We had friends over, and we decided to go to the Four Seas for ice cream after dinner. The Rover, a 1970 model, is our usual ice-cream vehicle, both because we can fit six people in it and because it just seems right to go for ice cream in a decrepit old rattletrap.

The ice cream mobile

We hadn’t even gotten all the way up the driveway before ominous creaking noises started coming from the rear end. We turned around, got out, and looked underneath. There was a huge crack in the frame, just where the leaf springs attach.

That was the beginning of Spring Break.

The next to go was the Eastern, our big boat. Kevin was out with his brother Marty pulling lobster pots, and the motor made a terrible noise when he tried to put it in reverse. It still ran, but it shook and rattled and shimmied. He limped in to the dock, and when he put it in reverse again the propeller shaft snapped clean off.

Then there was the door to the truck, which got banged into the dock as Kevin was backing a boat down a ramp. Yes, we brought that one on ourselves, but still.

How a frame shoudln't look

Then came the woodsplitter. Our friend Ed had several cords of wood that needed splitting, and he made a deal with us: we loan him the woodsplitter and help with the job, and get half the wood in return. That was a great deal for us, and we brought the splitter over to his place and got started. After several afternoons of non-stop splitting, it started to struggle. Then the hydraulic pump just gave up.

After the woodsplitter was the freezer. The freezer filled with thirty pounds of striped bass, six ducks, two turkeys, other miscellaneous meat, and various vegetables and stocks. Its defroster failed and, in a bit of appliance irony, the resulting ice build-up prevented it from freezing.

I caught it before everything defrosted, and although we lost about ten pounds of fish, the rest of it was salvaged. When the repair guy came, he told me that I could keep the freezer running in the week it would take to get the required part by plugging it in during the day and unplugging it at night to defrost.

I switched the food to the bait freezer, put the bait (fish frames, primarily) in the broken freezer, and tried his method. The first hint that it didn’t work was when we started to notice the smell of rotten fish suffusing the house. Taking that load to the dump and cleaning up the mess was about as disgusting a job as I’ve done since we moved here.

Last to go, the final insult, the straw that broke the camel’s back, was the coffeemaker. It was less than a year old, and it broke only because it felt it had to show solidarity with its electrical and mechanical brethren.

Now, two months from the beginning of Spring Break, we’ve gotten everything but the woodsplitter repaired, replaced, or resuscitated. The Rover frame is patched and the lower unit on the Eastern’s motor is replaced. The door of the truck is pounded roughly back to its original shape, and freezer is freezing once more. We have a new coffeemaker, which makes lousy, insipid coffee, and which I hate with a passion reserved for single-function appliances that perform their single goddamn function badly. I’m hoping this one breaks as quickly as the last one.

The woodsplitter, we put on hold, since it’s a little hot to be splitting wood anyway.

As we were dealing with everything broken – calling repair people, locating parts, writing uncomfortably large checks – my inner Eva Gabor was getting louder and more insistent. “Times Skvare,” she said, with her charming Hungarian lilt, and I thought longingly of the times when we owned no truck, no boat, no woodsplitter, and no freezer. Yeah, we had a coffeemaker, but it worked with us, not against us, and made decent coffee to boot.

It’s when the going gets tough that I’m tempted to hightail it back to New York, and trade my boats and trucks, freezers and woodsplitters, for a 250-square-foot apartment and a Metrocard. Kevin, though, is made of sterner stuff and, since I’m not going anywhere without him, I stayed and helped get everything fixed.

We got the boat back from our mechanic, Billy at Anchor Outboard, just this week, and Kevin took his son Eamon and Eamon’s friend Emanuel out to check our lobster pots. With the boat out of commission, we hadn’t been able to get out there for a good six weeks.

Why we lobster

Kevin called me after they’d pulled the first four, to report that there were already four keeper lobsters in the livewell, and the chicken I was planning for dinner would have to wait for another day.

A couple hours later, they rolled in with our all-time record lobster haul. Ten lobsters, one of them three and a half pounds. Sixteen pounds total.

We called friends. Doug and Dianne came. Les and Val came. I picked up some local corn, made a cole slaw, and melted some butter. Kevin boiled the lobsters in a giant pot on the burner outside. Les brought some littlenecks. We opened the wine, and sat down to one of the best dinners we’ve had in our three years here.

