A Star over Brooklyn

Regenerating Limbs

Ever since I hauled that lobster with the red gummi crusher claw, I’ve been troubled by the idea of a creature dropping appendages and growing them back. It’s actually been surprising to see how many lobsters we haul that are culls, with limp, red extremities in the process of becoming a bona fide claw or leg or antenna. Apparently, this is a nasty little sight that the commercial lobster industry spares the consumers.  So I’ll use this venue to show what doesn’t make it to market.

Red gummi appendages (both the crusher and antenna)

Regenerated claw cooked (but not eaten)

A cull with new regrowth

Pincer claw almost entirely restored to its original size

Just a wee tiny sprout

Strange crusher regeneration (or possibly mutation? doesn’t the crusher look like it’s facing outward?)

So, how do lobsters do this??  I have no idea.  But in lieu of an answer to that question, I’ll provide some interesting facts that I dug up while researching.

• The only parts of lobster that will regenerate are its claws, legs and antenna (i.e., it won’t grow a head back).
• In some case, if it gets stuck on a rock or entrapped in some way, a lobster will spontaneously drop a claw as a means of escaping danger. This is called “throwing” a claw.  Lobsters have preformed fracture planes where the limb can break easily without serious loss of blood.
• It takes 3-4 molt cycles to grow a claw back to regular size.
• Mature lobsters have something called “bilateral asymmetry“. In the early larval stages of development, the pair of claws are actually identical — they’re both slender and the muscles structures are similarly capable of fast movements. The crusher/pincer distinction isn’t determined until the juvenile stage, and it isn’t the result of genetic encoding, but determined instead by extrinsic factors. Generally, the side that experiences the most sensory input will develop into the  crusher claw, which has muscular fibers designed for slower movements.
• Scientists find that a juvenile lobster is just as likely to develop the crusher on the right side as on the left, explaining the 50:50 ratio in adults. Once the asymmetry is determined, it’s fixed for life, and all regenerated claws will mirror their predecessors.
• The regenerated limbs will actually be indistinguishable from the original, in structure, shape, function, and the make-up of muscular fibers.
• Removing the eye stalks of a lobster is a technique for accelerating growth and regeneration. Apparently, a hormone is present in the eye stalks that responds to seasonal and other indicators, such as temperature and nutrition, to inhibit or activate molting cycles accordingly. Without these hormones, lobsters will molt more frequently and increase in size more rapidly — they may experience 75-100% weight gain in a single molting cycle. While loss of eye stalks may boost growth initially over the course of one or two moltings, long-term survival rates are not good. The eye stalk hormones are involved in a wide range of important functions, from regeneration to digestion, and without them the lobsters become pale in color, uncoordinated, disproportionately sized, and very susceptible to environmental stresses.

That’s all I can ferret out for now. More to come. And send along good info if you have any!

Diagrams of Lobster Anatomy (including larva stage) available here.

More shots of regenerating culls available on Good Morning Gloucester‘s photostream.

Croakers for Bait

… Also, we exhausted our rotting pogie supply yesterday. It being Labor Day, all the bait shops down in the old port were closed, so we had to resort to the super market, making the assumption  (probably flawed) that what’s good enough for human consumption would be good enough for lobsters.

A. went with some inexpensive, nasty looking creature, aptly called a croaker.  Here we are contemplating the task of chopping it up into bait-bag sized pieces with a swiss army knife.

You can see, I’m not terribly pleased by the prospects. Let’s hope the lobsters won’t feel the same way.

Check out the Bait Log.

!! Guest Lobstress #2 / shell disease

Guest lobstress #2 — HELLO!

A.’s childhood friend was in town for the weekend and came out with us for an afternoon of lobstering. Not a bad haul, actually.  Our second berried female of the season. Very berried indeed.  This hen was already notched, so we were spared the excitement of snipping the back flipper this time around.

