It’s clear, cold and windy today. Winter is on us in Maine. What a pain in the neck – the world’s biggest inconvenience. I don’t own a snowmobile and I don’t ski or skate, and every time I make plans for the weekend, it snows.
I didn’t always feel this way.
Jerry headed out in his lobster boat dragger Hard Times, in winter of 1981.When I was fishing, I loved winter. Inshore dragging typically was slow in the fall, although some years migrating cod (you could tell by their white bellies that they weren’t locals) would come along to feed on herring spawn in Wells Bay, and occasionally we’d have some luck with them.
The gannets found the cod for us. They’d ride their six-foot wings and circle high over the ocean off Bald Head Cliff, as much as 100 feet high, looking for the herring. They’d tuck their wings in and down they’d go, great white falling swords. The herring would be down 15 fathoms or more – the water was about 17 fathoms deep – no problem for these birds. By and by the cod would move along, and we’d go back to trying to scratch up a few flounders on the open bottom further outside, waiting for winter.
The cold water typically brought flounders northeast of Boon Island. Cod and haddock passed through as they saw fit, as well as Maine shrimp (more correctly known as northern shrimp, or Pandalus borealis), according to their cycle.
Maine shrimp show up for a few years, then they don’t. It’s been that way since the 1950s that I know of, and probably much longer. Needless to say, many a crocodile tear has been shed fretting over the health of shrimp in the Gulf of Maine, but I haven’t used up too many tissues, myself. I believe northern shrimp hereabouts are driven by water temperature and by their abundance in the larger biomass of them far to the north.
Many Maine fishermen, including some of my mentors, love catching shrimp and do well at it. It is an affinity I never shared. My own career as a shrimper began on deck long before the invention of the bycatch (and deckhand)-liberating Nordmore grate. My peers and I spent endless hours on deck picking baby flounders, cigarette whiting and brittle stars out of the shrimp. It was, someone observed, like picking fly turds out of black pepper.
Winter also meant lots of wind, and as a result, high prices. We couldn’t get out as often or stay as long as we did in the good weather, but most trips were worth it. I carried two nets, even on my little lobster boat dragger Hard Times, one for hard bottom and one for soft. When we got bored grinding around for flounders we’d put the roller net on and chase cod in hopes of a bag so full it would pop out of the ocean.
This was before four-seam nets were widely used. The cod we stalked haunted very bony bottom, so rim-racks were not uncommon, and eventually mending nets in the frigid weather would nibble away at our patience and good nature and we’d go back fishing for flounder on kindlier bottom.
Fishing kept us engaged in those days because there was always something to look forward to. We didn’t get rich, but we got to go fishing.
