The Trick Is Getting Them Into the Parlor: A lobsterman reads his fortune in the pots he pulls from the Sound

By Russell Drumm

Jake jumped onto the rail, ran forward, and alternately pointed with his short snout at the orange buoys the Anna Mary was approaching and then looked back to the man at the wheel in his foul-weather skins - looked back to make sure his master saw the buoys, pointed, looked back, pointed, looked back, his excitement growing as the boat's 671 Detroit engine was throttled down.

Darren McGough grabbed the long-handled gaff he used to snag the buoy line. This caused the Australian cattle dog to take his position just forward of the hydraulic hauler on the starboard side. In one smooth motion, Captain McGough pulled the pot warp from the water and fed it into the hauler, which lifted the first lobster pot of a 12-pot string from 60 feet down to the Anna Mary's well-worn rail, where it received a welcome-aboard bite from Jake. It wasn't cattle, or kangaroos, but there was herding of a sort going on, and the dog knew it.

"You wouldn't believe the conversations we have," the Montauk lobsterman said, only half in jest. Knives in their sheaths, one mounted on the suspenders of his skins in upside-down, easy-grab position, another on the bulwark of the boat's port stern quarter, testified to the danger of fishing singlehanded on a lobster boat.

The danger comes once lobsters have been taken from the pots, old bait bags are emptied, and new ones hung in the pot's parlor - it comes when the pots are returned to the sea and the line that connects them whips and coils off the deck like an angry snake seeking a hand or foot to bite and take down with it. More than one lobsterman entangled in the lines of his rapidly descending lobster pots has had to cut himself loose to live.

This gray day, with a cold wind blowing from the east just 24 hours shy of the summer solstice, Captain McGough would be hauling a small portion of the 800 pots he is permitted to fish with his federal lobster license. He will have the entire complement in by mid-July and will haul between 200 and 300 per day trip with the help of a mate.

Until then, his singlehanded limit is about 120, divided into 12 or 15-pot trawls, or strings. Fifteen pots, with 72 feet of line between them, fit nicely along the boat's rails, where they rest, rebaited, until they are set again.

Storm petrels, otherwise known as Mrs. McCary's chickens, danced on the surface nearby as the fisherman read the contents of his first string of pots, shook old bait from meshed bags, and replaced them with bags stuffed with very ripe bunker and skate.

The almost visible smell of rotting bait comes with the territory aboard lobster boats and sets lobstermen apart - sometimes literally. Captain McGough apologized for it to a voluntary crewman, and said that because of it he often stripped before entering his house after a day's fishing. It's because of the smell that he owns two trucks.

"The bottom must be carpeted with them," he said of starfish, scooping a gloveful of them out of a pot from which a clump of glutinous squid eggs hung. The string had been "soaking" for nine days, but despite the long set, the 12-pot string had produced only four marketable lobsters.

Two of them had evidence of shell rot, a disease of unknown origin that has crippled and killed an untold number of lobsters in western Long Island and Block Island Sounds in recent years. The disease eats away at the lobster's shell, thinning it, and, in the worst cases, burrowing beneath into the animal's new shell, thus guaranteeing the crustacean will not survive its next molt.

Shell rot is not the cause of the mysterious die-off of lobsters that has crippled the fishery in western Long Island Sound. Nor does it make lobsters dangerous to eat. It does lower the price to the fisherman, however. "That one would have been a $6 lobster without the rot," Captain McGough said, holding a lobster with mottled shell. "I'll get 4. Some days half the catch has rot."

The good news was that Captain McGough returned at least six lobsters to the sea after the gauge that hangs from a string at his waist told him their carapaces were just short of the legal minimum length - 311/32 inches. The limit was shorter - 31/4 inches - last year.

"It's still 31/4 inches state waters. The Muskrat could keep this one," Captain McGough said, referring to Bobby Huser, a veteran Montauk lobsterman and mentor who operates in state waters within three miles of shore.

A separate gauge measures the maximum size of a female lobster. Big females must be returned. "I had a 12-pound buck [male] last week that was caught in the [pot] door," Captain McGough crowed. "It only had one claw. If it had two, it would have weighed 14 pounds. The record on this boat is 14 pounds."

"We call it changing water in the pot, when we haul empty pots," he said, going to do just that while describing a complexity of regulations that included a requirement that each lobster pot bear his license number, a two-inch-wide vent that allows undersized lobsters to escape, and a larger panel with biodegradable hinges. Should the trap become a "ghost pot," that is, go missing, the hinges will eventually rot away, permitting the lobsters to escape.

The lobsterman places nearly all of his strings on the ocean bottom where experience has shown it to be productive, and where management laws permit them to be. A logbook that records the exact location of his traps is kept handy in the wheelhouse beneath the Anna Mary's global-positioning receiver and electronic bottom mapper. Beside it is a book of federal log forms that must be filled out after each day's fishing.

A second string of 15 pots was hauled from deeper water, but with much the same results, only two marketable lobsters. Even so, the lobsterman saw promise, which he read like a fortune from the contents.

The pots had contained both "shorts," and "eggers," females bearing thousands and thousands of tiny eggs on their undersides. What's more, the fishermen could tell by the size of the eggs that they were about to drop. "You can see their little eyeballs." It's illegal to harvest eggers, and they must be returned to the sea, not to the trap.

He explained the shorts would probably become legal size with their next molt, which should occur when the water reaches 65 degrees. Once lobsters drop their old shell and their slightly larger, new shell hardens, they begin to feed in earnest and the catches improve considerably - or should. "In '99 we had a couple of thousand-pound days," Captain McGough recalled with hope in his voice.

In the meantime, he said, he would work a limited number of lobster pots, plus his fish traps - set up like large lobster pots - and will work part time with another Montauk lobsterman so they can both avoid the cost of a mate, at least until they "get on the meat." Captain McGough has 50 fish traps but is not fishing all of them because the legal daily catch for porgies and sea bass is only 100 pounds per day each. There is no limit on bergalls, however.

The toothy bottom feeder with no traditional domestic appeal has a growing demand in the Chinese market in New York City. A number of them were pulled from the pots this day and placed in the Anna Mary's live tank along with sea ravens, another species that sells to the Chinese market and looks like a cross between a dragon and a blowfish. Bergalls sell for $6 per pound alive, 40 cents per pound dead.

"Eggers, rot, and rotten eggers," Captain McGough chanted as he and Jake brought the first pot of the sixth string aboard for examination and rebaiting. But from the fourth pot on, a change. This string was being lifted from shallower water and the lobsterman found he was suddenly on the meat, relatively speaking.

His spirits buoyed, Captain McGough recalled finding "party pots" on occasion, pots containing beer cans, and the time he found a balloon with a note in a pot from a third-grade class in Twinsburg, Ohio. Captain McGough phoned, as the note requested, and learned that the class had launched the balloons as part of a mapping experiment.

Captain McGough has been lobstering for nine years, but still considers himself a newcomer with much to learn from the more veteran lobstermen. He said he made the most money the first year after he bought the Anna Mary. Shell rot and regulations have taken their toll ever since.

But he will keep fishing. "The bills don't go away," he reasoned, plus, "I like lobstering. You come back at the end of the day and can have kind of a normal life."