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.
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.
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…
Our readers may 
… And we’re back!
the haulress
the long hauler