The truck, the boat, the freezer, that’s what it’s all in service to. We’re bumbling our way through all this for the days when we can put an abundance of lobster on the table and watch as our family and friends drip butter on the tablecloth in their enthusiasm. I don’t expect to stop missing New York, but there are things you just can’t do with a Metrocard.

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Although there are still lobsters to be had, as days get colder and shorter and the wind is increasingly out of the north, opportunities to take our boat out into the bay are fewer and farther between. Yesterday was a good day, and although there will probably be more of them, we decided it was time to get the traps in and the boat winterized.

The last run of the season

Even though the harbor was glassy smooth, there was only one other boat trailer in the parking lot. Now that fishing season is over, it’s only the occasional duck hunter who ventures out.

I was surprised there weren’t more, given the flocks of ducks hanging around at the harbor’s mouth. My waterfowl identification skills aren’t what they should be, and I can’t tell you what kinds of ducks they were, but they were many and varied.

There was one lone hunter, in a camouflage boat, and we tried to give him a wide berth so as not to spook the ducks in his vicinity. But the channel is narrow, and there was only so far we could go. As we went by, a huge number of ducks took flight.

“I hope they come back,” Kevin said.

I looked over and saw that there were still quite a few left, right behind the guy’s boat.

“Why doesn’t he just shoot those?” I asked, pointing to the leftover ducks.

I’m very fortunate that my husband loves me despite having a clear-eyed understanding of my many shortcomings. “Those are decoys, honey,” he said, and patted my shoulder.

Well, they sure fooled me.

Turns out the ducks did come back, just in time for us to disturb them again on our way in.

In between, we pulled our remaining seven pots without incident. We had taken in three of them the previous trip, and we thought we’d lost one, but tide was low this trip and we found it. It had either drifted or been dragged, and it was well to the south of where it was supposed to be. We were glad to see it again.

Cross-species introduction

We got two keeper lobsters, one small male and another much larger, but clawless. (My friend Darren informs me that, in the vernacular, that’s a “bullet.”) That rounded out our catch for the year, so we did the end-of-season tally.

We made sixteen trips to pull the pots, and we brought home lobsters on every trip but two. (Those were the two trips where we were accompanied by my family members, but correlation is not causation.). Our total haul was 68 pounds of lobster.

For most of the summer, lobster was going for about $7. a pound, so that’s almost $500. worth.

If you figure each trip uses something north of three gallons of gas (between the truck and the boat), that’s about $10. Half the time, we had to pay $5. to park. Bait was fish leftovers, from fish caught by us our or friends, so it cost us nothing. Our total outlay was just around $200.

The equipment – traps, buoys, rope, bait bags – was a total of about $350, and we expect it’ll last at least five years. If we amortize that at $70. a year, our lobster catch is still a win by well over $200.

That’s not counting the boat, of course. But if you start counting the boat, nothing’s a win. It’s like asking your home-grown tomatoes to pay for the real estate they take up.

Not everything we do nets us more in food than we lay out in expenses. The garden is a win, as are the mushrooms and the chickens. Jury’s out on the hoophouse. Shellfishing (recreational, not the oyster farm) is a huge win. The turkeys are close, and so is fishing (not counting the boat). Hunting, so far, has been a loss, and we have to bag some serious game to make up the deficit. Between guns, ammunition, range fees, licenses, clothing, and our brand new deer blind (more on that soon), we’re deep in the hole.

Luckily, it’s not about the money. Or at least it’s not just about the money. If getting our food first-hand turned out to cost much more than getting it at Stop & Shop, we’d have to seriously reconsider what we’re doing. Exercise, fun, satisfaction, and general edification are all of value, but there’s only so much I’m willing to pay for them.

It’s nearly impossible to account for everything that goes into what we do. How many nails from the huge box did we use to make the hoophouse? How do we factor in the clam net we used for the turkey pen? How many Home Depot receipts did we lose? I have a gut sense that we’re not saving money, but it’s pretty close. Over the course of a decade, if we maximize the use of all the equipment we’ve bought, structures we’ve built, and skills we’ve acquired, we’ll probably end up ahead.

Not counting the boat.

