New York Times columnist John Tierney is as taken with all this as I am, and he ran a little experiment a couple years ago in which he asked readers to list their ten most expensive purchases, and the ten purchases that gave them the most happiness. The point was to find the overlap.

And he found it. Houses, college, travel, home electronics, and some kinds of cars (a wide range, from Jaguar to Honda Civic) delivered in the happiness department. But lots of other purchases didn’t. Take out things we have to spend money on, like insurance and taxes, and the big expenses that didn’t make people happy were children, wedding ceremonies, and all the cars that weren’t on the other list.

And boats. If it’s happiness you’re after, says Tierney, “Never buy a boat.”

I knew that when we decided, over the winter, to buy a boat. Specifically, we bought a 23-foot Steigercraft, tricked out with all the electronics a fisherman could want, and an F250 diesel truck to pull it. For us, it definitely qualified as a major purchase. The only thing we’ve ever bought that was more expensive is the house we live in, and that was a purchase of a different order. Real estate often holds its value. Sometimes, it even appreciates. The value of boats and trucks, though, just dwindles down to nothing.

To add insult to injury, you have to keep putting money in as the value dwindles. For starters, there’s gas. An awful lot of gas. Then there’s registration and taxes, every year, on the boat, the truck, and the trailer. There’s maintenance. Repair. Eco-friendly chemicals to get the caterpillar-shit stains off the gunwales. It never ends.

A boat, in short, is expensive.

Our previous boat, a 19-foot Eastern, cost a lot less. (And it isn’t ‘previous’ quite yet – it’s for sale at Millway Marina, and priced to move.) We could tow it with a smaller truck, it took a lot less gas, and had many fewer things that could go wrong. And we got a lot of excellent fishing done in it. The decision to step up to a bigger boat was non-trivial, and we made it because we have found, in the four years that we’ve been here, that we love to fish.

It’s not just the fishing. If you come here often, you’ve heard me say it before and I hope you’ll forgive me for saying it again: some of our very best days have been just the two of us, on the boat together. There was one day, one summer, at Horseshoe Shoal that was for me almost emblematic of happiness. Bright sun, calm sea, biting bluefish, and Kevin and me.

We want more days like that, and so we bought a bigger boat.

But you never know how things like this will turn out. The bigger boat could just be a bigger headache. It could be a hassle to trailer, and to launch. Its bigger size and deeper draft could limit us. More electronics means more things to go wrong. You never know.

So I am happy to report that the boat bought us a day like yesterday.

We woke up to fog and a little bit of spitting drizzle. There was a wind out of the south-east, not too bad, but enough to blow up two-foot seas in Nantucket Sound. We hadn’t planned to fish, but the boat was all set up in the driveway because we’d gone the day before. (And the day before that, and the day before that – Kevin’s brother Marty had been visiting, and it was all fishing, all the time.)

We were still drinking our first cup of coffee when I ventured to suggest we could go out to try for bluefish. We had caught some the day before, trolling with top lures, but we sent Marty home with them because every single one had been hooked by his rod. (It’s always that way with Marty, and I don’t understand it.)

Kevin was game. All we had to do was load the cooler and ice onto the boat, dress for rain, and go.

This was not a day we would have taken the Eastern out because we would have been neither safe nor comfortable. Dreamcatcher (we’re keeping the name), though, could take a day like that and much, much more. She’s got proper navigation lights, as well as both radar and GPS. We can see other boats and make sure they see us. Although we wouldn’t voluntarily go out in pea soup, a day with half-mile visibility isn’t a problem.

Electronics on a foggy day

Out in the Sound, about a mile offshore, we had the place to ourselves. I am a water sissy, and that used to make me nervous, but I feel much better in a boat that has the aforementioned radar and GPS as well as two batteries, a relatively new motor, and all recommended safety equipment. We have a marine radio that can send an automated distress signal with our location at the touch of a button, and we have a back-up, hand-held radio in case we lose all power. We have paper charts. We have a compass. We have two waterproof cell phones, and an up-to-date SeaTow membership. In weather that’s even a little dirty, we wear inflatable PFDs.

