Last fall on my second to last day of work doing a SCUBA diving lobster research internship, my old lobstering captain gave me a call in desperate need of a deck hand. I didn't have a job lined up and was excited to work with him again. We survived winter lobstering together. Although I worked as a sternlady for two summers in college, it was my first full winter working on the ocean. I quickly learned that it is a completely different game from the summer season. We were steaming an hour one way to haul traps 15-20 miles offshore in rough seas and bitter cold. BUT, since we were working so far away from land, the wind and waves would be more exaggerated and there would be 3 or four days in a week when it was too rough to be out. So hard work was punctuated with periods of rest. Not so with shrimping.
My captain and I are out on the water hauling about 75 traps a day for two days and then preparing bait/recuperating for one day. In other words, we don't have any real days off. In fact, we haven't had a day off for the past month. Shrimping takes place much closer to shore (about a mile from land), so we can go out in most weather. Also, the shrimp will die if they sit in a trap for more than three nights, so this is good incentive to haul as often as we possibly can. The shrimp draggers are just dropping off in their catch, which is good news for us. When the draggers start complaining, it means that the shrimp are dropping their eggs, getting hungry and going for the bait (herring pulp and inside-out pogies) in traps. However, this doesn't mean that the draggers should give up and go home. There might be another wave of shrimp that migrate toward shore to lay their eggs.
A bit about Northern shrimp (on the bottom in picture). Shrimp are hermaphroditic. For the first two years of their life they are male, then they have a sex change and become female. All of the shrimp that are big enough to be caught in nets or traps are female. They migrate north, or toward land, in order to lay eggs from December through March in Maine. The females invest all of their energy in their eggs and once the eggs hatch, the females are starving, so they are attracted to bait in the traps.
The catch is picking up and the trappers are getting hungry. Even though the price has dropped a bit (60 to 55 cents/lb, roughly), trappers are betting on quantity at the peak of the season. There is a frenzy to haul as much as possible.
Over the past week we have hauled a few traps with open doors. This is not a good thing, because a trap won't catch anything if the shrimp can escape through the doors! We were recently approached on the water by two different captains who asked if we had seen the same thing (doors open, bait bags missing, shrimp gone). Sure enough we had. Yesterday one captain was convinced that he knew who was doing this and steamed over to the suspect in a rage to give him a talking to. My captain thinks that seals are doing it. Harbor seals are smart and agile. They could easily figure out how to pull the twine handle on the hook that fixes the door shut. It makes sense that bait bags would be missing if seals were stealing the shrimp and trying to eat the bait. Whoever the ghosts are down there, they are getting a good fix of shrimp and provoking a lot of fishermen!
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