Show Notes
In this week’s [UNCENSORED] podcast by GoWild, we’re talking with Alex McKay from Maine all about the ins and outs of Maine lobster fishing.
In this week’s [UNCENSORED] podcast by GoWild, we talk with Alex McKay all about the ins and outs of Maine lobster fishing. We cover his story about how he began lobster fishing and his journey from then until now. The guys also do some talking about an upcoming fishing trip, if they can pull it all together, and hopefully Alex gets to join in while he’s here!
Alex tells us all about Maine lobster fishing. He covers any and everything about lobsters! From what it’s like to be on a lobster boat fishing in the brutal cold of Maine to what time of year the lobsters taste the best! He talks about the legal requirements to be able to catch lobsters in Maine and what lobsters you can and cannot keep. Alex warns the guys just how dangerous the seas can be, both in itself and other territorial fishermen. He also spends some time talking about upcoming protections for right whales and how some of that may change the way lobster fishing is done.
Of course we then pivot to food; how can you talk about lobsters without talking about lobster rolls?! However, absolutely do not mention cream cheese when it comes to a lobster roll! Alex describes to the guys his perfect lobster roll, and even invites them up to Maine to personally craft one for them!
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Show Transcript
[00:00:00] the guests extraordinaire today, the one and only Alex McKay flew in all the way from Maine. Alex of Maine. They have airports in Maine. Is that a United States? It is, but almost not. Okay. Almost not. Almost not. Yeah. It's basically Canada. You're way up there. Way up there. Yeah. That's not too bad though.
People live in San Diego. That's all the way down there. Yeah. Yeah. It's different. It's warm. You got nieces. I've only ever seen one in the state, and it died in my front lawn. Oh, dude. It died in his front lawn. Yeah, he do. After I hit it with my car, it was walking around in circles and it just laid down and that was it.
It was very sad. So then what do you do? I talked to the Ranger and he just said, leave it for the birds. So you had to what, so you had to watch, catch this 1200 pound animal just to cat it in your yard? Yeah. Yeah. No, really? Bruce the moose that sat there for a while, Bruce the moose. Wow.
You named it a dead moose. Did they? Was he gonna do, it's there for a while. Yeah. Did they inspect the cause of death at all? [00:01:00] Not like scientifically, they. Saw that it was walking in circles and just made a guess. It was pretty young. We have a huge tick problem up there. Because it's getting warmer in the winter these days, so the ticks just stick around. Usually they would go to the water and just dunk and get 'em off themselves, but it's not really working, as much. Or the cold weather would take 'em off. I'm not sure the exact science behind it, but yeah. Now now they're just getting a lot of text and dying.
The tick, the ticks themselves killed them. Or the diseases from the ticks. I think the diseases. Diseases. But I've heard some weird stories about the ticks up there, man, that they like, they'll interlock their legs and make like webs of ticks and just, float through the air. And like a rat king, like how rats entangle their tails.
I can't verify this. I've never actually seen this. This common section is gonna be off. Yeah, off the charts. It's like a b horror film. I'm interested. Tick web. So what's the status of Bruce now? Is he just like a. A skeleton? Actually, so one of the people that used to work at the lab where my wife works, came out and took the skull and cleaned it up and mounted it, I think in their apartment.
Why didn't you do that? She just had dibs. Did it have antlers?[00:02:00] No. No. It was young. Yeah, it was really young. It wasn't a very big one. I've seen way bigger ones out west. That was, I saw five or six in my first couple days when I was out in Teton. But man, you have to go pretty far up north to really see him.
Like Milano, Baxter State Park. But I live close to the coast and it's, it's a deer territory. Deer territory. Yeah. And fish. Are you gonna hunt for one? Are you gonna hunt for a deer? I haven't, no. Mean, I'm just so busy working for you guys. You got a bow? You bought a bow? You've been shooting at all?
I got a bow. Yeah. I shoot on the weekends. But yeah, no, I just, I've been so busy with, and then you guys are not gonna, you're gonna gimme shit for this, but wait, can I swear on the podcast? You just did be monetized yeah, no I've been so busy with the kid, man. We've had, daycare issues and I just don't have a ton of time.
