The Secret Life of Lobsters
Read The Secret Life of Lobsters Online
Authors: Trevor Corson
How Fishermen and Scientists
Are Unraveling the Mysteries
of Our Favorite Crustacean
Illustrations by Jim Sollers
It is in the unexpected or neglected place
that you will find the lobster.
âI
RISH SAYING
T
he morning sky was glowing pink in the southeast but a chill hung in the salt air. The grumble of a truck engine echoed across the harbor. Bruce Fernald's rust-encrusted Ford pickup skidded to a halt in the gravel near the fishermen's coop on Little Cranberry Island.
Bruce's sternman, Jason Pickering, was waiting on the wharf. Bruce had employed fifteen different sternmen in his thirty years of lobstering, and the most reliable had been the one woman he'd ever hired. After hauling traps with her by his side, through icy gales and summer afternoons suffused with the stench of bait, Bruce had asked Barb to marry him. It was a hard act to follow.
Bruce and Jason rowed across the harbor and clambered aboard Bruce's lobster boat, white with red trim. He'd had her built after the birth of his twin sons, and had christened her the
Double Trouble
. She was fast, though to accomplish her speed she was narrow in the stern, making her tippy when she got sideways to a rough sea. Bruce needed a calm sea this morning, because thirty-three of his eight hundred lobster traps were piled in a pyramid in the stern, along with a couple of miles of coiled rope and unwieldy bundles of buoys.
A century earlier, three hundred Maine islands had been home to year-round communities of fishermen and seafarers. Little Cranberry Island was one of just fourteen such year-round communities that remained. A mile and a half long and shaped like a pork chop, it lay among four other small islands that together
formed the Cranberry Isles. Nestled just south of the larger island of Mount Desert, the Cranberries were visible to hikers in Acadia National Park as a cluster of green slabs on the ocean.
Little Cranberry had been Bruce's home for most of his fifty years, and he'd spent most of his adult life trapping lobsters around the island's shores. So had his father, his grandfather, two of his brothers, and the dozen other lobstermen that made their living there. Along with a few builders, artisans, and retirees, and two schoolteachers, the fishermen and their families formed a community so tight that doors were seldom locked. Social life revolved around the general store in the center of the island, where Soos sold groceries and served pizza for lunch. In a corner of the store was the post-office window, where Joy dispensed stamps, local news, and homemade cream puffs. Next door was the two-room schoolhouse where the island's eleven students, from prekindergarten through eighth grade, attended class. Around the corner was the Grange hall, now home to town meetings, potluck dinners, and aerobics classes. Attached to the hall was a small library. Down the main street was the Protestant church. In the other direction was the Catholic chapel, where a fisherman's net hung behind Jesus, the fisher of men. Bruce Fernald attended neither, but if the lobstering didn't improve, it was possible he'd begin attending both.
Bruce plunked his lunch bag on the
Double Trouble
's forward bulkhead, then yanked off his cap and used it to swat a cloud of mosquitoes in the cabin.
“Ain't they something awful?” he asked Jason.
“Yup,” the younger man answered, adjusting the knife on his belt.
Bruce fired up the boat's diesel engine. The
Double Trouble
coughed, cleared a black cloud from her exhaust stack, and thundered to life. The engine's metallic growl ricocheted off the shore and scattered gulls that had been roosting on the bow. Both men clambered into orange rubber overalls, clammy with dew. Jason lifted the lid off the bait bin, filling the cabin with the stench of five-day-old fish.
Bruce propped open a panel of the windshield to draw in fresh air, then nudged the boat into gear. Pulling alongside the thick mooring chain that tethered the boat to a two-ton slab of granite resting on the bottom of the harbor, he freed the vessel and motored away, checking his electronics while waiting for the engine to warm. Mounted on the bulkhead and hanging from the ceiling were a color Fathometer, a depth sounder, a radar unit, a loran navigational locator, a Global Positioning System satellite plotter, and two VHF marine radios. Wires snaked across the interior woodwork, met each other in bundles, and bored up through the ceiling to feed a roof bristling with antennas and down through the hull to supply the underwater transducers. In front of Bruce, between the throttle and the steering wheel, was a white compass the size of a softball. Mounted in a corner was a horn. It would blare if water tripped a switch in the bilge. Generally that would mean the boat was sinking.