But over the course of the summer, I probably ate 25 pounds of lobster. On paper, that’s worth $175. But I never would have spent $175. on lobster; those meals are a luxury I simply wouldn’t have had. That’s worth a lot.

I also spent many days out on the water with my husband, and with our friends. I burned calories and exercised muscles. I felt the excitement of pulling a pot up over the gunwale 160 times.

It was a win.

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Most of what we do happens between April and November. Fishing, gardening, foraging. Turkeys, mushrooms, lobsters. None of them go through the winter, and this is the time of year that we decommission the garden, put away the fishing gear, winterize and store the boats.

The chickens, helping to clean off the lobster pots

We have a few winter activities. We’ll still have the chickens, of course, and they’ll still lay eggs. We make our own sea salt, and we’ll ramp that up just as we shut everything else down. A few things may survive in the hoophouse, and they’ll need our attention. This year, we’ve also got a few projects we’re plotting for the long cold months. Mostly, though, we’ll be dormant.

No turkeys to feed, no fish to catch, no pheasants to hunt. No plants to water, no produce to harvest, no mushrooms to scout. The bees go into survival mode, and all we have to do is give them sugar candy.

It’ll be just me and Kevin, with nothing to do.

Hallelujah!

We’ve been through two winters here, and they have both seemed long, snowy, and cold. Cape Cod in February might as well be on a different planet from Cape Cod in August. The restaurants close, the streets empty, the people flee for Florida. This year, though, after a spring, summer, and fall of non-stop activity, I can’t think of anything I’d like better than a couple of months with nothing much to do.

I’ll read an actual book! I’ll tackle the wallpaper in the bathroom! I’ll cook new things in new ways! There might even be time for – ahem – more intimate activities.

So, as we dismantle and deactivate, shut down and shut off, I feel no sadness. The garden’s already decommissioned, the cover crop sown. The fishing is over, the rods stowed in the garage. The turkeys will meet their maker in less than three weeks.

And today, we started taking in our lobster pots.

There are ten – or there were ten, at any rate. Now it seems there are only nine. Today, we went out to check them for the first time in six weeks, and to start bringing them in. As temperatures drop and wind comes increasingly out of the north, there are fewer and fewer days that we can take our boat out into Cape Cod Bay.

Today was one of the days. It was almost dead calm, and the water in Barnstable Harbor was glassy and still. There were friendly little wavelets out in the bay, and it was a smooth ride out. It was cold – about 45 degrees – but wind is what matters most. On a windless day, not only is the cold not as biting, there’s also much less danger of falling into the water, which is the real danger.

Possibly the biggest lobster of the season -- not legal to take, alas

Our plan was to bring in half, but when we pulled the first one and found two huge lobsters in it, we reconsidered.

In a pinch, we can fit all ten pots (and certainly all nine, if one has indeed disappeared permanently) on the boat in one trip. It’s mighty crowded, though, and a little heavy. It’s easier and safer if we take a couple of shifts to bring them in.

When we saw the lobsters in the trap, our first impulse was to leave all the pots out there. But when we saw that they were both egg-bearing females, not legal to take, it tempered our enthusiasm.

We checked all nine, and found a good half-dozen females to be reckoned with, but only one keeper. We compromised and brought in three of the pots, leaving six out there. That way, we can easily get the rest in one fell swoop if that’s what the weather seems to require. Regardless, we’ll have everything out of the water and stowed away within the next few weeks.

Cold-weather lobstering wear, and a very dirty boat

I don’t think I’ll miss either lobster or lobstering. One of the pleasures of procuring your own food is getting your fill in season, and getting a hankering again just in time for next year’s season. It’ll be exciting all over again in May, when we’ll put the pots in for the 2011 season.

Same goes for the garden, and the mushroom hunting. I’ll miss the salt water fishing, though. I love fishing. Luckily, we’ve got trout in our backyard, and that’s almost as good.

We’ll ice fish, we’ll shellfish, we’ll make salt. We’ll feed the chickens, collect the eggs, and tend any plant hardy enough to stay alive in our hoophouse. But that won’t take anything close to all our time, and I’m really looking forward to that.

