Lobster fishing ‘tie-ups’ spread

Price and supply almost always are an issue for Maine lobster fishermen, even as catch totals have climbed steadily upward over the past 20 years.

It’s rare, however, that lobstermen feel compelled to stop fishing en masse to protest prices that they say are too low.

But that’s what many have done this week. From Boothbay Harbor to Cutler, they’ve been coming back to port early in the day, tying their vessels together and drawing attention to the fact that they cannot cover their daily costs by being paid less than $4 a pound for their catch.

“For the last 25 years, this hasn’t happened,” Lewis Cameron of the Bristol village of Pemaquid said Wednesday. “You’re talking hundreds of boats up and down the coast.”

On Monday, more than 70 boats from the Gouldsboro fishing village of Corea and other towns farther east tied up in Corea’s harbor to draw attention to low prices. In Cutler on the same day, more than 30 lobster boats came into port after a few hours of fishing and tied up for the same reason.

By Wednesday, similar shows of unity were taking place in Boothbay Harbor, Corea, Pemaquid, Stonington and Vinalhaven. According to people in those communities, similar tie-ups were occurring in Bremen, Friendship, Round Pond, South Bristol and other communities.

Cameron said lobster retails in Maine in the range of $8 to $9 a pound, similar to what it has been in recent years. This spring, when demand was high but relatively few lobsters were being caught, retail prices in Maine spiked to around $15 a pound.

It’s the boat price – what fishermen get directly for their catch – that changes more often than prices at any other point along the supply chain, Cameron said.

“We’re not trying to get rich, we’re just trying to make a living,” he said. “The [boat] price would be well over $5 now if it kept up with inflation.”

Clive Farrin of Boothbay Harbor said dealers in some areas have been offering a boat price as low as $3.50 a pound. The last time the average annual boat price in Maine was less than $4 a pound was in 2003 when, according to the federal Energy Information Administration, the nationwide average price of diesel fuel hovered around $1.50 a gallon.

Diesel prices are now nearly twice that amount, while over the past two years bait costs have risen more than 30 percent to around $20 for 100 pounds. Farrin said his daily expense for bait is now about $190.

“You can’t buy a lobster dinner for less than $25, and you don’t get a lot with it,” Farrin said. “That’s some expensive corn.”

Farrin said he realizes everyone along the supply chain has to raise the price a certain extent to recover their costs, but below a certain boat price fishermen won’t recover theirs. Bait and fuel remain at historically high prices, and many fishermen have to pay sternmen on top of that, he said. The daily expense of just operating a boat runs into the hundreds of dollars

“You don’t see retail prices fluctuating the way ours do,” he said. “When [the boat price] goes below $4 a pound, and you’re not catching anything, you can’t do it.”

Part of the issue for lobstermen is that fishing this year has been slow. Some said that more recently it has been even slower because it is shedder season, the time of year when lobsters shed their shells and then hide out for a few weeks while waiting for their new, larger shells to harden.

Soft-shell lobsters fetch a lower price because they don’t sell as well, according to fishermen. Tourists in Maine want the experience of cracking into hard-shell lobsters, and soft-shell lobsters can’t be shipped long distances because they won’t survive the journey.

“The lobsters have only picked up here the last couple of weeks,” David Sleeper, general manager of the Spruce Head fishermen’s Co-op, said Wednesday. “Spring was dismal.”

Not all fishermen avoided going out for a full day, however. Farrin said he does carpentry work in the winter and has that to fall back on if fishing is not going well.

Many fishermen have too many payments to make to skip what could end up being a good day hauling traps, Farrin said. With the boat price in Boothbay Harbor having just increased from $4 to $4.25, he said he doesn’t picture local fishermen spending another day off the water.