“It’s very normal to have a slow start to the lobster season,” said Carl Wilson, Maine’s lobster biologist, in early April. “It won’t pick up till the water is 40 degrees.” What he meant was that lobster activity increases when ocean water reaches a temperature of 40 to 42 degrees Fahrenheit on the bottom and about four degrees higher on the surface. “This spring represents 50 percent of [former] spring seasons,” said Greg Hansen, of Portland’s Cozy Harbor Seafood. The rest were made up of warmer weather or those with what he called “lingering cold water.”
Frustration was the name of the game as fishermen longed to set their gear and take advantage of the highest prices being paid in about fourteen years: $9 per lb., $9.25 per lb. and even the rare exception: $10 per lb.
But despite the lure of this spring’s astoundingly high prices, few had set gear. In addition to the frigid water, windy weather and rough seas kept fishermen on shore. In Portland, lobster dealer Peter McAleney reported a temperature on the bottom of 39 degrees. At Spruce Head, John Petersdorf, of William Atwood Lobster Co., reported the same. Temperatures varied from place to place, but were all too low to get those ill-tempered crustaceans moving.
“The water [temperature] in January took its time going down,” Petersdorf said. “We didn’t have cold water till February.” The warm January weather kept fishermen active and added to the January landings. He quoted the old saying: “You can only catch lobster once” and explained, “The lobster caught in January would have been `groundskeepers,’ the leftover batch from the previous year caught in the first hauls in spring.” In other words, the lobster that ordinarily would have been landed in April had been trapped in January, leaving fewer available to trap in spring.
As for the wind part of the equation, rough seas make lobstering too dangerous to be worth the effort, even at an extraordinary $10 per lb.
That ten dollars, though shocking, did not reflect the height of the prices paid for live lobster. Lobster put away in the fall, held all winter in tidal pounds and still available brought astronomical “over the dam” prices of from $11.50 to $12 per lb.
These prices reflected the insignificant spring landings and that substantially fewer lobster than usual had been pounded last fall. This resulted in empty pounds by mid-March instead of mid-April and left the industry with a five- to six-week gap in supply that wouldn’t be filled until the Newfoundland Lobster Fishing Areas opened on April 20th.
Pounded lobster was a better value than fresh caught lobster because the pounded product had been fed, and over the winter the shells had hardened, whereas of the lobster landed in April, a high percentage was either missing a claw or had other problems that made it unattractive on the plate and/or — surprising for the time of year — had soft shells.
The unreal prices for pounded product left wholesale dealers with less than 20 percent of their usual potential buyers. One said that when the prices reach $12 per lb. or more, customers drop “to an elite ten percent of top-end restaurants and resorts” and added, “The mark-up gets to a point where none of it makes sense. What would be a reasonable percentage for a mark-up goes out the window and you end up taking a meager markup just to not fuel an already difficult sales/customer situation.” In the end, rather than trying to make a 10 to 12 percent mark-up and bringing the price to $15 per lb., most dealers put 50 to 60 cents per lb. on their lobster and hoped that would help keep their customers.
Retail dealers suffered, too. Tom Flanigan, of Sea View Lobster Co., in Kittery, said that because business had been so slow and despite his not having adjusted the prices to reflect current boat and dam prices, of the few customers who made it through his door, “quite a few looked at the price board and walked out.”
He was charging $12.99 per lb. for chix and quarters (one lb. and one and a half lb. lobster) and said, “That’s really too low, given what we’re paying, but this time of year we cater to local folks, so we just kind of left the prices there. But even at that, people got sticker shock. The price could drop four dollars, and we’d still be talking about high-priced lobster.”
Flanigan was paying a boat price of $10 per lb. for fresh caught lobster and $11 to $12 per lb. for lobster purchased from Canadian or other U.S. dealers. Although his bigger customers understood that the high prices were supply driven, he said his smaller airfreight customers didn’t, especially if they came from where the weather was sunny and warm. “Live lobsters are increasingly a headache to dabble in,” he said. “For some restaurants that sell ten or twelve a night, they’ve switched to alternative products.”
“When we deal with retail customers, we want it to be a positive experience,” he said. “A lot of our retail customers, when they come up here, this is where they come for lobster. With the prices now, we feel we have to spend five to ten minutes with each person explaining the situation.” He said that he and his staff like that personal contact, but noted, “You feel like you have to justify the prices and for the customers, it’s not a positive experience. It’s not good for the industry in the long-term.”
“If it snows till May, if the weather pattern continues, the shedders will be later,” Petersdorf said. Hansen advised, “Keep an eye on Newfoundland: it often gives a sense of the Gulf Stream; that tells when we will see warming waters.”