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My Priceless Summer on a Maine Lobster Boat

87 points by axiomdata316 6y ago

opwieurposiu 6y ago
Maine in the summer is a magical place, but you really need a boat to experience it. There are great little islands/towns all over. If you end up on an island with only one restaurant, it makes it real easy to decide where to eat. Dodging all the lobster buoys is a real challenge to navigation, but eating lobster every day is worth it. If you see and island on the map with "haven" in the name, be sure to check it out.
- ghiculescu 6y ago
  If you lived in, say, Illinois, what would be the best way to get onto a boat for the summer in Maine?
  - fred_is_fred 6y ago
    Probably the via the Great Lakes and then St Laurence seaway - seems quicker than the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico but probably overall colder.
- lemonberry 6y ago
  I've lived on the border of New Hampshire and Maine for most of the last 45 years. I love seafood and even spent a summer working at a lobster pound. I just don't get the appeal of lobster. On the other hand... scallops. Whether they're fried, baked, sauteed or wrapped in bacon... the food of the gods. If it weren't for the environmental issues I'd eat them everyday. To each their own!
- sdenton4 6y ago
  I had a couple great summers working as a trip leader for a summer camp. It was a pretty old-school no-electricity-for-the-kids experience. Lots of awesome dawn bike rides before breakfast, traversing bits of the Appalachian Trail, and planting seeds of socialist thought into the minds of children from extremely wealthy backgrounds. Two actual conversations: "So, Kevin, what do your parents do for a living?" "Oh, you know, the usual... My dad's a neurosurgeon and my mom's an editor at the new york times." --- "It's been a long eight weeks, Jimmy! Are you looking forward to seeing your parents?" "Well... actually I'm heading to a six week music camp tomorrow."
throwaway0a5e 6y ago
I get that everyone needs money and all dollars are green even if you have to sell your soul to get them but these sorts of pro-tourism "look how quaint this local boutique industry is" articles really rub me the wrong way.
- celim307 6y ago
  I didn’t get many marketing vibes from this. Sounded like a young writer experiencing something new
- colordrops 6y ago
  Imagine making money as a struggling journalist writing about an industry that supplies to high-end restaurants. The gall.
- zucked 6y ago
  Quite a jaded view of the world. This is more that just a boutique industry - this is how a lot of our food makes it to our tables; the part that hasn't been relentlessly mechanized, automated, and conglomerated, anyways. Is it a bit romanticized? Perhaps. But, there are thousands of these small-scale "boutique" operations around the country in all sorts of industries. How quickly we've forgotten that this is how it used to be done.
  - throwaway0a5e 6y ago
    >Quite a jaded view of the world. I grew up in one of these sorts of tourism places. Just because some people make a living doing Actual Things(TM) doesn't mean that having a large portion of the economy be tourism related does not have negative effects for pretty much everyone. >this is how a lot of our food makes it to our tables; And someone dicking around fixing heavy equipment in the mud is how the table became your table but you don't see people romanticizing the timber industry because for the most part it isn't associated with tourism the way waterfront communities (and by extension, their industries) are. The fishing industry exists as much to give the tourists something to look at so the captains' wives/friends/relatives can run successful restaurants and bars (and fish the tourists wallets) as it does to pull edible animals out of the water. On a community level this is all pretty soul crushing because your existence is predicated on your ability to basically put on a show for others (i.e. look quaint) but pretend that you're just this quaint naturally.
celim307 6y ago
That was a nice read. The author writes well
troelsSteegin 6y ago
If Maine fishing life is interesting to you, Linda Greenlaw's non fiction books, in particular "The Hungry Ocean", are authoritative, incisive, and make the quotidian compelling. A novel, "The Highliners" by William McCloskey, is a coming of age set in the Alaska commercial fishery. Also good. While fascinating and culturally rich, I think it's fair to say that small scale commericial fishing is a hard way make a marginal living. It's a privilege to have other options to get by.
jariel 6y ago
This is really just normal life for a lot (most?) people.
- PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
  Writing about life isn't the same as living life. That's always been true. This particular writing was of a quality that I think few of us could match. That it was about something fairly "normal" doesn't change that. I also wonder just what aspects of what she wrote about you consider "normal". Maine has a small population, there are very few fishermen working today. What are the elements here that are "just normal life for a lot(most?) people" ?
