(f) Distance Traveled to Grounds: Greater dis- 

 tances traveled would be compensated by larger 

 catches. 



Of course, there are probably other factors that de- 

 termine the annual production of lobsters, notably, 

 "the good captain"" hypothesis. That is, the experi- 

 ence and capability of the captain or boat owner may 

 greatly influence the annual production, ceteris 

 paribus. To explore some of the hypotheses listed 

 above, we ran a regression of annual lobster landings 

 against the various boat characteristics and operating 

 patterns. This is shown in Table 14. Although boat 

 size, age, and distance to the grounds were statistically 

 significant variables (at the 5 percent level) in "ex- 

 plaining"" annual production, the number of traps 

 fished and fishing trips were more significant, as indi- 

 cated by their /-values. Horsepower exhibited a nega- 

 tive sign which js^ inconsistent with the theoretical 

 hypothesis. The R- = 0.74 for the equation used to 

 "explain"" annual production is fairly good. 



(3) Determinants of the Cost of Production.— Many 



of the costs commonly associated with running a lob- 

 ster boat operation are related to the physical charac- 

 teristics of the operation as well as pattern of opera- 

 tion. Table 14 shows the relation between various 

 components of costs (i.e., fuel and oil, bait, salt, and 

 ice, etc.) and hypothesized determinants of these 

 costs. Generally, physical characteristics are poor 

 predictors of costs. For example, fuel and oil cost per 

 annum was hypothesized to be linked to (1) boat size; 

 (2) horsepower; (3) number of lobster t^aps; and (4) 

 distance from grounds. However, the R- was only 

 0.16. 



(4) Returns to Boat and Lobsterman, 1967. — For the 



inshore American lobster fishery, returns to capital 

 (i.e., vessel) are difficult (if not impossible) to distin- 

 guish from returns to labor (i.e., the vessel owner as a 

 lobsterman). For the most part, the lobster firm is a 

 one-man operation where the owner is also the 

 worker. However, some lobster boat owners do em- 

 ploy helpers to work along side them. Using the 186 

 boats in our sample, we see a breakdown of revenues, 

 costs, and returns to boat and lobsterman in Table 15. 

 The average boat earned approximately $10,460 (rev- 

 venue) per year from fishing (unadjusted for weeks or 

 hours lobstering) and incurred costs of $4,439 leaving 

 returns of $6,021 to boat and lobsterman. However, 

 these figures may be very misleading since they in- 

 clude boats that vary greatly in their weeks lobstering. 

 What we desire are earnings per week or hour so that 

 we can make interfirm comparisons. To do this we 

 divided for each firm the total returns to boat and lob- 

 sterman after deduction of costs shown in Table 15 for 

 each boat by weeks lobstering. This yielded returns to 

 boat and lobsterman per week. Figure 12 shows a fre- 

 quency distribution of weekly returns. The average 

 returns were $125.50 per week. This can be compared 

 with weekly wages in manufacturing for the State of 

 Maine of $93.07 (1967). The figures, of course, are not 

 strictly comparable since the returns to lobstermen 

 also involve returns to capital invested in the boat and 

 pots. The median weekly returns are $113.78, as 

 shown in Figure 12. Figure 13 shows the distribution 

 of hourly earnings. To get some idea of the returns to 

 labor (lobsterman), we estimated "profits"" or return 

 on investment by taking 15 percent of total business 

 investment. Fifteen percent was considered an ade- 



Table 14.— Relation of lobster production and cost to various boat characteristics and operating patterns (1967). 



r-values in parentheses. 



21 



