The Lobster Boat

A conversation with Erik Ronnberg

Maritime Curator, Cape Ann Museum

Lobstering sloop boat, 1880s ¹

Lobstering dory in the Ipswich Bay with riding sail ²

Engine-powered lobstering boats first appeared around Cape Ann in the late 1920s or early 1930s. Prior to that, the fishing was under oars. They rowed standing up, pushing the oars on a forward stroke, looking for rocks as well as buoys. They had to be able to get in close around the rocks when lobsters came in.

Lobstering dory, Cape Ann Museum
Eleven foot bottom length, fourteen feet overall

Inshore lobstering dories were tiny compared to those used in the schooner fleet. They had to be able to step ashore to recover their warp and buoys after heavy weather.

Sandy Bay Harbor, 1970s ³

Clare Waddell was one of several brothers who were local boat builders. His father David had operated a shipyard since the 1890s on Bradley Wharf in Rockport, next to Motif No.1. He even launched schooners there. About 1950 Clare moved the business up to his house on Cove Hill, where the Sally Webster House is now. The boats he was building by then were smaller and could go out of the shop on a trailer. When my father made a model of a lobster boat during the 1950s he may have visited Clare to get dimensions and look through the pile of construction molds that were lying around in the back yard. As kids Johnny Buckholzer and I used to play around in those things.

Lobstering boat interior ³

During the 1960s my father had the Rockport Marine Center on Tuna Wharf. He sold gas to the lobstermen. They were always in the shop, talking about this and that. I had some good close-up looks at those boats.

Erik Ronnberg working on a model of a lobstering boat
Cape Ann Museum, July 2017

Here at the Cape Ann Museum we wanted to have a finished model of a lobstering boat on display. Since 1980 we'd been storing one started by Herbert H. Court, which came to us from the  defunct Gloucester Fishermen’s Museum collection. As I worked on completing it, it and I were “on exhibit” in the Maritime Gallery.

 
At this point the companionway into the fo'c'sle needed to be changed. It has to be on the opposite side from the hauling winch and the steering wheel, which should be developing to the starboard. That's because when you're going to pick up a trap, one man has to be able to do the whole job of steering the boat up to the buoy, catching it with the boat hook, running it through the snatch block, and taking it around the winch head. It's all got to be right there at hand.

 
It doesn't yet have a prop guard, but it will. It's a ring that will enclose the propeller to prevent any pot warps from fouling the propeller. With all this turbulence, if there's any slack in the line, propeller suction will draw the line to it. I don't know what's worse--cutting the pot warp and losing 50 pots, or getting tangled up and not being able to get loose from the whole thing. Then he better call the Coast Guard.

He'd had a little cross bit here, but in all my photographs there's nothing back here, not even a stern chock. Of course there has to be a ring bolt for the aft mooring line. The important thing is that it be low profile, so that when you pile traps back here, it's not in the way when you give them a shove over the stern into the drink.

I decided on fitting her with the automobile-type steering wheel that became popular later in the period. Also the deeply-grooved winch that came to replace the long slender ones, where you had to take several turns around the winch head.

I wanted to give her a riding sail. They're not so common now, It was usually mounted off-center, just inside the coming. The interesting thing is that the sheet block for that was on the transom. Again, nothing on the deck. Then the sheet came through, probably to a cleat right on the mast. Very simple.

With a riding sail, you can come up to windward to pick up the buoy. It's a steadying device to keep the vessel from slopping around, strictly for controlling motion, pushing the stern off as you approach the buoy. It wouldn't have much effect on propulsion.

Of course the bottom is coated with standard red copper anti-fouling paint. The other colors are personal choices. It's important to stay away from model colors "out of the bottle." They're too bright, too pure, too clean. They don't take into account the fact that distance, and the intervening atmosphere, mute color perception. Additionally there are weathering effects, wear and tear, and metal corrosion to consider. Painting a model is a subtle business. Otherwise it looks like a toy boat.

Sources

1. Engraving from "History and Methods of the Fisheries," The Fisheries and Fishery Industries of the United States, ed. George Brown Goode of the Smithsonian Institution, 1887.
2. Martha Harvey photograph, courtesy of the Annisquam Historical Society.
3. Erik Ronnberg photographs

An Inshore Lobsterman's Year in Review

Before leaving Peter Prybot's memoir Lobstering off Cape Ann, please enjoy some excerpts from the chapter "An Inshore Lobsterman's Year in Review" accompanied by my illustrative photographs from Halibut Point.

