Late lobster season means higher prices
By mid-July, the lobstermen’s cooperative on Vinalhaven, one of Maine’s leading lobster ports, is typically shipping 150 crates of new-shell lobsters a day to buyers up and down the East Coast.
This year, it has been shipping only five to 10 of the 90-pound crates a day. The lobster catch is down, keeping prices high and causing some to wonder if the lobster harvest is in for a fall after years of spectacular catches.
Norah Warren, manager of the Vinalhaven Fishermen’s Co-operative, said the late start has some lobstermen concerned. “They love gloom and doom,” she said.
But they aren’t distressed, she said, because it’s early in the lobster season and the most bountiful months – August, September and October – are still to come. Besides, many lobstermen had expected a sluggish start to the season after a cold winter and spring.
“Everything has been late,” she said. “Flowers, fruit trees, everything.”
Also late in coming are lower lobster prices that normally coincide with the arrival of summer tourists. Lobster dealers say prices are 75 cents to $1 or more per pound higher now than they usually are this time of year.
The lobster season in recent years has gotten under way in mid-June, after lobsters molt, come out from hiding and begin crawling about the ocean bottom.
Lobstermen know abundant catches are soon to arrive when the newly molted crustaceans, known as soft-shell or new-shell lobsters, begin showing up in their traps in June or July.
But when the lobsters weren’t anywhere to be found by the Fourth of July weekend, some lobstermen became concerned, and restaurants scrambled to find enough lobsters for the tourist influx. It has been years since lobsters waited so late in the season to move into traps.
Cook’s Lobster House in Harpswell had to make due by serving more expensive hard-shell lobsters, those that have not molted, instead of the soft-shell variety for its lobster dinners for at least two weeks longer than usual.
Restaurant owner Curt Parent had to pay about $2 a pound extra for hard-shell lobsters, which cost him an extra $6,000 to $10,000 a week. Hard-shell lobsters cost more because they have more meat.
Parent said many tourists were disappointed that soft-shell lobsters weren’t available because they are easier to crack open and can be sweeter-tasting.
“It’s not what they expect in Maine in July,” he said.
Lobster industry veterans say what is going on this summer is actually typical, at least from a historical perspective. They say the season only seems to be getting a late start because the catches have started so early in recent years.
“We’re having an old-fashioned summer,” said Warren, on Vinalhaven.
The lobsters have begun showing up in varying degrees in different parts of the state in the past week or two. The best catches are reported in southern Maine, but the traps are still mostly empty along other parts of the coast.
In Stonington, lobstermen who have refrained from setting their traps are anxious to get on the water, said Barbara Eaton, office manager at the Stonington Lobster Co-op.
Most are hesitant to set traps before the lobsters start crawling because of the cost of things like fuel and bait.
“The money isn’t coming in like it usually does,” Eaton said. “Where things are slow in happening, people are getting antsy.”
On the positive side, prices that lobstermen get paid for their catch have remained healthy and didn’t drop sharply like they usually do after the Fourth of July.
But lobstermen aren’t making much money because the catches have been so meager, said Patten White, a York lobsterman and head of the Maine Lobstermen’s Association.
“You haul 100 traps for nine lobsters and all you’re doing is changing the water in them. That’s depressing,” White said. “You might as well stay home and chop wood.”
AP-ES-07-20-03 1701EDT
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