Maine lobstah

The lobster catch is down this year because the water is colder. Through the winter the lobsters go into deep water and hide in mud. When the water gets to a certain temperature they come in closer to shore, start foraging and get caught in lobster traps. If they're big enough---but not too big and not an egg-bearing female---they could end up on a dinner plate.

Lobster sweatshirts and live lobsters for sale at Shaw's Restaurant in New Harbor, Maine.

The only legal way to catch lobsters in Maine is with traps of a specific design, by lobstermen with the right licence and then there are volumes of regulations depending on which area is being fished. As with most commercial fishing, it's hard, cold and dangerous work and the people who do it are from families who have been doing the same for generations.

A typical Maine lobster boat.

I've visited the coast of Maine since I was a kid so I've seen the lobstermen working and I've bought many lobsters. A few years ago my curiosity got the best of me and I managed to get invited along with a lobsterman for a day, working as his sternman. This was a real privilege. The local lobstermen have always had an uneasy relationship with people "from away" (those who haven't lived in the town for a hundred years and, worse still with "summer people"like myself). And lobstering isn't the sort of thing they want an outsider to see at close hand.

The South Bristol Co-op.

This particular lobsterman---friend of a relative who is a local---said he could use a hand for a day. His wife was his usual sternman (men and women are both called "sternmen") but she said she didn't want to go out into John's Bay during the "roly-poly". A strong swell had been predicted for the next day.

Lobsterman looking for his buoys.

The lobsterman finds his buoys (the local pronunciation is "boo-ee" and never "boy"), pulls the traps into the boat, and throws the small lobsters, crabs and bottom-feeding fish back in the sea. The sternman takes out the old bait if there's any left and throws it away and then re-baits the trap. On my day the bait came from a barrel of very ripe alewife, a kind of herring. It was my job to spear them with a bait needle, weaving a string back and forth through each fish and then tying it in place in the trap before the trap was thrown overboard again.

Sorting the catch at the end of the day.

Click here to watch lobstermen sorting a day's catch. 

We set out sometime between four or five a.m. I'd asked before hand what I should wear and the lobsterman hesitated before saying in his very slow Down-East accent: "Nothin' good".  I hadn't intended to wear smart casual but when I got to the boat he handed me bibbed overalls to put over my grungy jeans and sweatshirt. For a short time I think I could have passed for the real deal. Well, at least to someone from away.

A customer at the South Bristol Coop.

Once we hit the roly-poly---and it really was---I began to realise why Mrs sternman wasn't so keen on this gig. It is a real art to staying upright when using both hands to spear fish and bait traps when it's wet underfoot and the boat is constantly turning broadside to the waves. It also wasn't long before I started regretting my breakfast of hash browns, bacon and eggs. I noticed that the captain only nibbled the odd dry cracker all day long. I spent hours sliding around like a drunken jitterbug dancer while struggling not to do the old technicolor yawn and reprise my breakfast.

The wooden half-round traps of my youth have been exchanged for
rectangular wire ones. This display is at the Maine State Museum in Augusta.

Lobstering is not only a skill bordering on a black art but it's also a very clannish profession. There are only so many lobsters down there and the thought of letting a newcomer drop traps in the lobstermen's yard is not always a welcome one. A turf war a couple of years ago in Maine ended in a couple of lobstermen shooting each other.

Once in a blue moon a blue lobster is caught.

In addition to the very restrictive rules and there's etiquette. For example: you don't drop a string of traps in an east-west orientation when others have set theirs north to south. Lines can get hopelessly tangled and much valuable time lost sorting things out.

We asked my grand niece not to play with her food.

Buoys are colour-coded and most lobster boats display one of their own buoys so that other lobstermen can see that they're only pulling their own traps. And god help anyone---especially a total outsider---who pulls a trap that isn't their own.

The Bath Maritime Museum has an excellent exhibition on the lobster industry.
And it has a lot more. Well worth a visit.

