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Before you tie on your lobster bib, before you get your first whiff of the feast that lies beneath its scarlet shell, the one-of-a-kind Maine lobster must be trapped. For most of the past decade, harvesting lobster meant financial success. But the 2007 catch figures—down 23% from 2006—confirmed what lobster fishermen already knew: The boom is over, at least for now.
According to Beals-Jonesport Co-op manager Steve Peabody, the rise and fall in the catch is “almost like an ocean wave.” Veteran fisherman Mike Flanigan puts it this way: “What we saw in the last 10 years was a phenomenon; we’ve just gone back to normal.”
“Normal” lobster catches, of course, do not pay as well as phenomenal ones. In recent years through ‘07, the price buyers paid fishermen, referred to as the boat price, averaged about $4 per pound, according to the Maine Department of Marine Resources (DMR). Four dollars times a recent average annual catch per lobsterman of 27,000 pounds equaled a gross income of $108,000—and that wasn’t counting an additional $10,000 to $18,000 in lobster co-op members’ dividends.
Last year’s reduction in lobster harvests means a $30,000 pay cut for the average lobster fisherman—a hit that has put some businesses, boats, houses, and trucks in jeopardy. “We tried to tell the younger guys to put money away, but some of them didn’t listen,” one old-timer says. “Now they know why we spoke up.” Bankers, not wanting to go into the boat business, have asked those with loans and mortgages to keep up their interest payments, but increasing foreclosure notices tell the sobering story: Those who didn’t put away money during the boom years are having a tough time paying a flood of bills.
Though lobster is free for the taking, it has also become increasingly expensive for the fisherman in terms of bait and fuel. By a year or so ago, expenses had risen to the point where it could, and frequently did, cost as much as $500 a day to go fishing. At one point last spring when landings were low, one dealer reported that one of his fishermen returned the bait he’d just bought because he had realized he would be losing money by leaving the dock.
Higher prices and lower catches also affect the businesses that support these fishermen. According to a salesman at Atlantic Boats in Brooklin, a 42-foot lobster boat, well-equipped, would run around $300,000; engines for a boat that size cost from $60,000 to as much as $100,000. “When the catch is down, boat sales go down,” he says.
Many lobstermen are skilled do-it-yourselfers (Beals Islanders always had to make-do. Retired Beals fisherman Clifton Alley once summed it up, saying, “If I wanted a boat, I built it”). But the price of supplies is beyond what old-timers like Alley could have imagined. Higher costs for boatbuilding supplies like fiberglass resin, which jumped from $300 to $700 a drum, have made boatbuilding cost-prohibitive for those who did not put money away during the recent stretch of high catch years.
Then there are gas prices. With diesel running close to $4.50 a gallon, it is about twice what it was last year. “Those hauling inshore use about 11 gallons a trip,” says Vinalhaven fisherman James Philbrook, “but the ones that go out a ways are using from 20 to 30 gallons.”
Beyond the low catch numbers and high prices for fuel and supplies, Maine lobster fishermen are also reeling at new requirements by the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) which will require them to replace all their floating lines with sinking ones by October. In the May issue of The Working Waterfront, Farm Credit loan officer Robert Horne estimates the cost of converting floating line to sinking line for 100 traps at $10,000 to $15,000. Although Maine’s congressional delegation is hoping to have these new regulations postponed, the news thus far is not encouraging.
Why lobster landings rise and fall, no one knows exactly, though theories are plentiful. Although over-fishing is usually the first guess made when catch numbers fall, attempts to limit fishing can have unintended consequences. In the mid-1990s the government set a limit on the number of pots or traps each lobsterman could fish. When the law went into effect, instead of fishing the 200 or 300 traps they had before, lobstermen felt they had to fish the 800 allowed; soon the inshore and near-shore waters off such highly populated areas as Portland’s Casco Bay grew clogged with pot-buoys.
Some think the glut of pots, ironically, may also be partly responsible for the most recent population boom. The theory is that all the baited traps on the ocean bottom resulted in the feeding of juvenile lobster, nipping in and out, taking bait meant for larger, trappable adults. Those who subscribe to this theory cite as evidence the rise in landings seven years after the regulation was implemented—the amount of time it takes for a lobster to grow to legal size.
Although the “buoy boom” of the mid-1990s might explain the lobster’s population rise, the recent decline remains to some a mystery. Maine’s lobster population peaked in 2001 or 2002, with landings of 90 to 100 million pounds, based on state sampling figures. By 2006, the catch had dropped to 72.6 million pounds; and the DMR’s recent announcement that lobster landings had fallen in 2007 to 56 million put some people in a downright panic.
