Sometimes it’s hard to believe there are enough lobsters to fill the 3 million traps that litter the Maine coastline, or enough people to eat all that lobster assuming there were! It’s an important industry and 5,500 people make their living fishing lobsters. The traps are everywhere, including in busy harbors and marked navigational channels, each trap or string (“trawl”) of traps marked by a uniquely colored buoy or pair of buoys floating on the surface and attached with various configurations of lines. This makes things stressful for boaters. There’s nothing worse than getting lobster trap lines tangled around your propeller. The water temperature in August is around 55º F (13º C) and the prospect of having to dive under your boat to free the line is daunting. And you can’t just cut and run. You need to retie the line without which the trap will be lost forever. Furthermore, lobstermen and women don’t take kindly to cruisers fouling their gear so if they’re in the vicinity, you may get some good talking to as a reward for your freezing plunge and stress.
There’s an ongoing struggle between the lobster industry and groups interested in protecting the natural state of the coast, protecting whales and imposing various regulations. Dan got a haircut and the barber was the wife of a retired lobsterman. He asked what awful names they call cruisers. She said they don’t really have ill will toward us and their worst “enemy” is other lobstermen and women, who are sometimes known to move each others’ traps, or put traps on top of other traps. Nor do they take kindly to the Maine Department of Marine Resources, which issue regulations about a topic they “know little about.”
Lobster trap stress aside, the Maine coast is beautiful. Dan lived here for a while back in the 1970s and visited numerous times since. Dan and Sandy came to explore Acadia National Park in 2015. But seeing it from the water adds a whole new dimension.