We were safe, and we were comfortable. The enclosed pilot house meant that the only time we weren’t sheltered was when we were setting up or taking in rods, or dealing with a fish. We went on the same troll we’d done the day before, trailing three lines with poppers, lures that bounce on the surface of the water. And we used our autopilot!

Yes, we have autopilot, and it is my candidate for the coolest thing ever. You can set a destination, or a route, or simply a heading. Press a button, and the boat takes over the steering while you control the speed.

There are a couple reasons that this is the coolest thing ever. For starters, the boat is much better at holding a course than you are. Driving a boat isn’t like driving a car; it’s very difficult to maintain a straight line. The better you are at it, the more efficient your boat is. You can burn a lot of extra gas zigging and zagging and correcting and over-correcting. I can’t hold a line to save my life, but the autopilot has mad skills and keeps us virtually dead on. If you set a destination it even accounts for drift!

Being able to set the autopilot for trolling means, first, that your lines are less likely to tangle because the boat holds its course. It also means that there is an extra set of hands, the hands that would have been on the wheel, available to help with the fishing. The danger of autopilot is that you can be lulled into not paying attention to where you’re going, and we make sure to keep a lookout at all times. We also make sure the radar is on, and set to sound an alarm if another boat gets close.

We were safe, we were comfortable, and we caught three nice bluefish. Not an epic fishing day, certainly, but exactly the kind of morning we wanted this boat for. Just Kevin and me, trolling for bluefish. Our lives are a little overcrowded, and being on the boat together, thinking about nothing but fish, ratchets us down a bit. As we came in, we saw a boat named “Off Switch,” and I thought it was apt.

The time may come when I curse the day we bought the boat. There are many boat-related scenarios involving time, money, and danger that could be enough to make me swear off boat-ownership forever. But for now, the boat – and what it lets us do – makes me happy.

Not only does it give us days like yesterday, it also lets us take people with us. We have friends who either don’t have a boat, or keep their boat in the water and don’t have the flexibility to fish both sides of the Cape, and we very much enjoy bringing them out to where the fish are. The boat also gives us fish. So far, a lot of fish – to date, we’ve landed about 60 pounds of striped bass filets (a bounty we’ve been able to share with friends), eight pounds of bluefish (drying in preparation for smoking, as we speak), and a pound of mackerel (which I pickled in an experiment I’m close to declaring a success). If we were keeping score, that would be about a thousand dollars’ worth, retail value, all caught in three weeks.

We’re not keeping score, because there’s no way we’ll ever come out ahead. What we spend on the boat and the upkeep would keep us in fish for the rest of our lives, and the fish don’t justify the boat. The happiness justifies the boat. The time out of mind justifies the boat.

Days like yesterday justify the boat.

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Trust me on this one.

 Grilled Striped Bass with Braised Leeks

1 T. butter
1 bunch leeks (3 large or 5-6 small), white and light green parts, sliced
1 c. white wine
2 oz. goat cheese
salt and pepper to taste

1 lb. striped bass filet

To make the leeks:

Heat a skillet big enough to hold the leeks over medium heat. Add the butter. When it’s melted, add the leeks and cook, stirring occasionally, until the leeks start to wilt, about 5 minutes. Turn the heat to low and add the wine. Cover and simmer until the leeks are tender, about 15 mintues. Stir in the goat cheese, salt, and pepper, and cook just to incorporate.

To grill the striped bass:

Start a charcoal fire, and let it burn down until all the coals are completely white and the heat has decreased a bit, about 20 minutes. Grill the bass about ten minutes per inch of thickness, turning midway through cooking time.

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In surgery, as in anything else, skill and confidence are learned through experience — haltingly and humiliatingly. Like the tennis player and the oboist and the guy who fixes hard drives, we need practice to get good at what we do. There is one difference in medicine, though: it is people we practice upon.

And you don’t want to it to be you. You want to wait until your surgeon has honed his skills on other people and then have your appendix removed or your kidney transplanted or your hip replaced. Yet it is in our collective interest to have a new crop of surgeons every year, or we’ll run out of appendix removers, kidney transplanters, and hip replacers in short order.  And so the patient of the new surgeon makes a sacrifice to the common good – although, if the bargain were put to him in those terms, he might very well change his mind.

