A midsummer molting season for lobsters off the coast of Maine so far has prevented professionals in the industry from predicting how the yearly catch will turn out.

Lobstermen and scientists alike are curious to see whether 2005 will resemble 2004, when a late-season flurry of lobster landings led to a record annual statewide harvest of more than 70 million pounds.

Carl Wilson, senior lobster scientist for Maine Department of Marine Resources, said Monday that in the 1990s, it was typical for lobsters to shed their hard shells in early summer. After shedding, the crustaceans tend to stay put, largely avoiding lobster traps while waiting for their new, bigger shells to harden.

“The past few years, the molt has been delayed a month or so,” Wilson said.

This means soft-shelled lobsters, or shedders, are appearing in August. It is usually not until their shells harden, which can take several weeks, that the creatures resume roaming the ocean floor and start appearing in traps in large numbers.

This delay means that it is still too early in the cycle to estimate how many lobsters might be commercially harvested in Maine this year.

There are “no big numbers coming in,” Wilson said. “I’ve gotten few phone calls. That tells me things might not be great, but they’re not that bad.”

Ken Wyman, who fishes out of Stockton Springs, said Tuesday that reported landings this year could end up rivaling those reported in 2004. Increased reporting requirements likely have led to record landing figures, he said, rather than an actual increase in the number of lobsters caught and sold.

Wyman, who also works as a lobster and bait dealer, said dealers currently are paying fishermen $6.50 per pound for hard-shell lobsters and $4.25 for shedders. Unfortunately, some costs for fishermen have risen more sharply than the boat price, he said.

“It’s a decent price,” Wyman said. “[Last year] the bait was less expensive and so was the fuel.”

Jon Carter, a Bar Harbor fisherman, said Monday that landings this spring in the Hancock County area were “great.” Now that it is midsummer, he said, lobster fishing activity is typically slow.

Despite the trend in the 1990s, lobster traditionally have shed their shells later in the summer, according to Carter. The current slow period might indicate a return to that prior pattern, he said.

“[Shedders] never did come that early in previous years,” he said.

According to Wilson, the late-season molt last year shortened the fall fishing season and likely led to the apparent abundance of lobster this past spring.

Carter said that though landings currently are coming in more slowly, he sees no reason to expect that the catch this year will be different from 2004.

“There’s no real way of telling,” he said. “It wouldn’t surprise me to see another record year.”

The record catch in 2004 also set a new high in value, with the 70 million pounds selling for more than $285 million, according to official DMR statistics. That eclipses the previous record of 63 million pounds of lobster, worth $210 million, that was caught and sold in 2002.

In 1990, when the statewide annual lobster haul began to increase sharply over the fluctuating pattern of previous decades, 28 million pounds of lobster worth more than $61 million was caught in the state’s coastal waters.