ROCKLAND (AP) – Maine’s biggest lobster party is about to get a bigger lobster cooker.

The Maine Lobster Festival is replacing its well-worn, decades-old cooker with a new one that will be designed in the shape of the Rockland Breakwater Lighthouse.

Inside the structure, there will be eight stainless steel cooking tubs, each of which can cook 150 pounds of lobster at a time. The old cooker, which has six cooking tubs with a capacity of 50 pounds each, boiled up more than 500,000 pounds of lobster in its three decades of service.

A scale model of the new cooker was unveiled Saturday in this midcoast town where the annual festival has been held for 60 years.

The event draws around 100,000 visitors and serves up more than 20,000 pounds of lobster annually.

Not only is the new cooker bigger, it’s designed in such a way that festival-goers will have a better view to see the crustaceans being cooked.

The new model also will have an overhead framework from which baskets of lobster can be raised and lowered into and out of the tubs with a mechanical hoist. The lobsters in the old version had to be loaded and removed by hand.

“At 50 pounds per tub, that’s a lot of lifting and a lot of manual labor when you’re talking 20,000 pounds of lobster,” said Pete Cella, president of the Rockland Festival Corp., the event’s governing body. “We want to make sure we make things as safe and as stress-free as we can.”

The cooking stations in the new model will be removable, meaning the lighthouse will serve as a picnic pavilion when it’s not in use by the festival.

The new model will be ready in time for the 2008 festival. It will cost an estimated $60,000, Cella said.

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