Watching a champion lobsterman haul his traps is like watching the Olympics: the perfection of craft. There’s not one unnecessary move.
Every movement counts because any unnecessary one wastes time. To many, Leroy Bridges is the thinking man’s lobsterman. He’s thinking all the time. One winter day, he said, “Being on land is boring.” You have to watch a fisherman fishing to understand that statement.
The day in late August I watched Leroy Bridges and his wife, Donna, haul and reset their daily total of 200 traps was foggy. When we left the dock in Conary Cove, on Sunshine Island (a small island off Deer Isle’s east coast directly across from Swan’s Island) a few minutes after 5 a.m., it was still dark.
Leroy, bearded and surprisingly lean at 6’1″, black and white striped railroad engineer’s cap, the kind he’s been wearing for 30 years, partially covering untamed graying hair, in oilskins, rubber boots, Dickies shirt and fitted rubber gloves, turned on the various devices he uses to find his way to his traps in the dark. The vessel: a specially designed (what extra feature where) 2004 Northern Bay 38 lobsterboat painted maroon and named Miss Maddison for his first granddaughter, a frequent visitor.
As he steamed to the first buoy, Donna, 5’1″, wearing eyeglasses, orange oilskins over jeans and boots, sweatshirt, heavy rubber gloves, and baseball cap covering her short, curly brown hair, forked salted herring into the bait tray. She then started filling the crocheted bait bags, called “pockets” because they’re like old-fashioned ladies’ purses.
Donna has been Leroy’s sternman for the past five years. Before that, she raised their two daughters, Danielle, Maddison’s mother, and Jessica, and processed and delivered the crab he trapped as bycatch. She was known for the quality of her product. They married when Leroy was 18 and she 15.
Neither spoke a word. His first words as he got out of his truck at Conary Cove had been, “The catch will be off. It always is with big tides.” The moon had been full two nights before, and around the full moon, the tides are always higher and stronger. (This also happens with the new moon.)
After filling the pockets, Donna explained she fills extras so she’s prepared if one has a hole or other damage. She emptied a bag of white bands (for hard shell claws) into a container, then a bag of pink bands for shedder claws, explaining, “it makes it easier at the dock.”
Leroy approached a balloon tied to his first trap line, slowed the boat to a halt, reached up and punched a button attached to the plotter to his left. This deleted the green ball on the plotter screen representing that balloon. He uses 30-inch balloons rather than pot buoys because he doesn’t have to paint them, thus saving approximately three weeks of shop time in winter. He then reached over the rail and gaffed the line, which he attached to the pot hauler while removing any seaweed or unraveling any twist to the line.
He set the balloon and buoy behind to his right in a bucket of hot water to kill any marine growth, as he swung the first, and main, trap up over the rail and set it lengthwise on the trap rail, opening it as he did.
He reached in, undid the bait pockets, removed them, swung them over to the bait tray, picked up two freshly filled pockets and dropped them in the trap.
He removed lobster, throwing obvious shorts back and tossing possible keepers in a metal, compartmented holder called the banding tray, each compartment about the size of a lengthwise shoebox. Crabs got chucked in a crate under the banding tray. He pushed the main trap down the rail to Donna and swung the second trap (called the “tailer” because it tails the main trap, or “trailer” because it trails along behind the main trap — he fishes pairs) over the rail, and repeated the process.
Donna fastened the freshly filled pockets in the main trap, removed any other debris and small creatures, then started measuring lobster until Leroy was ready to push the traps overboard. He pushed the trailer trap over the rail. She waited till the line had gone over almost to her trap, and then pushed that trap over and into the water.
As the main trap went overboard, Leroy again punched the overhead button to the plotter. This button showed where he reset the first pair of traps he had hauled. To his left was one of several screens. This plotter screen showed a map of where his traps were set. The new setting was in white to differentiate the old from the new.
While Leroy sped away to the next green balloon on the screen (and in the water), Donna cleaned up, made sure she had enough freshly filled bait bags, or pockets, ready to go, then started measuring and banding the keepers. She has a nifty homemade time-saving combination of measure and bander: the measure welded to one side of the bander.
After ascertaining that the lobster made the measure and was not egg bearing or V-notched, she poked the bander into the box of bands, emerging with a pink one, banded both claws, then sent the keeper, or counter, into a tank filled with constantly flowing seawater. Any questionable lobster she measured, she put in the two forward compartments, closest to Leroy to check. She said she gives questionable ones to him, “So if we get stopped, he gets the blame.” Then, eyes twinkling, “I had to throw that in there.”
The day I watched, four out of the five she questioned Leroy kept. He did the checking every so often, when he had a minute. Otherwise nothing stopped the assembly line perfection of their movements, each with an explicit purpose.
Later she remarked, “Some women say, `I can’t work with my husband.’ I don’t see why. Sometimes we say about three words to each other all day. We’re working or tired.”
Most of the lobster she measured didn’t make it. She tossed back short lobster, eggers: egg-bearing females, and females with V-notches cut into their tails. It seemed as if about four to five got thrown back for every lobster she kept. She held up a big, notched female, said, “It’s always the way: every time I get a good one;” and threw it back in the water.
When it grew lighter, Leroy pointed out one of his balloons. It was three-quarters submerged by the stronger-than-usual-tides, and Leroy said, “When the tides are this strong, how can you expect a lobster to walk?”
After two hours, Leroy had hauled 50 traps. He came back, disgusted, saying, “The guys on the radio are so p—- that they have so few lobsters, they’re talking of going in. We haul 200 traps, period. It averages out at the end of the week.”
At one point Donna remarked, “It’s 8 or 9 o’clock before I get to sit down” explaining that she has a good, hot shower first thing when she gets home, then does laundry, cooks supper, walks the dog, and pays bills. Asked what Leroy does while she’s working, she replied, “He sits in the recliner and reads the paper.” She went on to say that the night before, Leroy had gone to the Deer Isle supermarket and bought food for supper. She said, “I almost thanked him, then thought, Why? He doesn’t thank me for cooking dinner, and said, “I’m that stubborn.”
Leroy had left the dock a few minutes after 5 a.m. and, broken only by one short “snack-time” break, by 12:30 p.m., had hauled 200 traps.
Asked later how he knows where to set his traps, he replied, “You have to have a mental picture of the bottom.” Put the palm of your hand, fingers closed, on a table, he instructs. That represents the bottom. “If you sight across the top of your fingers,” he said, “That’s the hills and valleys. Some years the lobster are in the valley between your index and middle finger. That’s one particular piece of bottom. The following year, it may be on either side of that finger. So you have to find a method for finding them.” He said water depth is very important, temperature is not. The only time temperature is important, he said, is when it’s very cold, or when it’s warm, in spring. But it’s those channels that are important. He said, “I’m looking for tiny channels: six inches to a foot deep. Those channels all lead somewhere.” He also looks for triple echoes, which tell him about bottom density: mud versus sand, sand versus ledge, whether there’s kelp on the bottom.
“Your brain is going wide open all the time,” he said of his hours on the water. “When you go to sleep, your brain doesn’t always stop, and you wake up more tired than when you went to bed.” Asked why he got into lobstering, he replied that since childhood, “I always liked trapping things.”
He thinks the key to such success as he’s had — and said he has accomplished everything he set out to do — “I constantly use paradigm shifts. Once you do — not master the skill, but learn how to use it — you learn to look at things differently.”