K. got cozy with a baby short, featured here, but eventually opted to release it.

And what else?  … Oh yes! Very interesting — we hauled a lobster with some kind of degenerative shell disease.  Apparently, it’s an infection caused by a range of different bacteria and fungi that results in the gradual erosion of the lobster’s exoskeleton. The infection leads to soft, irregular lesions in the shell, seen here on the lobster we found as red and purple speckled sores (below).

The infection can spread to the gills and parts of the shell preventing a lobster from being able to successfully  molt. This is one of the ways the shell disease can cause mortality.

According to NOAA, interestingly, the degenerative shell disease is not all that common in the wild. It’s more prevalent — not to mention economically destructive — in lobster pounds, where conditions may be ripe for the harmful bacteria to grow.

Somewhat disturbing is the fact that the shell disease is observed in degraded coastal habitats, where the lobsters come in contact with contaminated sediment while roaming the sea floor. AND the infection has been generated in the laboratory environment by exposing healthy lobsters to sewage sludge. Ughly.

This is NOT encouraging at all. Especially in light of the recent nytimes series on the nation’s water quality, “Toxic Waters”.  They’ve pulled together data from the EPA into an interactive graphic that covers all parts of the US. You can zoom into Casco Bay, and it identifies multiple polluters in the immediate vicinity of our lobstering range that have failed to comply with the Clean Water Act at some point over the course in the last three years.

Below I’ve inserted a still shot of our home turf from the nytimes feature.

The orange dots represent facilities with one or more violations. Of those stamped with violations is our friendly neighborhood waste water treatment plant on the East End directly west of the boat launch. Another is the Portland city sewage treatment facility out on Peaks Island.

DEElicious. Needless to say, the one with the funky chitin we tossed back.

See a more detailed map of our trap locations here.

!! Guest Lobstress #1

Yesterday, we were honored to have an old friend and guest lobsteress with us: one Ms. T. of Los Angeles, California. (applause)

The catch unfortunately failed to match our enthusiasm.  The turn out was neither impressive nor abundant for our budding young lobster woman. Nonetheless T. demonstrated undeniable vigor and passion as she put hand over hand to haul up our traps while we drank beer. Here’s a video clip of T. in action [coming soon].

I think yesterday might have been a life changer for T. What with getting splattered by mud and rotting bait blood, then drenched with 50 degree ocean spray as the sun went down and the air chilled up. What do you say T.? Any plans to move to Maine yet?

While no keepers to speak of, our haul included a total of 15 crabs, 1 rock eel, and 5 short lobsters.

From One Lobsterman to Another: A Haunting Message

Oh, we read you LOUD and CLEAR.

In light of the recent flurry of reports about scuffles among area lobstermen, A.’s not willing to take any chances with his few remaining traps.

Episodes of violence among lobsterman have been especially intense this year. Record low market prices (lobsters were selling wholesale for $2.25-3.00 per pound, last I heard) for the second year in a row have put enormous strain on the traditional fishing industry. Violence came to a head recently in the well-publicized story of  Matinicus Island. This remote island 20 miles off the mainland with a year-round population of 51, according to the 2000 census, has some of the richest lobstering fields in the world. Tensions over turf rights on the island escalated to gunplay earlier this summer in July. Sixty-eight year old Vance Bunker shot Chris Young, 41,  in the neck — somehow managing not to mortally wound him.

The implicit code of territorial rights among lobsterman is no joke. Local fishing families do not hesitate to protect their turf, whether by cutting lines or even sinking the boats of competitors, as recently happened in another unrelated incident in the Mid-coast region. A more common practice is to send signals to the encroacher, signals such as leaving bottles in the traps or tying a knot in the buoy line.

Here’s a clip of A. last Friday deciphering the code:

A. has cause for concern and he’s not going to take any chances embroiling himself in a turf war.

More Sea Squirt Madness

There have been a lot of sea squirts on traps recently. Here’s one being encouraged to perform the pissing routine:

….. hahaaaa….  oh man. shiv cracks me UP

Aaaand we’re back. Again.