As the
Double Trouble
chugged along the island's western shore, Bruce and Jason gazed over the beach toward the dawn, sniffing for wind. Just past the beach, a row of gravestones stood like sentinels over the harbor. Bruce's grandfather lay under a pink square of polished granite, guarded by a field of goldenrod and Queen Anne's lace. Nearby was a lobsterman who'd been battered to death when a storm rolled his boat over the rocks. Under another stone was a sternman who'd drowned three years ago. Other graves revealed that the ocean wasn't the only danger an islander could face. Jason's half sister was buried there. She'd been killed in a car crash on the mainland, just shy of her twentieth birthday.
Rounding a point of land, Bruce piloted the boat into a narrow channel called the Gut. The
Double Trouble
's sophisticated electronics were no help here. Instead, Bruce peered through the open window and located Asshole Rock, a cracked ledge at the far end of the Gut. Asshole Rock served as a low-tech warning beaconâif a lobsterman saw that the crack was completely exposed at low tide, he knew his boat was likely to run aground, and he would turn around. Bruce
saw that the bottom of the crack was still submerged, indicating sufficient draft. He steered forward through the boulders, peering not at the rocks ahead but backward at a church steeple on an island three miles away, which he aligned with a seaweed-covered stone a hundred yards off the boat's stern. A moment later he turned and squinted at a ledge five hundred yards off the bow. When the ledge lined up with the tree line on an island two miles to the east, he turned the boat forty degrees to port.
The
Double Trouble
entered an ocean afire. The sun was emerging from the sea and had stained a bank of clouds to the south yellow, which in turn had gilded the water to the horizon. Seals sprawled on a ledge, and cormorants perched on the rocks, holding their wet wings open to the morning sun like capes.
Bruce gunned the boat to cruising speed for the run offshore, and the growl of the engine widened into a roar. He was leaning over to choose a fresh pair of work gloves when the boat jerked sideways. Bruce had a steady fisherman's physiqueâstocky, with powerful shouldersâbut he was thrown off balance. He swore and yanked back on the throttle. There was no wind, but outside the harbor the sea was a frothing cauldron.
“What's this slop doing out here?” Bruce asked. Perhaps he was addressing the question to his ancestors, who had fished these waters for a hundred years. Jason pursed his lips while Bruce watched the way the sea was working. Packs of wavelets scurried across larger waves at chaotic angles. The
Double Trouble
tossed like a toy.
“There must be a storm rolling this shit in from way offshore,” Bruce said, “and coming crossways at the tide.” He shot a despairing glance at the pile of gear in the stern. “Why? Oh, why?”
Tightening his grip on the wheel, Bruce nudged the throttle back up. He spread his feet apart and settled into a crouch for his knees to absorb the beating. The
Double Trouble
skidded, bounced, and bucked her way south into the open ocean. It is sometimes said that lobstermen are the cowboys of the American East. The resemblance can be striking.
Facing aft, Jason leaned into the bait bin and stuffed knit bags with fish parts. Normally he would fill the bags throughout the day, but with thirty-three traps to set he needed a head start. Rancid brown juice sloshed over the hems of his gloves and down between his fingers. When a steep wave struck the boat, droplets of bait juice splattered onto his face.
Bruce plucked a tattered notebook from the bulkhead and flipped through pages of scrawled notes, scanning for the coordinates of a particular underwater valley. With a pencil he jotted a few numbers directly onto the white paint of the bulkhead, then squinted up at the GPS plotter above his head. He pressed a few buttons to call up a waypoint, then adjusted his course by several degrees. It was reassuring to see his position confirmed by transmissions from four different satellites, but in a pinch he could go back to navigating by local landmarks and his compass, as his father still did.
Ten minutes later Bruce throttled down and the boat buried her nose in a trough. Jason dunked his gloves into a barrel of steaming water, heated by a coil from the engine, while Bruce stared at blotches of color scrolling across his Fathometer screen. The screen painted the bottom as a jagged black line that marked it as rocky ledge. He circled the boat a quarter turn and motored slowly east, watching the line drop off and the color lighten from black to purple, indicating a deeper section of cobble. As the boat continued east the color changed to orange, indicating gravel. Then the line fell precipitately and settled into a mushy yellow haze, a bottom of thick mud. He was over the valley.