Spring

            By early April the first diatom bloom occurs, and millions of microscopic green glittering primary producers briefly turn the navy-blue waters of winter green, only to bust by a combination of being grazed upon by zooplankton and depleting the nutrients in the water themselves.

            Then knotted wrack or rockweed, Ascophyllum nodosum, "goes spawny" along the rocky shoreline's intertidal zone. During this roughly month-long process, which usually begins in mid-to-late March, the algae's olive-colored fronds turn a slimy brown, and their tips' yellow receptacles first swell up and then break away, soon releasing gametes for the future generations.

            Animal harbingers catch my eye, too. Late March is announced by the white specks of once-planktonic barnacle larvae suddenly settling on new fixed and floating homes--especially buoys, traps and rocks.

            Suddenly catching good numbers of two- to five-inch-long rock eels and cunners in the traps again also tell me it's spring. These fish then move inshore and become active again....A bottom water temperature above fifty degrees Fahrenheit, often felt in May, seems to trigger the cunner movements. Usually the spring lobster run is not too far away.

            The final spring harbinger, the April departure of most of those cute but pesky and pilfering harbor, grey and hooded seas to more northern waters, is welcomed by Cape Ann lobstermen. Some three hundred seals winter on the Big and Little Salvages, the rocky outcroppings and ledges about three miles off of Rockport.

Summer

            Much happens between this season's June arrival and September departure. The marine ecosystem's productivity machine makes hay while the sun shines under ideal conditions of abundant light, food and warmth. Flora and fauna grow, build up their body reserves, and multiply as new generations hatch and old ones die.

            Other lobstermen, along with recreational fishermen and boaters' activities on the crowded inshore grounds, cause tension, too. You often then get set over by other lobstermen's gear, making it hard to pull up your traps. Fishing inside this time of year can get to be downright "seagull," as everyone vies for the tight inshore grounds, much like seagulls diving for food on the beach.

            Another late summer biological occurrence, the shoreline, coves and harbors teeming with huge schools of migrating two-to-three-inch-long menhaden or pogies....These silvery fry hug the shallows, sometimes swimming amongst the rockweed at high tide, in a vain attempt to escape predators like voracious pollock, mackerel, bass and bluefish.

Fall

            Early fall's high activity slows down dramatically by its official December 21 end. The surface water temperature often drops to the mid-fifties by the end of October, and the forties by December. The thermocline in the water column gets closer to the bottom as the cold works its way down....The fall shoreline often thunders with pummeling surf and waves.

            The dinoflagellates bloom in the fall and fire up the dark ocean. The movements of swimming fish and passing boats agitate these top-shaped single-cell microscopic organisms to luminesce.

            The catching of warm-water fishes--triggerfish, filefish, sea horses and scup--in lobster traps signals early fall. Offshore storms and hurricanes usually drive thee Cape Ann rarities into northern waters either from the Gulf Stream or up from the south.

            Early fall's inshore waters become "very active" with bluefish and striped bass as they feed, fatten and group up in preparation for their imminent southward migration. Most of the time, these fish leave Cape Ann waters in early October.

            The skies becoming peppered with vacillating flocks of migratory eiders, old squaws and scoters is a traditional September through November harbinger. These birds fly head on in great numbers, often just above the waves when the wind blows northeast. Majestic gannets move south about the same time, then are frequently seen dropping out of the sky, plunging into the ocean's surface like arrows after fall-fattened mackerel.

Winter

            Winter ends the annual seasonal cycle. The water, like the creatures that live within it, usually rests; just surviving is now the name of the game. Except when agitated by waves, the ocean water becomes very clear, sometimes down to a depth of over fifty feet. It also becomes uniformly cold or isothermal from the surface to the bottom, often hitting thirty-four to thirty-six degrees Fahrenheit. The lowest light levels and (usually) the coldest air and water temperatures slow down nature's production machine to a near halt except for the spawning activities of cod, winter flounder, herring and northern shrimp.