  - jariel 6y ago
    "What are the elements here that are "just normal life for a lot(most?) people" ?" Fishing is one of the absolute most ancient forms of tradecraft, dating back 10's of thousands of years and basically universal in the human condition. There is a port in Nice, France, for small boats (it's a natural harbour) and a fish market there a few times a week that that has been going on, fairly uninterrupted for thousands of years. Literally you buy buy fish on the same terms as Phoenicians and Greeks before the Roman Empire. The livelihoods surrounding most of these trades, and frankly most 'working people' is extremely common and normative, and could hardly be Romanticized by anyone but a fairly small (but growing) group of people living in modernist bubbles, almost detached from the entire history of 'common culture'. The writing is nice, but the perspective of the alien observer, an 'outsider' to what would otherwise be be literally normative life for regular people, is almost a little eerie.
    - PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
      So sure, fishing is something humans have done for a long time. But hardly any human beings at all (as a percentage of the population, certainly) now take part in this activity. Growing food was once the preoccupation of almost every human being alive - in the USA it now employs around 1% of the population, and most people have almost no understanding of how to grow food at all (and certainly could not farm, evne if they have a small garden). The working activities described in the essay has almost no relationship with normal life for the vast majority of people living in industrialized countries around the world.
fallingfrog 6y ago
Lobster fishing is one if the last fishing industries that is run by local fishermen and women rather than big corporate boats. They can do it that way because there’s a limit on how many licenses each fisherman can have, a limit on the number of licenses they give out, and also they throw back lobsters that are too big, too small, or have a history of being successful breeders (they notch the tail to mark those). So the fishery is sustainable. But the downside is that the licenses tend to run in families and you have to know someone to get one, so it’s not open to people coming in from out of state. You can get a special limited license to put 4 traps out as an amateur but the professionals are going to cut the lines on your traps, they hate four trappers invading their fishing territory. And if you go out raiding someone else’s lobster pots, they’re gonna shoot at you, so don’t do that!
- weeksie 6y ago
  Not sure this is true everywhere. Maybe in the northeast, but I grew up in a fishing village in Alaska and pretty much all of our coastal towns are fishing-dominated with many, many small boats in addition to the bigger trawler/processors. We have a similar thing with the licensing. I inherited a limited entry permit from my father. It's like getting a taxi medallion in NYC. Being young and stupid I sold it to my best friend on zero percent interest and he paid me about 1% of the total price of the thing, then stopped paying. Never had the heart to chase him for it.
  - japhyr 6y ago
    Where did you grow up? I've been in Sitka since 2002.
    - weeksie 6y ago
      Cordova, not too far from there (for Alaska.) I moved out of AK in 98.
      - cl0ne 6y ago
        Wow, crazy to see Cordova on here.
op03 6y ago
No Black Harbour fans around here?
supernova87a 6y ago
You know how there are vacations that you can take where you work on a farm or have some kind of agricultural related activity? I have seen those kinds of things offered, but never in my life come across some similar offering to be on a boat and do some work as a "vacation". I love the sea and would jump at that chance. But I guess, that's also called, "just working on a boat". I'm sure they'd love the free labor. And you'd go crazy at not being able to return for an extra week if the catch was going good (or really badly) I suppose.
- mstade 6y ago
  I'm not a fisherman, but I personally know several and they're happy to take people out on a sunny days with nary a breeze. But there are many more days that aren't sunny and calm, and those days they wouldn't bring an inexperienced crew member on board regardless how cheap (or free) they are. Depending on where you are and what you're fishing for, it can be exceedingly dangerous and having the right experience can literally be the difference between life and death. They'd probably happily have you fix nets and cages though. :o)
legerdemain 6y ago
For a complementary point of view, please read my essay titled "My Horrifying Summer as a Maine Lobster."
- defen 6y ago
  David Foster Wallace actually wrote this essay, it's called "Consider the Lobster". I believe it caused a not-insignificant number of chefs to start killing the lobsters first instead of just boiling them alive.
abductee_hg 6y ago
WOW that's pretty tonedeaf. remember David Foster Wallace? "Consider the Lobster"? Here's a reminder: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fZOl7C_vDI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fZOl7C_vDI