Â
At the helm of his lobster boat Jack Merrill yawned and scratched his beard, then draped his hand back over the steering wheel and looked at the cabin clock. It was a few minutes past 6
A.M
. Jack seldom beat Bruce out in the morning, even though the twin-turbo diesel engine aboard Jack's boat, the
Bottom Dollar,
cranked out nearly two hundred more horsepower than the
Double Trouble
. This morning Jack would be
even later than usual, because he had a task to accomplish before tending his traps. But given how worried he was about the lack of lobsters, it was a job he had to do.
A flash of reflected sunlight caught Jack's eye. He nudged the wheel to starboard, aiming his bow toward a white wedge on the horizon. Reaching overhead, Jack dialed his VHF marine radio to the hailing channel. He plucked the microphone from its clip and cleared his throat.
“This is the
Bottom Dollar,
calling the R/V
Connecticut,
” Jack said into the mike, his voice gravelly. From a loudspeaker by Jack's ear the response blasted back.
“This is the R/V
Connecticut,
” the voice said. “Go ahead.”
Jack winced and turned the volume down.
“Good morning,” he responded. “Is Bob up?”
“Yes. He's expecting you.”
Fifteen minutes later Jack throttled back, twirled his wheel, and peered up at the ship that loomed above his boat. “R/V” stands for “research vessel,” and the
Connecticut,
operated by the Marine Sciences and Technology Center of the University of Connecticut, was a state-of-the-art platform for the study of undersea life. Her bridge rose from behind her soaring bow like the control tower of a small airport, and her aft deck was equipped with a variety of machinery, including a gray A-frame crane for launching submersible equipment off the stern. Crew members wearing flotation vests and carrying walkie-talkies deployed rubber bumpers from the
Connecticut
's rail. Jack maneuvered the
Bottom Dollar
to the side of the ship with forward and reverse thrusts of his propeller.
From inside the
Connecticut
's superstructure a compact man strode on deck. His name was Robert Steneck, and he was a professor of marine science at the University of Maine. He was smiling.
“Hey, Jack!” Bob shouted.
Bob Steneck and Jack Merrill had been friends for fifteen years. Marine research and commercial fishing were two different worlds, and for nearly a century the relationship between scientists and lobstermen in Maine had been one of
open hostility. But with many of New England's fisheries decimated by overfishing, Bob and Jack had joined forces in the hope of averting a similar disaster in Maine's lobster fishery.
“Good morning, Bob,” Jack said. “I've got some numbers for you.”
“Excellent,” Bob said. He grinned and rubbed his palms together.
Bob pulled a notebook from his breast pocket. Jack produced a notebook of his own and read off several pairs of coordinates to the scientistânumbers he wouldn't have shared with his fellow lobstermen.
“That's where I've seen them,” Jack said. “Big ones.”
“Good,” Bob said, jotting down the information. “We'll take a look.”
The two men traded banter for a moment. Then Jack pulled away from the research ship, gunned his turbodiesel, and roared off toward his traps.
Bob stepped through a portal in the
Connecticut
's bulkhead and strode through the ship's laboratory. Passing the smell of breakfast cooking in the galley, he mounted a steep stairway to the bridge. Surrounded by navigational electronics and hydraulic control levers, Bob studied a nautical chart and mapped out the coordinates Jack had given him.
“Two outcrops,” Bob said, nodding. “Little underwater mountains.” He sipped from a cup of coffee. “Just where you'd expect to find big lobsters.”
Bob conferred with the
Connecticut
's captain and put together a plan for the day. Bob was conducting a census of large lobsters. An average lobster in Maine waters required approximately seven years to grow to harvestable size. That was also about the age at which lobsters started to become sexually active, and lobsters old enough to copulate and reproduce were crucial to the health of the lobster population. If their numbers were dwindling, trouble could be in store for the lobster fishery. From the look of the catches this year, some feared trouble had already arrived. Bob wasn't so sure. With the help
of lobstermen like Jack, Bob hoped the waters off Little Cranberry Island might provide some answers.