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The mark of authenticity is the mess

When I go get my own lobster, though, the mess is epic. We went out yesterday, in a two-foot chop, to pull our pots. The ropes are covered with sea crud, which has to be removed to get a hold on the rope, and most of it lands on the deck. The pots themselves are also grimy and weedy, and when you brace them against your body to hold them steady on the gunwale in a heaving sea, the grime and weeds get all over you. (You’re wearing coveralls, if you’ve thought to bring them.)

Then you have to rebait the bags. First, you dump the bones of the old bait overboard, but a few inevitably find their way onboard. Then you fill the bags with the frozen pieces of bluefish rack from the smelly cooler full of bait. The bait leaves blood and guts on anything it touches, which always includes your gloves and sometimes, your deck and your clothes.

By the time you’ve checked all ten pots, the boat’s a disaster. The deck is cruddy and slippery, your gloves and clothes are stained and wet.

That’s what Kevin and I looked like yesterday when we brought our boat in on the Blish Point ramp, where four tourists from Cincinnati were wandering around the parking lot.

They were clearly lost, and we asked them if we could help them find something. This led to a whole discussion of what to do on Cape Cod and, for what may have been the first time since we moved here two years ago, I felt like a local.

It wasn’t because I knew where to go to eat, or which activities were not to be missed. It was because I was standing on the ramp, next to my grimy working boat with five lobsters in the hold, wearing my stained coveralls.

Kevin caught the pool fish, almost ten pounds

But I also had authenticity momentum. We’d gone out fishing the day before, to Horseshoe Shoal, in Nantucket Sound. At first, it was a slow day (we even considered renewing our membership in the Sea-Level Club, but it was a little chilly). Then, round about mid-day, we found the fish – the old-fashioned way, without our GPS/fish-finder, which we’d forgotten. A little local knowledge, a little luck, and we brought home fifty pounds of bluefish.

Bluefish mess is a little different from lobster mess. There’s less seaweedy crud, but blood and guts, as well as the bluefish’s last meal, get all over everything.

The mess, though, neither starts nor ends on the boat. Before, there’s the mess of bait – bluefish racks and scraps for lobster, and squid, shiners, or eels for fish. The single most disgusting thing we’ve had to deal with here was the freezer that stopped freezing when it was full of bait. The flies were fighting each other just to get close.

After, there’s the mess of garbage. Yesterday we smoked our bluefish and boiled our lobster. Although most of the shells and scraps end up in the compost or the shell pile, enough end up in the garbage that you’ve got about a twelve-hour window to get to the dump.

Everything we do makes a mess. Besides the bloody boat and the cruddy clothes, there’s chicken poop on the walkway, washing machine parts all over the garage, dirt under our fingernails. So we hose down the boat, do the laundry, sweep the walkway. The garbage and spare parts go to the dump, and we get in the shower. And then we start all over again.

So, if you’re ever at my house, and you wonder, as you approach the front door, what that smell is, I can tell you right now. That’s the smell of authenticity.

I was high hook, with five fish, but my biggest was only 8 pounds

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I understand the fuss about making the perfect pizza, or clam chowder, or brownie. Those are all dishes that have significant variation, and take practice and experimentation to get just right. There’s even bona fide disagreement among reasonable people about just what the perfect pizza, or clam chowder, or brownie tastes like. But we all agree on the perfect lobster roll and any bonehead can make one.

Here’s how you do it. Take lobster meat, roughly chopped. Add a small amount of finely chopped onion, maybe with a little celery or parsley.  Maybe not. Add just enough mayo to get it to hold together. Serve it on a toasted, buttered hot dog roll.

That’s it.

The key to a lobster roll is letting it taste as much like lobster as possible. That means that you just don’t do much to it. Muck around with it, and you invariably make it worse. Thomas Keller can sous vide til the cows come home and he just can’t improve on it.

There is only one thing that can make the boneheaded perfect lobster roll taste better, and that is catching your own lobster.

Trust me on this one.

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The only reasonable conclusion, I thought, was that my family scared the lobsters away. My family has scared away tougher things than lobsters, so it wasn’t a stretch. But then I heard from a couple of sources that lobsters tend to move around, and that these particular lobsters had moved east. I thought this a more probable explanation, so Kevin and I planned to go out and move the traps to where the lobsters were presumed to be. That was over a month ago.