            By early winter the lobsterman's mind is working on relaxation despite being enveloped by this season's early-on gloom and doom ambiance created by the short days and dark mornings. I still feel pressured to earn as much as I can then, knowing the holidays and tax time are just around the corner, and every little bit helps.

            "Do I go, or don't I go?" I make this decision at home by first listening to the weather reports and then looking at my weather instruments. If there's further doubt, I'll step outdoors, glance at the tree branch movements and listen to the sound of the ocean before going to the wharf. Most of the time I'll go, preferring to get my work done early. If the ocean is too rough, you can always turn around and come home. Many other lobstermen make their last-minute decisions from their warm pickup trucks at their favorite ocean observation spots. The truck heater feels awful good on questionable days.

Lobstering off Cape Ann



Hauling pots off Halibut Point

 Both the rocky crevices and the muddy bottoms off Halibut Point afford prime lobster habitat at different times in the crustacean's life cycle.

Looking into the sunrise

Knowing the lobster's habits and the patterns of its marine environment are a key part of the preparation for success in the lobster fishery.

Lobstering in the Ipswich Bay, 1887 ¹

The design of the lobster trap has not changed greatly in the century and a half it has been in use. Smelly bait attracts the scavenging lobster through a netted funnel into the 'kitchen' in the front half of the trap. The lobster is more securely caught if it goes through a second netted funnel to the 'parlor.' But underwater cameras have shown that the lobster is as capable of walking out as in. Fishermen already suspected this. They try to catch their guests early in the morning. Lobsters are primarily nocturnal feeders, browsing with highly sensitive organs of smell and touch.

Lane's Cove, 1887 ¹

Lobstering has long been a mainstay of the indigenous economy in Lane's Cove. Some of the old shacks were still there when local lad Peter Prybot put his skiff and ten pots in the water at age 12 in the summer of 1959. He was able to transport a forty-pound trap from home by tying it to the side of his bicycle and walking it half a mile to the Cove.

The old timers around the wharf growled at the prospect of new competition.  "You damn fool--go to school and make something out of your life." But Tut Ahonen gave him a hand with his old Studebaker pickup truck. George Morey sold him squirrel hake and pollock for bait from his fish trap back of the Cove.

Peter grew up to make a career in the lobster fishery. He loved the independent, self reliant enterprise. He wrote and photographed profusely about maritime life for the Gloucester Daily Times and for trade journals. He published an inquisitive, candid, affectionate memoir in 2006. ²

"Every lobsterman has his or her own story of how and why they are in business. Some were born into it, and the lobstering is just in them, often generations worth on both sides of their family....I'm one of those lobstermen who gradually worked his way into lobstering despite having neither any fishing family history nor roots in Gloucester. I was a true outsider who simply fell in love with [it.]"

Peter Prybot with a lobster he caught by diving ²

"By age eleven, I hunted lobsters during the summer along the shoreline at low tide by either listening for the bubbly breathing noises and then overturning rocks to get at them, or spearing the lobsters from the surface from an inner tube. A mask, snorkel and a pair of flippers and a crude spear consisting of a long pole pointer with a sharpened finishing nail made the job easier....During my active scuba diving days, I picked up some big lobsters like this 19½ pound male. This lobster was sitting right in the open forty feet down, alongside a muddy, rocky edge."

Cookout on the flat rocks, Lanesville shore

"One day during my first summer of lobstering, I got to be the lobsterman hauling traps in front of my family's picnic spot. That day my brother, mother and a good friend of hers with her three children held a cookout there. Not only did I supply the lobsters, but I also took some of the people out to show them about lobstering. I was so proud."

Pigeon Cove

In the mid-1970s Peter moved his mooring around Halibut Point to the advantageous harbor of Pigeon Cove. It had hoists, didn't freeze in the winter, and was much easier and safer to work out of than Lane's Cove. About thirty full-time lobstermen called it home.

Pigeon Cove breakwater holding off a nor'easter

"Every lobsterman works a garden patch in the Atlantic. For some, this plot is miles long, hundreds of feet down, and out of sight of land. My garden in the southernmost Gulf of Maine runs along an approximate five-mile stretch of northern Cape Ann's primarily rocky shoreline out to the man-made Sandy Bay breakwater, about two miles off of Rockport. Much of this territory is very vulnerable to easterly storms."

