The Secret Life of Lobsters

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Book: The Secret Life of Lobsters Read Online Free PDF
Author: Trevor Corson
Jack spent his boyhood summers entranced by the island’s rocky beaches, its stands of spruce, and the scent of salt in the air. One day he eagerly accepted an invitation from an old-timer to go lobstering. At 6:00 A.M . the young Jack nearly lost his breakfast walking past the bins of rancid bait on the wharf. But staring straight ahead, he held his breath and made it aboard the old wooden boat and out onto the sparkling sea.
    â€œNature has a way of separating the men from the boys,” the old-timer said, pouring himself coffee from a thermos and soaking up the sunrise.
    For Jack, the end of each summer on Little Cranberry, andthe subsequent reversion to suburban life, was torturous. He vowed to make something of his affection for Maine’s craggy coast and wide-open ocean. His ancestors on his father’s side had come from Maine, and his great-grandfather had been a governor of the state. As he neared adulthood, Jack grew certain that he wanted to return to these family roots.
    This dream nearly became the death of him. Jack taught marine ecology for several summers at an outdoor adventure camp in Maine. Once, he and a group of campers were sailing a pair of thirty-foot open boats out of Hurricane Island when an October gale whipped up enormous waves. Both boats were swept out to sea. Jack and his fellow sailors rode the storm through the night, bailing to stay afloat. The gale subsided and in the morning the Coast Guard found them, chilled and exhausted. Jack figured that if he could survive that, he could survive commercial fishing.
    By the age of twenty-one, Jack was back on Little Cranberry Island and ready for a job as sternman with Warren Fernald. During his first week aboard the Mother Ann, Jack stood by with a can of claw plugs when each trap broke the surface. Often the traps were loaded with lobsters flapping their tails. Warren would open the trap and reach among the snapping pincers. He tossed most of the animals overboard without a second glance. Several he kept only long enough to slap a brass ruler on their backs before throwing them back into the water too.
    The trap would be empty and Jack would have yet to change the bait. He would hurry to unwind the spent bag and hang a fresh bundle of herring in the trap. Warren would tie the door shut and shove the trap overboard. After an hour of this routine Jack would steal a glance in the barrel of keepers. More often than not, he could still see the bottom of the barrel. Warren threw more lobsters overboard with each trap he hauled.
    â€œThis is nuts,” Jack said under his breath. Another trap came over the rail, full of shiny lobsters that would go back into the sea.
    â€œToo bad we can’t just keep all these,” Jack muttered.
    Warren thought for a minute.
    â€œYou want to be a lobsterman?” Warren asked.
    â€œI don’t know. Yeah, maybe.”
    â€œYou want to keep on lobstering after you start?”
    â€œYeah, sure.”
    â€œWell, you can’t catch everything and expect it to continue,” Warren said, turning the brass ruler over in his hands. The ruler, which lobstermen called the “gauge,” enforced a minimum-size law that had been in effect in Maine since 1895. “Throw back more than you catch and, why, there’s always going to be something there tomorrow.”
    As if to punctuate his point, later in the string of traps Warren turned a female lobster on her back and showed her to Jack. Glued to the underside of her tail were thousands of pine green eggs. Warren reached for his fish knife and cut a quarter-inch triangle out of the lobster’s tail flipper, then slid her back into the sea. He had just marked her as a breeder by bestowing her with a “V-notch,” so-called because the triangular cut was shaped like a V. If caught again, the lobster would be illegal to sell whether she was carrying eggs or not.
    Jack was getting used to the idea of returning “shorts,”
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