Briggs tells me that he liked the last piece I wrote about rules and regulations. (“I especially enjoyed that you dilated on the subject of gillnets on my behalf.”)
But he thought I was “taking too much for granted how much the general populace understands about the culture and business of lobstering.”
The basics is what he wanted, he wrote. At least a start. (And yes, he wrote this in an actual letter, not an email. With a fountain pen. Who writes letters anymore? Briggs does. You should see his penmanship. It’s finest kind—he could copy the Declaration of Independence and you wouldn’t know which was which. He wrote it from his new school. But more about that later.)
Tell people the basics, he said, like what a lobster trap is. Give people the fundamentals.
So, here goes (even though I can hardly believe there are people out there who don’t know what a lobster trap is).
Back in my granddad’s day, wooden traps were the kind everyone used. They used wooden pegs to keep the claws from opening, too, by jamming the pegs into the joint of the claws. Now everyone uses rubber bands. The wood pierced the lobsters’ flesh and gave them diseases. Now the only time your see a wooden lobster trap is in a gift shop—luring tourists to buy them.
Nowadays we use vinyl-covered metal mesh traps, but they’re basically the same as the old wooden ones except they last longer. They don’t get as heavy as the old ones, which soaked up all the water till they weighed a ton. We put bricks inside to weigh them down.
The lobsters want to get the bait that we stuff into bait bags, herring or redfish, and they crawl into a chamber called the kitchen. The parlor is the inner chamber. Traps have an escape vent so the little lobsters and fish and crabs can leave.
When you open a trap to take out your catch, you have to be sure the lobsters you keep are legal size. We have a gauge we use to measure from the back of the eye socket along a parallel line to the end of the body shell—what Briggs would call the carapace. (Am I right, Briggs?) The lobsters we catch have to have body shells of at least 3 3/8 inches or we have to throw them back. They can’t have eggs or “berries” or be a bug with a V-notch in her tail that we put on breeding females.
Okay, I could go on, but that’s the basics. I’ll give you more later. Briggs: Does that work for you?
Hey, if you want to see some great pictures of lobstering, take a look at a book called The Lobstering Life by David Middleton and Brenda Berry.
Lobster Boy 