Bait prep

Moving lobster pots that have been sitting in a lobsterless part of Cape Cod Bay is sheer drudgery. It’s all the work of hauling pots with none of the excitement of expecting lobsters. Any wayward specimens that had wandered in would doubtless have found their way out by now, or died in the attempt.

That’s why we didn’t get around to it until yesterday.

We’d frozen the racks from the ten bluefish we caught over the weekend, and Kevin cut them into pieces that would fit in a bait bag, an activity that requires a machete, a hammer, and a high tolerance for the flies that come swarming around as soon as the first few shards of bluefish guts defrost. Kevin has gotten good at this. (And, yes, we make the master baiter joke all the time.)

We filled a cooler with the bait and put it on the boat. We brought fishing rods because we figured we might be able to snag a fish on our way in, consolation for the heavy, unrewarding work we were going out to do.

We put the boat in, glad at least to have a beautiful windless day. We motored out to our line of ten pots, which was right where we left it.

I grabbed the buoy of the first pot, and started hauling. When the pots have been out a long time, the ropes get fouled with all kinds of sea crud, and Kevin stood at the gunwale, de-crudding, as I hauled on the line. The crud not only made the pot heavier than usual, it made the rope diabolically slippery. As Kevin ran the rope through his hands to clean it, the crud fell on the deck, making that slippery, too. Blech.

But when Kevin pulled the first pot over the gunwale, all blechiness was forgotten. There were two – two! – lobsters in it. One was blue, and looked to be almost three pounds.

“Please don’t let that one be a female,” I said as Kevin opened the trap. He pulled it out. No eggs. No notch in the tail. A keeper! As was the other, smaller one.

We banded the lobsters, filled the cooler with sea water, and got the aerator going.

The work got way easier after that.

Am I blue?

We ended up with twelve – twelve! – lobsters. You’re not allowed to take females with eggs under their tail, and we had to throw back three big hens. You also have to let go any lobster that’s undersized or has a notch in its tail – we had one of each. That left us with seven keeper lobsters. Seven! It was our biggest haul ever, by a long shot.

But you’ve got to wonder what goes on down there on the sea floor. What would possess a lobster to go into a trap with no bait? I assume these guys hadn’t been there with no food for five weeks, as they seemed feisty and robust. Do they figure out how to get in and out, and take up residence like it’s some kind of cave? If so, why bother baiting at all?

We don’t know a whole lot about lobster behavior (‘we’ being the marine biology community, not Kevin and me), but what we do know has been written about by Trevor Corson in a book called The Secret Life of Lobsters, which has been recommended to me. I just bumped it up to first on my to-read list.

Seven lobsters would have made our day, but we kept seeing fish on the fish finder, so we dropped a couple of lines down on our way in. First up was a spiny dogfish, a kind of small shark. Alas, I found out too late that it has to be bled right away to be edible, or uric acid in its bloodstream contaminates the meat, so it’s destined to be lobster bait. (For more on sharks, read Hank Shaw’s post at Hunter Angler Gardener Cook. If we all ask him nicely, I’m hoping he’ll tell us how to gut and bleed a dogfish.)

I know just what to do with a fluke, though, and Kevin caught one, our second of the season, just outside Barnstable Harbor.

The only casualty was Kevin’s twenty-five-year-old fishing rod, which snapped in half when my fluke hook got caught on the seabed. We can live with that.

Dinner!

When we got home, we weighed the catch. It was fourteen pounds in total, and the blue one was three pounds even. My parents came over, and Kevin’s son Eamon is visiting, so we had a lobster feast for five. With leftovers! Who ever heard of leftover lobster?

Several of the lobsters were so big that they were hard to crack, and had a tendency to open explosively when you finally exerted enough pressure on their joints. My mother had to clean her glasses several times, and the table was a disaster. But I’m thinking any night you get lobster in your hair is a good night.

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Sea salt anchors the low end. The effort involved borders on nothing. About once a week during woodstove season, we fetch a pot of water from Sandy Neck. We put the water in a pan on the stove. When all the water’s dried up, we put the salt in a container. A season’s worth of water gives us at least a year’s worth of salt, with leftovers to give to our friends.

One of our lobster pots, about to go in for the season

But the payoff is more than just salt. It’s the fascination people have with the idea that you can make your own salt. Of all the things we do, this seems to be the one that interests people most.

On the other end of the E:P ratio spectrum is lobstering.