So I've been doing it on Sundays. I go out and shoot. But other than that, not really. He's got a bunch of turkeys on his property too. Yeah. I love them. I don't wanna kill them because they come in, they eat all the ticks. Yeah. So they come in like a, drove like 40 of 'em. I'm still picking of ticks flying through the air in the [00:03:00] web.
Yeah, a web of ticks. I'm going, I'm gonna get on YouTube and Google that. Yeah. One again, I will say that the sounds that turkeys make is wild. Yeah, wild. I'll be getting up pretty early in the morning these days and I didn't know that they sounded like that. The Toms that make some crazy you should talk to 'em, man.
What do you mean? Get a call and talk to him? Invite him over? Yes. Invite him over Corn Powell. Yeah. No, I'm just a weird developer, guys. I'm not, not cool like you guys. This is cool. Yeah. Don't strive for it. Strive for it. All right welcome man. I'm glad you're here. Yeah. Thanks. I'm glad to be here.
There's been talk of trying to get a fishing trip while you're in town. If we can put one together, that's about the, as far as we've gotten on the planning side of things. Other than we strongly suggested Zack's, we did Honey hole, which is a euphemism, could be if we had a pineapple. Okay. Don't bring inside jokes to the masses here.[00:04:00]
No, but we strongly suggested that. I don't know if that's gonna happen, but yeah, we'll see what we can pull together. We were wanting to wait cuz it's raining this week and we didn't wanna say we're gonna go here and then it get blown out or something. So yeah, the creeks I've been fishing lately could use some rain if we get some rain dirty the water up, bring it up a little bit.
It actually would be really good. We could go hit some small mouth creek spots, but we'll just see what happens. I have recently been, Absolutely bitten by the small mouth creek fishing bug. It is, it's incredible. Hard to get off the brain this time of year. I'm, I can't wait to go back out. So I don't think you knew this.
I just got a new rod. Did you? Yeah, I got, what'd you get? I got we sent a customer, remember the wrong color rod. Okay. This Abu Garcia Revo x Uhhuh plus Revo X. It comes two colors, blue and a sea foam green. Okay? And all the marketing materials like blue is for boys, seafood foam green is for girls.
And so he sent this customer, he wanted the blue, the image was of the blue, and. Backend [00:05:00] issue. Sent him a sea foam greens like, this isn't what I want. Okay. All right. Send a pack. So we sent 'em the blue one and I had cut the, so you the girly rod now. And I was just in my office just like testing the as.
I'm like, oh, pretty nice rod. So I'm like, if anyone, if I'm out fishing with it. And anyone's that's a girly rod. I'll just be like, that's my wife's, so how a day? Come on. I didn't tell my wife about it. I go, I got you a present. But it's really for me. And she's what is it? I'm like, it's in the garage, I'll gotta show you.
So I showed it to her and she's oh cool. And I'm like I don't, I'm just gonna say it's yours. If you want to use it, you can, but really it's just for me, it's just, I need you just to own it. You a scapegoat. I need you to scapegoat it. So I can be allowed to have this sea foam, green rod real combo, but it's a real nice it's a little bit heavier than the one that Jake picked out.
Oh, little top rod. Hot water rod? No, it's a, is it medium heavy? Me? Medium. Medium. It's a medium. Okay. And I think the other one I recommend is the diala. The same arid X that you have. That's a great one. Which they're [00:06:00] just, they are just lighter. Their medium is just lighter. Yeah. Cuz I think my reel can do up to 12 pound test and that reel could do eight or 10 pound test.
As far as the rating. Yeah, that's a, that's 30. Size 30. You may have gotten a 25 in the other one on mine. It is a size 30. Yeah. Yeah. So I was thinking we go up to the falls. Oh yeah. And go after those monsters. Phil has been on me about wanting to go do that. Brad was talking about wanting to go again too.
Did he? Let's do a trip boys. The kayaks. Yeah. Brad went out with us last time. It was awesome. No Phil didn't get to go last time. He just, no, Derek, me and Derek were just telling him about the crazy buffalo we were catching. Alex. It was wild. We were up there. We were up there and there's like these rapids where the falls are, and you'd put your line in the water and you'd feel some monster take it and just pull out all of your lines and then just snap the line.
