This past week, a lobster boat waiting to unload after returning from a 5 day trip, was boarded by Fish and Wildlife officers. A routine check of the live lobsters on deck, found a significant number of ‘shorts’, requiring the officers to go through the entire 5,000 lbs on ice. When the checking and unloading was finished at midnight, the undersize lobsters totaled about 350.
The Key West Citizen reported the ‘bust’ on the front page and the article included a picture of the short lobsters lined up and spread out for dramatic effect. According to the article, the officer in charge blamed the illegal catch on the “greed factor” and an “opportunity to make the money while they can”.
In a similar article, the Keynoter newspaper included the observation that the dead lobster will never have a chance to reproduce, which is presumably true. They also included the statement that there were “wrung tails” which is positively not true. Mistakenly reporting that there were wrung tails, was an egregious error, since it points to criminal intent on the part of the fishermen, which was not the case.
As the owner of the fish house where this captain has worked for over 40 years, I can say with certainty, that he would never purposefully take shorts nor would he ever allow his crewmen to try and sneak them through. Most fishermen I have known, like the population at large, have been honest people. This man, however, I would put at the top of the list, and without hesitation, vouch for the fact that his character and integrity are beyond question.
Okay you say. So how does an honest man accidentally end up with 350 illegal lobsters in his catch? Well, maybe you are one who has a hard time just finding your 6 per day while diving. Or maybe you have never even seen 350 lobsters before, but pictures don’t lie, and any way you look at it, that’s a massive amount of shorts you see in the newspaper photo. Perhaps even, you have some vague notion from the media that lobster are in short supply, and taking 350 undersized ones could have an impact on the overall stock. In any case, you just can’t come up with a logical reason to explain how one person could accidentally have 350 undersize lobsters.
Before I explain, let me preface it by saying that there is no one more upset about the incident than the captain himself. In a lifetime of captaining his own boat, and after 100 or more boardings by law enforcement, he has never had a fishing violation. His crewmen are efficient and well paid, and he works them hard just like he does himself. Though the captain does not measure the lobster, he would never put the blame on his crew – where fault begins – because he feels certain that it was not done purposefully. In other words, the captain accepts full blame, and expects to pay the consequences.
Both captain and crew are fully aware that undersize lobsters would never make it through the weigh in process. At the fish house, every lobster purchased is inspected for both quality and legality by experienced and certified personnel. At the first sign of an undersize lobster, the captain is informed, and told to check all of his lobster before they come up the conveyor. For the fish house, there is zero tolerance on undersize lobsters, and even a single short in a 5,000 lb catch is kicked back to the boat.
Even if a fish house wanted to allow a minimal amount of shorts to slide through, it wouldn’t work. The processors that receive our lobsters pack for government contracts and export, and must pass inspections at every step of the way. It is of course, impossible to be perfect when dealing with millions of pounds of product, but processors with FDA inspectors on site, are so strict that they will deduct a single undersize lobster from the payment just to make the point.
Okay, so how do you put off 350 illegal lobsters to a careless error by honest fishermen? As we often find in life, there’s usually more to a story than first meets the eye. Part of this story is familiar to all of us who have ever been in a stressful situation and allowed ourselves to become rushed into carelessness. The other part involves the migratory pattern of lobsters which is only familiar to those who make their living by working traps.
Each year in October, sparked by some as yet unidentified force, the lobsters migrate en masse (known as a ‘run’ to the fishermen), from Florida Bay to some unknown location to the south. Experienced fishermen understand this movement better than the scientists and must place their traps accordingly. After working the hard bottom for the first two months of the season, it is critical to move all traps into the soft bottom to take advantage of the migration. For lobster fishermen, the migration in October, is often the make or break time for the entire year.
At the exact time that the traps should have been moved, the boat in question developed engine trouble. What was thought to be a minor problem, turned into a major overhaul, forcing the boat to remain at the dock for 2 weeks. In the meantime, the run started, and those who had gotten their traps moved in time, were making daily catches as high as 2,000 lbs. Our beached captain meanwhile, was racing back and forth to Miami for engine parts, chasing down mechanics, and watching helplessly as his season passed by.
The engine was no sooner started, than they took on ice, bait and fuel, and headed for the traps. For 5 days they worked at a breakneck pace from sunup until sundown, trying to make up for lost time. After cleaning, baiting and moving all of the traps, the whipped crew returned to the dock. Their catch of 5,000 lbs would normally be considered an excellent one, but other boats had caught 15,000 lbs in the same period.
To fully understand a run of lobster, and realize how shorts can inadvertently slip into the catch, it is necessary to be on the boat as the traps are pulled. Even scientists, and those who regularly dive for lobster, cannot fully imagine the massive number of lobsters that come up in the traps during a run. A 5,000 lb trip means that the fisherman averaged about 3 legal lobsters per trap. Along with the 3 legal ones however, will be between 10 and 40 shorts, while uncountable numbers of smaller lobster escape through the laths as the trap makes its way to the surface. In truth, there is a prodigious amount of lobsters in the ocean, and though traps loaded with shorts mean a lot of work, nothing makes a fisherman happier than to know that next years harvest is assured
When a trap with 30 lobsters reaches the rail, a mate will typically unload it by taking out first, the lobsters that are obviously large. Once the large ones are picked, the winnowing process begins, with those needing to be checked for size put into a separate box, the obviously small ones returned to the ocean, and 3 or 4 of the largest shorts left in the trap as attractants.
The critical point at which errors are made, is after the large ones are first picked from the trap. With 25 or so undersize lobsters flapping their way around a trap, the eye starts to play tricks, and the larger of the shorts look as if they are of legal size. Under normal working conditions, the mates have plenty of time to measure lobster between traps, but when extremely rushed as they were, people become careless, and content themselves that their experienced eye is as accurate as the measuring gauge. At that point, lobsters that should be checked, get thrown into the box with the large ones.
On this particular trip, the crew dealt with a minimum of 10,000 short lobsters. Nevertheless, even to those of us who are experienced with trapping, 350 short lobsters in a 5,000 lb catch are far too many to be excused, but the error is understandable. By all accounts, the FWC officer in charge acted professionally and courteously, but it is unfortunate that he blamed the incident on greed, when in actuality it was nothing more than common carelessness.
For his part, the captain makes no excuses. I am offering an unsolicited explanation, because my own trap pulling experience qualifies me, and I see that a truly good person has had his lifelong reputation besmirched by one hectic fishing trip. He will not defend himself because that means blaming his crew, and he maintains that under the rushed conditions, he should have been checking them more closely. Let us hope that the judge recognizes there was no intent to commit an illegal act, and that the punishment is proportionate to an act of carelessness.