Back on the water tonight in a relatively short time frame. Thankfully the marine mechanic was able to sort out the latest motor problem in just a couple of days. Turns out that with all the rain, A. should have closed the vent on the gas tank. The 10% ethanol content in gasoline makes it much more susceptible to contamination by water, and the fact that the tank sat for nearly 3 weeks due to the

last mechanical failure made it separate out and go bad. This is a widely documented problem and is causing a stir among the albeit small boating community in some parts of the midwest, and elsewhere.  So, with a cleaned carburetor, fuel filter, fuel line, and a new tank of gas, we were back on the water (and $180 poorer)…

Still rebounding from that blow, it wasn’t long until we’d received another. This one from Hurricane Bill who evidently swept away a number of our traps over the previous weekend. We’reboth down to ONLY TWO TRAPS apiece. Serious bummer.

We’re now faced with a critical decision. Should we replace the lost traps?  Get reissued tags? And keep aggressively fishing the remaining 4 or so weeks of the season?

Honestly, our sponsor (i.e., our wallet) is  threatening to pull the plug on this less than lucrative operation.  The latest cost-per-lobster analysis was a wake up call, for sure.

Leaving that decision for another day, onto the catch… We only caught two shorts tonight, although the by-catch was stellar. We found a pair of crabs sharing an intimate moment (does this count as pornography?), as well as a couple hermit crabs, and two eel-looking fish. Anyone have any ideas as to what this is (above)?

It’s Not Looking Good, My Friends…

Motor troubles have seriously thrown our cost trajectories. Not long ago, we were down to 15 bucks a lobster, but the trend we thought was inevitably sloping downward has reversed. After three weeks out of the water with zero new catch and 480 bucks in motor repairs, we’ve jumped up 10 whole dollars per lobster.

This is very unfortunate. If our goal had been to reach some semblance of market value, where lobsters are selling for $6.99-7.99, then we would have needed to get down to an estimated cost basis of around $8 or $9 per lobster.  That goal, I’m afraid, is slipping out of reach quickly.

See the Balance Sheet for itemized expenses.

Look Familiar?

@#$”%^!!#$@&#!!*&@#!*%$#!*@!Aaaarrrggh….. You have got to be kidding me….

It was the same picture not long ago!

Area man suspects fugly sea gunk as culprit

Hard times inspire bold theories.  We got nothing last night.  A couple crabs, one short, one starfish. Nothin’.

Since leaving the traps out for three weeks, they’ve been covered in a rainbow assortment of sea crud, including: a leopard patterned sea sponge, bright orange/red algal goop, tiny mussels, furry seaweed masses, and everyone’s favorite, sea squirts. Could this sea gunk be the culprit?  Is it putting off the lobsters?

Updated: Pot Locations/Casco Bay

When we first put them in, readers may remember, we dropped our pots off the northwestern coast of Great Diamond Island.  Over the course of the last month or so, we’ve gradually migrated them northward toward Cow Island, finding the catch more reliable along the rocky ledge there.

Cow Island is not without its risks however. The shelted cove off the western side of Cow is home to a mooring field favored by local day-trippers, a “cocktail cove” they call it. My recent loss of two traps from that area is evidence enough of the risks.

New Fugly Bycatch

Here’s a clip showing our first encounter with the latest mystery bycatch. This time it’s some sort of clear jelly nugget blob that urinates on its enemies. ha!

Call it a sea slug? A sea cucumber? A sea squirt? Or what? Does ANYONE know what these little jelly nuggets are?… Or have we unknowingly stumbled across a NEW SPECIES??

Update: Never mind. Forget it. I think it’s just some common invertebrate, something called Ascidia callosa or something from the Ascidia genus anyway. BOORing. Page 30 of this technical report from NOAA detailing flora and fauna from the eastern US mentions them — documented off Mt Desert Island in the 19th century (whatever). They kind of looked like this and a little like this.

… No longer a mystery, but still definitely gross.