You'd just be like that literally happened to me. It took all the line off my rail. I was just sitting there. I was like, eh. And then I started taking turns with Derek. Did it? Did it break? Derek's [00:07:00] rod? No, he didn't have any rocks. I just remember Derek was like, shell shocked and he was, we were like having lunch or something on the rock, and Derek's oh, I'm outgunned.
I didn't bring enough firepower. Literally, there's some monsters in here, so we're gonna go back up there. And this falls of the Ohio, this falls of the Ohio. And we took kayaks into these like little islands that you can't get to from just like the parking lot access. So we were over by ourselves on the fossil beds just, and the water was so low down on the.
It's like a dam, but then there's like a concrete pad almost that's like down there where the water falls on and it's literally like an inch or two of water. And so you can stand on that and fish Down the river, down the current and these fish will grab it and then take off down current and you're just like, there's tons of rocks for them to break off on.
I've heard there's some mutants in that water, so Yeah. Oh, for sure. Oh yes. Fish. And the current adds like 30 pounds to the fish. Yeah, that's true too. Yeah, we reeled a couple of 'em in those big old buffalo, but it seemed like the ones we got reeled in were the ones that got foul hooked. It was weird.
I don't [00:08:00] know how it happened, but I feel like it was, had to have been all stripers that were taken are. I think it was stripers and buffaloes, but we never reeled in any stripers. I don't think Buffalo. Cause I, cuz I was casting into the current and I don't think Buffalo would be, dude, it literally happened.
We pulled them in. We'll get up in there. We pulled them in. Like we, we cast into the crane. We pulled them in. Oh. All the buffalo I was catching was like off to the side in like little pools. Yeah, you were like down farther. We were all the way up by that. There's those big Asian carp in there too, which you could snag one of those in the side.
They're a little bit harder to hook. Like they would actually intentionally bite your bait. Yeah. Didn't we both catch a gar? No I didn't. I caught I hooked a bunch, but I never landed any. I think I caught a car. You did. You landed one. Yeah. Yeah. And I landed a carp, an Asian carp on accident. And then I sight fished.
I think for one it might have been another Asian carb. But yeah, and then one of those buffaloes just, or a striper, whatever it was, took everything I had and I was just like I had a $14 lure, and I'm like, this is the perfect spot for it. Thing was instantly gone. That thing was dope. Instantly gone.
[00:09:00] $14, you were the first one to hook into whatever those were with that lure. And then we just started throwing like white paddle tails on like a white. Umbrella jig head thing or not umbrella. I made the mistake of calling it last time on the podcast. It got roasted. I don't remember what it was. It's something else.
I remember you getting roasted, but I'll remember the details. Send all your roasts to at Brayden Ware. Yeah, go wild. Speaking of doing fishing stuff, lobster man. Oh, what a transition do you have to. Can anyone lobster fish in Maine, you have to have a commercial license. No. If you're in the state, you can get a rec license.
I think you can have maybe 30 traps, something around there, but it's just recreational. That seems like a lot. That's a lot. Do you have to be a resident or could you go up there? If you're on vacation, could you get like a. I don't think you can do it if you're not a resident. I'm not, don't quote me on it.
But I don't think you can getting It's commercial. Very expensive, not easy. Yeah. Yeah. You have to go through like a stewardship and it's, you got through a lot of hours. It's a lot. Tell us the story. How'd you get into it? [00:10:00] How did I get into it? It's. I dunno, that's weird story I guess.
I, I was living in DC at the time and my grandparents came into some pretty poor health and I decided I was gonna go up to Maine where they lived to help them out for the summer. And I was working part-time at a restaurant and also working part-time for this music festival. And the restaurant was Luke's Lobsters in DC and I had met the owner, Luke.
Super nice guy. And I told him what I was doing. I was like, look, I'm gonna have to leave you guys. I'm going up to Maine. And it oddly enough serendipitously, he got a huge amount of his product from the town where my grandparents lived. Huh. Millbridge. And he hooked me up with a wharf manager up there for just a job for the summer.
While I was helping with my grandparents, and that was easily the hardest job I've ever had in my life. Working on the wharf. Heavy lifting, stinky fish. You know what's a wharf? What do you mean? It's a big dock where okay. Where the boats come in, they will they'll [00:11:00] refill, they'll get their bait, sell their lobsters or whatever they have, this one lobsters, like technically where we went was the wharf.
