Fall 2023
By Christopher Birch
ailing the mostly lobster-trap-free waters of Newfoundland. Photo by Christopher BirchS
The Siren call of lobster-trap-free water has lured many a sailor north of the border. Legend and cruising guides lead you to believe that Canadian waters are devoid of fishing gear in the sailing season because the lobster fishery is closed there in the summer. On a recent sail to Canada, we found the truth was more nuanced. Beware the Siren.
Sailing with my wife, Alex, from Mt. Desert, Maine, to Yarmouth, Nova Scotia this past June 11, we observed that the traps worked by Maine fishermen vanished abruptly 24 miles off the coast. Then, much to our surprise, we started to see traps again, which continued to appear all around us for miles. As the sun lowered in the sky, mild panic set onboard. Finally, about 50 miles off the coast of Maine, the minefield mercifully came to an end in the waning light of day. Turns out, I later learned, our rhumb line took us across Area 38, a Canadian fishing district south of Grand Manan Island worked legally by lobster boats out of New Brunswick from the second Wednesday in November until the fourth Wednesday in June. Sure enough, when we returned through these waters on Sept. 2, the traps were gone.
The brain trust in Ottawa has divided the Atlantic lobster fishery into 43 geographic districts. For reasons not readily apparent, the fishing season varies considerably from one district to the next. For example, in West Nova, including the fleets out of Yarmouth and Halifax, the lobster season shuts down on May 31. This is probably where Canada earned its reputation for being trap-free in the summer. But there’s a lot more to Canada than just Yarmouth and Halifax.
As we continued to work our way east, lobster traps episodically returned to the waters. Our course wound through different districts and our schedule happened to span the array of different district close dates. The season in East Nova closes on June 20 except for District 31A off Canso, which closes on June 30. In the Bras d’Or Lakes, District 28, the season closes on July 9. Off Cape Breton Island, District 27, the season stays open until July 15. Off the Eastern end of PEI, you can fish for lobster from May 1 – June 30. In the waters off the western end of PEI, you can fish for lobster from Aug. 10 – Oct. 10. Go figure.
South of Newfoundland, the season stays open until July 31. You might be able to catch the tasty crustaceans up there, but good luck finding someone to sell them to on the south coast of The Rock where there are no roads to transport a lobster to market and caribou outnumber people by a wide margin. And caribou don’t eat lobster. That didn’t stop people from setting traps – personal consumption, perhaps. As one Newfoundlander explained, “You gotta go easy on the Screech [a brand of rum] in July because there are lobster traps out there that you gotta be mindful of.” If you follow that logic, through, I guess you have a different sort of human hazard to worry about in August.
Even after you have the district map and dates memorized, and your Screech consumption under control, there’s still more to learn about navigating through Canadian fisheries. For starters, they use different rope up there than New England lobstermen use. The Canadian line floats. And instead of adding toggle to account for the change in tide, they just send out a bunch more line than the water depth requires resulting in a long, hazardous ribbon of floating line stretching 50 or 100 feet away from the pot. Oftentimes you’re forced to guess whether the pot is lying to the wind or to the current as you approach in order to pick a side to pass on. And you better guess right – this is a cold and remote place where calls to Sea Tow and TowBoat US go unanswered, and you don’t want to be on the wrong side of the learning curve.
We found the Canadians set far fewer traps than their counterparts in America. There’s a lot of room to work with up there and the density of traps on the water mirrored the population density ashore. The down side to this fact is that a passing sailor can be lulled into watch-keeping complacency. The sea can feel trap-free, and then all of a sudden there’s a lone trap lurking close off the bow. It’s counterintuitive, but a thinly settled field of traps can be more hazardous than a thickly settled one.
One additional Canadian fishery practice caught our attention. It’s a devilish arrangement that I have never seen before in all my travels: Fishermen (or marine biologists?) string a floating line between two small trap pots spread 500 yards apart. On approach, it would never occur to you that these distant pots are connected, but they are. You don’t want to sail between these two pots. The chart makes vague mention regarding an area of fishing operations. I don’t know for certain what these things are designed to catch. But they resemble a boat trip line, and from the look of it, what they were hoping to catch was me. Fortunately, we didn’t see many of these, but the ones we did see were in areas where the lobster fishery was closed.
We’re back from Canada now and we never did end up snagging a pot. Despite my words of caution here, we had a fantastic cruise. The landscape was sensationally beautiful, and the people were most welcoming. There are a thousand good reasons to cruise Atlantic Canada, but relaxing in lobster-trap-free waters isn’t one of them.
Looking back, June is a tough month to be sailing in Canada. It’s foggy and cold and plenty of lobstermen are still on the hunt. We had concluded that if we wanted to go to Newfoundland and get back south again before we ended up with snow on the deck, we had better start early. In hindsight, I think that logic was flawed. Allotting three months for this trip was a good idea, but when picking a month to tack on to July and August, we would have been better off taking our chances with September instead of June.
Go and see the place for yourself next summer but maybe wait for a July 1 start. Steel yourself against watch-keeping complacency and proceed with caution in those cold Canadian waters. Pack a wetsuit and a mask just in case. And go easy on the Screech.
Christopher Birch is the founder of Birch Marine Inc. on Long Wharf, Boston. He is now out cruising full-time with his wife, Alex, aboard their 36-foot Morris Justine. Follow their voyage at EagleSevenSailing.com.
