Ambrosia

Thanks to Elmer Fudd, I learned from a young age that if you are hunting "wabbit" it is helpful to think like one. If I didn't attempt to think like our nocturnal crustacean friends every day, then I wouldn't have tolerated the smell of rotten fish for this long.

Today, like any other day, when the traps hit the rail, lobsters and bait flew everywhere. The name of the game is: remove lobsters and add bait as fast as humanly possible. When I fall behind, there are lobsters suspended from every horizontal surface in the wheelhouse. OK, maybe this is a bit of an exaggeration, but sometimes it feels like it. Cap usually throws the few hardshells that we catch daily in the bait tray to distinguish them from the shedders, which we stack in buckets. I was standing there in front of the bait tray measuring and banding lobsters when I looked down at a hardshell, just paralyzed there atop a heap of smelly herring. He must have thought he'd just landed in heaven atop a mountain of ambrosia! Clearly, lobsters have different gods than I do, because my gods don't eat herring! Regardless, that lobster looked quite content before it met

its doom.

Just yesterday I finished work and stopped at the church on the way out of town to say hi to my best friend. She was setting up the sound system for a concert that night. I was glad to see her and approached her with a big smile and arms open for a hug. She cringed. "Phew!" She hooted, "You stink!" I found this quite amusing. I was still in a dehydrated stupor from a 13-hour day on the water, but now I wish I had informed her that the lobsters love how I smell! So does my parent's chocolate lab puppy, Zipper. . and all other dogs, for that matter. In fact I'm quite a hit around town. Maybe I should come out with a new line of perfume. Ambrosia.

Elmer thinks like the "wascaly wabbit" so much that he ends up in the asylum thinking he

is Bugs Bunny. Somehow I don't think that will be my fate. It isn't all that easy to relate to a creature that perceives putrid pogies as a delicacy and that calls a hole in the rocks underwater "home." I hope I never have to find out what herring tastes like, but I have a feeling I wouldn't confuse it with the food of the gods.