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Published: August 31st 2006
Leaving the Dock
Lobsterboat leaving the Richibucto docks before sunrise.
Richibucto Harbour, New Brunswick
& Northumberland Strait What’s purply-brown, armored like a tank, can be right- or left-clawed, and goes by the nickname of “bug” out here on the east coast?
We found out one week ago, when we were handed an opportunity that was too good to pass up: spending a day on a New Brunswick lobsterboat and seeing what the life of a lobsterman is really like. It ended with a dinner featuring those tasty “bugs.”
The offer came through a new friend we met on a whale-watching cruise in Nova Scotia a few days before. Rob and his girlfriend Josee were on vacation from the Moncton, N.B., area, and when they found out how interested we were in all things related to the sea, Rob said he could set us up with a real experience in his home port of Richibucto, N.B.
So we backtracked a little on our route and on Tuesday afternoon Rob took us down to the docks to meet his friend Josh, the captain of a lobsterboat named Steven V. Josh turned out to be a very competent 21 years old, and we were impressed
Sunrise on Northumberland Strait
A brief, fiery sunrise was trapped between the horizon and a low cloud bank, but in that gap my telephoto caught the silhouettes of two lobsterboats and a bell buoy. enough by his demeanor and the shippiness of his craft to confirm we wanted to go out with him the next day. “Then meet us at 5:30 tomorrow,” Josh said matter-of-factly.
We parked Matilda in the port parking lot and tried to go to sleep early. The next day, Wednesday, was one of the most memorable of this trip, so we break from our usual blog postings to bring you this LOBSTER SPECIAL. The photos and captions tell most of the story, but I also worked up this timeline of highlights.
4:30 a.m. We rise and shine without the benefit of an alarm clock (we didn’t pack one). We estimate we had only a few hours sleep, what with the disruption in our sleep schedule and the noisy refrigeration unit on a semi-truck parked nearby that rumbled all night long. It’s chill, so we layer up and make a thermos of hot tea. We hear the first boat engines revving to life around us about 5 a.m.
6:00 a.m. The crew of the Steven V arrives and within five minutes we cast off. Josh expresses mild surprise that we actually showed up. There’s another newbie on
Few Extra Winks
Steven V was the name of our vessel, and while Josh captained her to the lobstering grounds, co-owner Cameron snuck an extra hour and a half of sleep atop the engine cover. this cruise: Josh’s half-brother Dusty, age 8. This is the first time he’s been allowed to join a Steven V workday, and he’s really excited. Dusty’s dad (Josh’s stepdad) Ray is one of the three active crew-members.
Josh’s partner and Steven V co-owner is named Cameron, and he’s in his late 20s. Cameron immediately flops down and goes to sleeps on the vibrating bed of the engine cover. It’s going to take us an hour and a half of cruising at 8 knots to reach the first buoy.
6:30 a.m. The sun rises over Northumberland Strait and the clustered clouds explode into fiery orange, with the rest of the lobster fleet silhouetted on the horizon. Turns out this is Josh and Cameron’s first season working their own boat, but both have been crewing for others for many years. They purchased Steven V, a wooden boat built in 1987, for $10,000 and received a fishing license from the Mi’kmaq reservation they belong to. When the summer lobster season is over, they join snow crab fishing crews. Professional fishermen to the core!
7:30 a.m. We reach the yellow-and-green buoy marking the first line of traps. It’s actually the trap
Jeff Gazes Out to Sea
In the early morning light, Jeff scans the horizon that will make up our world for nine hours of that day. set furthest to the north. Josh tells us by the time we reset the last line, it will be only a 30-minute run back to port.
Steven V works 42 lines, with six traps per line. That’s about 250 traps we can look forward to hauling and seeing what’s inside.
Little Dusty says he’s cold, but he hasn’t brought a jacket. His father smugly tells us he wanted to wear shorts this morning, but was vetoed. He is wearing pants. I roll up the sleeves on my rain shell and zip him up in it.
8:15 a.m. Once he’s warm, Dusty falls asleep in the co-captain’s high-backed seat in the cabin. He’s out cold; his head knocks gently against the bulkhead with the rocking of the hull, but he doesn’t wake.
