It’s 10 a.m. and the lobster boat, Dorothea Isabel, is steaming northward out of Sesuit Harbor in Dennis against a steady chop and headwind. Normally, Tyler Daley, the boat’s owner, would already have been on the bay six hours earlier, but weather kept him in. But conditions should break in a few hours and until then the two- to two-and-a-half foot waves will just be an annoyance when harvesting begins.
The Dorothea Isabel, named after Daley’s grandmother, is a 35-foot, bare-bones, floating platform built for fishing. There are two things you notice immediately when you step aboard. The first is the smell, an overpowering mix of diesel fumes combined with the stench wafting from the approximately 400 pounds of a secret blend of putrefying fish used for bait. You do get used to it, though. The second thing is that there is no head; no place to answer nature’s call. You pray you won’t have to get used to that, too.
The first half-hour or so is the only time Daley and his deckhand, Julian Escobar, have even a modicum of downtime. Daley steers the boat while Escobar readies the deck for harvesting: securing bins and coolers that will hold the catch, transferring bait and readying bait bags that will be placed in the traps, each holding a handful of the slop that’s a gourmet treat for lobsters. Escobar is a chef and has worked in some of the finest restaurants including Clio and Bricco in Boston, 5 Corners Kitchen in Marblehead, and the Woodstock Inn in Vermont. But today, like many Cape Codders, he’s doing what he has to do to make ends meet. He likes lobster fishing though. “It was scary at first,” he says. “ But eventually it gave me such a sense of life. You have to constantly be aware to take care of yourself when you’re on the boat.” Daley’s concentration, too, is unflagging as he monitors the boat, charts his course, and plans the workday. “I try not to let my mind wander, otherwise I’d end up screwing something up,” he says. “I have to make sure I stay with the program and Julian is safe.” The Brewster native has been fishing for lobster for more than 20 years, since he was 12 and had 25 traps of his own. Now, after a few stints fishing for lobster offshore for others ending in 2012, he owns the Dorothea Isabel outright and tends 800 traps, the maximum amount allowed, plus an acre grant for oysters.
Five miles out of Sesuit Harbor, Daley signals that the real work is about to begin. He ties on an apron and flicks on the hard rock that will blare over the sound system, adding for the rest of the day to the cacophony made from the deep throbbing of the engine and the high-pitched whining of the winch. After using a combination of old-school LORAN and GPS on his phone to find his traps, Daley maneuvers the boat to hook a buoy that marks one end of a trawl—a 2,000-foot line that sits on the bottom of the bay with 16 traps connected to it at intervals. Daley then connects the trawl to the electric winch, and as the traps appear in the first few feet of green, luminous water, he hoists them dripping onto the boat’s rail, flicks open trap’s door, and empties the trap of lobsters.
At the same time, Escobar removes the old bait and rebaits the trap. All this takes seconds. As Daley winches up another trap, Escobar grabs the first trap, drags it one-handed along the rail, and stacks it on the boat’s stern deck. Each trap weighs anywhere from 45 to 65 pounds, and because this is a short day, the crew of the Dorothea Isabel will check only about 250 of the 800 traps Daley tends. After all 16 traps have been emptied and stacked, Daley throttles up the boat and Escobar positions each trap at the stern, being mindful not to get his feet caught in all the lines that are uncoiling overboard as each trap slips into the boat’s wake and back to the bottom of the bay.
Haul up, clean out, rebait, stack. Fishing for lobster is hard, rote, monotonous work, repeated over and over for hours, and Daley and Escobar work in tandem without words, as if they’ve become parts of the pitching Dorothea Isabel. They say fishing is the most optimistic pursuit a person can do. You cast a fetid piece of bait into all of that water in hopes of a retrieving a fish to eat or sell. A few of the trawls were all but empty, and Daley repositioned those trawls somewhere else along the bottom, playing cat and mouse with an enormous, crawling pod of lobster he knows is down there somewhere. In the interest of sustainability, easily two-thirds of what Daley catches this day will get tossed back into the bay. The lobster might be a female, the eggs covering her underside looking like coffee grounds, or either too small or surprisingly too big—lobsters mate front to front, and large, egg-bearing females need a similar sized fertile male to procreate. A Chihuahua/Great Dane mix isn’t in the crustaceans’ cards.
