EclectEcon

We happened to end up in Caribou, Nova Scotia, the first day the lobster fishers were allowed to go out to drop their traps for the season. They would load their boats with traps, take them out to the choice areas, drop them, and then return to the harbour to load up more traps.






The big grey tub in the foreground of the photo on the right has little orange bags of bait for the lobsters. They put a bag in each trap as the trap was being loaded.

As you can see, the lobster industry is undergoing some technological changes. Slowly, the operators are replacing the old semi-cylindrical wooden traps with metal rectangular traps.

This next boats below are preparing to carry all metal traps. The one in the left looks as if they have a separate buoy for each trap. Sometimes they string several traps together all attached to one buoy. The buoys are different for each fisher so they can readily identify their traps.




The harbour was busy. The boats cannot hold all the traps to which the licences entitle the fishers, so they rush out with about half their traps, set them, and then come back for the rest. After that, they are not allowed to retrieve any traps until the next day, but they can bring back a few lobsters “for personal use”.

These last two photos were taken from the Wood Island Ferry (which you can see coming into dock in the background of the above photo on the right), as we were crossing to Prince Edward Island. I might have had a chance to go out on a lobster boat while we were in PEI, but given that they leave at 5am (no problem for this early riser) and work hard (still not much of a problem) and stay out from 5am until about 3pm (way too long for me when I’m on holidays) and I don’t know how I’d cope if suddenly afflicted with mal de mer, I opted out.