That essay has come to mind often, as I’ve done so many things for the first time over the last few years. Not many of them are physical skills like surgery, which require a very specific kind of learning, based on repetition, that hard-wires the procedure into your brain. But even more general undertakings – designing a hydroponics system, building a hoophouse, making a souffle – have a better chance of success when they’re undertaken by people with experience. The Internet will take you only so far.

As I venture out way beyond my comfort zone, I’ve been grateful that it’s not people I practice on. The soufflé falls, and the worst-case scenario is take-out Chinese. Nobody’s going to die on the table.

But livestock is different. It’s not people, and I am very clear on the difference. But it’s live. The animals we raise are sentient, can suffer, and are completely dependent on our stewardship. When we bungle it, nobody dies on the table, but it’s not take-out Chinese, either.

And bungle it we do. There’s no way to venture into taking care of animals without making mistakes born of inexperience. Almost all the deaths we’ve had around here could have been prevented if we’d simply been better at our job.

I’m not being hard on us here. I know that mistakes come with the territory, and you do your best and try and learn from what goes wrong. But I am responsible for our animals, and it sometimes feel like they got a bum deal being stuck with us instead of, say, Jen over at Milkweed & Teasel.

The issue at hand, this time, is our first attempt to hatch fertilized eggs. We bought six turkey eggs about four weeks ago and popped them under Queenie, our broody Buff Orpington hen. About a week before we were expecting chicks, we found one of the eggs cracked open, so we were down to five. We did, however, learn that at least that one egg was fertilized, so we had hopes for the remaining eggs.

Then, four days ago and a day ahead of schedule, we had an actual chick! It was peeping and eating and drinking, and Queenie was being very attentive to it. We were hopeful that the remaining four would follow suit.

Queenie, distracted

But then things went south. Queenie seemed to have trouble attending to both the chick and the eggs, and she abandoned the nest to keep the chick warm. We had set the Varmintcam up above the brooder, and we knew from the timestamp that the nest had been empty for at least four hours. Was the brooder too big? Did we put the food and water too far away from the nest? We didn’t know.

By this time, the full 28 days had elapsed, and we thought it was possible a chick might have survived, but didn’t have the strength to get out once it had gotten cold. So we tried opening one of the eggs. There was a chick, barely alive, and we tried to warm it and revive it, but our efforts failed and the poor thing died inside ten minutes. Was it a mistake to open it? We didn’t know.

Three eggs were left, and Queenie clearly wasn’t going to be able to keep them warm. But Kevin had the brilliant idea of putting them under Blondie, who was also broody and had hunkered down in a nest box in the coop. I also sent an e-mail to Jen, who assured me that chicks were sometimes much hardier than you think they’re going to be, and told me not to give up hope.

And I didn’t, but it was close.

After Blondie had been sitting on the eggs for a day, we checked on her. She was exactly where we’d left her, but she had moved two of the three eggs out of the nest, and had only one under her. We checked the two eggs she’d rejected, and they were clearly long dead. How she knew is beyond me – and I think she did know, because the one she was sitting on was alive. There was a little hole, with a little beak! And I heard a little peep!

We wanted to make sure the chick bonded to Queenie, so we gave it some help getting out of its shell and put it in the brooder with its little sibling and surrogate-mother-to-be. And Queenie took to it. She tucked it under her wing and kept it warm. An hour later, it was almost dry, and looked comfortable.

But by evening it was dead.

If you had told me this story, I couldn’t have imagined being so sad about a three-ounce, just-born turkey, but I actually had to hold back tears. When we’d found that second chick alive, I’d been elated – yes, actually elated – that our chick would have a playmate, and that little death of an hours-old creature affected me as much as any livestock death ever has.

Partly, I mourned the failure. I suspect we made a number of mistakes, because all the eggs were fertilized and all had developed substantially. Was the brooder too cold? Did Queenie get enough to eat and drink? Should we have put the other eggs under Blondie as soon as we realized Queenie was having difficulty? Should we have watched more carefully so we could have taken corrective action more quickly? But, our role aside, I feel bad for this little chick. I don’t think animals, with the possible exception of cats, should be alone.

