LOBSTER TRIBULATIONS

Everyone connected with the Maine lobster industry seems caught as this summer winds down. The lobstermen (and women) find the current “boat price,” or what they get for their catch, too low, especially since it went down another 50 cents to $3.50 a pound. Diesel fuel and herring bait have gone up, and they’re feeling a pinch. Many of them tied up their boats last week, but that lasted only a day or so.

The dealers are in the middle, with their costs up, too. Some feel lucky to make 20 cents a pound when shipping the lobsters off mostly to Canada for processing.

The Canadian processors have overhead problems, too, and quit buying for a couple of days, possibly in retaliation for the brief harvesters’ strike. Even not counting “shrinkage,” the proportion of lobsters that arrive too long dead to use, they need 5 pounds of lobster for each pound of meat – 6 pounds or more for soft-shells.

Some restaurant diners probably find $15.99 for a pound-and-a-quarter lobster (and nearly twice that for a 2-pounder) a bit pricey. Supermarkets are getting $10.99 for a live hard-shell, $6.99 for a soft-shell, and $12.99 for 7 ounces of frozen claw and knuckle meat.

On the face of it, $3.50, a pound sounds meager when the product is bringing several times that amount at retail. And shipping so much of Maine’s signature product to Canada seems uneconomical. But Maine has no large-scale processing plants, partly because Canada has such a head start and partly because any business in Maine must confront transportation costs, plus the mounting burden of health benefits for any U.S. business.

One of Maine’s leading dealers, Bill Atwood at Spruce Head, has been mulling an offbeat solution that he has not dared offer to anyone: Why not divide the Maine coast into three sections and close each one for a month in series to let the harvesters have a month off and let the soft-shell lobsters harden up so they could be marketed directly rather than being sent to Canada for processing?

The Maine commissioner of marine resources, George Lapointe, sees some merit in ideas like that, although a month off might clash with a change in water temperature. He says that’s the kind of talk that’s needed to deal with a fishery resource that would be in big trouble without the current trap and harvester access limits but hasn’t been brought under control.

Some veteran lobstermen expect the year’s catch to improve as this fall. They see the meat content improving and, they hope, a rise in the boat price. That has often happened in other years.