I think Wharfs Oh, okay. Are generally commercial. Use. Okay. Like you wouldn't have private boats. That'd be more like a marina. You could have a private boat come and get fuel, but you're not gonna go out and get bait or sell lobsters. You're talking about when we went to Erie? Yeah.
That was like, that's war fish. Okay. Yeah. It's cuz it's different than a marina. Cuz the marine. Yeah. I would've called it a marina. Yeah. A marina's I think for like private boats and that's where you have Ice cream stands. Yeah. When I think of wharf, it's big commercial fishing boats. Similar.
Similar layout. Grimy location. Yeah. It's like everything is covered in like an inch of fish. Fish grease from just the bait and stuff. I dunno if you, all so at lobsters you bait them with. Mostly herring. You can use other stuff, but a lot of people use herring and the way you get it ready for the season is you mix it with salt and pickle it in the heat and it just gets nasty just outside.
Yeah. And these big vats, and you just constantly have to, you take a forklift and you dump some and throw some [00:12:00] salt on it and mix it all together. Keep doing that until it gets real nice in oily. Cause lobsters love oil. I mean they just love the grease. Anyways, so I was working there.
And that job sucked. So I worked to the point where I could, I got in with a fisherman and he took me on his boat the next season and we were island fishermen. So we didn't go out super far. Like those really. Big boats, like they're really the big, we call 'em the big titers.
Those guys that go out there. The big titers. Y'all are little titers. We're little titers. Yeah, no, exactly. Tots. Some call those tots and they out there they runt, trawls, 20, 20 traps to a string. So they'll pull 'em all up. They'll go through their whole, slew of traps. In, in, in a day, maybe two.
We would go through ours and Four or five days, cause we were just doing single traps to a buoy, double traps to a buoy. And you can't leave 'em overnight, right? Like you put 'em out in the morning, you pick 'em back up the same day? No. You leave 'em out for three days. Oh really?
Yeah. Yeah. Huh? Yeah. The lobsters, they come in, they eat it at the bait and get trapped in the [00:13:00] back and you come pick 'em up afterwards. They go, you might be thinking of crab. I think crab is like that. I thought it was just like the same day they didn't soak over night. Would traps get in your traps?
Yeah. Actually that was something that we would take home and just eat, we didn't sell them. Usually Jonah crabs, they're really good crabs actually. So that's just a park of the job. Yeah. Yeah, that's cool. We don't get any crabs here. And how long was the sea do? We did well, just a different kind.
It depends on the fishermen, some people go all year, they'll fish in the winter. Oh, so there's no like government restriction so the only restrictions really are like the size of the lobster. Whether it's a egg bearing lobster, a female that bears eggs things like that. As far as fishing time-wise, you do it after sunup, you can't fish before the sun breaches the horizon and for a lot of the summer you can't fish on Sundays.
I think that was a rule that was put in place for the tourist season. The boats are loud and tour were complaining. But yeah, no, I mean there's not a huge amount of rules around there. And how's the fishery up there? Are they still, is it one of those things where it's [00:14:00] like it's hard to get.
Lobster like you used to, or it's never been better or it's weird. It's they have had some record halls in the past probably five, 10 years, something like that. But the lobsters are moving towards Canada. They say that the Gulf of Maine has some of the warming, the fastest warming waters in the world, and the lobsters are just crawling right up to Canada, where it's a little chillier.
But it is still good. They're making. I remember when I was working at the wharf, some of those guys had come in with four or 5,000 pounds of lobsters, wow. It's a lot of lobster. And is lobster super cheap up there? Is it like you can go to the grocery store like ham or like horse meat here in Kentucky?
Did you say horse meat? You buy your horse meat at the grocery? Yeah, Kroger. They're always running horse. Walk out to the field and get it yourself. No way, man. It's expensive. Oh, is it? Yeah. It's probably not as much as it's here, but yeah, we're. They know what they got. No transportation costs added onto it.
Yeah. Yeah. No, I don't know. If you go the same places that you would get a lobster roll, they're are serving the [00:15:00] tourist crowd, so they're gonna, they're gonna jack the prices up. Is there a time of year that the lobster taste better? Yeah. Absolutely. Actually. We usually say around July 4th is when the shutters come in and shutters.