Pogie Style

Our readers may remember that just before all this motor failure transpired, we’d switched to a new bait fish: menhaden, also known as pogies.  So for the last three and a half weeks a bucket of pogies has been rotting in my basement.  Needless to say, they smelled pretty rank yesterday when we went to bait the traps.

Pogies are a larger, rounder fish than the herring we’d previously been using, so the technique for baiting a trap with them is slightly different.  Whereas the herring just get stuffed into a bait bag and the bait bag is strung up in the trap, the pogies are too big to fit in the bags.  Instead, you have to get all gory and string them through the eyes socket.  A dedicated fishermen will use a special tool for this, called a bait iron or bait needle, but we kept it real with the ever-handy pocket knife.

Here’s A. demonstrating how it’s done:

Toward the end of the video, you’ll also witness the sea squirt things discharging on us.  So rude.

BACK in the SADDLE

… And we’re back!

We FINALLY went out last night after almost a MONTH.  The motor is running better than ever, but I feared that I’d lost my lobstering groove. In the end it was an eventful evening.  Highlights included: three big keepers; two lost traps; spearing rotting POGIES through the eye with a swiss army knife; and a lot of new weird bycatch.  Fun fun fun.

Having left the pots in the water unattended since July 25 (!), we had no idea what we might haul up from the sea floor.  As it turned out, the bycatch was PHEnomonal.  First off, the trap lines were covered with baby mussels. The traps themselves were covered with something comparable to sea squirts, but we don’t know what they actually are — clear, jelly-like lumps, affixed to the metal grating of the traps. After a short while out of the water, these nubby creatures would contract suddenly, pissing out mystery juice in a strong stream (seriously ew). Then there were a couple starfish; six or so large north atlantic whelk, which was a new find for us. AND the prized bycatch of the day — a flounder!

OO I almost forgot to mention.  There were a few other noteworthy encounters last night.  One was a crab that was embracing another smaller crab, holding it like a football into his chest.  See pic above.  He held on strong, running across the trap and the floor of the boat with the smaller guy held into him, wouldn’t let go. Was the baby crab dinner?  Was it a younger brother? A sole mate?  A play thing?

AND it was interesting that each of the keepers we hauled was in the parlor section of the trap, and they were all BIG fallas too. We surmised that if they were stupid enough to get stuck in the traps for up to three weeks, then they must have been good fighters too, holding court in there.

Our theory was supported by what we found in the last trap: the empty shell of a lobster that looked like it had been well ripped to pieces.   Here’s a photo of the loser on the left and the “winner” on the right — relatively speaking, of course…

Here’s some footage of A. with the flounder too…

Anyone know a good marine mechanic?

Unfortunately the boat has been out of the water for over a week now with engine trouble. Just can’t get it started, and have had trouble booking time with a mechanic to get it sorted out. If anyone knows a qualified mechanic who is available to work on a 1987 Mariner 20 hp 2-stroke ASAP, let us know!

Update: A. has been stood up by various marine mechanics! They won’t return his calls! Additionally, the nagging question persists — WHEN WE DO FIND A MECHANIC should whatever it costs to fix the motor be factored into our expenses?? The motor was probably due for a breakdown anyway, right? Regardless of our lobstering endeavors this summer, wasn’t it?? :p

Down to $15.59/Lobster

I updated the Balance Sheet finally.  It’d been a while, I know…

Frankly, we’re doing significantly better than I ever would have expected. We’re actually at the $15 per lobster threshold. You see plenty of menus offering lobster dinners for anywhere between $15 and $25.  So 15 bucks invested in gear, gas* and incidentals for each lobster we’ve hauled doesn’t sound THAT bad by comparison.

But take into account current market prices, on the other hand, and our record isn’t all that great either!

Commercially, lobster is selling for around $6.99-7.99 per pound; wholesale it’s selling at a near record, industry-crippling low of $2.25 per pound – that’s “less expensive than hot dogs,” says one lobster boat captain. Assuming that a lobster with the minimum legal carapace length weighs no less than one pound, I would guess that the average weight of our haul has been around 1.125-1.25 pounds per lobster.