For those in the business who break a rule of etiquette there can be warnings. Back in the village nothing might be said to the offender but if he finds a simple half-hitch knot in his buoy line he can be sure there's a reason for it. If warnings go unheeded, a lobsterman might be "cut". The errant lobsterman goes out and finds his buoys floating free and his traps stuck irretrievably on the bottom of the ocean and goodbye investment.

Inland Mainers (not "Maniacs") hated the lobster licence plates. There were
also those who thought a dead animal was inappropriate as a state symbol.
There is now a choice of images.

On my day out, I'm guessing that we would only have caught forty or fifty lobsters, a lower than usual catch, I was told. When you consider the overhead of maintaining a lobster boat, it may not have been a break-even day.

At today's prices and exchange rate, the average lobster
costs about $A15.00 per kilo.

This is the cost of lobster at the Sydney Fish Markets. And they don't even
have front claws where the best meat is.

Lobsters used to be so plentiful that the local Native American's---okay, Indians---used to put them on their crops as fertiliser. And from the early 1600s when there were English fishing stations on the off-shore islands, it was cod, not lobster, that they were after. In early colonial days the lobsters were fed to the help because they were cheap. At one point servants in Boston rebelled and refused to eat lobster more than three days a week. It's a delicacy now but I can't imagine being forced to eat lobster all the time.

A happy gathering...although maybe not so happy for the lobsters.

Monhegan---Out-To-Sea Island

The ferry ride from New Harbor, Maine, was a smooth one-hour ride to our destination: Monhegan Island, twelve miles (22 km) out to sea. There were eleven of us---all relatives or friends---in search of hiking exercise and a restful day of meandering around this very pretty little town (population around 75).

The Monhegan mailboat ferry from where it leaves in New Harbor.

Monhegan---the name comes from Monchiggan meaning "out-to-sea island" in the local Algonquian Native American language---has a small lobstering fleet that works most of the year. But in summer the island is a tourist mecca populated on a good day by a couple hundred people who arrive from New Harbor, Port Clyde and Boothbay Harbor. Like us, most are day-trippers who leave on the afternoon ferries.

The town of Monhegan.

It's mostly a day-tripper island and the first and most famous day-tripper was English explorer and colonist, Captain John Smith who arrived in 1614. Smith is probably the best-known explorer of that time in the East Coast of what would eventually become the USA not only because of his exploits (he brought Pocahontas back to England) but because of the somewhat exaggerated accounts he wrote about his voyages. He claimed to have been captured by Native Americans and was about to be killed when Pocahontas saved his life. From one of his accounts:

Pocahontas threw herself across his body: "at the minute of my execution, she hazarded the beating out of her own brains to save mine; and not only that, but so prevailed with her father, that I was safely conducted to Jamestown". 

Well...

The Island Inn is the big building in the background.

In fact when he brought his ships into Monhegan Harbor there was already a fishing station there and it had already been visited by another Englishman, Martin Pring, in 1603, Samuel de Champlain in the same year, "English" explorer John Cabot (born Giovanni Cabotto in Italy) and maybe various Vikings around the year 1000. And of course "discovery" takes on a new meaning when we consider that native Americans had already been living in this area for tens of thousands of years.

Very New England cedar shingle patterns.

Next year the Monhegan Islanders will be celebrating the 400th anniversary of Captain John Smith and if it's anything like Chowderfest (clam chowder) that we happened across this year along with the Island Brewery's Beerfest, it should be a lot of fun.

Burnt Head

The tiny town is on one side of the island and, under Maine law, is a "plantation" which is a local government category between a town and a township. Most of the island is parkland and never to be developed. Typical day-trippers to the island (us) land in the town and then walk around the rugged other side for a couple of hours before seeking out art galleries, chowderfests and beerfests before the ferry leaves again for the mainland. You don't want to miss the sailing because in summer there will be no room in the inn.