So lobsters like crabs they molt and they become soft shells. So soft that you could poke your finger through 'em. We call 'em rag dolls when they're like that. They're just like these little jello things that just gotta wobble around. And they harden up. And at that point they're, you can catch, you can still like just crack 'em open a little bit.
They're really pretty soft. But when they get in between cheddar and in between a hard shell, hard shells when they're so hard that they're like, they got barnacles on them, they're really pretty rugged. But in between that, I call 'em a hard cheddar. It's simple thing to call 'em, but that's when they're perfect.
Because when they're soft, they don't have a lot of meat in em. They may have a little bit of weight to 'em because they're full of water. But they just there's not much to eat. You get right before they turn really hard, they're perfect cause of meat. It's sweet, it's it's just really nice.
But if you get to hard, shell really like dense lobsters. Ah, they're dense like you'd imagine, it's okay. Like chewier. [00:16:00] So what is the main lobster dish that all the tourists, is it the lobster roll? Yeah, lobster roll. They'll go for, yeah. Yeah. And that what's in a lobster roll?
I've eaten 'em, but I don't just cream cheese and mayonnaise, cream cheese out with you. I don't know what it is. It's just mayonnaise and lemon juice and lobster butter. Yeah, I know you and butter. Strong butter. Yeah. Yeah. So the way I do it is you take the hot dog bun right? But it's sliced on top like a cheap hotdog bun.
I use a very specific brand. I like the country kitchen ones. Okay. That's not a plug for Country Kitchen. I don't like kitchen. Alex is not affiliated with Country Kitchen. But yeah, no, I use those. And then I do a little bit of a swipe of mayonnaise on each side. Chilled lobster meat inside.
I then you put the butter, which is already cut with lemon on top. I like to season it with a little bit of paprika and celery salt. And then that's it. Oh, sorry. The bun should be toasted. Yeah. Interesting. You guys come up. I'll make you some really good lobster rolls. [00:17:00] Surely will. If I'm anywhere, I was in Vegas and I got a targeted Facebook ad for.
Like in, in a casino mall, there was like a lobster role place and I was like, good Facebook targeting. I'm going there. This is it's a 20 minute walk. And I'm like, how much was it? I think it was like 25, $30. Yeah. For a hot dog. Bun Uhhuh. It's like more, it was more like a hogie. I probably took a picture of it.
I'll show you how podcast you have a quarter pound of meat in it. Yeah, I mean it's a treat because there was a lobster roll food truck. In Louisville for a bit. Yeah. And they were like 20 bucks. Yeah. For lobster roll. Random fun fact that I thought of. Did you know that Louisville had, and I'm gonna get the facts of this wrong, but the gist of the fact is the largest saltwater aquarium in the world.
Yeah. Yeah. At the airport. Oh yeah. Cuz we bring it all in. Yeah. And then they like, so all that fresh [00:18:00] seafood, they would like let. In between plane flights, I guess let rere or whatever, and then they'd reprocess it. Into boxes onto its next destination. How about that? Interesting. What was the training process like?
Say your snide bar. Oh. I can tell it's got a face. Like I'm like, dumb story. I think Dan's right about that actually. I've heard that too. Thank you, Alex. I didn't say he was wrong. That's all right. Just not that exciting for me. Sorry. No, but your cream cheese on your lobster roll. I'm curious what the training process is like to become a lobsterman.
Sink or swim, usually just alright, you're on the boat now. What's the hazing like? It's a lot of abuse. No, yeah, it depends on who you go with. You're basically on a boat with, one other guy or maybe two other guys if you're going on a bigger one. And I picture a lot more dudes.
I figured it'd be like full of people. No, there's one guy driving the boat, pulling the buoys and, pulling the traps up. The other guy Pulling the lobsters out, measuring 'em, abandoning 'em, baiting the trap. It's pretty straightforward, it just, and are you getting paid like hourly or are you getting paid [00:19:00] like a quarter of the catch?
Quarter percentage. Quarter of the catch, quarter the catch. That's pretty good. Yeah. It depends on the day. Yeah. Yeah. Sometimes quarter the catch, but it's it's brutal work, right? Like you're waking up at duck hunting hours every day. Yeah. I look back on it with a mixture of nostalgia and just absolute dread.
