Lobstering Can Be Fun

When you've got all this nice white snow about the house, clogging up the driveways and walkways, what better use to make of it than to plant a few score of dirty rotten seaweed-covered lobster buoys into the snow, just for a nice touch of the ocean. Ahhh... you can smell the sea in our driveway right about now.

I don't mind the smell - it only lasts for a day because the traps and buoys will dry right out, and the ocean odor will dissipate right away. But for those of us who don't get down to the sea very often anymore, it's a nice smell, if you've grown up near it and have loved it all your life, as have I.

Paul's sniffer doesn't work any more. Too many hours spent over a ripe-smelling bait barrel - his nose just went on strike one year and never came off. Oh well. I swear that's why he never complains about my cooking. He probably can't taste much because I'm pretty sure that if you can't smell your food, you don't taste much of it either. He will dispute this fact, but I know better. He almost always says that my cooking tastes fine and sometimes, well, I know that can't be 100% true.

The snow, which totaled oh, around 12 to 15 inches here, has melted down quite a lot in a few days. Today was positively balmy here in New England - they said on TV it would hit 50 degrees, and I'm sure they were right. The drip-drip-dripping sound coming from the back deck is proof positive.

It wasn't exactly a day off for us here. Paul went out lobstering, as usual, and I did about a half-day's worth of typing. I'll have another half-day to do tomorrow, as well, and he'll be back out on the ocean doing his thing then, too.

Paul is bringing in his allotment of traps for the winter. He leaves a bunch of them out for the whole winter to continue fishing, but the ones he brings in now will all need complete overhaul. The buoys need to be washed in bleach, scraped down, sanded, painted 3 times with 3 different colors. The ropes all need to be sorted out and organized and washed and folded up in groups. The traps need to all be cleaned off of the detritus they collect at the bottom of the ocean and then pounded back into shape, new heads put in where necessary and new runners put on (oak) and brick replaced. It all is very time consuming and takes Paul the rest of the winter months to do. In between going out lobstering, that is.

So a lobsterman's work is never really done. But sometimes it CAN be fun. Like today when he got 75 lobsters out of 72 traps... now those are GOOD ODDS!

Cheers,

Bex & The Lobsterman