The undeveloped side of the island.

A brief raspberry stop on our walk.

Since the late 1800s, there many artists have either lived or just visited the island to find inspiration. Winslow Homer, George Bellows and various Wyeths were there but my favourite---at least as an eccentric personality---was Rockwell Kent who lived there year round for a few years. While living here, Kent painted a painting called "The Wreck of the T D Sheridan". It was good to find the wreck in much the same condition it was in 1949.

Rockwell Kent's 1949 painting "The Wreck of the D T Sheridan".

After 64 years the wreck has held up well.

So we walked, picked raspberries, saw whales and seals, bought a couple of paintings and filled ourselves with clam chowder, beer, coffee and blueberry muffins before returning to the mainland. A great day out.

We spotted a whale from here.

Among the other events on Monhegan is the annual circus. It began in 1912 and this year it will be on August 17th. By then I'll be back in Australia but I'd have loved to have seen it.

The view towards the mainland.

It's difficult to walk on the island without tripping over an artist's easel.

Here are some of the acts as advertised on the 1913 poster (designed by artist, Frederic Dorr Steele):

 SAVE YOUR PENNIES FOR THE CIRCUS 297 STAR ACTS INCLUDING AMONG OTHERS MLLE DOLLY DELERIA’S DEATH-DEFYING DIVE OVER SIX CAMELS * SIMULTANEOUS & SYNCHRONOUS PERFORMANCES BY TROUPES OF THE WORLD’S GREATEST PERFORMERS ON THE TRAPEZE * PROFESSOR BELLOWS’ LADY BAREBACK RIDERS * PROFESSOR DELICATESSO’S PERFORMING LIONS * PROFESSOR CAZALLIS’S MARVELOUS MONKEYS * PROFESSOR BOSS’S EDUCATED ARTISTS * COL. A BROWN’S TROUPE OF AERIAL ACROBATS DIRECT FROM LONDON, PARIS, BERLIN, & VIENNA * AND MANY OTHER CONSTELLATIONS 7 GALEXIES OF STARS * NOT FORGETTING AN ARMY OF HUMOROUS BUT REFINED CLOWNS!!!!!!

A seal pup sunning itself on a bed of seaweed.

Volunteers handing bowls of clam chowder and other food for Chowderfest.

Anyone who has dipped a toe into this water will know that jumping and
diving into it is a serious act of bravado---or stupidity.

Another week and a bit and we could have seen Monhegan's Cardboard Regatta.
Could it have been inspired by Darwin's Beercan Regatta?

Not quite Munich during Octoberfest but Monhegan Brewing Company
had its own beerfest for two hours on the day we were there.

Waiting for the ferry back to the mainland at The Barnacle.

Ice Harvesting in Maine

It was a brilliant idea: the lakes and rivers in Northeastern USA freeze solid in winter so why not chop the ice into blocks in winter and sell it around the world all year long? There were of course logistical problems like how to keep it from melting. And there was the question about who would want to buy ice and why? Did the world need refrigeration? Fish and meats had been salted and/or dried forever, people in the tropics didn't have a taste for dairy products and everyone was happy with the state of things. Frederick "Ice King" Tudor, an enterprising Bostonian was determined to change all that (and make a killing out of it in the process) when he started harvesting ice and selling it in 1806.

Frederick Tudor, the Ice King   (Wikipedia Commons)

Tudor built ice houses where the blocks could be stored in straw or sawdust and could last all summer. In fact it could be packed in straw and shipped as far away as India and China. Enough ice was left by the time the ship arrived at its destination to make the trip worthwhile. In 1839 ice shipments from New England, USA, to Sydney, Australia began although on an irregular basis.