The three crew quickly fall into the rhythm of checking a line: snagging the lead buoy with a hook on a pole, leading the buoy line over the wheel of hydraulic winch at the stern, tugging each trap in turn onto the narrow deck on the vessel’s port side, extracting the lobsters and rebaiting the traps, then resetting that line parallel to all the others
Rogue Wave
Jeff nearly loses his balance as a surprise wave rocks our boat all a-kilter. It was pretty rough for a few hours in the morning, and soon started whitecapping. More pix of the little guy sitting next to Jeff to come... strewn across the ocean floor.
8:30 a.m. We pull our first female with eggs from the water. The black roe are stuck to her belly. Gestation of the eggs is for 9-11 months, incredibly, before they hatch and the lobster larvae float away. It takes about 7 years for a lobster to grow from larva to keeper. Maine lobstermen notch the tails of egg-bearing females, but that’s not the custom in New Brunswick. However, all such females must be thrown back, as must all females over a certain size. Need to keep the breeding stock in action!
9:20 a.m. We haul up our first “market”-sized lobster. Up until now, all the lobsters have been smaller, “canner”-sized. The term is probably a throwback from lobster canning days, but now it just means they’re a little smaller. They’re still served whole in restaurants. We separate them in two different bins and rubber-band the claws of the markets with a simple spring-loaded hand tool. This is a task Jeff and I can do, so we take it over, and Dusty helps. Apparently the bigger lobsters will sometimes attack each other, but we don’t see any such aggression. After an initial wriggle
Gaffing the Buoy
Cameron starts the process of hauling in a line of traps by snagging one of the end-buoys with a gaff hook. Steven V's buoys are striped fluorescent yellow and green, and numbered 1 through 42. when they’re thrown onto a pile of their brethren, the lobsters lie surprisingly still and docile.
We don’t join in any of the work with the traps, since we don’t have the proper protective clothing. The three active crewmembers wear rubber boots, rubber overalls, and gloves. It’s not extremely messy or slimy work, but they do get wet.
10:30 a.m. We finish checking half the lines, the 21 that are set on the north side of the entrance to Richibucto harbor. It’s taken three hours and it’s time for a break. The crew waters the lobsters by dipping the slatted bins overboard. Then they eat sandwiches as well as the grapes and cookies we brought aboard while Josh steams to the southern fishing grounds. Jeff and I dip corn chips (him) and wheat crackers (me) in hummus. Probably the first time garbanzo bean dip has made an appearance on Steven V.
12:40 p.m. A check of the engine compartment follows Josh’s concern that the gasoline engine seems to be running roughly. Ray thinks it’s a worn universal joint, what he calls “the knuckles.” It’s determined we can keep running the engine, but this part should be replaced
Hauling Traps
We had 42 lines of traps (6 to a line, so about 250 traps) to haul that day. Here Cameron hefts a single trap onto the coaming as the hydraulic winch mounted to his right whirrs in the line. as soon as possible. I pray we don’t bring Matilda’s break-down bad luck aboard. Being stranded in the strait would definitely be more challenging than breaking down roadside.
1:20 p.m. Dusty artfully arranges our recent by-catch on the engine cover. Rock crabs are the most common and detested interloper in the traps—they eat the bait intended for the lobsters—but we also see green urchins, purple sea stars, a few soft green sponges, a couple flounder and a couple rockfish. The flounder are kept for bait; the rockfish are thrown back, but their swim bladders seemed to have inflated. Not sure any of the fish survive their journey to the surface.
We’re told the traps are mostly set in rocky areas, because that’s where lobsters like to live. They also like kelp forests, and we pull quite a bit of kelp aboard as we drag our lines through the water. The average depth of the traps is 50 feet.
2:30 p.m. The 41st line is re-set, one shy of 42 because one line couldn’t be located. I did wonder how each lobsterman could find his own buoys in the endless sea of them bobbing around us. Josh says
Checking the Traps
When all six traps were lined up on the coaming, Capt. Josh (at right) donned his work gloves and began checking for legal lobsters with his stepdad Ray (to left). The little guy is Ray's son, Josh's half-brother Dusty. he enters a point into his GPS unit each time a line is reset, and uses that coordinate to find the lead buoy the next trip. The missing line could have gotten fouled in another boat’s prop and been cut free, although it’s not kosher to do that without retying the buoy line.
Josh is congratulating himself on not wrapping any lines around his own prop—a common occurrence, we are led to believe—when Cameron pokes his head into the wheelhouse, looking serious. “I think you just ran over a buoy,” he says gravely. Josh peers over the stern and concurs. He changes course to head to a sandspit at the left of the harbor entrance channel so he can beach Steven V and leap overboard to check.