By those numbers, I think we still need to get in the ballpark of $8 per lobster for this to have made ANY economic sense.  But of course this doesn’t make any sense, because I haven’t included opportunity costs (I could have spent my time becoming a mistress of fly fishing? or we could have vacationed in Mexico??)  or the fact that we NEVER would have wanted to eat this much lobster to begin with:)

*Note: our itemized expenses and total costs now include gas, which we had previously overlooked. Though it’s a minor expense given that the motor (which hopefully will be back up and running soon, poor guy!) is only 20 horse power and gets good fuel efficiency, it does begin to add up.

See our updated itemized expenses on the Balance Sheet.

See our cost per lobster chart from July 5, 2009.

!Motor Trouble!

Plenty of things went wrong today. The motor died while it was idling while I tended the first trap, and try as we might, we couldn’t get it started again. We were forced to tend the remaining traps under the power of my electric trolling motor.

Guest lobsterman Greg (B still away) had some bad luck with my mackerel  rod when he went to cast and the entire top end of the rod popped loose and flew into the ocean, never to be seen again. And finally, a lot of shorts, but no keepers.

New bait used today — menhaden, or as they’re locally known, pogies. They’re bigger and rounder than herring, and I strung them directly through the eye without using a bait bag. Most lobstermen have what’s called a “bait iron” for this task. It’s basically a long needle that’s used to thread the line through the bait in order to secure it within the trap. Not having a bait iron, I was forced to rely on brute force and my trusty Swiss Army Knife.

I’ve heard from some local lobstermen that they don’t like using the pogies because they’re more bony and have less flesh than herring. We’ll see what happens.  Here’s the view as I was towed home (Thanks again, Nate).

Substitute Lobsterman

With B off to the Mid-West for a long weekend, we had a guest lobsterman aboard. My dad had plenty of ideas as to where he thought the lobsters might be……..  But only the next haul will tell if my slight readjustment of trap placement will pay dividends.   I was able to finally set my 5th trap, after tracking down our friendly local Officer at the Department of Marine Resources in order for him to issue me a replacement tag for the trap that I lost on 7/10.  Two keepers today: one decent one, one just over the minimum 3 1/4 inch carapace length. I heard they might be turned into lobster rolls by the time this goes to print…..

A Decent, if Unremarkable Haul

7 keepers tonight, which is a pretty strong performance.

BUT things seem to be tapering off a bit, and we’ve noticed that much of the lobstering gear has moved out of the area…

Maybe the majority of the lobsters have wandered out a little bit deeper in preparation for the summer molt? Or maybe the departure of our competition has countered the effect of there being fewer lobsters anyway?? Are we just scooping up the stragglers?? OR… Do we continue to over-think this?

Anyhow, one of the ones that we kept was a BRUTE. Take a look at those claws.

We did have a nice picnic out on the water — do most commercial lobstermen snack like this after a haul?

The Big and the Small

Tonight produced both the BIGGEST crab we’ve seen — dwarfing the earlier biggest caught on June 21 — and the TINIEST   lobster to date, which literally fit in the palm of my hand.

We were surprised the little one didn’t escape through the vents in the trap designed to let the small ones out. I guess we hauled it before it had a chance to scoot away.

Here the two critters are posed next to one another for comparison.

The haul was semi-ok, with ultimately only one keeper. We had another that was quite close to the legal size, but ultimately proved just a hair too short.  We let it go, but not before it managed to give B. a serious chomp on her hand with its serrated pincher claw.

This may or may not have been my fault…

Just as dangerous as the wily short that nipped B. was a surly group of yahoos that we encountered out in our usual fishing grounds, laughing and carrying on as if they owned the place.  

More Debate, Fewer Conclusions

Of note today were two things: a lobster with the earliest signs of a regenerated limb, and the conclusion that we have been trying to draw conclusions too quickly with regard to bait.