Lobstering is a lot of hard, heavy work. You have to acquire and set up the pots with ropes and buoys painted your designated colors and etched with your permit number. You have to load your boat and take the pots to somewhere lobsters are likely to be, generally a place that’s far from shore and covered by a lot of rough water.

Then you have to wait for weather that’s calm enough for a small boat (ours is a 19-foot Eastern) to safely venture out into Cape Cod Bay. You go out to your spot (ours is about three miles from the Millway marina, where we put in), bait your traps, and drop them in your best approximation of a straight line.

This year, we did our ten pots (the Massachusetts limit) in two shifts. Last year, we did it in one, and we learned our lesson. Five pots fit on our boat easily. Ten fit very uneasily indeed. We did our first load of five on Monday, and went out Tuesday with the second five, picking up our line where we’d left off. And then, once they were all in, the E really began.

The need to haul pots up from the bottom of Cape Cod Bay is what ought to make the effort-to-payoff ratio of lobstering unsatisfactory. It’s hard to pull a fifty-pound trap up through fifty feet of water, hand over hand. It takes me several minutes of serious effort, and I don’t have the upper-body strength the get the pot up on the gunwale without bashing it against the side of the boat – Kevin has to do that part. Checking even five of the pots is a workout for both of us.

But it’s hauling the pots up from the bottom of Cape Cod Bay that keeps me coming back. Bringing a giant cage up from the murky depths in the hopes that there will be a lobster in it, peering over the gunwale to get a glimpse of the contents, is absurdly exciting.

It’s almost as exciting as catching a fish, and together those two activities are the best argument for the compelling power of mystery that I’ve ever encountered.

Mystery does nothing for me.  Except when it involves seafood.

Those of you who follow this space have heard me say that I believe everything is knowable, and I’d like to know as much of it as possible. I’m a hard-edged rationalist, in it for the science and the certainty. Mystery does nothing for me.

Except when it involves seafood.

Trying to coax things to eat out of their home below the water’s surface is an exercise in guesswork. Even the best-informed among us don’t know precisely what’s going on down there. The most experienced fisherman will still pick a lure by trial and error. Cutting-edge oceanographic science can only tell us so much about what fish do and when and why they do it. Lobsters, particularly, are notoriously enigmatic.

But solving the mystery, if only for that one pot on that one day, is only part of the reason catching a lobster is exciting. It’s also, I suspect, because luring edible animals into cages – whether on land or under water – awakens the predatory instinct.

Humans are predators. I know this. But it’s been a long time since, as a species, we’ve had to hunt to survive, and I guess I’d had the idea that millennia of civilization had evolved the predatory instinct out of us, or at least tamped it down. And, even if it didn’t, what would women be doing with a predatory instinct? We’re the gatherers, remember?

But there’s no other explanation for why my heart beats faster and the adrenaline flows when there’s a fish or a lobster on the line. As distasteful as I find the idea of killing, say, a deer, I suspect the same instinct will kick in when I have one in my sight this fall, when hunting season rolls around. I’m catching my own food, and tapping into the brain-stem chemistry that enabled us not just to survive as a species, but to head the food chain.

So much for the veneer of civilization. Next thing you know, I’ll be wearing animal skins and carrying a club.

The one we let get away

Our five traps contained lots of crabs (which we also eat, when they’re big enough), a zillion snails (whose edibility I’m unsure of, but will look into), and one lobster that was just under legal size. Do you have any idea how hard it is to throw a lobster back? My brain stem says, “Hey, we caught that fair and square!” and my stomach says “Hey, that would taste really good!” Luckily, the cerebral cortex has veto power, and it says, “Hey, we play by the rules, and we want to maintain a sustainable lobster population. Besides, you can go to jail for taking lobsters illegally.”

But we’ll be back, probably tomorrow, to check again. No matter how much effort it is, the payoff isn’t just lobsters. It’s the ridiculous, disproportionate excitement that comes with tapping into my primal, reptilian self.

When I got back to civilization, I washed the salt water and sea crud off me, and prepared to go to the nice, clean supermarket to buy what I needed for dinner. On the way out the door, though, I checked my teeth and claws. Red.

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Yesterday morning was a window of opportunity and, since I’m in Albuquerque, Kevin recruited our friend Bob to go out with him and take the traps in for the season.