Vinalhaven fisherman Walter Day says those who are frantic over the drop in catch have simply forgotten about lobster’s cyclical nature. He recalls a day last November when a DMR official called him, saying people up and down the coast were calling the DMR, worried about the drop in landings. Day, a calm man who has been involved with the Lobster Institute for years, said he had reassured the official that landings were still over the 100-year average of 20 million pounds. He notes that the mere 56 million pounds of lobster landed in 2007 “were still twice what fishermen had caught 20 years ago.”
Despite Maine’s 20-year cycle being on the positive side, the news is not so good for its neighbors to the south. Twenty years ago, the fisheries of Connecticut, Rhode Island, and southern Massachusetts were also strong; now the lobster industry in these areas has virtually collapsed from years of over-fishing, shell disease, pesticides, and pollution. Some fear the consequences are moving north. “This year,” says one wholesaler, “it sure appears that a number of areas up the coast are headed toward the same decline.”
In order to understand the fluctuation of the lobster population, one must understand something of the creature itself. The lobster is an arachnid, part of the spider family. When you see some version of BUG on a license plate, chances are, the vehicle’s owner fishes lobster. In one way, the animal can be likened to a rose: As the rose’s sharp thorns protect its delicate, fragile petals from predators, so the lobster’s hard, thorny shell protects its soft, fragile meat. As the rose must be kept in cool freshwater, the lobster must be kept in cool saltwater. On fishing boats, fishermen keep the trapped animals in tanks of constantly changing ocean water. Lobster can live out of water for 48 hours if kept chilled. If not, it decomposes rapidly.
The lobster population favors some areas over others in numbers and quality for reasons not yet understood. For instance, fishermen and dealers call the area between Swan’s Island and Vinalhaven the state’s lobster pound. This term refers to the small coves that lobster dealers fence off, called lobster pounds. They keep soft shell, or “shedder,” lobster purchased in summer and autumn in these tidal pounds, feeding and holding it for holidays and periods of minimal fishing when they can sell it for higher prices.
Today lobster has a different diet than its ancestors. Day reports that 80% to 85% of what scientists find in lobster’s stomachs today is herring and other bait. “The scientists won’t admit that we now do open-ocean farming,” he says. “That term would jeopardize their jobs, if there was no mystery to it. Fishermen haven’t figured [lobster] out, and that’s good. If we did we’d catch them all and be out of business.”
Lobster dealers, on the other hand, face the threat of having too many in the market all chasing a piece of the lobster business pie. One wholesaler, recalling his college economics 101, quoted the old adage: “Too many sellers chasing a business pie will depress prices. Half as many sellers chasing the same pie will raise prices.” He says that retailers and supermarkets normally work on profit margins of 26% to 33% and that restaurants and resorts normally mark up “center of plate” (the lobster or steak) from 100% to 200%, while Maine’s lobster traders, wholesalers, and distributors currently work on a gross profit margin of 9% to 12%, with a fixed overhead cost of 6% to 9%.
Whether one agrees with all the wholesaler’s points or not, obviously, those numbers tell us there are too many people trying to make a profit from the tasty Homarus americanus. “Competition in the middle of the pipeline is so fierce that dealers undercut each other in price,” he says, leaving what he calls “nonsensical” profit margins. “The dealer part of the lobster industry will not even begin to recover until there are fewer chasing a piece of that pie,” he says.
Tough times may have the winnowing effect he wants, as transport costs are affecting everyone from dealers, distributors, and restaurateurs to the pocketbooks of their lobster-loving customers.
Indeed, it is not only those who catch or sell lobster who must accept the natural fluctuations in Maine’s most famous industry. Those who love eating lobster have had to adjust, too, beginning last spring, when the price of lobster shot to an unheard-of high. “As these prices have increased,” Steuben poundkeeper Michael Pugliese says, “you’ve eliminated almost an entire clientele of people: the middle class.”
That bug, once so cheap and available 150 years ago it was used to feed soldiers and slaves, became a festive meal purchased to celebrate holidays, anniversaries, and special occasions. These days it has become a true luxury item.
Like the tides, lobster prices and lobster catches rise and fall. Though lobster fishermen in April got about $5 per pound, that’s little comfort if there are few keepers in the traps. Yet, even a recent “bad” fishing day—when Walter Day’s sternman Corey Cayton had to throw back nine out of 10 of the lobsters he measured—had a silver lining: “Most of these should be big enough after the next shed,” Day says.
This observation is confirmed by Rick Wahle, senior research scientist at the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences in West Boothbay Harbor. Wahle recently released data showing that lobster larvae have maintained the strong settlement rate that started in 2001 and continued right through 2007. That means that, starting this year, there should be lots of healthy, harvestable keepers grown from quarter-inch juveniles that settled on the cobbled bottom of the Gulf of Maine seven years ago—perhaps in time for your autumn dinner table.
