Recreational Lobstering 101
I’ve pulled a lobster pot up from the sea floor hundreds of times. And it’s exciting every single time. Cue the laughter from the professionals, who have pulled them up hundreds of thousands of times, and probably don’t see it quite the same way. But, for an amateur, it just doesn’t get old.
My husband Kevin and I have tried to glean food from the world around us every which way from Sunday. We grow tomatoes and collards and Asian pears, we keep chickens and pigs and turkeys, we hunt and fish and forage. We make our own sea salt, even. But lobstering could be my all-time favorite.
It was astonishing to me, when we moved here from Manhattan a decade ago, that any old person can buy ten lobster pots and put them out there in the ocean, just about anywhere you like. Why doesn’t everyone do it? It’s LOBSTER, and you can just pull it out of the water!
Pretty much immediately, we got our required permit (now $55), bought ten used traps from a professional lobsterman, attached buoys with our permit number and color scheme (blue, white and orange), and we were good to go.
But where, exactly, do we go? We had no idea where we might catch lobster. So we employed a strategy that we always use when we find ourselves clueless: we find people who aren’t clueless, and do what they do.
In the case of lobstering, it’s hard to keep secrets. Your lobster pots are out in the water, for the whole world to see. Since a good number of them were clustered just north of the head buoy for the channel into Barnstable Harbor, that’s where we went.
This was three boats ago, when we had a 19-foot center console that barely fit all ten pots. We found a place that was close, but not too close, to other pots, and dropped them in some semblance of a straight line, each baited with a little bag of fish heads and frames and guts—whatever’s left over after you eat a fish.
A couple days later, we went out to see what we caught. And we began to get an inkling of why everyone doesn’t do it.
We didn’t have any equipment to pull the pots up (we’ve wised up since), so we did it by hand. Hand over hand. Those things are heavy—some 50 pounds each—and pulling them up through fifty feet of water is not a trivial job. Luckily, one of the reasons Kevin and I do this get-your-own-food thing is for the exercise, because exercise is what you’ll get if you lobster this way.
And then there’s the mess. As the season progresses, the lines get increasingly fouled by sea crud: seaweed and algae and even ropeloving critters. As you pull the pots up, a reasonable amount of the crud is transferred from the line to the boat. The pots themselves are also grimy and weedy, and when you brace them against your body to hold them steady on the gunwale in choppy water, the grime and weeds get all over you.
Then you have to rebait the bags. First, you dump the bones of the old bait overboard, a few of which inevitably find their way onboard. Then you fill the bags with the frozen pieces of bluefish rack from the smelly cooler full of bait. The bait leaves blood and guts on anything it touches, which always includes your gloves and sometimes, your deck and your clothes. By the time you’ve checked all ten pots, the boat is a disaster. The deck is cruddy and slippery, your gloves and clothes are stained and wet. You’re exhausted. But damned if you haven’t had a good time! Also, LOBSTER.
Without heroic measures that require things like fancy neoprene suits and oxygen tanks, the sea floor is a place that we don’t get to visit. When you pull up a lobster pot, you get a little diorama of what’s going on down there. It’s great when there’s a lobster, or two, or even five (our personal best). But all kinds of other things come up.
We get crabs, including Jonah crabs, which are arguably more delicious than lobsters but are a royal pain to get meat out of. We get small fish like flounder and skate, and we even got a legal-size tautog once. We get starfish and sea urchins and some mysterious transparent creatures that have defied my best efforts at identification. Every pot is another opportunity to be surprised.
If you’re game to be surprised, start with getting a few traps.
A lobster trap is a box made of PVC-coated wire mesh, divided into two “rooms.” The first room is the kitchen, so-called because that’s where the food is. The lobster comes up a tube that narrows at the top to get in. Then, if all goes well, it goes from the kitchen to the parlor, through another mesh-lined tube that narrows at the end, in a bid to escape the kitchen.
There’s a funny thing about lobster pots, though. In general, in the world of traps, the objective is to keep the animal in. And, sure, if at least some animals didn’t stay in the lobster pots, I’m sure the design wouldn’t have become industry-standard. But when people started sending video cameras down with the pots, it became clear that plenty of lobsters come and go at will. They eat their fill and go out the way they came in.
While a better mousetrap is so obviously a good thing that’s it’s become an idiom for a marketable idea, a better lobster trap doesn’t seem to generate much interest. I’ve been told it’s part of keeping the fishery sustainable, but I can’t verify that. It could just be inertia.
You can often find used versions of these minimum-security traps on Craigslist and other local sources of listings. Money-wise, you can expect to spend between $25 and $50 on a pot in good condition, and you’ll need buoys and line on top of that.
And a boat. You’re going to need a boat. Although there are a couple of places where it’s possible to catch lobsters from shore (the Cape Cod Canal is probably the best of them), most lobstering does require that you go out on the water. And, while you definitely don’t need a davit—that aluminum arm that swings out over the water— my lower back is here to tell you that it helps a lot, especially if it has an electric motor attached.
Make sure you’re familiar with the regulations. There are rules in place for sustainability of the fishery, as well as the safety of lobsters, whales and mariners. There are size limits and, where we are in Cape Cod Bay, you can’t take lobsters that have a carapace less than 3.25 inches or greater than 5 inches (there are other limits in other places). You can’t take egg-bearing females, which are easy to identify since lobsters carry their eggs on the outside, in the nooks and crannies in the underside of their tail.
You’re also not allowed to take any lobster with a V-notch in her tail, because it got there when a commercial fisherman caught that lobster when she had eggs. It’s a voluntary system devised by lobster fishermen and -women to make sure there are enough females to sustain the population. If you’re lobstering recreationally, you don’t have to notch; you just have to throw back any notched lobster.
I will warn you in advance that it’s hard to throw a lobster back. Your brain stem says, “Hey, we caught that fair and square!” and your stomach says “Hey, that would taste really good!” Luckily, the cerebral cortex has veto power, and mine says, “Hey, we play by the rules, and we want to maintain a sustainable lobster population. Besides, you can go to jail for taking lobsters illegally.” Back it goes.
There are also equipment regs. You have to use sinking line, so there isn’t a floating mass of rope on the surface to entangle boats and marine life. Your buoy has to have a “weak link” where it attaches to the line so that if something does get entangled, the buoy will break from the rope. There has to be escape hatch for small lobsters and other creatures to easily get out.
When you read the specs, it sounds complicated, but any local outfitter can help you make sure you’ve got the right stuff. And it’s worth it, because LOBSTERS.
We’ve never hit the daily limit of 15, but we’ve come close. And there’s something both wholesome and decadent about a gigantic pile of a luxury food, pulled by you, from the sea. You make a potato salad, grill some corn, and invite your friends. You pass around the lobster crackers and make an unconscionable mess. Any night you get lobster in your hair is a good night.
We usually put our pots out in late spring, and we know the season’s over when the spider crabs move in, usually in late October or early November. I’m not sure why that is, but obviously conditions somehow change and our lobsters move on. By then it’s getting a bit too cold for me to want to be on the water anyway, so I don’t mind bringing them in.
By spring, I’ll be ready to start again. Hope to see you out there.
