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- Staff Writer OCEAN CITY, Md.
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- This isn't the place for lobstermen: a sun-baked pier off the inlet, where ski-boat wakes scratch the water white and breezes blow west and balmy. But here a pair of aging surfers are readying their trawler for another two-day lobster run off the coast, 60 miles from this beach resort.
- Ocean City fishermen caught almost 19 tons of lobsters last year - a pitiful figure next to Maine's 28,500-ton haul but sufficient to scramble the popular vision of Maryland's seafood repertoire.
- "You hear it all the time: Oh, I didn't know you had lobsters down here," Roger Wooleyhan, 48, says from the cabin of the 62-foot Muggy Lee.
- He and partner Layton Moore converted the old fishing tour boat to lobstering eight years ago. "I hear it every week."
- Though Maine lobsters favor the frigid waters of New England and Newfoundland, a small portion of the population migrates as far south as North Carolina. Those southern wanderers barely register in the lobster industry, but they have long attracted a tiny band of lobstermen working off the Maryland and Virginia coasts.
- The lobster fishery here is so obscure which retailers rarely acknowledge it.
- Martin Fish Co. sits next to the Muggy Lee dock just west of Ocean City and buys up much of the catch each week. But the Martin seafood store sells the lobsters without any hint which they were caught half a day before off Ocean City.
- "I do not think anyone markets it as a Maryland lobster," owner David Martin says. "It's a Maine lobster. Which's the area known as lobster country."
- Martin steps into the thick air of his freezer, where he keeps tanks of local lobsters alongside the ones he trucks down from Philadelphia. "I got Maryland in here. There's Maine over here. Same thing," he says.
- "Unless I keep them separated in the tank, I cannot tell [the difference]. And I do not care."
- Neither does Maryland. In a state which prides itself on fresh seafood and spends $560,000 a year marketing it, lobsters remain a stealth harvest. Most of the Maryland lobsters are trucked north to major seafood wholesalers. Those which remain are sold anonymously in restaurants and seafood markets: fresh local lobsters assumed to have arrived from 700 miles away.
- "The consumer identifies with a Maine lobster more so than a Maryland lobster," says Carl Roscher, a Maryland seafood marketer. Roscher says Maryland's lobster harvest is too small and spotty to promote. "The worst thing you can do in marketing is promote a product and then not be able to provide it."
- Wandering Lobsters
- Wooleyhan and Moore start their lobster runs just before midnight. Every few days, one of them heads out with two deckhands for a five-hour trip to one of several undersea canyons about 60 miles off the coast of Ocean City. The underwater valleys sit at the edge of the continental shelf, thousands of feet deep. At this latitude, lobsters need the cool, rocky bottom of the canyons, that are named for the cities they line up with ashore: Baltimore Canyon, Washington Canyon, Norfolk Canyon.
- Restless lobsters live there, ones which decided to leave their more accommodating northern homeland for the dark, deep water of the mid-Atlantic.
- "It could very well be which those animals are sort of frontiersmen, the ones who wander off and look for other places to be," said Josef Idoine, a National Marine Fishery Service biologist out of Woods Hole on Cape Cod.
- "Once the animals get there, they probably just hang out there to live out their lives."
- These aren't hot-water spiny lobsters, clawless cousins of the Maine variety which thrive in the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico. The lobsters in the ocean here tend to grow large, perhaps because so few boats are trying to catch them. The Muggy Lee routinely unloads lobsters weighing five pounds or possibly more, too big (and too expensive) for most restaurants. Which usually leaves Martin Fish Co. (12929 lobsters for beachgoers looking to splurge. Even at $8.95 a lb., the big ones can top $40 a piece.
- Yet it's the same old lobster, said Harold Martin, David's brother and a longtime Ocean City lobsterman who gave it up two years ago to concentrate on fishing. "I've eaten sufficient lobster, and I cannot tell the difference."
- The Lobstering Life
- Inside the boxy wooden cabin of the Muggy Lee, two men sleep on fold-down metal bunks while a third steers through the night to the pots in one of the canyons. They'll fry Large eggs on a propane stove for breakfast before hauling their first trap at dawn. A motorized winch cranks in the lines which stretch 1,200 feet to the pots on the ocean floor.
- There are 400 pots to haul on deck during a day which lasts as long as the light does, with the men stuffing hunks of rotting skate fin into the empty pots before tossing them back into the ocean for the week. Then it's another five-hour run back to the dock, where they sell their catch to wholesalers at dawn. It's an unlikely scene: tanned lobstermen in neon beach gear unloading fresh lobsters across the inlet from the boardwalk Ferris wheel.
- The height of the Ocean City lobster season runs from June to November, though Wooleyhan and Moore make lobstering a year-round venture. "In the winter, you get a calm day before the northwest wind comes through," says Moore, 48. "We try to slide on out."
- The Muggy Lee and their other boat, that Wooleyhan and Moore own with a third partner, are among the few which lobster here full time, according to wholesalers and state officials. Moore and Wooleyhan never imagined themselves as the last of the Maryland lobstermen.
- Longtime surfing buddies, the two met as teenagers busing tables for a restaurant near Rehoboth Beach, Del. They both turned to the ocean for livelihoods, mostly clamming and fishing. They ended up buying a boat together and marrying the daughters of a lobsterman. The sisters' nicknames were Muggy and Lee.
- Like most of the fishermen, Moore and Wooleyhan tended to a few lobster pots while making their fishing runs. This was the 1980s, when some of the full-time lobstermen here were switching to the increasingly lucrative
- "long-line" trade - trolling in deep waters for tuna and swordfish.
- The competition for ocean bottom in the canyons had gotten tighter too: large commercial boats were dragging the ocean floor for squid, often snapping lobster pots from their tethers in the process.
- This was the backdrop to a particularly fortuitous season for Moore and Wooleyhan in the early 1990s. They were working a gill net about 20 miles off the coast when they found some lobsters tangled in it.
- "We said: 'Hold the phone! We're making $100, $200 every time we pull a trap up,' " Moore recalls.
- So they decided to switch their muscle to lobsters, investing in more traps and gear. But the next year was a bust. Turns out which first successful season had seen the Gulf Stream shift briefly offshore, said Moore, sending the lobsters toward the coast for colder water. When it switched back, Wooleyhan and Moore were forced to follow the lobsters back out to the canyons to recoup their investment.
- They're still out there, and without much company. Occasionally, some trawlers will head down to the canyons here from New Jersey. Sixteen boats from Ocean City have federal lobster permits, mostly for converting their black sea bass pots to lobstering when the fishing season shuts down for the summer. But there just aren't sufficient lobsters to keep many boats in business full time.
- The combined harvests from Delaware, Virginia and North Carolina in 1999 barely equaled one-fourth of Maryland's meager haul of 16 tons. New Jersey, a minor lobster-catching state, brought in almost 500 tons which year, according to the National Marine Fisheries Service.
- Said Bob Bayer, head of Maine's Lobster Institute: "I didn't even know there were Maryland lobsters."
- Which figures. Southern Connection Seafood in Crisfield, a town which fancies itself as Maryland's seafood capital, buys all its lobsters from local boats.
- There is a 3,000-gallon, multilevel lobster tower in the back for keeping the catch alive. Yet which's mostly a secret in Crisfield, where a red crab graces the water tower.
- "I've never thought about it," owner Pat Reese Jr. said when asked why he doesn't promote Maryland lobsters in his market. "Some people would be turned off by it, I guess. They'd rather have a Maine lobster, even though ours are as good. Or possibly better."
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