2:40 p.m. Cameron and Ray wash down the deck with a seawater hose and a long-handled broom. When the bits of seaweed have been washed through the scuppers, Cameron sits down to snip a tube of black netting into bait bags. He clamps one end with a metal clip to make a closure; the open end is simply twisted closed when full.
3:00 p.m. The beach is coming up awfully
Trapped Lobster
What one of the caged lobsters looks like when it's hauled aboard. Studies show that 95% of lobsters that enter traps walk right out after a bite of bait. These guys were in the wrong place at the wrong time! fast. Josh yells for everyone to hold on, and runs Steven V’s bow up on the sand. He’s down below stripping off his overalls when the Dept. of Fisheries and Ocean boat we’d seen checking another vessel comes up alongside us. They formally ask if they can board to do a routine inspection, and Josh appears in his PJ bottoms to give his permission. Turns out he knows all these guys, so doesn’t feel the need to be too formal.
There are three officers on duty. One officer pulls out his measuring stick and checks a few lobsters in each of the three bins we’ve filled. He’s checking for undersized lobsters, females with eggs, or especially large females, but finds no violations. We are introduced as “tourists” and the officers are interested to hear the quick summary of our road trip. We vouch for the crew of the Steven V as being conscientiously honest.
3:02 p.m. Josh signs the Fisheries paperwork in his boxers, and dives in as their boat pulls away. Through goggles, he confirms there’s nothing fouling the prop. The water temperature is not unpleasant. Josh says he sometimes stops here just for a swim. Dusty
Josh Measuring the Catch
One of my favorite photos from the day's shoot: Josh measuring a lobster to make sure it's legal size, then flipping it over to check for eggs before tossing it in the keeper bin. jumps in for a couple minutes, too. It’s obvious he’d do anything to be just like his older brother.
As we steam toward Richibucto, there are six lobsterboats right behind us. It’s the end of the day for everyone.
3:40 p.m. We tie up to the fish-buyer’s wharf and our three bins are hoisted up and away. Our total haul weighs in at 210 pounds, probably 200 individual lobsters. This is on the low end of the average hauls for this late in the season. We hear that a good day results in at least one pound of legal lobster per trap. With 250 traps checked and only 210 pounds, we’re below this marker. In the first week of the season, hauls of a couple thousand pounds paid the bills, Josh says. But the traps blanketing the ocean floor are perhaps too efficient to keep up those numbers for long. The buyer pays the fishermen between $4.50 and $5.50 per pound.
3:50 p.m. Back to the docks, after nearly 10 straight hours on the water. Rob is waiting for us to pick up the 10 pounds of canners he pre-ordered. We have selected two 1-pound lobsters for
Berried Female
This is what a "berried" female looks like, and the presence of these eggs makes her illegal to keep. Females brood ferilized eggs on their bellies for 9-11 months before they hatch and the larvae float away. Can't fish the breeding stock! ourselves and press a $20 into Josh’s hand. Our payment also includes a promise to mail a CD of my photos to him (done!). We leave the crew sprawled on their bellies with their heads in the engine compartment. Their day is not yet done.
5 p.m. Our biggest pot in Matilda’s cupboard is just big enough to cook one lobster at a time. We steam them in turn in seawater we dipped up offshore and stored in a quart Nalgene bottle. Pliers from the toolbox serve to crack the shells. Have never tasted fresher or better!
8:30 p.m. We get a couple hours of driving under our belts, pull over on a logging road, and close our eyes for 11 solid hours of sleep. So tired and we hardly did a lick of work. Our appreciation for the lobstermen’s stamina is vast.
This entry is dedicated, with thanks, to Josh, Cameron, Ray, Dusty and Rob!!!
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Alison Howe
non-member comment
All the way from downunder
I have been following your journey for sometime(being attracted by the waltzing matilda title). No I am not some crazed Aussie stalker, just a mum whose first son is at present travelling the world for 4 months. He set up a blog and had such good intentions to keep the old folks at home up to date. Unfortunately studying Acturarial Studies at University in Canberra for 5 years did little to increase his communications skills, or his ability to give us a little glimpse of the places he visits,therefore I find myself heading straight to Waltzing Matilda. I do hope that you are not offended that a stranger on the other side of the world is eagerly logging on to your site and very much enjoying the detailed journal of your amazing adventure.