Gloucester lobsterman Arthur Surrette returns to port
aboard his Tempest Tossed II
after a day out fishing in the winter

"People ask, 'How do you do this in the winter in an open boat?' You simply dress appropriately to keep warm, and this often includes putting on thermal underwear, a facemask, a scarf and taking along an extra pair of thermal-lined rubber gloves....My wife and friends are working on me to cease winter fishing."

Fisherman Gus Doyle holding a 28-pound male lobster
dragged up in a net from 1,200 feet down.

"Wanderlust got the best of me during the off-season of my first extended lobster year. That November and January I made several ten-day-long offshore fishing trips as a guest aboard the 117-foot-long Gloucester dragger Judith Lee Rose with her seven-man crew....The wooden vessel often dragged up huge lobsters...in different outer Georges Bank canyons."

Monkfish captures gull off Plum Cove beach
Joe Sinagra drawing

"Every lobsterman's career includes rare personal experiences....I couldn't believe my eyes: there was a black-backed gull stuck in the mouth of a three-foot-long monkfish lying diagonally in the water. The rear end of the gull stuck out of the fish's mouth; the bird's tail fanned and its webbed feet struggled in the air....Should I play god? I pondered...."

Summer sunrise over The Salvages, off Rockport

"The lengthening days and rising temperatures plague lobstermen with spring fever year after year. When spring has sprung, you can smell, hear and feel it in the air. Smiling and talking become second nature again, and hope and enthusiasm, especially for a banner fishing year and good weather, flow anew. Just some warm weather and a sign of a few lobsters will trigger many lobstermen to set their traps, and "The gold rush is on again," says Fed Hillier, a veteran Pigeon Cove Harbor lobsterman. These lobstermen fear their competitors might get a jump on them if they don't set their traps."

Peter Prybot
(1948-2011)

"Today I still wouldn't trade lobstering for any other job in the world, and if I had to do my life all over again, I wouldn't change a thing. In what other occupation can one simultaneously earn a living, be one's own boss, work close to nature and be in sync with her rhythms and seasons, experience solitude (most of the time) and also get fresh air, exercise, and your own seafood?"

Sources
1. Engravings from "History and Methods of the Fisheries," The Fisheries and Fishery Industries of the United States, ed. George Brown Goode of the Smithsonian Institution, 1887.

2. All subsequent quotes and photographs are from Lobstering off Cape Ann, by Peter K. Prybot, 2006.

The Secret Life of Lobsters

The Lobster Pool, Folly Cove

Perfectly wedged between the Folly Cove shoreline and our tourist highway Route 127, the Lobster Pool restaurant fascinates diners with an aquarium view of its namesake crustacean.  You can take your meal to a picnic table alongside the ocean where curious buoys mark the lobsterman's traps. You can speculate, as he does, about life on the sea bottom.

Lobster trap buoys

The density of the buoys seems to form a lethal obstacle course that ought to deplete the lobster population. Yet somehow the traps keep producing salable lobsters, year in and year out.

Lobsterman in Folly Cove a century ago

Lobsterman off Halibut Point today

Here are some tidbits to whet your appetite from The Secret Life of Lobsters [authored by Trevor Corson, 2004], a good New England story of intrigue, science, and colorful coastal characters. 

            Scientists in New England, like those in Canada, knew that lobster larvae floated off the coast during the summer and that, a few years later, young lobsters showed up in fishermen's traps. What happened in between was the mystery. If it was the limited number of shelters that was causing a demographic bottleneck, Rick suspected the bottleneck occurred sometime during this cryptic period of early life.... 

            If the lobster had been able to see the robot hovering overhead it might have been unnerved. The eyes of a lobster can detect motion under low-light conditions but don't discern much detail, especially when faced with floodlights. Lobsters are, however, equipped with sensitive touch receptors, in the form of their two long antennae and thousands of minute hairs protruding through the shells of their claws and legs. Like houseflies, lobsters can also taste with their feet. But a lobster's most acute sense is its ability to smell. A smaller pair of two-prong antennae, known as antennules, contain hundreds of chemical receptors that give lobsters most of their hunting and socializing skills. But the Phantom didn't emit a recognizable scent.... 