We will get more turkey poults from the feedstore when they get a batch in a couple of weeks, and I’m hoping everybody will be young enough for the flock to integrate successfully. And I am glad that we got at least one chick out of the effort – and a mighty cute little chick it is, too. But I wanted to do better. I really wanted to do better.

On the plus side, at least I’m not a surgeon.

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Overabundance, though, as we all know, is the mother of invention. Our hoophouse is bursting with radishes and arugula, and I managed to make a salad with them that is actually very good. The sweetness in the dressing balances the bite of the greens and the radishes, and the whole thing goes beautifully with a grilled fish or maybe a pork loin. Perhaps the strongest argument for it is that Kevin, who isn’t a big fan of salad (“this is the food my food eats”), eats as much as I put in front of him.

I’m guessing you may have some arugula and radishes too, it being arugula and radish season, so you might want to try it.

Arugula Salad with Orange Vinaigrette
(serves 2)

5 cups arugula, roughly chopped
4-6 radishes, sliced
1 oz. goat cheese, crumbled (or some shaved Parmesan, which Kevin prefers)

For the dressing:

1/3 c. fresh-squeezed orange juice (I strain the pulp, but you don’t have to)
1/3 c. olive oil
2 T. cider vinegar
2 T. maple syrup
salt to taste

Combine dressing ingredients in a jar and shake like the dickens to emulsify. Pour the amount you like over the salad (the recipe makes much more than most of us would want, but dressing is a personal thing).

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She’s got four more eggs to go (one broke), and we have yet to see whether she can teach them life’s basics, like eating, drinking, and avoiding being crushed by a well-meaning but clumsy mother surrogate.  But we have a poult.

We have a poult.

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We’ve got four overwintered collard plants that are ready for their Little Shop of Horrors audition. Every day, they send up seed heads in what I am trying to make a vain effort to reproduce. To that end, every day I go out there with my kitchen shears and cut off the seed heads. So far, the plants haven’t gotten bitter or woody, and I treat the seed head stalks like broccoli raab.

Feed me, Seymour!

But I know this is a battle I’m destined to lose, if not to the collards themselves then to the slugs who, unlike Kevin and me, seem more than happy to live on an all-collard diet. Before it’s too late, I have to harvest the leaves. Once I harvest them, they have to be washed, chopped, blanched, and frozen.

It is a job I dread, largely because washing greens is probably my single least favorite kitchen chore. I don’t know why I dislike it – there are a zillion jobs that are just as tedious or messy that I don’t mind at all. I’ll sit there all day taking crab meat out of crab bodies with a nutpick, but give me a lettuce to wash and I absolutely, positively, have a prior engagement.

That's a lot of collards

So you can understand that a bushel of collard greens is enough to chill my very soul.

Last night, over dinner, Kevin and I were talking about how to tackle them, and my first idea was to put them in the bathtub. Kevin thought that wasn’t much of a labor-savor, and might be a turn-off to anyone who’s ever seen our bathtub. And then he said, offhandedly, “Why don’t you just do them in the washing machine?”

The washing machine! Genius! Because what is a washing machine if not a salad spinner, writ large?

I went out with my kitchen shears. I cut a bushel of leaves. I ran the washing machine empty, once, to get rid of any residual soap, and then put in my load of collards.

And I checked the dial. There’s Permanent Press, there’s Regular, there’s Whites, but there’s no Leafy Greens cycle. Delicates seemed to come closest. Compared to, say, arugula, collards aren’t delicate at all, but compared to the frilly lacy things that I gave up long ago in favor of underwear that wears well and doesn’t show the dirt, collards are delicate indeed.

Delicates it would have to be, in cold water. I closed the door, turned the dial, and started her up.

Half an hour later, I had a bushel of clean collards!

I can’t say it worked perfectly. The greens got pretty bruised, but that doesn’t matter much for greens that you’re going to blanch and freeze anyway – don’t try this with that arugula. (At least there was no ring around the collards!)  The only other problem is that it left a lot of bits of green in the washer. I left the door open for a while so they would dry, and cleaning the washing machine wasn’t nearly as bad as cleaning the collards themselves.

