Anthony DiMeglio pulls his orange bib overalls over his rubber boots and begins another 10-hour day on his Novi, a Canadian-made, 40-foot lobster fishing boat. The lobsterman fuels the boat at Mill Basin in Brooklyn, where it’s docked, loads it with barrels of ice and bait, and then cruises to fish the waters of the Atlantic Ocean south of Long Island.
“People think you just throw a pot in the water. But there’s a science to it.”
— Anthony DiMeglio
During the first two or three hours at sea, he fills bait bags with fish heads, bones, fins, and other viscera. He drops the bait bags into lobster traps (aka pots) to attract — he hopes — the lobsters. Using hooks, DiMeglio hauls the pots back to the boat, removes the old bait, and measures the catch of the day.
The process resumes as he rebaits the pots and sets them on the boat’s flat backend, known as the level. The fisherman begins his next drop, running 20 traps fastened about 110 feet apart on a rope.
DiMeglio steers the Novi toward GPS coordinates that mark each trap’s drop-off point. The traps slide off the bow of the boat, one after the other. “You try to pull 400 pots a day,” DiMeglio says. “It’s a lot of work, and it’s like that all day.”
That’s not the hardest part of lobster fishing. The hardest part is finding the lobsters.
“People think you just throw a pot in the water. But there’s a science to it,” he says. And every year is different: Water temperatures, which shift degrees every few feet, change where the lobsters may or may not choose to hunt for food. “In a warm spring, we’ll catch [lobsters] as early as March. In a cold spring like this year, you really have to wait.”
DiMeglio says lobsters can also be finicky about their environment, taking shelter on gravelly terrain one year and on silty ocean bottoms another. Even barometric pressure changes during moon phases are a factor, he says. At the Dobbs Ferry Lobster Guys store on Main Street, DiMeglio says, “I can [look] in the tank when a full moon is about to come; the lobsters won’t move. They stay still.”
DiMeglio doesn’t remember when he first began heading out on a boat and learning about lobsters. “My grandfather started hauling lobsters sometime back in the 1960s,” he says. Then his father, Captain Carl, a lobsterman and a chef, started the next wave with his son Anthony on board.
Before 2000, the DiMeglio family trapped lobsters in the waters of Long Island Sound. But rising water temperatures and the spraying of pesticides have apparently brought lobster fishing in the Sound to an abrupt end. “They just died; the entire population was just gone,” DiMeglio says. “It wasn’t that the lobsters moved, they were just dead on the bottom.”
Despite the challenges, DiMeglio’s doing well. He has started a family and invested in the Dobbs Ferry Lobster Guys shop, where he sells his catch and lobster rolls three days a week, Friday to Sunday. He also sells lobsters at a stand at the Pelham Farmers Market on Sundays.
The rest of the week, you’ll find DiMeglio on his Novi, baiting the pots and running his trap lines out in the ocean. If he were a younger man, he says, he’d be on his boat every day. “People still can’t believe that there are people like us who do this.”
Gregory Thomas is a food writer, essayist, playwright, and creative home cook living in Westchester County.
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