With fresh herring in the traps, and a two-night soak, our traps produced 3 keepers and a lot of crabs — 16 in one trap, in fact. This is not remarkably better or worse than we’ve done in the past by simply “topping off” with a few fresh fish in a bait bag that hasn’t been decimated by lobsters and crabs.

So I think we’re done, for the moment, with believing there’s some specific bait recipe that produces more than another…

We did move some gear around a little, into shallower water (about 12 feet, in both cases), if nothing more than for a change of scenery while we’re hauling.

We also heard from a friend recently that in addition to looking at the swimmerettes of the lobster to determine its sex, you can also observe a difference in the curvature of the tail. A flatter tail or wider curvature indicates a female; this adaptation exists allegedly to create a more protected area under the tail where the female will carry her berries.

Can you spot this subtle difference in the photo of the two lobsters here?

!!Lost Gear… AGAIN

We forgot to charge the camera batteries yesterday.  I especially would have  liked to share a picture of a tiny claw on a large crab.

A. lost a trap last night – serious bummer.  Just when we thought we were back at full capacity. It was one of his favorites too, out by the red can off the northwestern tip of Great Diamond.

We did have 5 keepers though, not a bad haul.  Cost per lobster is coming down even as we continue to lose gear, we’re somewhere around $26 a lobster now.

An Unexpected Haul

Well, well well… last night threw every theory we ever had OUT THE WINDOW…

We went out with a bucket of fresh salted herring to bait the traps. It’d been 12 DAYS since we’d last rebaited.  That’s the longest we’ve gone without rebaiting. With the July 4th holiday, following by out-of-town meetings for work, we just hadn’t had time to tend the traps,  so we’d had to leave them out there dormant for a few days.

Needless to say, we did not expect to find anything in the traps last night.

BUT WE DID.  We got 5 good sized keepers last night!

Not bad not bad not bad at all.  Especially considering that the bait bags had been picked CLEAN, literally they were empty but for a few scales here and there. We found all the keepers in the parlor, so they must have been a sampling of some of the stupider of the species (see the NPR story on that here).

We got a couple really good-sized ones, most of them very hard shell, with dark speckles.

You may remember that I had lost a trap a while ago.  Well, for $15 each we bought two used traps from a retiring lobsterman of 50 years in South Portland and I got my replacement tag from the Department of Marine Resources for $0.40 last week.  So last night we finally put in my fifth trap.  I’m happy to announce that we’re back at full capacity.

By the time we got back up to the house, cleaned the boat and scrubbed the stench of bait off ourselves, it was too late for dinner.  The lobsters went to friend this morning.

Cost per Lobster @ $33

We’ve been hauling for just about three weeks now.  We’ve invested $554 so far.  And we’ve hauled 17 keepers.  Our expenses are still rising but cost per lobster is coming down, if gradually.  We’re at $32.57 per lobster.

See our running list of expenses at the Balance Sheet.

More Musings on Bait

One more thing on bait.

On July 29, we did ok: on 9 traps, we hauled 23 lobsters of which 6 keepers.  You’ll remember that previously we had NOT topped the bait bags off, but instead dumped everything that was left overboard, and rebaited with salted herring. The salted herring at that time had been sitting unrefrigerated in my basement for over a week, stewing in their own increasingly noxious juices (seriously). We baited my final trap exclusively with freshly-caught mackerel to see if that would make a difference in yield.

That final trap, which had the berried female, one short, and nine menacing crabs, did no significantly better or worse than the other traps. Ultimately, though it’s terrible to work with, requires labor intensive clean-up of the boat, and keeps us reeking for hours, no days, after hauling, the noxious herring might be ok for bait. Or maybe the more important thing is to empty out the bait bags, instead of freshening them up?

Our sample size is probably far too small to be deriving any general principles regarding the preferences of lobsters. But I guess that was the conclusion that A. came to already said in the previous post… ho hum.

More at the Bait Log.

A Big Female — with Berries!

