Each spring, when lobstermen set out traps at the beginning of a new season, the chatter is what the year will bring when all is said and done in December. Few expect that this year could be as good as last year.
In case you forgot or were not paying attention, the total volume of the 2010 lobster harvest in Maine surpassed all known records in the history of the fishery—approximately 93.5 million pounds. But because the price was lower than at its peak in 2007, the value of last year’s harvest was only the third highest on record. Still, the $308 million that flowed into the pockets of Maine’s 5,500 lobster license holders represented an almost a 25 percent pay increase over the previous year for many, many lobstering families. Few, but bailed out bankers, got bonuses that hefty.
Unfortunately, the bounty was not uniformly distributed along the entire Maine coast. Lobstermen in the eastern half of the Maine coast, from Vinalhaven, Swan’s and Islesford, eastward to Cutler, generally had a fantastic year, while most lobstermen in southern Maine, up through Casco Bay had an average year. It is hard to feel great about your fellow lobstermen when you’re having an average year and guys to the east of you are just slaughtering them. The story for last year could be summed up as the waters warmed up early with a “spring spurt” and they never stopped coming until December. For most of the past 20 years, the lobster territories from Friendship to Matinicus to Isle au Haut were the industry’s “Golden Triangle,” but in 2009 and 2010, Hancock County landings surpassed those in Knox County for the first time in history.
This year, after a long, intensely cold winter, the waters of the Gulf of Maine are still cool, and lobsters, which are exquisitely tuned to water temperatures, have not moved around enough to produce a significant spring spurt. Still, the number of juvenile lobsters and egg-bearing females that lobstermen found in their traps last year augers well for this season’s catch and for the next few years of a healthy resource.
The real questions now are how prices will hold up and how the costs of fuel and bait will cut into margins. If you can answer these questions, you could make a lot of money by bottling and selling this as a new patent medicine along the coast. But a couple of trends are worth noting.
First, there has been a significant increase in the number of lobster processors in Maine. First and foremost is the seemingly bottomless wallet of Linda Bean (granddaughter of the legendary Leon Leonwood), who has capitalized her business, Linda Bean’s Perfect Maine Lobster, by purchasing buying stations on Vinalhaven, Owls Head, Tenant’s Harbor and Port Clyde and processing her branded lobster meat in Rockland, is a major new buyer in the Maine lobster market, heretofore dominated by Canadian companies.
Calendar Islands Maine Lobster (in which the Island Institute has a small equity interest), is another new processor in the market place. Calendar Islands has also developed a new line of value added lobster products that is sold through Hannaford’s and many other local fine food stores.
The big difference between Linda Bean’s operations and Calendar Islands branded lobster products is that the 39 fishermen in the Cheabegue Island lobster co-op have a major equity stake in the operation, meaning that if the business succeeds, local lobstermen benefit not only through their individuals sales to the company, but also through a share in the profits.
Another new lobster processing operation has set up shop in Maine’s last herring packing plant in Prospect Harbor that Bumble Bee Foods shuttered last year. The owner of the new Live Lobster Co., Antonio Bussone, promises to hire back at least some of the 130 laid off workers to process lobsters rather than herring.
Speaking of the end of herring packing on the Maine coast, it is useful to know that herring has been the premium bait supply for trapping lobsters since”¦well, forever. But herring supplies have tightened as fisheries managers have substantially cut back the total allowable catch of herring in the Gulf of Maine because of concern that previous harvest levels are not sustainable. The result is that bait, which used to be cheaper than fuel, now represents three times the cost of fuel for a lobsterman. And since fuel prices are also increasing, the squeeze is on.
With less herring available for bait, many lobstermen are switching to “alternative” and exotic baits, including rockfish racks imported from the west coast by Maine’s largest bait company, F.J. O’Hara. Others are using German redfish, Vietnamese tuna heads, and carp from Mississippi or Asia. One can only hope that these new bait supplies will not introduce unknown pathogens to the marine environment. But it is a quandary because the old adage has not been repealed: “Fishermen don’t catch lobsters; bait does.” It used to be that bait bags were the size of a baseball, according to fishermen who participated in the Island Institute’s annual Lobsterman’s Roundtable. “You were a damned fool if you had a softball-sized bait bag,” said one of the participants, “but now you can literally put a soccer or basketball into the bait bags guys are using.”
The days when a lobsterman, using his own dories and nets, shut off a cove to catch his own bait or maintained a herring weir as a sideline business are long gone. The bait business has shifted from a slow, cove-based artisanal enterprise to a massive industrial fishery—just like everything else in Maine’s (and the world’s) other fisheries. Nevertheless, there is a certain timelessness to the sounds and sights along the shores of 144 lobster harbors on the coast and islands of Maine before the eyelid of dawn rises above the spikey spruce as the proud progression of idiosyncratically named boats head off for their hard-won fishing grounds. Thank the lord, a new season has begun!
Philip Conkling is president of the Island Institute based in Rockland, Maine.