Land & Sea heads to the lobster grounds to find out why the fishery is booming

An insatiable curiosity about Newfoundland and Labrador's fishery — and all the critters living in our ocean — stems from the many years I spent hosting CBC Radio's The Broadcast

And so, this past spring, when I was hearing so much about the abundance of lobsters in our waters, I wanted to find out what was going on. 

I called around to several harvesters in various parts of the province to find out about their catch rates.

The thing is, when lobsters are plentiful, lobster fishermen can be a tight-lipped bunch. 

I knew after a few phone calls, it would be hard to get anyone to go on camera for a Land & Sea show to brag about their bounty.

And that was confirmed for me by Fortune Bay fisherman Alfred Fitzpatrick, who fishes out of Garnish on the Burin Peninsula.

"Fellows will tell you they poached a moose before they tell you they caught a lobster. If you hauled 200 pots and you got 10 lobsters, and your brother asked you, you'd say, 'Boy, I got five,'" explained Fitzpatrick.

Fitzpatrick understands the protectiveness.

You see, lobster harvesters can move around within their fairly large designated areas.

He recalls a year when the word got out about a nearby community hitting the jackpot on lobsters.

It wasn't long before the dozen or so local fishermen saw more and more boats in their harbour and people moving in.

"All of a sudden there was, like, 30 licences fishing there the next year, and the year after it was 50 licences fishing there," Fitzpatrick said.

"It's like a garden, people start seeds to get it to grow. They want to reap the benefit."

In Fortune Bay, lobster fishermen have been taking care of the resource by abiding by the federal regulation that says all undersized lobsters must go back in the water.

Only lobsters that measure more than 82.5 millimetres, from the eye socket to the start of the tail, can be kept and sent to market. 

What's more, for the past 20 years, harvesters have been voluntarily protecting female lobsters.

They mark spawners with a small "V" in their tails and leave them alone to reproduce.

As a result, lobsters have been Fortune Bay's good fortune for decades now and the backbone of Garnish's fishery. 

And now, Fitzpatrick says, he is encouraged to hear that communities all over the province have been seeing dramatic increases in catch rates where they never saw much lobster before. 

"Now there's people talking about making investments in the pots and the investment in boats and everything to prosecute the fishery because there's money to be made there and it wasn't there before," he said. 

"People are hauling traps out of wherever they can find them and putting them in the water, because, well, nobody was ready for it. Like this happened overnight in some areas."

Fitzpatrick is counting on many good years to come in the lobster fishery and wishes that more fishermen in Newfoundland and Labrador benefit from the resource.

As you'll hear in our Land & Sea show, Lobster Hope, Newfoundland and Labrador recorded its highest lobster landings ever this past season. 

And so, there is optimism for the future of lobster.

And in this challenging industry, where nothing is guaranteed, hope is all fishermen can ever have. 

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