When Bill Atwood broke away from the family’s business and struck out on his own in 1962, he rented some space on a wharf in Spruce Head, a coastal community south of Rockland, and bought and resold lobster from just six boats. Lobsters were selling for about 45 cents a pound that year and gross sales hit about $56,000.

Forty years later, the William Atwood Lobster Co. buys from about 200 boats, hauling in more than $30 million a year in lobster sales. With operations in Spruce Head, Rockland and Tenants Harbor, Atwood’s is touted as one of the largest seafood shipping companies in Maine.

“Forty years,” 64-year-old Bill Atwood said, as if surprised himself that the company marked four decades in business this month. “I was aggressive. … I was in the right place at the right time.”

As big as the company has become, with as many as 75 employees working the wharves and processing facilities at the busiest times of year, Atwood still tends about 100 traps of his own – for the sheer pleasure.

“I like it,” he said during a recent interview. “It’s peaceful. It’s in the blood, I guess.”

Indeed, when Atwood first set up shop in Spruce Head, he was no stranger to the lobster industry. His father and grandfather had operated a lobster business at Rowe’s Wharf in Boston for years before their facility burned down in 1950.

The family moved to Tenants Harbor and started up again.

Atwood did a stint in the U.S. Marine Corps, studied accounting for a couple of years in college, and eventually settled in to work for the family business as well.

But there were many family members involved in Atwood Brothers Lobster and Bill Atwood wanted to work for himself. He had been lobstering a few miles away out of Spruce Head and decided he wanted to try striking out on his own in that area.

He was “somewhat in competition” with the rest of the family, he said, but “we never really stepped on each others’ toes.”

The businesses survived together for years, until after his father retired in the 1980s and Atwood bought out his aunt and uncle when they gave up the business in 1993 or 1994.

Today, the company processes about 60 million pounds of the seafood annually, shipping live and cooked lobster worldwide. It is the largest Maine wholesaler of lobsters to Europe at Christmastime, when the delicacy is the favored entree to serve friends and relatives.

At Atwood’s facilities, there are winches and forklifts for moving the lobsters from the boats to the wharves and processing areas. Lobster boat owners unload their catch, have the crustaceans weighed, and buy bait, fuel and other supplies from the company.

Atwood has “verbal agreements” with the lobstermen who sell to his company, according to Bill McGonagle, the firm’s chief operations officer.

The company still does business “the old-fashioned way [with] a handshake,” McGonagle said.

Once the lobsters are unloaded from the boats, they are picked over, McGonagle said.

Weak lobsters are cooked and picked for meat, which is sold to restaurants for soups and stocks or to retailers to be canned or frozen.

The only parts of the crustaceans that are discarded are the empty claws, knuckles and tails, he said.

The healthier lobsters taken off the boats are “seasoned” for two days, meaning they are placed in cold-water tanks. The temperature is kept at 36 to 38 degrees to help the lobsters recover from the stress of being caught, he said. The critters also purge the bait from their system in the cold-water tanks.

The lobsters are then graded and inspected, separating chicks (weighing less than 11/4 pound), 11/4-pounders, 11/2-pounders and selects, which are larger lobsters.

Only the best-quality lobster is fit for shipping, McGonagle said. “To ship good-quality lobster, you have to put a lot of work into it” and quality control is the key reason for the company’s success, he said.

The current wholesale price for lobster ranges from $4.60 per pound for new shell to $7 per pound for hard shell.

Over the four decades he’s been in business, there have been a few hard times, Atwood acknowledged, recalling the mid-1980s when the bottom dropped out of the economy. Last year, however, was probably the worst period Atwood said he could remember in all his years of selling lobster.

On Sept. 11, Atwood had 2,200 pounds of lobster on American Airlines Flight 11, the first jet to slam into the World Trade Center, and another 8,800 pounds of live lobster on the runway that officials would not ship. There were further losses in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks when shipping by air was curtailed and many people stopped going out to eat.

But demand is picking up again and there have been some good times to remember, too.

Atwood takes particular delight in the Maine Lobster Festival, which draws thousands of seafood lovers to the Rockland waterfront in late July and early August each year. Atwood’s company exclusively supplies the 20,000 or more pounds of lobster sold at the festival annually.

On the last day of the festival, young and old are attracted to the popular William Atwood Great International Lobster Crate Race, which involves running across the tops of 50 lobster crates strung together in the harbor. The competition always produces plenty of laughs and splashes as many drop into the drink before completing the course.

In 40 years, Atwood also has seen many changes in the lobster industry.

Early in his career, he hauled traps by hand using hemp rope. Today, lobstermen have the ease of automatic pot haulers and longer-lasting nylon rope. Fishermen also have switched from wooden lobster traps to wire traps. And newer fiberglass lobster boats require less maintenance than the older wooden vessels, Atwood said.

Conservation measures adopted in recent years also are helping the industry, he said. Such measures increased limits on the size of lobsters that can be kept, required vents on traps to allow smaller lobsters to escape, forced the release of egg-bearing female lobsters, and restricted the number of traps that can be set and the number of fishermen who can work in specific areas.

The escape vents on the traps also have two biodegradable rings that disintegrate after about six months so lobsters can free themselves in case a trap gets cut and falls to the bottom of the ocean.

Atwood said all of the conservation measures are helping to preserve the future of lobstering, which he believes will continue to be strong.

When asked about retirement, Atwood said, “it’s somewhere in sight,” but as long as everything is running well, he’ll stick with it for another five years or so. He’s trained many people, he said, so he doesn’t work as much these days.

He’s not certain about the future of the company. Perhaps the employees will take it over, he said.

With lobster so readily available to him, Atwood sometimes eats the seafood two or three times a week, he said, but usually at least once a week.