Kevin thinks we can get it to work better if we just do a rinse and a spin, rather than an entire wash cycle. I think he’s probably right, but I have no idea how to make our washing machine do that. Even so, I will definitely use this method again, either for collards or kale.

Kevin and I may be walking around with little flecks of green, or maybe of slug, on our clothes for a while, but that seems a small price to pay for anything that gets me out of washing collards.

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Yesterday afternoon, we ditched them all to go fishing. Again. We’d had such a good trip on Saturday, and the weather was so glorious, that we couldn’t resist. Not only did we walk away from all our responsibilities, we convinced Gus to walk away from his, too.

Gus is our friend and our mechanic. Fish swim in his veins, perhaps because he is Greek. (His real name is Konstantin, but when he came here from Greece as a young man and applied for a Sears credit card, his full name was too long for the form. “You can be Charlie,” they told him, “or you can be Gus.”) He speaks with the kind of mellifluous Mediterranean accent that makes you think everything’s going to be ok. Which is an excellent bonus in the person who fixes your car.

Last fall, when Kevin and I drove down to North Carolina for our friend Allison Fishman’s wedding, I took our Saab to Gus before we left, since the suspension was making a rather ominous creaking sound. Gus drove the car and heard the creaking, but he wasn’t going to be able to open up the suspension in time to find what it was, fix it, and get it back to us.

“Can I take it North Carolina?” I asked, worried.

“I had a guy once who had a camper,” Gus said, with his mellifluous Mediterranean accent, “and he wanted to take it to California. ‘Gus,’ he asked me, ‘can I take it to California?’”

“’Look,’ I told him, ‘if you have a donkey, you can get to California. You stop, you give it hay, you give it water, you keep going. Take the camper to California. If it breaks down, you stop and you call. They come, they tow, they fix, you keep going.”

“Tamara,” he said to me, “take the car to North Carolina.”

I laughed. “But you’ll fix it when I get back?”

He shook his head. “No.”

“No?”

“No,” he said, and pointed to the offending suspension. “You have to wait for it to get worse.”

When I bring a car to him, we talk about cars for a minute or two, and then we talk about food We first met Gus when he was roasting a lamb on a rotisserie he built out of a washing machine motor, and we knew he was our kind of person. He keeps a smoker in his garage, and smokes a mean bluefish. And, if you ever meet him, ask him to tell you the story about going through customs at JFK with a frozen suckling pig. (“What is that?” the officer asked him. “What do you mean, ‘What is that,’” Gus said. “It’s a pig.”)

Gus

When I called him yesterday morning to ask if he wanted to go for stripers, I could hear the conflict in his voice. He said he had a lot of work, but I could tell he really, really, wanted to go fishing. He said he would try and get everything done, and call me at noon. At noon, he was in.

He met us at the dock at 2:30, and out we went. The plan was the same as Saturday’s: jig up a couple dozen mackerel, and liveline them for stripers. We went out to our usual mackerel spot, though, and found no fish. A few (apparently) on the fishfinder, but none on the sabiki rigs.

I was a little concerned. This was the first time we’d taken Gus out with us, and I didn’t want him to think we were the kind of loser fishermen who fish at random, having no real idea what they’re doing. But the mackerel aren’t always easy to find, and we had time. We saw a few boats farther out in the Bay, and we figured they might be into them, so we headed in that direction.

Sure enough, we hit them. Since I was jigging off one side of the boat and Gus was on the other, I didn’t see him pull in his first fish, but Kevin told me that he lit up. You know how much someone likes to fish by his expression when he gets a bite, and Gus really likes to fish.

It didn’t take us long to fill Kevin’s livewell, and then we headed back to the mouth of Barnstable Harbor to try our luck for stripers.

The theory behind this kind of fishing is that the striped bass go into the harbor to feed when the tide comes in, and then are just about forced out when the tide ebbs. The channel out of the harbor is narrow, and it funnels all the fish into one little spot. Go there on the outgoing tide, at the right time of year, with the right kind of bait, and your chances are good.

