Wet and Hungry
An Atlantic Fisherman's Life
by B. R. Lynch

 Chapter I

Crazy People

A pot bursts out of the ocean. Tommy grabs it and pulls it onto the gunwale. Louie explodes, “Come the ___ on, Blueballs!”

After lifting several hundred pots, the crew is slowing down. Louie wants them to speed up. Nothing the crew does satisfies this hot-headed perfectionist. Tommy stands by the gunwale, sixty miles off shore over the Atlantic’s Washington Canyon.  He’s a strapping, curly-haired, blue-eyed, eighteen-year old. Louie, a stocky, forty-five-year old Italian, stands next to him, running the hydraulic hauler. A wet, yellow rope strains in the block over Tommy’s head, runs through the hauler and joins coils of more yellow rope snaking over the deck to a stack of tarred, mesh lobster pots. The rope is a 1,200-foot buoy line and a 3,000-foot runner with nine-foot snoods attached to each pot in a fifty pot rig. The rigs are set 300 to 1,200 feet deep on the canyon’s edge.

Tommy takes the lobsters out of the pot. Marco, Louie’s buddy, and Eddie sort and band them. Lockwood baits and stacks the pot. A black colossus with arms ribbed like pumpkins, he doesn’t look at or speak to Tommy. He wanted his drinking buddy, Eddie, to have Tommy’s job. The night before, Lockwood and Eddie had stayed until midnight at a pool tournament in a bar across from the Davis and Lynch Fish Company. The boat was to have left at half past eleven that night. Louie waited and fumed. This kind of behavior led Louie to hire Tommy instead of Eddie.

Lockwood and Tommy each get twenty percent of the value of the catch. This is their crew share and the government considers them self-employed. Louie, the boat owner, gets the captain’s and boat owner’s share, sixty percent. Marco and Eddie only go out on weekly lobster trips, not the more frequent sea bass trips. They don’t receive a crew share, but take home a few lobsters.

When the deck is loaded, Lockwood stands in the stern, throwing weights and pots overboard while Louie steers. Lockwood moves with rapid agility to avoid the rushing ropes. One misstep and a rope could grab and take him overboard.

At day’s end, Tommy and Lockwood have handled six hundred pots. Tommy lies in his bunk in the bow on the five hour trip to port and he thinks, “I’m not going to make it. Louie yells all day and Lockwood hates me.”