Day 3

Day 3 started out with gray skies and rain once again....surprise, surprise. The fog made for a "zero" visability day. We boarded the Erica Lee once again for a trip that would include checking lobster pots and trolling. We headed out to the mouth of the river once again and the outgoing tide and incoming wind once again made for some choppy seas. We were in 3 foot waves for a few minutes, and it felt like we were on an amusment ride. For someone who was not feeling well the other day, this was actually fun for me. We learned that lobster pots have to have unique colors that are displayed on your boat and we learned that Maine lobstermen are more territorial than mother gulls, and you can legally shoot at someones boat if they mess with your gear. Marissa prepared the famous "bucketfish" for baiting the traps in picture below. I got a chance to pull up a pot from about thirty feet. Sadly, there was only a small male lobster in my pot that was not a keeper.

We learned how to sex a lobster by feeling the simmerets closest to the carapace, if they are feathery -female, if they are hard - male. We also reviewed how to sex a crab, v-shaped was male and a u-shaped abdomen was for female. We looked at handedness of lobsters, which is dictated by the side that has the crusher claw. We found that there were some nice data points that could be graphed by students when dealing with the lobster pots: number in pot, sizes, sex, dominant hand, etc.

We checked the clarity of water, and how far down you could see using a secchi disk. We did this in the mooring area and out in the ocean and we found that the water was more clear out in the ocean. We also towed a plankton net in two different spots. We found there were great examples of zooplankton in our ocean and that these practices, again, gave great opportunities for graphing data.