We went to the harbor end of the channel and Kevin cut the motor. Gus reached into the livewell, put a mackerel on his hook, and tossed it over the side. Before I had a chance to bait my own hook, Gus had a striper on the line. Literally. It took about seven seconds.

And that’s how the day went. We had striper action for a good two hours. Some of the fish were schoolies, and we watched as the bass chased the mackerel around the surface of the water even though they were too small to eat them. We use a kind of hook, a circle hook, that’s designed to minimize the chance that the fish gets gut-hooked, but is also relatively easy for the fish to shake, so we lost a couple big fish we’d had on the line.

But we caught plenty. Gus got his two (the limit) before either Kevin or I had landed one, but I also ended up limiting out, and Kevin got one. One of mine was just shy of three feet long, and may be the biggest fish I’ve caught to date.

Today, all the things we didn’t get done yesterday are still there, and we have that much less time in which to do them. But they will get done – or maybe they won’t, I don’t know. But I do know that we had a great day on the water. We also came home with about 15 pounds of striped bass filets, and Gus had almost as much, plus the leftover mackerel.

We happen to live in a place with world-class fishing, and Kevin and I have decided to make taking advantage of it a priority. On the days when the fishing looks promising and the weather is good, we’re willing to let other things slide to go out and try our luck. It is a luxury to be able to do that. An indulgent, time-consuming, expensive luxury, and one I feel lucky to have. Because I really love to fish.

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He made the call to the contact in the ad, to a woman named Lucy. She was in Bourne, about fifteen miles from us, and Kevin told Lucy that I’d come pick them up.

“Wait,” Lucy said. “Your name is Kevin and your wife’s name is Tamar?” Kevin confirmed.

“Are you Starving off the Land?”

Turns out that Lucy is a regular reader and commenter! Which means there’s a kind of goes-around-comes-around rightness in turning her tubs into our livewell.

I zipped over with a check, and Lucy and I put the tubs in the car, talking about chickens and bees and gardens. We kept talking for quite some time, and could have gone on all day, I suspect, if both of us didn’t have to get back to work.

I brought Lucy’s tubs to Kevin for inspection. They were perfect. And if the first one didn’t work out, we had a back-up.

The tub was the big hurdle, but Kevin needed a few other things to get the job done. We needed a lid that was heavy enough to stay put when the boat was moving, made of a material that could withstand salt water, and fittings to attach the input hose at the bottom of the tub and the outflow hose near the top.

For the lid, we went with stuff called Azek, which is essentially boards made out of PVC. We learned about Azek from Bob (our friend, fishing instructor, and builder), who used it as trim when he put new doors and windows in our house. We bought one board, and Kevin cut a piece about two inches wide to span the top of the tub and snap in under the rim. Then he added semi-circles of Azek to each side of the center span with hinges, to make the lid you can lift up to put fish in or take them out.

Once that was done, it was just a question of hose fittings. Our boat has a pump that pumps in seawater for washing the deck, so we had a ready-made water supply. Kevin used a washing-machine hose to connect the pump to the bottom of the tub, and made the intake with PVC fittings and fluffy rubber washers to make sure it was watertight.

PVC and fluffy washers also connected a wider outflow hose about five inches from the top of the tub (to leave room for sloshing), and that hose was long enough to drain the water off the back of the boat, over the transom.

This past weekend, we used it for the first time. Would it work?

It worked!

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We went out to the head of the channel, about two miles outside the harbor, and jigged up a couple dozen mackerel to use as bait. Then we went back to the harbor and did loops drifting from the mouth out to the bay, livelining the mackerel.  When we got to the head of the channel, we’d motor back and do again, floating with the tide as it went out.

At first, there was nothing. And then, there were bass. By the time the day was over, we had each caught one. Both fish were 32 inches. Both fish were 11 pounds. They were virtually identical. We had caught them exactly the same way, on very similar tackle. So why does Kevin look like a manly boat captain, holding the fish that is the due of a skilled fisherman …

… and I just look like a dork?

