Plastic Classic Forum

We had a rather foggy trip back from the Basin on the New Meadows River today. At times visibility (as determined by GPS and chartplotter measurements to bouys) was down to .11 nautical miles but at other times it scaled up and made for some nice pics.

Damn, that is a LOT of pot bouys!
(A menace, I tell you!)

Hehe. It's all what your're used to. I hardly notice them most of the time. It's second nature to avoid them.

Figment wrote:Damn, that is a LOT of pot bouys!
(A menace, I tell you!)

Where? I don't see all that many.

Figment wrote:Damn, that is a LOT of pot bouys!
(A menace, I tell you!)

What in the world are you talking about? There aren't hardly even any there--open water.

You southerners...

And no toggles on the pots in these pictures, either. A cakewalk!

no toggles, and no current either. I can't recall the last time I saw a pot bouy standing erect like that. Freaky.

they think they own the water!

I had the same thought - that looks like a lot of pots. At least they are visible, though. I'll try and snap a photo of a crab trap. The floats are much smaller and, often, are either painted black or so covered in slime that they are difficult to spot during the day and impossible at night. I came real close to picking one up Saturday evening. I heard two thumps on the hull and looked back to see a crab trap emerge from the transom.

By the way, great shots Nathan. I particularly like the third one. Sailing in Maine is right at the top of my wish list.

Figment wrote:no toggles, and no current either. I can't recall the last time I saw a pot bouy standing erect like that. Freaky.

they think they own the water!

The photos are deceptive. Lobster pots often stand quite upright when there's a current: you need to look at the water rushing past! Actually, the pots are more likely to lay over at slack water.

You can sort of see the current rushing by the pot in the foreground of this pic:

Now, this is a lot of pots. (Sorry for the width; I left it full size to show detail.)

Tim wrote:Now, this is a lot of pots. (Sorry for the width; I left it full size to show detail.)

Sure, a lot of pots in the picture, but look at the scale of the view; the density of pots shown there does not seem all that unusual...

I can't help but wonder about the effectiveness of setting so many traps in a given area. Clearly, it's effective or they wouldn't do it, but it still seems strange.

It's like the folks at my marina who never leave the dock, but as soon as someone DOES take off for the weekend they all line their chairs up at that slip and start fishing. Ten lines fishing in a twelve foot deep 25x20 area of water, in addition to the compulsory 3 lines fishing from each boat in its slip for the full length of the runway.
I gotta think that the ratio of lines:fish has to be at least 3:1

Lobster trapping is a REAL hit & miss thing. I once saw a show about lobster trapping... it was on Discovery channel. They had a lobster trap cam and it was SHOCKING for me to watch.

The shocking thing to me... Roughly 90% of lobsters ESCAPE the trap. I live in Maine and always thought that the lobster traps catch all of the lobsters with only the little ones escaping. Wrong. Lobsters are not that clever but they are more than clever enough to escape. Even fairly big ones.

Lobster traps are in fact buffets for lobsters.. the bait and the other smaller lobsters eating the bait. The cams (it was sped up to amplify the effect) showed tons of lobsters crawling in, munching on bait and other lobsters and scurrying out. The cam view made me think of cockroaches and in fact Lobsters are the water cousin of the cockroach... (I once found a dead 8 inch cockroach in DC and the underside... looked awfully like a lobster...).

The ones caught usually were lobsters in the wrong trap at the wrong time. Or they were rather dim for lobsters, could not figure out how to escape.

There are lots of lobsters crawling in areas with lots of rocks and a decent amount of current so that is why you see lobster buoys seemingly overcrowded in some spots. That is where the lobsters are at. With a 90% escape rate, its still rather profitable to put lobster traps with lots of other traps. It all depends, of course.


- Case

catamount wrote:

Tim wrote:Now, this is a lot of pots. (Sorry for the width; I left it full size to show detail.)

Sure, a lot of pots in the picture, but look at the scale of the view; the density of pots shown there does not seem all that unusual...

That's right: it's not unusual. That's the whole point here.

Also, I did the best I could to find a photo in my inventory that better showed a typical density. I'll try harder, I guess.

"I'll try harder"

photoshop?

;)