The Secret Life of Lobsters: How Fishermen and Scientists Are Unraveling the Mysteries of Our Favorite Crustacean by Trevor Corson

Author:Trevor Corson
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Technology & Engineering, Lobsters, Fisheries & Aquaculture, Animals, Nature, Marine Life, Lobster Fisheries, General, United States, Gulf Of, Maine, History
ISBN: 9780060555597
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2004-01-01T22:00:00+00:00

EPILOGUE

Hauling In, 2001

The Double Trouble’s new engine had cost Bruce Fernald twenty thousand dollars, and the whirring monster blasted a well-tuned howl from the exhaust stack as Bruce churned the boat through another circle across the sea. But it was the few hundred bucks he’d spent on a different piece of equipment that had most dramatically improved his efficiency hauling traps. Bruce had finally started wearing glasses. This morning, though, even they didn’t seem to help.

“Come here, you son of a bitch!” Bruce shouted.

Jason Pickering, the Double Trouble’s sternman, rushed to the helm with a pained expression on his face.

“No, no, not you,” Bruce said. “I was talking to the buoy.” When a buoy eluded Bruce his tantrums were legendary.

Picking out a Styrofoam bullet on twenty square miles of sea pimpled with whitecaps was an incomparable form of aggravation, even with four satellites telling the GPS unit that the buoy was already aboard the boat.

“Tide,” Bruce said, invoking every lobsterman’s nemesis,

“you turned early on me, didn’t you?” When the tide is running hard, a stationary lobster buoy looks like it is streaking across the surface, a bubbly wake boiling behind it. As long as the buoy doesn’t get dragged under, it is relatively simple to locate because it gets tugged in a predictable direction—often that is toward shore if the tide is flood and away from shore if it is ebb, depending on local currents. But during the half hour or so when the tide switches 260 The Secret Life of Lobsters

directions, the position of a buoy is about as predictable as that of a helium balloon on a hundred-foot tether in a shifting breeze.

A tide calendar would tell you that the sea floods toward land for six hours and six minutes and then reverses direction and ebbs for the same length of time, this cycle occurring roughly twice a day. During a strong flood or ebb tide, a string of buoys ought to behave like a row of balloons in a steady wind, each tied to a brick, strings pulled taut at an angle. A helicopter pilot, having dropped the bricks single file in line with the wind, could circle back and fly straight into the wind, pick up each balloon, and keep flying while he reeled in the string and approached the brick underneath, and so on for the next balloon and brick. Bruce liked to haul his traps in a similar way. Whenever the terrain of the seafloor allowed it, he set his strings of traps more or less parallel to the flow of the tide.

When it came time to haul them a few days later, he’d drive the boat into the oncoming current and haul the row of traps from downstream.

This morning Bruce had planned to arrive at the offshore end of his first string of traps while the tide was still ebbing.

Then he would haul toward land against the tide and finish the string just as the tide changed directions. With the tide having turned to flood, he would wheel the boat around and haul the next string as he headed back out to sea.

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