According to Beals-Jonesport Co-op manager Steve Peabody, the rise and fall in the catch is “almost like an ocean wave.” Veteran fisherman Mike Flanigan puts it this way: “What we saw in the last 10 years was a phenomenon; we’ve just gone back to normal.”
“Normal” lobster catches, of course, do not pay as well as phenomenal ones. In recent years through ‘07, the price buyers paid fishermen, referred to as the boat price, averaged about $4 per pound, according to the Maine Department of Marine Resources (DMR). Four dollars times a recent average annual catch per lobsterman of 27,000 pounds equaled a gross income of $108,000—and that wasn’t counting an additional $10,000 to $18,000 in lobster co-op members’ dividends.
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Last year’s reduction in lobster harvests means a $30,000 pay cut for the average lobster fisherman—a hit that has put some businesses, boats, houses, and trucks in jeopardy. “We tried to tell the younger guys to put money away, but some of them didn’t listen,” one old-timer says. “Now they know why we spoke up.” Bankers, not wanting to go into the boat business, have asked those with loans and mortgages to keep up their interest payments, but increasing foreclosure notices tell the sobering story: Those who didn’t put away money during the boom years are having a tough time paying a flood of bills.
Though lobster is free for the taking, it has also become increasingly expensive for the fisherman in terms of bait and fuel. By a year or so ago, expenses had risen to the point where it could, and frequently did, cost as much as $500 a day to go fishing. At one point last spring when landings were low, one dealer reported that one of his fishermen returned the bait he’d just bought because he had realized he would be losing money by leaving the dock.
Higher prices and lower catches also affect the businesses that support these fishermen. According to a salesman at Atlantic Boats in Brooklin, a 42-foot lobster boat, well-equipped, would run around $300,000; engines for a boat that size cost from $60,000 to as much as $100,000. “When the catch is down, boat sales go down,” he says.
Many lobstermen are skilled do-it-yourselfers (Beals Islanders always had to make-do. Retired Beals fisherman Clifton Alley once summed it up, saying, “If I wanted a boat, I built it”). But the price of supplies is beyond what old-timers like Alley could have imagined. Higher costs for boatbuilding supplies like fiberglass resin, which jumped from $300 to $700 a drum, have made boatbuilding cost-prohibitive for those who did not put money away during the recent stretch of high catch years.
Then there are gas prices. With diesel running close to $4.50 a gallon, it is about twice what it was last year. “Those hauling inshore use about 11 gallons a trip,” says Vinalhaven fisherman James Philbrook, “but the ones that go out a ways are using from 20 to 30 gallons.”
Beyond the low catch numbers and high prices for fuel and supplies, Maine lobster fishermen are also reeling at new requirements by the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) which will require them to replace all their floating lines with sinking ones by October. In the May issue of The Working Waterfront, Farm Credit loan officer Robert Horne estimates the cost of converting floating line to sinking line for 100 traps at $10,000 to $15,000. Although Maine’s congressional delegation is hoping to have these new regulations postponed, the news thus far is not encouraging.
Why lobster landings rise and fall, no one knows exactly, though theories are plentiful. Although over-fishing is usually the first guess made when catch numbers fall, attempts to limit fishing can have unintended consequences. In the mid-1990s the government set a limit on the number of pots or traps each lobsterman could fish. When the law went into effect, instead of fishing the 200 or 300 traps they had before, lobstermen felt they had to fish the 800 allowed; soon the inshore and near-shore waters off such highly populated areas as Portland’s Casco Bay grew clogged with pot-buoys.
Some think the glut of pots, ironically, may also be partly responsible for the most recent population boom. The theory is that all the baited traps on the ocean bottom resulted in the feeding of juvenile lobster, nipping in and out, taking bait meant for larger, trappable adults. Those who subscribe to this theory cite as evidence the rise in landings seven years after the regulation was implemented—the amount of time it takes for a lobster to grow to legal size.
Although the “buoy boom” of the mid-1990s might explain the lobster’s population rise, the recent decline remains to some a mystery. Maine’s lobster population peaked in 2001 or 2002, with landings of 90 to 100 million pounds, based on state sampling figures. By 2006, the catch had dropped to 72.6 million pounds; and the DMR’s recent announcement that lobster landings had fallen in 2007 to 56 million put some people in a downright panic.