The work may be hard and monotonous, but it’s the hunt that continues to thrill Daley. “It’s boring when you’re not catching them, but it’s what you keep trying for and it keeps you coming back,” he says. “I wouldn’t want to be doing anything else.”
The Dorothea Isabel, named after Daley’s grandmother, is a 35-foot, bare-bones, floating platform built for fishing. There are two things you notice immediately when you step aboard. The first is the smell, an overpowering mix of diesel fumes combined with the stench wafting from the approximately 400 pounds of a secret blend of putrefying fish used for bait. You do get used to it, though. The second thing is that there is no head; no place to answer nature’s call. You pray you won’t have to get used to that, too.
The first half-hour or so is the only time Daley and his deckhand, Julian Escobar, have even a modicum of downtime. Daley steers the boat while Escobar readies the deck for harvesting: securing bins and coolers that will hold the catch, transferring bait and readying bait bags that will be placed in the traps, each holding a handful of the slop that’s a gourmet treat for lobsters. Escobar is a chef and has worked in some of the finest restaurants including Clio and Bricco in Boston, 5 Corners Kitchen in Marblehead, and the Woodstock Inn in Vermont. But today, like many Cape Codders, he’s doing what he has to do to make ends meet. He likes lobster fishing though. “It was scary at first,” he says. “ But eventually it gave me such a sense of life. You have to constantly be aware to take care of yourself when you’re on the boat.” Daley’s concentration, too, is unflagging as he monitors the boat, charts his course, and plans the workday. “I try not to let my mind wander, otherwise I’d end up screwing something up,” he says. “I have to make sure I stay with the program and Julian is safe.” The Brewster native has been fishing for lobster for more than 20 years, since he was 12 and had 25 traps of his own. Now, after a few stints fishing for lobster offshore for others ending in 2012, he owns the Dorothea Isabel outright and tends 800 traps, the maximum amount allowed, plus an acre grant for oysters.
Five miles out of Sesuit Harbor, Daley signals that the real work is about to begin. He ties on an apron and flicks on the hard rock that will blare over the sound system, adding for the rest of the day to the cacophony made from the deep throbbing of the engine and the high-pitched whining of the winch. After using a combination of old-school LORAN and GPS on his phone to find his traps, Daley maneuvers the boat to hook a buoy that marks one end of a trawl—a 2,000-foot line that sits on the bottom of the bay with 16 traps connected to it at intervals. Daley then connects the trawl to the electric winch, and as the traps appear in the first few feet of green, luminous water, he hoists them dripping onto the boat’s rail, flicks open trap’s door, and empties the trap of lobsters.
At the same time, Escobar removes the old bait and rebaits the trap. All this takes seconds. As Daley winches up another trap, Escobar grabs the first trap, drags it one-handed along the rail, and stacks it on the boat’s stern deck. Each trap weighs anywhere from 45 to 65 pounds, and because this is a short day, the crew of the Dorothea Isabel will check only about 250 of the 800 traps Daley tends. After all 16 traps have been emptied and stacked, Daley throttles up the boat and Escobar positions each trap at the stern, being mindful not to get his feet caught in all the lines that are uncoiling overboard as each trap slips into the boat’s wake and back to the bottom of the bay.
Haul up, clean out, rebait, stack. Fishing for lobster is hard, rote, monotonous work, repeated over and over for hours, and Daley and Escobar work in tandem without words, as if they’ve become parts of the pitching Dorothea Isabel. They say fishing is the most optimistic pursuit a person can do. You cast a fetid piece of bait into all of that water in hopes of a retrieving a fish to eat or sell. A few of the trawls were all but empty, and Daley repositioned those trawls somewhere else along the bottom, playing cat and mouse with an enormous, crawling pod of lobster he knows is down there somewhere. In the interest of sustainability, easily two-thirds of what Daley catches this day will get tossed back into the bay. The lobster might be a female, the eggs covering her underside looking like coffee grounds, or either too small or surprisingly too big—lobsters mate front to front, and large, egg-bearing females need a similar sized fertile male to procreate. A Chihuahua/Great Dane mix isn’t in the crustaceans’ cards.
The work may be hard and monotonous, but it’s the hunt that continues to thrill Daley. “It’s boring when you’re not catching them, but it’s what you keep trying for and it keeps you coming back,” he says. “I wouldn’t want to be doing anything else.”