Two big factors contributed to our reluctance to haul today: the weather, and our lack of confidence in the bait we’d set in our traps. It turned out, though, that we’re glad we did. Our efforts were rewarded well, in the form of 6 keepers, and our first encounter with an egg-bearing female lobster.

Here, I’m taking a look at the thousands of lobster eggs clinging to the underside of her tail:

In this next clip, B v-notches the lobster’s flipper. This will indicate to other lobstermen who might catch her when she is not bearing eggs that she is a productive breeder, and that they must, by law, release her to the wild.

In addition to the v-notching fun, we decided that it’s too early to draw conclusions

about our earlier bait strategy, because this successful yield was achieved with our now week long mix of bait. So it seems that maybe it’s not the age of the bait necessarily, but rather content of oil or some other element that dictates its attractiveness to lobsters.

Also noteworthy: we’ve noticed that several of our traps are consistently more productive than others, although it’s hard to say why at this point. Each of these is at a different depth, and in areas of varying densities of other traps, with what seem to be different bottom conditions.

By the way, females lobsters are called hens, and the dudes are called cocks, like chickens.

Questioning the New Bait Strategy

Today’s haul of ZERO keepers was sub-par by any standard, and especially so given our haul on 7/20. This could be on account of several factors: a) increased traps in the area; b) weather factors (consistent rain); or c) bait.

For the time being, it appears the problem was our bait. In short order, we’ve come to question our new bait strategy. Previously, we’d bought a 10 gallon bucket of salted herring, and used it and fresh-caught mackerel to top off the old bait.  But the salted herring had been sitting unrefrigerated in the basement for several days, and we hadn’t been very aggressive about catching fresh mackerel.

It seems that lobsters, with all the talk of their being bottom feeders and their nickname (“the cockroaches of the sea”), are pretty picky eaters. Our strategy of simply “freshening up” the existing bait bags with a few new fish doesn’t seem to be working.

This leaves us with two choices: buying bait regularly, or fishing harder for mackerel on each outing. Here, B reflects on the day’s outing, contemplates the solution, and admires a juvenile lobster:

B’s final trap of the day was baited exclusively with fresh mackerel, although neither of us believes this gives us a big enough “sample size” to effectively evaluate this idea.

Lost Gear, V-notch Females…

After repeated passes through our fishing grounds without spotting it, we were forced to conclude that we’d lost our first trap of the season. We’re both fairly sure that it fell victim to the prop on someone’s boat. There are typically a couple of reasons that gear goes missing: a) surly commercial lobstermen cut them when someone has invaded their territory and/or wrapped around their fishing gear, b) gear failure (e.g. knot coming untied on the pot warp), or c) gear entanglement in the motor of a passing vessel. Our gear is set well away from other lobstermen, and as each buoy is marking a single trap there is no groundline from one trap to another that might get set over someone else’s gear causing it to be entangled and cut.  So it goes.

In other news, we did haul not one but two large v-notch female lobsters, the first of the season. As a method of

conservation,  both non-commercial and commercial harvesters are required to cut a “v-notch” in the flipper to the right of the middle flipper on egg-bearing females. This identifies them as productive breeding animals, and their preservation is critical to conserving the resource.

New Bait Strategy

By the way, we have a new bait strategy: mackerel. We’ll fish mackerel and put ‘em in the traps directly.

We had enough time on Saturday afternoon to pick up about 20 or so of the little fish.  A. did most of the fishing; I did the unhooking.

Poor suckers are pretty helpless against a sabiki rig.  That’s a japanese word that means something like “rig” and for some reason is used to describe a special rig set-up that has several branches stemming off of the central line, each with a hook and shiny material attractant.  The end of the line is weighted with a diamond jig lure.

If you drop the sabiki rigging into a school, you can pull out as many fish as there are hooks on the rigging.  One time, A. trolled us over to a school, I literally just dropped the line, let it fall, and when I pulled it out there were 4 mackerel on the line.

We’ve heard of serveral other non-commerical lobstermen (they were all dudes) using mackerel as bait too.  If the lobsters go for it, this could save us some serious money on that salted herring.