Vinalhaven fisherman Walter Day says those who are frantic over the drop in catch have simply forgotten about lobster’s cyclical nature. He recalls a day last November when a DMR official called him, saying people up and down the coast were calling the DMR, worried about the drop in landings. Day, a calm man who has been involved with the Lobster Institute for years, said he had reassured the official that landings were still over the 100-year average of 20 million pounds. He notes that the mere 56 million pounds of lobster landed in 2007 “were still twice what fishermen had caught 20 years ago.”
Despite Maine’s 20-year cycle being on the positive side, the news is not so good for its neighbors to the south. Twenty years ago, the fisheries of Connecticut, Rhode Island, and southern Massachusetts were also strong; now the lobster industry in these areas has virtually collapsed from years of over-fishing, shell disease, pesticides, and pollution. Some fear the consequences are moving north. “This year,” says one wholesaler, “it sure appears that a number of areas up the coast are headed toward the same decline.”
In order to understand the fluctuation of the lobster population, one must understand something of the creature itself. The lobster is an arachnid, part of the spider family. When you see some version of BUG on a license plate, chances are, the vehicle’s owner fishes lobster. In one way, the animal can be likened to a rose: As the rose’s sharp thorns protect its delicate, fragile petals from predators, so the lobster’s hard, thorny shell protects its soft, fragile meat. As the rose must be kept in cool freshwater, the lobster must be kept in cool saltwater. On fishing boats, fishermen keep the trapped animals in tanks of constantly changing ocean water. Lobster can live out of water for 48 hours if kept chilled. If not, it decomposes rapidly.
The lobster population favors some areas over others in numbers and quality for reasons not yet understood. For instance, fishermen and dealers call the area between Swan’s Island and Vinalhaven the state’s lobster pound. This term refers to the small coves that lobster dealers fence off, called lobster pounds. They keep soft shell, or “shedder,” lobster purchased in summer and autumn in these tidal pounds, feeding and holding it for holidays and periods of minimal fishing when they can sell it for higher prices.
Today lobster has a different diet than its ancestors. Day reports that 80% to 85% of what scientists find in lobster’s stomachs today is herring and other bait. “The scientists won’t admit that we now do open-ocean farming,” he says. “That term would jeopardize their jobs, if there was no mystery to it. Fishermen haven’t figured [lobster] out, and that’s good. If we did we’d catch them all and be out of business.”
Lobster dealers, on the other hand, face the threat of having too many in the market all chasing a piece of the lobster business pie. One wholesaler, recalling his college economics 101, quoted the old adage: “Too many sellers chasing a business pie will depress prices. Half as many sellers chasing the same pie will raise prices.” He says that retailers and supermarkets normally work on profit margins of 26% to 33% and that restaurants and resorts normally mark up “center of plate” (the lobster or steak) from 100% to 200%, while Maine’s lobster traders, wholesalers, and distributors currently work on a gross profit margin of 9% to 12%, with a fixed overhead cost of 6% to 9%.
Whether one agrees with all the wholesaler’s points or not, obviously, those numbers tell us there are too many people trying to make a profit from the tasty Homarus americanus. “Competition in the middle of the pipeline is so fierce that dealers undercut each other in price,” he says, leaving what he calls “nonsensical” profit margins. “The dealer part of the lobster industry will not even begin to recover until there are fewer chasing a piece of that pie,” he says.
Tough times may have the winnowing effect he wants, as transport costs are affecting everyone from dealers, distributors, and restaurateurs to the pocketbooks of their lobster-loving customers.
Indeed, it is not only those who catch or sell lobster who must accept the natural fluctuations in Maine’s most famous industry. Those who love eating lobster have had to adjust, too, beginning last spring, when the price of lobster shot to an unheard-of high. “As these prices have increased,” Steuben poundkeeper Michael Pugliese says, “you’ve eliminated almost an entire clientele of people: the middle class.”
That bug, once so cheap and available 150 years ago it was used to feed soldiers and slaves, became a festive meal purchased to celebrate holidays, anniversaries, and special occasions. These days it has become a true luxury item.
Like the tides, lobster prices and lobster catches rise and fall. Though lobster fishermen in April got about $5 per pound, that’s little comfort if there are few keepers in the traps. Yet, even a recent “bad” fishing day—when Walter Day’s sternman Corey Cayton had to throw back nine out of 10 of the lobsters he measured—had a silver lining: “Most of these should be big enough after the next shed,” Day says.
This observation is confirmed by Rick Wahle, senior research scientist at the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences in West Boothbay Harbor. Wahle recently released data showing that lobster larvae have maintained the strong settlement rate that started in 2001 and continued right through 2007. That means that, starting this year, there should be lots of healthy, harvestable keepers grown from quarter-inch juveniles that settled on the cobbled bottom of the Gulf of Maine seven years ago—perhaps in time for your autumn dinner table.