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Myron is the number-two guy at Ketcham Trap, the New Bedford fishing supply business we buy our oyster cages from. The number-one guy is Bob Ketcham, and both Bob’s wife Mona and Myron’s wife Michelle work alongside them in the office. The four of them, essentially, are Ketcham Trap. (I should note that, technically, the business is called Ketcham Supply Corp., but we’ve been calling it Ketcham Trap too long to stop. Is that OK, Bob?)

Myron is the person we deal with most, and we like him for a lot of reasons, but mostly because it’s impossible to be in a bad mood around him. This is particularly true when Michelle is with him, but when she’s off doing other things, he’s capable of doing the mood elevating solo. He has an irrepressible, off-color, gleeful good nature. He thinks everything is funny, or maybe stupid. He is smart and irreverent and good at what he does.

We’d ordered 150 oyster cages, each four feet by three, and six inches deep. Myron could have had them delivered to us, but we figured that, now that we have a big hairy truck and trailer, we could save the delivery charge by picking them up ourselves. We weren’t quite sure they would all fit, but Myron assured us that a full-size pick-up with trailer could handle the load.

So, yesterday we hooked up the landscape trailer to the big hairy truck and headed out to New Bedford.

To look at it, you probably wouldn’t know that Ketcham Trap is a thriving business. It’s in an old three-story brick building that looks like a warehouse but was, for many years, an elementary school. “It was my elementary school,” Myron says with a grin. “And all the teachers told me that, if I didn’t shut up, I’d never get out of here.” That he now makes a very good living in that very building, and still doesn’t shut up, is a bit of irony that Myron clearly relishes.

The building is in a gritty part of town, and the signs on it are hand-lettered and irregular. The lot is piled with lobster pots, oyster cages, and giant spools of rope. The office has bare floors, haphazard furniture, and surfaces covered with gloves, boots, and jackets. But Ketcham supplies a wide range of fishermen, lobstermen, and oyster farmers, in a part of the world that has a lot of all of them. I don’t have access to their books, but I know Myron takes way better vacations than we do.

We pulled into the yard, and parked next to our order, which was stacked on pallets. The stacks seemed awfully high, and it looked like, contrary to what we’d been told, we wouldn’t be able to get everything loaded. When Myron came out, that’s what said to him. “Well, you didn’t tell me you had this little toy trailer,” he said. That’s the kind of thing Myron says all the time.

“We won’t get it all, but we’ll get most of it,” he went on, and called a couple of young guys who worked there over to help.

It wasn’t Myron’s job to load our truck. We were doing the pick-up, and were fully prepared to do the loading. But Myron knows he’s loaded more trucks with more oyster cages than, possibly, anyone on the planet, and he’s better at it than we are.

Myron, loading

When you’re trucking items that are relatively large, but light, using diesel fuel that’s expensive, packing the truck as full as possible is the name of the game, and Myron packed our truck in a way I never would have thought of. He piled one stack of trays in the bed until it came up to the top of the bed walls, and then he piled two stacks on top of that, balancing on the single stack and the walls of the bed, with the edges sticking out about a foot.

Then, a single tray on top, over the seam between the two stacks, and a bunch of rope tied tightly and strategically. We got 52 trays on the truck, and another 60, stacked the same way, on the trailer.

Kevin, surveying the load

I’ll admit that I was a little skeptical. It looked a bit precarious to me. But Myron assured us he’d loaded lots of trucks that way, with only the occasional mishap. He told us he used to pack even more aggressively, and he once, in his youth, seriously overloaded his delivery truck with lobster pots. He wasn’t halfway to his destination when he saw the flashing lights behind him, and a cop pulled him over.

The cop walked around the truck looking at the tower of traps, and then came to the driver’s side window. “Son,” the cop said, “Just where you goin’ with all them chicken coops?”

Since then, he’s learned to walk the fine line of just enough overloading to avoid the scrutiny of law enforcement. And he does it well. We got home without incident and at least one police officer passed us without paying us any special attention.

Other than the boat, the cages are our biggest expense, and it’s good to know that, with this order, we have a full complement. They have at least a five-year lifespan (if all goes well), so we won’t have to do this again any time soon. Which means that, next time we’re in a bad mood, we’ll have to find something else to buy at Ketcham Trap.

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