Kinky sex secrets of the lobster

These are tough guys, aren't they? Do they start punching each other at some point?

They are very tough guys and there are definitely stories of guns on boats and whatnot. They're very tough and the communities are very tight and they really look out for one another. It's partly for safety, because it's a dangerous job. There were two guys at Little Cranberry Island who were killed in a storm at sea and one of my fellow stern men was dragged overboard while I was working there, though fortunately nothing happened. Almost all these guys have a story of getting a foot tangled in a rope and nearly being dragged overboard.

There's a variety of lobstering subcultures along the coast. Different areas have different mentalities and practices, but what really impressed me about the guys on Little Cranberry Island is that they were serious about basic conservation, such as V-notching, which is a peculiar practice. It came about because you can't sell a lobster with eggs; it's illegal. But there's a terrible history during the 19th century of lobstermen scraping the eggs off female lobsters and selling them. So at one point the state started offering to buy those egg lobsters and release them in order to protect them, which was a good idea, but then the lobstermen would just catch the same ones and keep getting paid for them, so the state said, "Hey, wait a minute."

So they came up with the idea of notching the flipper. Then in the 1920s there was kind of a bust, probably due to overfishing and the Depression, and something like a third of the fishermen left the business. When the next generation came back after World War II they were aware of this bust and realized that they needed to do more to protect the industry and decided to do self-imposed notching. Especially the previous generation, they were very serious about it. And the current generation, at least on Little Cranberry Island, was inculcated into those practices and they're very serious about it.

What did you do on the boat as a stern man? I went out with a friend once who used to lobster on the weekends, though I wasn't able to help much. I couldn't get over the smell and the rocking boat. So assuming someone isn't useless like I was, what do you actually do?

When you become a stern man you're under the wing of the captain, but economically you are also technically self-employed. You get paid a share of the catch at the captain's discretion. So if you go out for the day and you don't catch anything, you don't get paid. There were slow days where if I computed my hourly wage it would have been a dollar an hour or something abysmal.

Most lobster boats function with two people. The captain runs the boat and owns everything and figures out where to put traps and when. He's the brains of the operation, and there are a lot of brains involved. These guys are very aware of the weather and the tides and how the boat interacts with the ocean. They also know where the lobsters are going to be at what time of year, what they're doing, how they're running. It's a family thing. Bruce Fernald, the guy who hired me, is a fifth-generation fisherman on this little island.

The stern man is mostly in charge of the bait, which is crucial and totally disgusting. My job was to stuff these little mesh bags the size of a grapefruit with bait and I have only a few seconds between traps to do that. Some lobstermen claim to like the smell, but it's certainly nasty. I spent 8 to 10 hours a day hunched over a bin the size of a kitchen table full of rotting herring. It's not intended to be ripe -- people have a misconception that rotten fish attracts lobsters -- it's just the nature of storing raw fish. You throw it in a barrel with a bunch of salt and make do.

Meanwhile the boat is constantly swinging and bucking. The height of fish season is the fall and the weather sucks in fall because it's kind of windy. When the sun's up people on land are happy, but on the ocean you don't care about the sun at all, the wind is your nemesis. An overcast rainy day with no wind is far preferable to a sunny day with a breeze. So if there's any breeze at all, and there usually is in the fall when you're fishing really hard, the spray is flying, the deck is constantly heaving. It's totally draining and exhausting.

The other part of my job is to help the captain sort through whatever comes up with the trap. When he throws open the top, and it's full of gunk, there are tons of things in there. Sea urchins, which ended up cutting through my gloves a few times, and a piece of embedded spine landed me in the emergency room with blood poisoning. These nasty, nasty spiny fish called skultons, which we kill and then slice open and use as additional bait. There are snails and little crabs, and hopefully some lobsters.

How much of the catch can you keep?

The majority of the catch actually goes back overboard. You have undersize lobsters and oversize lobsters and females with eggs that have to be thrown back, so you're sorting through all these and measuring and putting rubber bands on their claws with little pliers. The borderline lobsters you throw in a bin to sort later on and the obvious ones you throw back overboard. The minimum size is 3-1/4 inches on the body shell and you can't keep any with a body shell larger than 5 inches. The maximum is because if they've avoided the lobstermen and managed to make it through the gauntlet, they deserve their retirement. It's also so there will be more mating lobsters. So it's like populating a big sex club for retirees.

What did you and the other lobstermen do to blow off steam?

Well, there are a lot of practical jokes. People were always putting stuff in each other's traps. A can of Spam, stuff like that. There was one guy who had little kids and he kept tripping over his kids' toys in the morning when it was dark. So he started taking whatever toy he tripped over and later put it in one of his friends' traps, so one day someone would haul up a little frog in his trap or a stuffed bear. One fellow tied a small fridge onto a trap so when his friend pulled up the trap he pulled up a refrigerator. Silly stuff like that.

One time, my friend was looking for a practical joke to play. He went to a Barbie doll outlet on the mainland and he got a skirt, blouse and high-heeled shoes on one of the V-notch lobsters and stuck it in this guy's trap. When he hauled it up it was very funny and it was a big joke and everyone was talking about it on the marine radio. But then the guy throws her back into the water to see if she would show up in any other traps, because these females migrate in and offshore during the season. She showed up in trap after trap. Bruce caught her at one point; one of his brothers caught her. She was walking several miles in high heels between each trapping and gradually losing pieces of clothing along the way until she finally lost it all and returned to her unclothed dignity.

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