You know who your friends are when you start asking for help pulling lobster pots. You have to haul them up from the murky depths, pile them precariously on the boat, where they take up all available space and constantly threaten to fall overboard, and then motor in with a boat so heavily laden that the water comes much closer to the gunwales than any reasonable person would be comfortable with.

The lobsters that should have been Bob's

It’s hard work, and it’s dangerous. The water is cold, and the motion of pulling a 50-pound trap out of the water and into the boat is just the kind of thing that can send you tumbling overboard. Lucky for us, Bob is both a true friend and an excellent seaman, and he and Kevin got the job done before yesterday’s weather turned dirty.

I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, I don’t like to have Bob do what should, by rights, be my job. On the other hand, I’m delighted to come home to pots that are high and dry. What tips the balance and makes me wish I’d been there was the catch.

I expected empty traps. The bait was long gone, and I couldn’t think of any reason anything edible would wander in. But Kevin came home with fifteen crabs and two lobsters, one of them blue.

The crabs that await me

The lobsters had Bob’s name on them, and not just because he earned them with back-breaking labor. Back in the spring, Bob and his wife, Mad Dog, gave us not one but two whole striped bass, which means we’re running a significant seafood trade deficit. A couple of lobsters wouldn’t bring us back to even, but it would be a start. Bob, though, refused them, on some flimsy pretext of going out of town.

Kevin and his daughter, Fallon, who’s visiting us, ate the lobsters. The crabs, though, will still be there when I get home tomorrow, and I’ve been thinking about what to do with them. Since I’m in New Mexico, I’ve got chiles on the brain, and I’m thinking of roasting some mild green ones and cooking them with the crab and some shallots in smoked chicken stock and coconut milk. I’m not tied to it, though, so if anyone’s got a better idea, pass it along.

I missed the adventure, and I missed the lobsters, but I certainly can’t complain about what my husband does when I’m out of town.

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The day before, though, we tried to check our lobster pots for the first time.

We consulted the weather forecast in the morning, and it looked like the wind, which was blowing out of the north at about eight knots, was going to pick up as the day went on. We figured our best bet was to get out early, so we headed out as soon as we figured it, at about 7:30.

Barnstable Harbor

When we got to the boat ramp, which is about two miles west of the mouth of Barnstable Harbor, it seemed pretty windy already, but there wasn’t much chop in the harbor and we started out.

We turned the corner into Cape Cod Bay, and it got considerably choppier, but still manageable. We can pull pots in this, I thought to myself.

Then we came out of the channel into the body of the bay, and everything changed. The waves were a good five feet, and they tossed our boat around in ways which I understand are to be expected in a boat the size of ours, but which scared the bejeezus out of me.

After we’d come crashing down in the third or fourth trough, I found myself hanging on to the rail of the console with both hands, bracing for the next impact. It came in short order, as did the one after that and the one after that. Waves were breaking over the bow, and the boat seemed to always be pointing either up or down at an alarming angle.

Terror was occupying all the parts of my brain that ordinarily do the thinking, so it took some time for an idea to penetrate. Eventually, though, it occurred to me that we didn’t have to do this.

I hadn’t even finished having the thought before I communicated it to Kevin. “Honey,” I said, “I can’t do this. I’m too scared.”

I don’t believe words to that effect have come out of my mouth since I was eight years old. I didn’t like the sound of them, but I really was too scared to do this, so there wasn’t much point in beating around the bush.

Kevin didn’t try to talk me out of it; he turned around immediately. In part, this was undoubtedly because he knows I would never say anything like that unless I were beyond discussing it. But, even at the time, I understood that many a reasonable person would decline to pull lobster pots in water like this in a nineteen-foot boat. It wasn’t a fanciful request.

That didn’t stop me from feeling like a lily-livered, yellow-bellied, sniveling weenie. We’d gotten within a quarter-mile of our pots, and I made my husband turn the boat around because I was afraid. As glad as I was to be back on dry land, I was not happy with myself. Fishing is a big part of what we’re trying to do here, and if I’m too chicken to go out in the boat in anything but a dead calm, that’s a problem.