            If one lobster didn't win within twenty minutes, the pair was disqualified. One lobster usually capitulated before the time limit, signaling its surrender with a display of groveling. But it turned out that the loser's subservience lasted longer than the end of the fight. Jelle and his students staged rematches between the same lobsters twenty-four hours later....Attaching blindfolds made little difference....Jelle and Diane Cowan had shown that lobster behavior in the boudoir was governed by scent....
 
            The American lobster urinates not from some posterior region of its body, but directly out the front of its face.....These powerful streams mix with the gill outflow and are carried some five feet ahead of the lobster in its plume....Finding out, of course, would require a lobster catheter....The scents of his dominant masculinity and her seductive femininity would mingle, Jelle supposed, and waft out the back door of his shelter, like an olfactory billboard posted in his backyard....
 
            Dye swirling in a current might appear chaotic to the human eye, but after several hundred million years of tracking odors underwater, a lobster inside a turbulent odor plume surely felt right at home....When the backpack was attached to a lobster, one electrode sat directly behind each antennule....Now that Jelle understood how a lobster perceived an odor landscape, it was a simple matter to generate lobster virtual reality....
 
            The hurricane warning crackled over Bruce Fernald's radio aboard the Double Trouble two days before the end of August 1996. The storm was a monster and approaching Little Cranberry Island quickly. Of Bruce's eight hundred traps, a third were still sitting in shallow water near shore, where a gale could beat them into tangles of wire and twine....
 
            When GoMOOs came online, it became one of Lew's most important tools in the quest to figure out where lobster larvae, creatures the size of ants, were being carried across the thirty-six thousand square miles of the Gulf of Maine....Working with GoMOOs was a little like playing Poseidon. Lew could peer down from heaven, reach out a hand, and peel away a layer or two of ocean. What he saw didn't so much bestow omniscience as humble him. The sea's movements were staggeringly complex....
 
            The gyre flows northward and returns to the Northeast Channel, where much of the water exits the gulf and flows back into the North Atlantic. Some of it remains inside the gulf to cycle through the gyre again. The currents inside the gulf are chaotic, and a myriad of eddies and vortices complicate their movements. Oceanographers have calculated that an average parcel of water spends about one year traveling inside the gulf before it leaves. When the lobster hatching season begins, usually between mid-June and early July, large numbers of females carrying fully developed eggs undergo abrupt contractions of their tail  muscles during the night....
 
            After several days the first-stage larva sheds its shell and enters a second stage, which is more sophisticated. It has grown only a millimeter but it has gained new appendages and muscles. It floats below the surface, perhaps ten feet under or even deeper, putting it at the mercy of the gulf's complex currents. By now it has developed many of the characteristics of a lobster, including tiny claws, swimmerets, and tail flippers. Finally it becomes a postlarva, or superlobster, and returns to the surface to swim and sail on the wind. After a few days the superlobster begins to dive, searching for cobblestones in shallow water....
 
            The larvae of the cod and crab are passive creatures that settle wherever the ocean puts them. By contrast, the superlobster's ability to seek out hiding places is the lobster's secret weapon. By exerting a degree of control over its fate, the superlobster vastly improves its chances of survival. But this is also the lobster's greatest reproductive liability. A single cod or crab mother makes millions of eggs. For a mother lobster, the extra resources required to build her miniature superheroes means she can make only thousands. It is a risky strategy, because the delivery system that lobsters depend on--ocean currents--can fail to carry their limited numbers of offspring to their targets--the nurseries....
 
            An eastern counterpart to El Niño, the North Atlantic Oscillation is a titanic seesaw in pressure distribution that tips into a subtropical high or a polar low for years or even decades at a time. It can push the Gulf Stream away from the edge of the continental shelf, which appears to affect which type of water is dominant in the Gulf of Maine. For the study of lobster ecology the primary challenge would be to determine the trajectories of actual larvae....

 

            The talk turned to the season's strange turn of events, the slow spring and the sudden late-season spurt of shedders. Halfway through his beer, Bruce turned to Barb. "Sometimes I really wonder, Bruce said, "why they do that."....As Bruce and Barb sat on the couch in their cozy living room, their children off to college, it seemed that the man on the screen might be right. Fishermen could do worse than protecting their young until it was time to release them into the currents. The rest was up to the sea.