Uhhuh. Yeah. Because yeah, you're getting up early, in the part of Maine where I was living the sunrises, four, yeah. Like four 30 is like the earliest there. I think maybe 4 45, something like that. But I was living, like a half hour away and I. I would drive there.
So I was getting up at two and getting to the wharf at four, loading up, going out. You catch the most jaw-dropping sunrises, they're amazing. Sure. It's beautiful out there. Some days it sucks. Some days it's cold. Finishing out the season in November is not great. It's, the boat is icy and, it's chilly.
It hurts. The storms start to come on in the fall. So you end up doing a lot of like trap moving, we'll [00:20:00] place a lot of traps in, in some risky areas behind the islands where the waves really come up if a storm comes up and so you spend a lot of time, like one day we had to move all of our traps cuz there was like a nor'easter coming and we had get 'em out of there.
They're just gonna get wrapped up around rocks, destroyed. Yeah, some days it sucked. Some days it was great. It was beautiful. Yeah. Is the territorial like nature of that ever come into play? This is my area. I was, I literally was about to ask that same question. That makes me nervous that I'm synced up with dancing.
Yeah. I heard about it more than I saw it, there were stories. I'll give you a couple of examples. There was a story about a fisherman in Portland, which is, the biggest city down there in more southern Maine where they burned another guy's boat down cuz he was fishing in their area.
It's not officially his area. It's yeah, you can fish wherever you want. Okay. Yeah, technically if you want any burn boat, if you want your boat burned. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. It's like the wild west. Yeah, it is it's like being a sea cowboy, sea cowboy. That should be your Twitter handle.
The,[00:21:00] I never saw any of that. We would give people shit, we would get on the radio and be like are your traps going over here? Like that kind of thing. Can you tell about buoy whose traps they were? Yeah. You have to memorize the color pattern, you can tell who it is.
So they generally stuck to where they stuck to also because that's, they fish where they've had luck and, People just establish their areas. It's not so much like somebody comes in, he is the new guy in town, he is gonna beat up the other guy. Or I guess we're in jail now, but you know what I'm saying?
It's but I guess like very similar, I guess yeah. Everyone knows when the boat comes in, how big everyone else's hall is. It's public info like, oh, this boat is getting twice as much as everyone else. Where are they fishing at? Yeah, not indirectly. Cuz they sell to the people that work at the wharf and the people that work at the wharf hope they're not listening, but they're some big gossips, lemme tell you.
And so yeah they'll share that information with other fishermen mostly to give 'em a little jab yeah, so and so came in with like 4 billion pounds the other day. This is a, you got two crates of lobsters here, man. What you doing? Oh. Because they're just, their big thing is they just want as many lobster at the wharf as [00:22:00] possible.
You mean the wharf people? They don't wanna work very much, so they want, oh, really? They don't wanna haul 'em up too much. But yeah. The goal of the wharf is to sell as many lobsters as they can. I was wondering if there was a little bit of Scarcity limiting, like they want to No, make it seem like there's not that many.
So I don't know. They do things and I don't know. The economics of this, but they'll build a lobster pound, which is one of the first things they did when I was there. Cuz you can't farm lobsters. It's illegal to farm lobsters. I did not know that. So what they'll do is they'll build a pound, which is if, so imagine you have a cove and the wharf is like this big dock that's pretty high in the air, so they're gonna accommodate big tides and whatnot.
And then just shoots across the entire bay. What they'll do is they'll wall off. The in inner side so that when it retains water and they'll toss some of the lobsters they wanna hold in there, not quite sell yet, and then sell them later. I don't really know how that works economically for them, but that's the closest thing they do.
I'm surprised you can't farm raise 'em, it seems that would be environmentally [00:23:00] friendly. Yeah. You know how things go. There's the Lobster Fisherman's Association. They have a lot lobbyists of power in the state, yeah. I would just imagine you'd have to label it. Farm raised and market prices would be less.
But I read an article about it the other day in, in the paper. And yeah, there's talk, but there's no movement. I don't think right now the biggest thing that's going on is the right whales. I dunno if you heard about that, but the right whales are this endangered species. Did we hear about that?
You didn't hear about, I didn't make newspapers not super deep into the lobster culture these days. Okay, so the right whales are this endangered species of whale. And there's. Talk. I don't believe I, I'm gonna, if there's anyone from Maine listening who's, on either side of this argument, they're probably gonna, roast me, but cool.