87 points by axiomdata316 6y ago

Maine in the summer is a magical place, but you really need a boat to experience it. There are great little islands/towns all over. If you end up on an island with only one restaurant, it makes it real easy to decide where to eat. Dodging all the lobster buoys is a real challenge to navigation, but eating lobster every day is worth it. If you see and island on the map with "haven" in the name, be sure to check it out.

ghiculescu 6y ago
If you lived in, say, Illinois, what would be the best way to get onto a boat for the summer in Maine?
- fred_is_fred 6y ago
  Probably the via the Great Lakes and then St Laurence seaway - seems quicker than the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico but probably overall colder.
lemonberry 6y ago
I've lived on the border of New Hampshire and Maine for most of the last 45 years. I love seafood and even spent a summer working at a lobster pound. I just don't get the appeal of lobster. On the other hand... scallops. Whether they're fried, baked, sauteed or wrapped in bacon... the food of the gods. If it weren't for the environmental issues I'd eat them everyday. To each their own!
sdenton4 6y ago
I had a couple great summers working as a trip leader for a summer camp. It was a pretty old-school no-electricity-for-the-kids experience. Lots of awesome dawn bike rides before breakfast, traversing bits of the Appalachian Trail, and planting seeds of socialist thought into the minds of children from extremely wealthy backgrounds. Two actual conversations: "So, Kevin, what do your parents do for a living?" "Oh, you know, the usual... My dad's a neurosurgeon and my mom's an editor at the new york times." --- "It's been a long eight weeks, Jimmy! Are you looking forward to seeing your parents?" "Well... actually I'm heading to a six week music camp tomorrow."

throwaway0a5e 6y ago

I get that everyone needs money and all dollars are green even if you have to sell your soul to get them but these sorts of pro-tourism "look how quaint this local boutique industry is" articles really rub me the wrong way.

celim307 6y ago
I didn’t get many marketing vibes from this. Sounded like a young writer experiencing something new
colordrops 6y ago
Imagine making money as a struggling journalist writing about an industry that supplies to high-end restaurants. The gall.
zucked 6y ago
Quite a jaded view of the world. This is more that just a boutique industry - this is how a lot of our food makes it to our tables; the part that hasn't been relentlessly mechanized, automated, and conglomerated, anyways. Is it a bit romanticized? Perhaps. But, there are thousands of these small-scale "boutique" operations around the country in all sorts of industries. How quickly we've forgotten that this is how it used to be done.
- throwaway0a5e 6y ago
  >Quite a jaded view of the world. I grew up in one of these sorts of tourism places. Just because some people make a living doing Actual Things(TM) doesn't mean that having a large portion of the economy be tourism related does not have negative effects for pretty much everyone. >this is how a lot of our food makes it to our tables; And someone dicking around fixing heavy equipment in the mud is how the table became your table but you don't see people romanticizing the timber industry because for the most part it isn't associated with tourism the way waterfront communities (and by extension, their industries) are. The fishing industry exists as much to give the tourists something to look at so the captains' wives/friends/relatives can run successful restaurants and bars (and fish the tourists wallets) as it does to pull edible animals out of the water. On a community level this is all pretty soul crushing because your existence is predicated on your ability to basically put on a show for others (i.e. look quaint) but pretend that you're just this quaint naturally.

celim307 6y ago

That was a nice read. The author writes well

troelsSteegin 6y ago

If Maine fishing life is interesting to you, Linda Greenlaw's non fiction books, in particular "The Hungry Ocean", are authoritative, incisive, and make the quotidian compelling. A novel, "The Highliners" by William McCloskey, is a coming of age set in the Alaska commercial fishery. Also good. While fascinating and culturally rich, I think it's fair to say that small scale commericial fishing is a hard way make a marginal living. It's a privilege to have other options to get by.

jariel 6y ago

This is really just normal life for a lot (most?) people.

PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
Writing about life isn't the same as living life. That's always been true. This particular writing was of a quality that I think few of us could match. That it was about something fairly "normal" doesn't change that. I also wonder just what aspects of what she wrote about you consider "normal". Maine has a small population, there are very few fishermen working today. What are the elements here that are "just normal life for a lot(most?) people" ?
- jariel 6y ago
  "What are the elements here that are "just normal life for a lot(most?) people" ?" Fishing is one of the absolute most ancient forms of tradecraft, dating back 10's of thousands of years and basically universal in the human condition. There is a port in Nice, France, for small boats (it's a natural harbour) and a fish market there a few times a week that that has been going on, fairly uninterrupted for thousands of years. Literally you buy buy fish on the same terms as Phoenicians and Greeks before the Roman Empire. The livelihoods surrounding most of these trades, and frankly most 'working people' is extremely common and normative, and could hardly be Romanticized by anyone but a fairly small (but growing) group of people living in modernist bubbles, almost detached from the entire history of 'common culture'. The writing is nice, but the perspective of the alien observer, an 'outsider' to what would otherwise be be literally normative life for regular people, is almost a little eerie.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
    So sure, fishing is something humans have done for a long time. But hardly any human beings at all (as a percentage of the population, certainly) now take part in this activity. Growing food was once the preoccupation of almost every human being alive - in the USA it now employs around 1% of the population, and most people have almost no understanding of how to grow food at all (and certainly could not farm, evne if they have a small garden). The working activities described in the essay has almost no relationship with normal life for the vast majority of people living in industrialized countries around the world.

fallingfrog 6y ago

Lobster fishing is one if the last fishing industries that is run by local fishermen and women rather than big corporate boats. They can do it that way because there’s a limit on how many licenses each fisherman can have, a limit on the number of licenses they give out, and also they throw back lobsters that are too big, too small, or have a history of being successful breeders (they notch the tail to mark those). So the fishery is sustainable. But the downside is that the licenses tend to run in families and you have to know someone to get one, so it’s not open to people coming in from out of state. You can get a special limited license to put 4 traps out as an amateur but the professionals are going to cut the lines on your traps, they hate four trappers invading their fishing territory. And if you go out raiding someone else’s lobster pots, they’re gonna shoot at you, so don’t do that!

weeksie 6y ago
Not sure this is true everywhere. Maybe in the northeast, but I grew up in a fishing village in Alaska and pretty much all of our coastal towns are fishing-dominated with many, many small boats in addition to the bigger trawler/processors. We have a similar thing with the licensing. I inherited a limited entry permit from my father. It's like getting a taxi medallion in NYC. Being young and stupid I sold it to my best friend on zero percent interest and he paid me about 1% of the total price of the thing, then stopped paying. Never had the heart to chase him for it.
- japhyr 6y ago
  Where did you grow up? I've been in Sitka since 2002.
  - weeksie 6y ago
    Cordova, not too far from there (for Alaska.) I moved out of AK in 98.
    - cl0ne 6y ago
      Wow, crazy to see Cordova on here.

op03 6y ago

No Black Harbour fans around here?

supernova87a 6y ago

You know how there are vacations that you can take where you work on a farm or have some kind of agricultural related activity? I have seen those kinds of things offered, but never in my life come across some similar offering to be on a boat and do some work as a "vacation". I love the sea and would jump at that chance. But I guess, that's also called, "just working on a boat". I'm sure they'd love the free labor. And you'd go crazy at not being able to return for an extra week if the catch was going good (or really badly) I suppose.

mstade 6y ago
I'm not a fisherman, but I personally know several and they're happy to take people out on a sunny days with nary a breeze. But there are many more days that aren't sunny and calm, and those days they wouldn't bring an inexperienced crew member on board regardless how cheap (or free) they are. Depending on where you are and what you're fishing for, it can be exceedingly dangerous and having the right experience can literally be the difference between life and death. They'd probably happily have you fix nets and cages though. :o)

legerdemain 6y ago

For a complementary point of view, please read my essay titled "My Horrifying Summer as a Maine Lobster."

defen 6y ago
David Foster Wallace actually wrote this essay, it's called "Consider the Lobster". I believe it caused a not-insignificant number of chefs to start killing the lobsters first instead of just boiling them alive.

abductee_hg 6y ago

WOW that's pretty tonedeaf. remember David Foster Wallace? "Consider the Lobster"? Here's a reminder: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fZOl7C_vDI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fZOl7C_vDI