Every day, when we get to the wharf, if we need more herring or more Rockfish, we get them from the shed and load them onto the boat with a little mini crane that looks sort of like this one. (Picture Left)It takes the trays of bait and can easily transport it onto our lobster boat in the water. After we get the bait if we need it, we get on our gear, and head out on the boat.
On the way out to our first trap, i usually bait, bait bags because we need them filled.
We get to our first trap and then just haul traps for the rest of the day. We haul the trap, take the lobsters out of the trap, take the old bait bag out of the trap, put a new bait bag into the trap, send it back down.
Each trap takes about 3-5 minutes to get it up, and down again.
There are 2 main, rectangular bins on the lobster boat. One, is for holding lobsters, and the other, is for holding the herring/ rock-fish. Both, have a tray connected to the inside of them, that can be cranked up if needed. So, if we have used a lot of the herring, we can crank the bin up so that we can reach the rest of the herring easier, and we don't need to reach all the way down into the bin. It is really helpfull!
The picture above, is a picture of the white lobster bin. It holds the lobsters after i band them. After they are banded, i send them down that white tube you can see, and it leads to the lobster holding bin. The red tube that is going into the white tube connected to the lobster bin, is always pouring water into the bin. the white tube that is going to the left of the bin, is poring water out of the bin. This filters water through the bin so that the lobsters always have fresh water while they are in the bin.
This picture above, is a picture of the bait bin. This, holds the herring for the bait bags. This can be raised up with a crank if you need it higher. Over time, as you leave all of that herring in the bin, the herring give off this weird oil from their skin, and it all collects at the bottom of the bin, and after the bin is empty, we need to empty all of that weird oily stuff from the bottom of the bin. At the bottom of both bins, is a screw on/off cap that can let all of the liquid out of the bottom of the bins.
This is a picture of the wooden thing that holds the lobsters so that i can band them. There are 3 boxes for the lobsters to go in. The box, farthest to the right, is the box that holds the rubber bands and the bander.
This above, is a picture of the machine that hauls the traps out of the water. Uncle Art, has a stick that has a hook at the end of it, and he uses that to grab the buoy out of the water. Then, he takes the buoy, and the rope and puts the rope over the first little wheel (top right of the picture) and then around the big wheel (bottom right of the picture) and then he turns a lever, and it turns the big wheel, and it pulls the rope up out of the water, and leaves the leftover rope, in a nice circle so that it doesn't get all tangled when we put the trap back out into the ocean.
There is a thing that is called a hot tank. It is basically a big plastic bin filled with water. It is called the hot tank, because we hook up a metal tube shaped like a U, to the pipelines of the motor of the boat. We put the metal part of the tube, into the plastic bin of water. When the hot water flows through the pipelines, it goes through the metal part and heats up the water, since metal is a great conductor of heat. The water in the plastic bin gets so hot it steams! Uncle Art said that i could make soup on the boat if i wanted just by dropping the can of soup into the hot tank in a bait bag
The real purpose of the hot tank, is to get the green stuff off of the buoys. Sometimes, the buoys, will have this green stuff on it, and it is really thin and impossible to get off, so we soak the buoy in the hot tank for a minute, and the green stuff comes right off! At the end of the day, the hot tank is full of green, hot, stinky water. Uncle Art, had to dump the hot tank out on the boat because he couldn't pour it over the edge. All of the hot stinky, green water, went all over the floor of the boat, and it looked cool, but it STANK!
I hope you enjoyed this "Learner" Page! My next post on my blog will be tomorrow, and my next "Learner" page, will be on Monday.
-August 8, Saturday
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