Looking forward to it. Yeah. There's talk that there's, they get tangled up in the gear, because the ropes, you're talking about people that fish at the edge of the bottom there, so it's 300 feet deep, right? And so these, geez, these whales are running into the the lions getting tangled up, dying.
They say, oh, the scientists say, I don't think there is any. [00:24:00] Examples of that. Yeah. I don't, trying to picture a top line. Yeah. And then a whale just going, just roll it. Yeah. Bill, what are you doing? Magic. Swim around. The only time I've ever caught anything in the line was a coran, a bird. One of the birds that does the weird V thing.
I'm familiar. Experience catching. Okay. Birds while fishing, don't share it. I'm gonna try to keep you outta jail here. Don't talk about that. So I was going to ask the question that you just answered of how deep these things are. You're saying 300 feet? Yeah. The people that fish at the edge of the bottom, I think I've heard them say three 50 to 400, but I don't know.
I've never been out. Wow. Yeah. That would be a lot of rope. So here's the, that's here's the difference. Yeah. Okay. So that's, that's one of the things, those guys that go out there and fish the deep waters, that's, it's dangerous. If you don't pay attention, you gotta have your head on.
Cuz you're, like I said, they're fishing trawls, so they've got 20 traps to a string. And you can imagine if they got. They got one end of the string and another end each with buoys. And those are [00:25:00] floating up to the surface. So you got that much rope on each end. Yeah. And you got the rope between the traps.
Yeah. So it's kind like a net almost. So you like the ho without the horizontal lines. Think about like it's big U shape kind of thing, right? Oh, it's a u So there's not like individual lines coming down off the, it's one line on the end, one line on the other end. And it's just, and they haul 'em all up and then they put all, they stack all the traps on the stern of the boat.
Okay, so you get 20 traps stacked on the back, and you can imagine how much rope is on the deck at that, right? So yeah, they, what happens is, you set one of 'em, you push one of the traps off the stern, and they just go boom. So you wanna watch where your feet are?
Sure. Just get wrapped 300 foot down. Just get, yeah. That's why when you're out there, when you're in your in, in your oil plants you have a. A knife is strapped to your chest, so if you do get wrapped up, you can just, cut the rope in. Dude, I get yelled at by the captain for cutting the rope, Travis?
Yeah. Cause that's not connected. Yeah, he's mad. He's just go down. I don't care. Yeah. Yeah. I only heard about it happening once to one guy, but he didn't actually get caught up in the rope. He got caught up in, I wanna say like the gfe got caught up in something and he [00:26:00] got it, hooked him on his hoodies, stomach pocket, and just went down.
I think he got the bends, but I think he was fine. Oh, it took him down that far? Yeah. Wow. Yeah, cuz you get on pretty quick. I think they're weighted, yeah. Huh. Anyway, so amazing. The right whales thing is interesting to me. Oh yeah. Okay. Yeah. Now there, there's all this. I don't know if they've actually implemented it yet, but they're trying to get the fishermen to switch over to rope less traps, which is mind boggling.
Wanna use magnets? Magnets use a big magnet, like magnet fishing can pull 'em up 400 feet maybe. I think the main. Technique they're looking at is buoyancy. So they'll, trigger like radio control. Yeah. Yeah. Which to me sounds not dumb. Magnets like a disaster. Just cuz those, I remember being out there how many times, and this is with rope, so maybe the rope not being there.
So not gonna be an issue. But you would get wound up. Cause the tides, they go in and out and your traps go with it. They don't just sit there, they get moved. This ocean's strong, [00:27:00] right? And so we would get hung up. All the time trying to pull our traps up all the time.
So I imagine these guys are gonna lose a lot of gear when they switch over to the buoyancy stuff, and that would be if it's not tethered to anything. Yeah, and the traps would be like three times as expensive if you had to have like yeah. So them being forced to switch over is causing some financial headaches, I think.
Isn't that the whole thing with like whales and the Navy? It's like, All the radio waves in the waters, like scrambling whales, brains and stuff. Yeah, I didn't know about that. I'm not up on my whale news guys. Yeah. I gotta get caught back up with these poor whales out there. Yeah, your brother would know something about that.