Luckily, it turned out that I wasn’t a lily-livered, yellow-belied, sniveling weenie; I was merely an imbecile. Later that day, we discovered that the conditions had been bad enough that the NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration – the ultimate authority on all things wet) had issued a small craft advisory for Cape Cod Bay. You just don’t go lobstering in a nineteen-foot boat when there’s a small craft advisory in effect. You just don’t.

Unfortunately, the NOAA doesn’t issue imbecile advisories, and so people who don’t know there’s an active small craft advisory blithely head out in their small crafts. Because nobody called us on the phone and said, “STAY HOME, YOU IMBECILE,” out we went.

I can assure you that this will never happen again. A mistake like that has compelling instructive power.

Which brings us to yesterday, a different day altogether. The wind had shifted so it was coming out of the south, and had died to almost nothing. The NOAA website, which I checked, said that seas were less than one foot. Nevertheless, I felt a trepidatious flutter as we motored out into the harbor.

Trepidation is unsustainable in a dead calm, though, and I felt just fine as we pulled up to our first lobster pot.

Russ hauling a pot on to the gunwale

We have friends visiting from San Francisco, and Russ and Mylene had come out with us. Russ took the helm as Kevin started pulling up the rope, hand over hand. I had been very worried about the difficulty of pulling heavy traps off the seabed, but it didn’t look like he was straining.

“Is it hard?” I asked.

“Not too bad.”

That was good to know, but the fact that it wasn’t too bad for Kevin didn’t necessarily mean it was possible for me.

It only took a minute or so for him to get the pot out of the water and on to the gunwale, in clear view. We all stared in wonder.

There was a lobster in the trap.

We measured it, but I could tell by looking that it was big enough to keep. Our first pot, our first pull, our first lobster.

And it wasn’t just a lobster. It was a small triumph. After fishing trips where we came back empty-handed, boat and trailer problems that kept us out of the water, bugs in our collard greens and blight on our tomatoes, here was a tangible, hard-shelled, two-clawed success. I felt something embarrassingly close to elation.

That made pot-hauling easier, I think. I took hold of the rope on our second trap, and found that I could pull it up without too much difficulty. It was heavy, and I needed Kevin’s help to lift it up on the gunwale, but I could get it from the bottom to the surface.

Kevin and dinner

Second trap, second lobster. Astonishing.

Russ and Mylene took their turns hauling, and I went again, but the next few traps came up empty. One even had a missing bait bag. But it was okay, because we had two lobsters in the cooler, and dinner was assured.

Then, on the sixth or seventh, Kevin pulled up the motherlode: two legal lobsters, one of which looked like it was nearly three pounds.

All told, we came home with five lobsters weighing a total of ten pounds, and a renewed sense of enthusiasm.

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Ten pots, just barely

In order to discover which of the plants and animals around us are good to eat, some brave soul has to go first. Fortunately for us, most of the testing has already been done, and we can find out what’s edible by checking Wikipedia. Our ancestors, though, had to bite the bullet and go with trial and error, hoping that the errors would be few and non-fatal.

Starvation is a powerful incentive to risk those errors, but even the prospect of a slow, lingering death wasn’t enough to convince some of Cape Cod’s earliest British settlers to try the lobsters, which you could apparently pluck right off the beaches. There were members of the Plymouth colony who preferred eating nothing to eating lobster, and expired dreaming of steak-and-kidney pie.

Now, I can understand an unwillingness to cook up something that looks like a giant cockroach, with menacing claws and a bad disposition, but if the alternative is death? Come on.

Fast forward four hundred years, and you’ll find an Irishman and a Jew (no Mayflower roots here!) heading into Cape Cod Bay, braving water and weather in the hopes of pulling a few lobsters up from the depths. As we speak, there are ten lobster pots at the bottom of the bay with our name on them – well, with our license number on them, at any rate. With any luck, some lobsters have spent the last 48 hours crawling in and not crawling out.

Kevin baiting a trap

Kevin and I are well-fed, and we have access to a wide variety of food at the supermarket down the road.  We are nevertheless going to spend the morning taking an open boat out on some serious chop and hauling fifty-pound traps up through fifty feet of water in the pursuit of something that looks like a giant cockroach, with menacing claws and a bad disposition.

Recreational lobstering, this is called.

If the Pilgrims had starved just a little longer, maybe we could still pluck them off the beaches.

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