TRAPPING THE YACHTS

Lobster traps can catch yachts as well as lobsters. It can happen when the helmsman runs his boat over a potwarp, the line that runs from a plastic lobster buoy down to one or more traps on the ocean bottom. The worst case is when the line wraps around the propeller shaft and stops the engine. Another bad scene is when the line runs up between the rear of the keel and the rudder, often dragging the buoy against the rudder and disabling the steering.

The solution can mean going overboard to untangle the mess, sending for a diver or calling the Coast Guard. For the yachtsman, it can spoil a day on the water. For the lobsterman, it can cost up to $150 or more for the loss of traps, line, gear and buoy.

There’s a solution, but it’s controversial. Several companies sell line cutters, razor-sharp blades that are attached to a propeller shaft and cut any line, net or weed that gets in their path. Spurs Marine Manufacturing, in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., calls them “line busters” and boasts that they have been installed on Coast Guard, Navy and thousands of pleasure and commercial vessels worldwide.

Sandra Dinsmore, writing in The Working Waterfront, the monthly newspaper of the Island Institute, has brought the subject to the fore. She quotes lobsterman Leroy Bridges of Deer Isle as saying that when the Eggemoggin Reach Regatta and the New York Yacht Club came through Jericho Bay this past summer they destroyed around $10,000 worth of fishing gear.

Donald Straus, a Somesville sloop sailor turned power yachtsman, says he spoke with seven local lobstermen who all preferred line cutters to getting their line tangled in propellers. They reasoned that most lines are cut between the buoy and a toggle, a smaller buoy often used to hold up the line between the buoy and the trap. That way, the buoy is cut loose, but the toggle remains in place to mark the location of the trap. Some other yachtsmen who use cutters feel guilty about it, especially after reading the Dinsmore article.

On Islesford, Bruce Fernald agrees that cutting is sometimes better than tangling a warp around the propeller and dragging the trap off somewhere. But he prefers protective cages around the propellers to the spurs. He says he knows only one lobsterman who uses cutters, and they were already on his boat when he bought it.

Roger Duncan, whose “Cruising Guide to the New England Coast” is a standby for many sailboat sailors, says flatly, “I’m against them. To promiscuously destroy someone’s property, without even knowing about it, is immoral.”

Certainly, the lobstermen could ease things by agreeing to leave channels open among their forests of buoys. In the meantime, think twice before you use cutters. Steer more carefully and you may stay out of trouble without destroying the tools of a lobsterman’s trade.