I imagine. My brother is in the navy. He, that's all he can say. He has a lot. He was it sub marine marina. He never gave me any good whale stories though. Too much of a nerd. Just whale. Yeah, he's in the, he's in the reactor room. He's in the belly. The belly, the beast. Does he travel around a lot? Do what?
He traveling around a lot right now. He was stationed in [00:28:00] Japan for all of Covid, so we didn't get to see him and he just moved back and he's stationed in Washington state now. Just moved back in May, April. Oh man. I thought of being in the submarines. That's crazy. That's like a whole nother podcast, but you just hear stuff that, that.
They deal with them mean he was doing some stuff where they would, cuz literally the only reason they have to come up is for food. And if they don't run out of food, they can stay underwater for months and not surface. Wow. All the air is recycled, all the water's recycled. It's nuclear powered, so there's no fuel.
It's literally just food. And he said, That the chef is the most important person on the boat. I'm not. And they had, they went to port once and one of their chefs went, or their main chef guy went awol. And it was like the boat couldn't even leave port. It was like that one guy being like, Nope, I'm out. I'm just gonna stay in Thailand or [00:29:00] wherever we were.
Oh, it's that's it. But yeah, the submarines are crazy. But as far as whales go, I don't know. All that stuff's out. You'd probably get those buoyancy traps and then you'd have A whale just like swimming along and then all of a sudden, just like a trap with an airbag, just box on the head, giving whale concussions.
Now, as far as I know, the Lobster Street, when you start putting helmets on them, is very, it seems sustainable to me from, the way they fish, the way they mark the females, the size, regulations, all that stuff. The number of lobsters they catch, it seemed like they're doing all right.
They're all over the place. So go ahead. I have a question about egg bearing female lobsters. Because I caught a blue crab in Florida one time and picked it up. I was like, oh, you can keep and eat these. Flipped it over. And it has what looks like a, an orange sponge on its stomach.
And I was like, Ooh, that looks different. So I looked it up on my phone real quick and tossed it back in cuz those were eggs. Yep. Is that what a lobster [00:30:00] eggs looks like? Yeah. So the underside of the tail of the lobster, how it thins in and it's got a concave area. Those fill up with, I think they say like more than 10,000 eggs.
Whoa. And they look like if you were to look at it. It looks like one giant, Blackberry, they call 'em buried lobsters. Ah. And yeah, I mean they when you catch one of those, yeah, they go overboard. But first what you do is if they don't have this already, is you cut a little v-shaped notch into the second from the right fin, or I guess that's what you call it, the on the tail.
And that when they mott that scar persists. So if that, The lobster gets caught again and you check it and you're like, oh, this one's gotta be notch. You throw it back in even if it doesn't have eggs. Huh. Yeah. That's how they sustain the popul. That's how smart. Yeah. That's how the fishing stays.
Good. Yeah. It's amazing what conservation does to help these boy animals. That's pretty cool. That's great. And there's a whole other podcast we could talk about your time with your other company of your, what was that effort? Carbon Removing carbon from the ocean. Carbon, yeah. Yeah. Carbon [00:31:00] sequestering.
Yeah, we were farming oysters. Yeah. Yeah. So that's a whole other podcast. But Alex is deep into the stuff on a nerdy level. I can't imagine. I know. I view Maine as like Alex is both sides of Maine. There's like the weathered. Wharf, old school main people and then a bunch of eco hippies. That's pretty accurate.
And a couple of dead moose Eco hippie. It's me, actually. Me. Sorry. We gotta do our next retreat up there. Oh, that's a good idea. I would love to, man. We gotta start putting that bug in. And Brad, so you're about the retreat cuz. I feel, I don't know if it's better to do it before the launch of our new product or after the launch of our new product when we have to sustain.
I think it's gonna have to be after. No, we'd usually just do it in the middle of turmoil. Yeah. And chaos. Someone's launching next week, literally. Or like we launch it and then we go to Maine to not support first week. Speaking of Brad, he requested that we make this a short one for Alex. Cause he's a.
Super. It's got something to build. Yeah. He like, things [00:32:00] to work on, builds all the stuff that we do, yeah. Yeah. I made that clear transition from Lobstering to programming, so Very, that's another podcast in itself too. Yeah. He learned everything he needed to know about coding from lobster.
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