Ill 



Artificial Bait 



One respected and successful lobsterman has stated: 



" Summer or winter, if you put a lobster pot where 

 there are some lobsters, you will catch them. Too many 

 fishermen blame their lack of accuracy and instincts for fish- 

 ing on bait, weather behavior and other conclusions of their 

 own. A lobster is simple enough. But if the guy going after 

 him is even simpler, he might as well give up." 



Lobster bait is usually the offal remaining after fillets 

 have been removed from edible fish, or waste from sardine 

 canning. It is packed in open barrels at filleting plants. 

 These plants are often in large fishing centers such as 

 Gloucester, Rockland, or even Provincetown, so extensive 

 trucking is necessary to bring the bait to the many small 

 lobstering ports. 



A competing buyer of fish waste is the large fishmeal 

 industry which grinds and dries this waste into chicken feed. 

 The fishmeal people are able to offer increasingly higher 

 prices for fish scrap— and higher prices than lobstermen can 

 pay. Fish scrap which cost $1.00 a bushel a few years ago 

 now sells for as high as $1.60. Moreover, fish catches are ir- 

 regular; big runs of herring, etc., are followed by lean 

 catches. The fishmeal factories can handle large batches of 

 scrap when it is available, but the lobsterman cannot handle 

 such surplus (except by a troublesome packing in barrels 

 between layers of salt, i.e. pickling). 



A manufactured bait would make a lobsterman inde- 

 pendent of vagaries of the fish supply. Three days without 

 bait (which may happen whenever red fish or herring are 

 not running) means three days lost to the lobsterman, and 

 three days every now and then amount to a sizable lost time. 

 A manufactured bait could be shipped to any seaport in ad- 

 vance of its use and stored for a reasonable time. There 

 would be none of the uncertainty involved in finding a truck 

 which will take stinking fish scraps aboard and carry them 



