Christmas Cove family unruffled by winter lull

CHRISTMAS COVE – Don’t look for bright Christmas lights adorning the gray-shingled houses hugging the rocky shoreline in this tiny village. Holiday shoppers are nowhere to be seen, either.

About the only holiday lights to behold are tacked around the edges of a big plywood lobster over the door to the barn near Wayne McFarland’s white century-old house. The string of lights has been up for years.

Despite the seasonal ring to its name, nearly everyone is gone for the winter from Christmas Cove, a part of the town of South Bristol that’s so small it’s easy to drive right through. In fact, once you do drive through, a sign painted on a driveway advises in bold letters, “Turn Around.”

“We’re it. We’re too damn stubborn to leave,” said McFarland’s wife, Amy. “We are pretty much the end of the Earth.”

The main company for the McFarlands and their two teen-age sons is the sound of the ocean lapping against the shore behind their house, and harder pounding of the waves when storms hit. The family is used to it, having been here for five generations, building boats, fishing, working as carpenters.

McFarland, 49, keeps plenty busy despite a recent downturn in the lobster business. A lobsterman who also installs kitchens and makes furniture, McFarland’s main schtick is making custom lobster traps.

The old, semicircular oak traps often depicted in pictures and carvings are long gone, not so much because they were poorly constructed but because they are not as efficient as wire traps.

Nowadays, lobstermen use wire-mesh models that are all similar. The main difference – and where McFarland’s expertise comes in – is in the design of the netting inside the trap.

Lobstermen from as far away as Cape Cod and Rhode Island who place orders with McFarland, also have their own ideas on other details, such as how many metal clips are needed to hold the trap together, and whether the netting should be blue, orange, green or black.

After a customer shows him a design, McFarland fabricates a prototype, which the customer tests out in the ocean.

“They think their way is better, so we try to copy exactly what they have,” said McFarland. “What it all boils down to is they’re 99 percent the same.”

At peak production, McFarland and 17 employees can crank out 130 custom traps a day, or 14,000 a year. A typical sale is for 100 traps.

For the traditionalists, McFarland has also mastered the art of building oak traps, and doesn’t worry that he hasn’t practiced in years. “It’s something you don’t forget,” he said.

Lobstermen are superstitious about what works best, whether it be placement of the escape vents for juvenile lobsters or other details.

Superstitions even inspire rules some lobstermen impose aboard their boats, such as no swearing and no whistling. “His uncle wouldn’t wear blue jeans on a boat,” said Amy, who sometimes helps her husband haul traps.