Discovery Channel’s TV show “Dirty Jobs” has nothing on the job of the mud walker. As low tide approached, more than a dozen lobstermen and sternmen, dressed in oilskins, fishing boots, and heavy gloves, methodically combed the inside of the lobster pound at the Swan’s Island Fishermen’s Co-op.
The pound, a 400- by 350-foot enclosure, with walls reaching 15 feet high from the mud bottom, is used to hold lobsters at various times during the year before they go to market. The mud walk is the last day of emptying the pound, getting the last of the lobsters, the ones lying on the surface of the mud, and the ones buried deep in the mud-covered bottom.
The whole process of bailing the pound takes about a week, depending on the weather and the number of workers. The biggest factor involved is the amount of lobsters in the pound, which in the past has been anywhere from 15,000 pounds to 85,000 pounds.
On the first day, small skiffs, using nets to drag for lobsters, enter the pound between half and high tide. The lobsters that are caught in the drag are brought aboard the skiff and emptied into crates. The dragging yields about three-quarters of all the lobsters in the pound. The mud walk gets the rest.
The mud walkers began along the shoreline, where the mud was the thickest. It was hard going along the edges, with workers sinking into the deep mud. Each mud walker carried a five-gallon bucket to hold the lobsters that were plucked from the bottom of the pound. Once the bucket was filled, the lobsters were dumped into lobster crates scattered around the pound. Each crate held 100 pounds of lobsters, and workers expected to fill more than 100 crates with the mud-covered crustaceans.
During the months of storage in the pound, some of the lobsters lose the bands that hold their claws closed, so care must be taken when reaching down to pick them up. Given the chance, a lobster will latch on to whoever, or whatever, is trying to get him. These lobsters, of course, will need to be re-banded before being shipped to market.
As the morning tide receded, more and more lobsters began to appear, making it easy picking. “This is the best fishing I’ve had in a long while,” exclaimed lobsterman Spencer Joyce, who came out to help his son, Josh, and grandson, Elijah, who both sell their catch to the Swan’s Island Fisherman’s Co-op. Elijah, at age 6, is the youngest lobsterman selling to the co-op. He has a handful of traps that he hauls in the summer with his dad.
Happy voices filled the pound as the work continued because the bailing of the pound signals money for the co-op members. Members who elected to put a percentage of their catch in the pound last fall, when the price was low, will reap the benefits of higher profits, now that lobsters are fetching an increase of more than $4 per pound this spring.
The mud walk lasts a couple hours, starting about two hours before low tide and ending when the tide turns and starts to fill the pound again with water. If the workers haven’t found all the remaining lobsters by then, it will take a second low tide to continue work in the pound, which means waiting until the next day.
The spring mud walk, however, does not mean the end of work at the pound. Shedders, or new shell lobsters, are pounded in the summer. The lobsters’ soft shells will harden by early fall yielding a better price and making them easier to transport to market.
So once again, in the fall, mud walkers will be out in full force trudging through the thick bottom mud hand picking the lobsters. If catching lobsters was only that easy the rest of the year!