If you’ve spent any time in Maine in the summer and looked out across the water, you’ll be struck by the multitude of lobster buoys. Come back in the dead of winter and you’ll hardly see a buoy. Ever wondered why?
As you may or may not know, molt each year in the warmer months, and they come in from offshore to the more protected coastline to shed their shell. If you’ve spent any time hanging around a fishing wharf, you’ve probably heard the term sheddar, rebranded a decade or so ago to “new shell”. Cheddars, or new shell lobsters, are typically what is available in summer. They are less expensive because they yield less meat per pound than hard shells, but the meat is considered sweeter, and they are much easier to eat – you can just about break the shell open with your hands!
The myriad of buoys you see tight in along the coast in the summer is the result of fishermen following the lobsters inshore for the summer catch. It has the added bonus of adding a bedazzling view on a blue bird summer day, but the brightly painted buoys are less fun to navigate on a motor boat (ask anyone who has caught a line on their prop – both embarrassing, costly and will ruin most any island picnic!). Some days it does look as though you could just about walk across the water on the buoys for your island picnic and skip the motor boat all together.
In the colder months, after the shed, the lobsters head back off shore, and so do the fishermen. Of course, not all fishermen fish through the winter, plenty bring their gear in for the winter (another coastal sight – traps stacked high on trailers and in trucks along Rt. 1, and in door yards and side yards through the winter months). For a sense of scale, a commercial fisherman may have up to 800 traps, and there are just about 5,800 commercial lobstermen in Maine. There are a number of other types of licenses available – student licenses (number of traps increased each year by age), and recreational licenses (up to 5 traps). The most significant defining characteristic of Maine’s lobster industry: the license cannot be sold, and lobstermen are not allowed to fish each other’s traps. That piece of regulation is the heart of the Maine lobstering economy and it explains why, in a world where consolidation is king, the Maine lobsterman is still out there everyday plying his trade, answering only to him (or her!) self, the weather, the tides and the movement of the lobsters.