In 2020, with Covid looming, Glinda's birthday present was a lobster fishing trip out of Portland, Maine. Unusually for us, we booked ahead with a local outfit called Lucky Catch Cruises, only because they promised a true working lobster boat. So, armored with by the humungous Bloody Marys from the Porthole Pub—one of our favorite dive bars anywhere—we showed up, climbed aboard, and donned our official, ugly-orange canvas aprons.
Technically, you don't fish for lobsters. You bait those iconic, boxy traps with the netting and waterlogged wood (or these days, metal) and send them over the side of the boat, tethering and marking the spot with one of those equally iconic lobster floats. The next morning’s boat out pulls up and empties your traps, then sets another round. So if the lobsters aren't hungry, or the previous trappers didn't set their traps right, you're out of luck.
Not that it matters—because at Lucky Catch at least, the captain, deckhands, and the eccentric souls who sign up for this sort of thing—not to mention the gorgeous harbor and ocean, of course—are too much fun for anyone to care.
In our case, it was a slow lobster day. We ended up trapping our lobster rolls with drawn butter a short distance up the coast in Yarmouth, at the walk-up window of Day's Crabmeat & Lobster. Sitting in their iconic (there we go again!) Adirondack chairs with the breeze coming in over the cottontails, we couldn’t have asked for a more satisfying end to our mini-adventure.
As for lobsters:
They are probably one of the least friendly species on the planet. They eat everything, including each other, and can easily break a finger with one of their claws. Nevertheless, humans are much nicer to lobsters than lobsters are to their own prey, with an entire raft of regulations around when and how they can be caught.
Not that it helps the steamed, boiled, or baked red male on your plate. All of the regulations have been instituted not out of kindness, but to prevent over-fishing, and in that have been entirely successful. So feel free to indulge your most carnivorous instincts—there are legions more from where yours came from.
Lobster is one of the few seafood dishes where there is a clear and incontrovertible difference in taste and quality between one region of the world and all the others. And that special region is the Maine coast, from Portland on up—what the locals somewhat illogically call Downeast. The lobsters there are the finest on the planet, and there's just no discussing it. Or so says we.
And we can't leave Maine without hearing from The Meddiebempsters, one of the six A-Capella groups so popularized by the mellifluous students of Bowdoin College in Brunswick. This one is a treat.