The lobsterman’s search for the best bait – the bait that as one veteran fisherman put it, “will give him an edge over the rest of the guys” – has led to some innovative and bizarre experiments, but few of them match the squash caper.
The story goes like this: A group of fishermen, out for some fun, started talking among themselves about what good luck they were having with that squash bait.
Squash? The fellow they had targeted perked up, and although he didn’t say anything, it seems he hustled to town to buy a load of squash to use when he baited his traps the next day. The rest of the group, suspecting they had made their mark, waited a while and snuck out to pull a few of the guy’s traps, to verify. There it was: no lobsters in the traps, but lots of squash.
In their quest to attract lobster, fishermen have rarely resorted to vegetables, but they have used just about any marine animal that moves and a lot of oily, fatty products that don’t.
Fishermen in West Point, Phippsburg, say in the past it was common practice to tie a chicken bone on the bottom of the bait line in a trap – the bone served a double purpose, perhaps emitting some attractive odor, but also keeping the fish bait from sliding down the bait line. Only one fisherman, they say, reasoned that if the bone was effective, wouldn’t chicken parts be better? Wrong – he caught three lobsters in 250 traps.
Then there is Todd Watson, who says when he had a pig slaughtered, he decided it would be a shame to waste all that good pork fat, so he put it out in his bait bags. “I was going to disprove the notion that pigs are bad luck on boats,” he says. Wrong again. No lobsters.
Other fishermen have poked holes in cans of smelly, oily or fatty foods like sardines, dog food and cat food and hung them in the bait bag. These did pretty well, according to hearsay, but were affordable only by the person who fished very few traps or by the one who suddenly found himself out of bait just before he’d finished hauling the last couple of traps.
The list goes on, with improbable additions such as one West Point fisherman who discovered that putting a Styrofoam cup in to bounce around below the bait bag increased yield. Fishermen have crushed clams and mussels for bait or have strung up whole crabs – egged she-crabs are reputed to be most effective. Herb Hodgkins of Tidal Falls, who sells artificial bait and continues to test new formulations, says fishermen have used mackerel skins, and that when times were really tough, they soaked bricks in kerosene to substitute as bait.
Jim Doughty of Phippsburg has resorted to anything available when he’s run out of bait, sacrificing his peanut butter sandwich, apples, a pork chop – whatever was on board. Doughty also came up with one of the more outrageous recycling ideas for bait – to make use of fryolator oil discarded each day by a friend who owned a restaurant on Bailey Island. “It was sort of the consistency of Crisco,” he says. He tried to confine it to the small bait bags he was using at the time, but found “you could hardly stand up in my boat.” He didn’t catch any lobsters, but he calmed the waters wherever he put down a trap. “The water was just as flat as it could be, no matter how hard the wind was blowing,” he says.
To be effective, bait has to emit an odor attractive to lobsters, hold up well – at least three, preferably more, days; and – rare – not be attractive to seals (which plunder bait bags, ripping them apart to eat the contents) or sand fleas, which eat prodigious amounts of bait.
A great variety of fish baits, depending on the supply, have been used over the years: herring, pogies, mackerel, redfish, flounder, sculpin, cunner, bluefish, and assorted fish racks, cuttings, or heads.
In the early days before fish stocks declined and fish were plentiful near the coast, fishermen would catch their own bait. Or, says Chebeague fisherman Ray Hamilton, 92, who has fished most of his life and recalls spearing sculpin and flounder for bait, fishermen would go to the fish markets in Portland and pick up fish racks.
“This was in the 1930s,” Hamilton said. “The owners were glad to get rid of the racks, and they didn’t charge for them, because otherwise they’d have to take them out and dump them in the harbor.”
Herring, when available, is the preferred fish bait for most fisherman, although many like to change to alewives when they are running in spring. Capt. Ted Spurling, Sr., of Islesford describes a daring technique, known as fishing with a dragon, (called torching in Casco Bay) which was used off the Cranberry Isles near Mt. Desert during the Depression years. Two men, he says, rowed out at night towards an area where schools of herring had been seen. They carried a five-gallon container of gasoline, a bucket, some gunny sacks and a contraption that looked like a wire net. Once they were at the scene of the herring school, the “net” was clamped to the rowboat, with the wire mesh hanging out well beyond the bow.
The man standing in the bow of the boat doused gunny sacks in gasoline and laid them in the wire net, then struck two friction matches together and threw them towards the net, which exploded with flame. Since herring, which feed near the surface at night, are attracted to light, the person rowing the boat could lure them towards another, larger dory, where a fisherman with a large dip net would bring aboard large quantities.
“It was very dangerous,” said Capt. Spurling, who was a teenager at the time and sometimes rowed the boat for his father. “The wind might blow the fire back, and it could singe your eyebrows. One fellow’s pants caught on fire and he jumped into the water.” The practice was also against the law, but Spurling said because families were suffering so during the Depression, law enforcers “turned their heads the other way.”
A West Point fisherman recalls people using basically the same technique, but says the instead of throwing gunny sacks into the net, someone developed a device similar to a gas burner on a stove with a pipe leading to a bucket of fuel, which consisted of a mixture of gasoline and kerosene.
Hamilton, who has read extensively about the history of fishing, says torching was introduced by Italian fishermen in Boston Harbor in the 1880s and used until it was declared illegal.
In the early 1970s, Jim Doughty and his brother used to go inland in spring to catch white suckers (Catostomus commersoni), which inhabit lakes and rivers, and swim up tributaries to spawn. This odd-looking fish, which has thick, fleshy lips, was especially good as bait, says Doughty, because it is about the only fish seals will not eat and it holds up well for several days.
To catch suckers, Doughty and one of his brothers headed inland after they’d brought in their catch for the day. “We’d walk upstream, slipping and sliding on the rocks,” he said, “and I’d shine a light through a crack in my fingers (to keep from scaring the fish) until we found a place that was black with them.” Then, they set up a stop net a short ways downstream. “One of us would whack the water with a pole to scare the fish, and of course, the other one would be soaked, and then, he’d whack back,” he says, and the fish would rush downstream, sometimes so forcefully they’d take the net right with them.
Once the fish were in the net, the fun was over. “The streams always had steep banks,” Doughty says. “We’d have to haul the fish up the bank and to the truck. Sometimes we carried them in gunny sacks over our back, and that water would trickle right down into our pants. But it was fun. We’d get back just in time to go out fishing again.”
Because suckers fished so well, Doughty tried salting a barrelful for storage. When he took the lid off to check on them a few weeks later, he says nothing was left of the 17 bushels of fish except a thick black liquid “that had an odor there’s no word to explain” and a handful of bones that fell apart when he touched them.
These days, most experiments with bait involve research on artificial substitutes, but it seems likely lobstermen will never get rid of that itch to find something new – that extra touch that will give them the edge over the rest of the fishermen and send everyone else scrambling to do the same thing – or, to figure out something even better.