Captain Mark Leach talks about lobstering at a Meet the Fleet.
By Doreen Leggett
Captain Mark Leach has been fishing for close to 40 years and has had many opportunities to try different baits, when it comes to lobster they often don’t work.
He and his son Sean, now a captain himself, recently had the opportunity to experiment again, this time with Asian carp.
“More options are better than no options,” said Sean. “No one has actually cracked the code on this, but we’ll see.”
The program, funded by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, run through E & E Marketing Management, with WHOI, Cornell University and Cape Cod and Rhode Island fishermen as partners, was launched last year and is expected to continue this summer.
The initial data is promising, but far from conclusive. Chunked carp was tested against traditional baits – skate, menhaden and Chilean and black sea bass – by five fishermen.
Information collected included location, depth, water temperature, and bait type, which alternated between carp and conventional. The number of keepers, bycatch and other data was tallied.
Aubrey Church, policy director at Fishermen’s Alliance, helped connect scientists and fishermen.
“Involving fishermen in testing alternative lobster bait can provide economic relief when traditional bait prices increase, and can ensure sustainability and control of invasive species, while providing opportunities for increased bait availability should traditional species become scarce due to future regulations or environmental changes,” she said.
In Rhode Island, traditional bait performed slightly better, but there was no strong statistical difference compared to carp shipped from the mid-West. Initial work also showed carp, an invasive species, was more effective for Jonah Crab, which is becoming more economically important for fishermen.
Cape fishermen had less success, although there were a few trawls when carp outperformed traditional bait by a 5- to 10-percent margin. Carp performed better with longer soak times.
Cape lobstermen ran experiments in August, Rhode Island tried the bait in January, March and during the summer.
Captain Mike Rego, of F/V Miss Lilly, said he was interested in the pilot because like everything else, bait has “shot up” in price. He is spending about $150 more a day than when he started lobstering.
To get a sense of carp bait’s effectiveness, Leach said they would have to use it for at least ten weeks in a row – far more than the pilot allowed. He added they were supplied with 100 pounds, and they go through close to 40,000 pounds of bait a season.
There have been efforts to step away from traditional baits for many years. One reason is that there are often bait shortages in New England.
Bait also can be expensive. Since the explosion of Asian carp is wreaking havoc on ecosystems in other parts of the country, it is plentiful and cheap.
Leach is more concerned with whether it works.
“You could have the cheapest bait in the world. If it doesn’t work, I’m not going to use it,” he said.
He is particularly interested in experimental dry bait work being done out of Cornell by Eugene Won.
Won said he got involved a few years ago. He remembers a bait shortage and how lobstermen imported from Germany and South America to keep their businesses running.
“It hit me like a brick in the head, you shouldn’t be doing that,” Won said.
Won’s philosophy is, “There’s no such thing as waste if you use it; it becomes a resource.” He wondered if it was possible to exploit local resources and thought of racks (fish bones) and internals left over from processing.
If researchers transformed that waste into dry bait it would be beneficial on many levels. Maine lobstermen prefer herring or menhaden, diminishing a vital food source for everything from cod to tuna to whales to birds.
“It just seemed to me that there should be a substantial volume of local fish carcasses from the New England ground fishery and, if the fishermen couldn’t use it right off the cutting table, then maybe it could be made into a dry bait and stored … Fish processors are paying disposal fees to dump the guts in landfills, which is idiotic in my opinion, so this project is essentially matchmaking between fish processors and lobstermen,” he said.
Plus dry bait can be saved for when bait is scarce.
“It’s hard to save smelly fish,” he said. “You can put this in your back pocket” — not literally, he added with a smile.
Won set to work. Some of his initial tests were with haddock, ground down with an enormous grinder.
“Its nickname is the mafia grinder,” he said.
Tests in the lab showed that when lobsters were given a choice between skate or bait cakes the two were roughly equivalent.
In the field the dry bait also had some success, 1.75 lobsters a trap compared to two for traditional bait.
“We were happy with those results,” Won said.
Offshore results were different, Won said, dry bait caught 64 percent fewer lobsters than conventional. One theory: It is dissolving too quickly, so Won wants to try different binding materials and do some tests on Cape Cod this summer.