Ice Harvesting on a river in Maine

Initially, the ice was used by commercial fishermen so that people could buy fresh unsalted fish when the fleet returned. And ice was also loaded as ballast for cargo ships going to the Caribbean to pick up sugar and, later, cotton. Tudor's idea was to sell the ice to wealthy colonists to put in their drinks. He even marketed his ice in England advertising that it came from the pure water of the Kennebec River in Maine and therefore was safer to put in a drink than any locally-harvested ice from some typhoid-ridden pond in Lancashire or Yorkshire.

Ice harvesting display at the Maine State Museum

With ice now commercially available all year round refrigerators, known as "little ice houses" were invented in Boston in 1816. Long before the advent of electricity people could keep produce in their own homes for extended periods of time and enjoy out-of-season fruits and vegetables for the first time. There's no doubt that the ice trade changed people's diets around the world and extended our lifespans. Norway---also big in shipping and cold weather---because a major competitor for the world's hunger for ice.

Refrigerator

A note for Australian readers: in 1864, after a few failed attempts, salmon eggs were transported in ice from Britain to Tasmania. This was the start of the Tasmanian salmon industry.

I'm writing this from South Bristol, Maine, where various member's of my family have had holiday cottages since 1910. There are two activities here: lobster fishing and summer tourism. Before the summer people began to arrive in the late 19th century this was an isolated community that relied on fishing. So it was that the Thompson family, 160 years ago, started sawing up their pond in winter, storing their ice in the Thompson Ice House for use by fishermen to bring in a fresh catch and for its shipment to Boston and New York.

The restored Thompson Ice House

Some February ice remaining in the ice house in August

In summer blocks of ice were delivered to summer cottages for their refrigerators. I remember these days before summer cottages had electricity and I remember Ice Thompson himself coming in through the kitchen door and dropping another ice block in our "ice box". (I don't think we called it a refrigerator because that word had been taken over by the electrical ones.)

Ice busters in the Thompson Ice House

Ice---his real name was Herbert but everyone knew him as "Ice"---was the end of a line of ice-providing Thompson's and when the business finally went under his ice house fell into ruin. Happily, in recent years, money was raised, the ice house was restored and it is now the Thompson Ice House Museum. If you come to South Bristol on any year in February you, too, can join in with a small army of volunteers and cut ice from Thompson Pond to restock the ice house. It looks like cold and dangerous work to me but when I'm sweltering in the heat in Sydney I may just watch the video of the Thompson Pond Ice Harvest to help cool off.

Herbert "Ice" Thompson

There's also an excellent display about Maine's ice harvesting industry at the Maine State Museum in Augusta; worth every cent of the two dollar admission price. (Cheaper is you're young, old or part of a huge family.)

Yesterday, while walking in the woods, Jill and I came to a small cemetery and there were the graves of "Ice" and generations of Thompson icemen and women. It's tempting to say---but of course I won't---that if any family deserved to be cryogenically preserved, it's this family.

Ice tongs
Ice seemed to be able to carry a block of ice holding just one of
the handles. I'm not sure how he did it.

Maine wildlife

This island in Maine is teeming with wildlife and I've been tiptoeing around, camera in hand, trying to get photos. Many of the animals, such as the skunks and raccoons that get into our garbage, are nocturnal. Some, like the deer, are around in daytime but shy of tiptoeing nature photographers. Whether nocturnal, diurnal or crepuscular, I haven't had much success in capturing the local wildlife.

I did manage to get a Monarch Butterfly to pose and also a very patient Great Blue Heron.

And a Gray Squirrel stayed still long enough to allow me to get a snapshot.

A (harmess) little Garter Snake seemed unconcerned.

My breakthrough came on a visit to the famous hiking, camping and clothing store, L L Bean, where there were bears, moose, deer, skunks, badgers, raccoons, bobcats, coyotes, fisher cats (all stuffed) and tanks filled with (live) fish. L L Bean is not only famous for its wonderful merchandise but for the fact that it's open for business 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and, 365 days a year---that is, all the time. Very convenient for insomniac shoppers and wildlife photographers.