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.