2.08.2015

Last June: lobstermen plying the water off Cape Breton Island

These images of the Jason and Jeffrey were taken at about 5:30 in the morning from a bluff in Ingonish, Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia. Lobster boats in NS will typically have three men aboard. You can see that in these pictures. As I understand it, with unemployment running high in Nova Scotia, captains are required to hire two additional lobstermen.  (Along the coast of Maine you will usually see just two men per boat.)

I watched this boat for quite a while as it worked its traps.  I very much enjoyed seeing the traditional wooden traps being used. 

The the harvesting process was one of pulling up a trap and circling while one man (blue jacket) removed the lobsters and a second man (tan jacket) dumped a new pot, freshly baited, after the boat completed its circle, at nearly the exact spot where the first trap was hauled.  The hauled trap was then rebaited and staged to replace the next pot hauled, and so on and so on.  Unfortunately my angle did not allow me to photography the pot being dumped, as it was always on the far side of the boat. Image #3 is the closest I got.

The following pictures were taken during a one minute period.  Actually, the difference between the first and last image is 58 seconds.  They indeed worked fast!

If you look closely at the wake in the water, you can see that the captain circled nearly twice during this short sequence... rapidly moving along the shoreline like a corkscrew.











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