Lobster Schooling

by Captain Perry Wrinkle

The first warm days of spring always remind me of my grammar school days. I would get up in the morning and there would be a feeling in the air that seemed to just take control of me. I would think of getting my skiff painted so I could set traps, the buoys were all painted and ready. I was thinking about those “ground tenders,” big old 3-pound lobsters just laying there in the rocks.

I forgot about home work that was not finished, or the math test we were having. I was too busy trying to think up a way to skip school. I think my mother must have had those same feelings when she was young because she always had an answer to all of the reasons why I should stay home, and when the first bell rang she made sure I was headed out the door with my lunch.

There was a big church bell on top of our school house that could be heard all over town. The first bell sounded at 7:30 a.m., and the second bell rang at 8 a.m. sharp, and you had better be there. We would start the day off by reciting the Lord’s Prayer. We would then sing “God Bless America.” We had a red-headed teacher and that woman was “all business.” She would put the math lesson on the blackboard and go on to explain how to do it. I would be sitting there drawing pictures of lobster boats with traps piled high on the stern. The next thing I knew: Bang! I would get a whack on the side of the head with a geography book, grab up my work of art and crumple it up, then stomp to the waste basket and throw it in. She would then smile sweetly and holler, “Pay attention!”

I’ll never forget my first “failure slip.” Boy, that was a wake-up call. The teacher mailed a notice home that my grades were falling. I was just starting to set traps. I went down to the shore after school and lo and behold, the outboard motor was gone. I ran up to the garage where my father worked to tell him of the theft. He smiled and pointed to the motor. It was on a bracket in the corner of the garage. He said, “It’s going to stay there until your grades come up.”

“How can I set my traps?” I asked. “Ash breeze,” he replied. The ash breeze meant the two seven-foot oars that were made of ash wood and I would have to row.

For the next few weeks I rowed and not many traps got set, but the homework got done and my grades came up. Dad would go to haul with me on the weekends. I liked this time best of all. I would run the boat and he would haul the traps. We went to the shore together on Saturday morning and I figured I would have to row again. Wowee. There on the stern of the boat was a nice big Evinrude. He looked at me calmly and said, “I swapped the old ‘water-witch’ for that one.”

I couldn’t wait, I thought I would burst before we got on board. Dad went back home to get our lunch and some bait bags. I started pulling on the pull cord to fire up this new Evinrude. He was gone about 15 minutes and I was still pulling when he got back. Once in awhile a belch of smoke would roll out. He said I had flooded it. He took out the spark plugs and cleaned them, and after a lot of pulls and a few choice words, the thing finally started. It was a four-cylinder, but it was running on only two.

Father took a screwdriver and shorted from the plug to the motor-head, the spark started jumping across and pretty soon it fired the plug. He did the same thing to the fourth one and it worked.

We were soon humming out of the harbor. The old “waterwitch” was only a 3 HP, this one was a 5.5. I opened her up, expecting great things. Not much happened, but every time I slowed it to an idle, two of the cylinders would cut out and I would have to ‘shot’ them with the screwdriver. In the two weeks we had that thing we put in new spark plugs and a bunch of other stuff, but it kept doing the same thing. Sometimes the spark would arc on me instead of the sparkplugs. To keep from being totally electrocuted, I finally borrowed 20 bucks off Grandfather and traded that thing for a 7.5 horsepower Elgin. I enjoyed the two weeks it took me to pay Gramp back. Lobsters were only 30 cents a pound, but it was fun catching them.

I learned two lessons that year. One was to keep my grades up, and the second was that bigger is not always better.

Good Fishing.