Technology and Innovation Put Friendship Trap Company at
Center of Change



On the production floor at Friendship Trap. Custom made traps are built to customer specifications. The customer fills out an order sheet specifying all the details of what they want and that order is built from scratch. There are many options available and every trap order is different. ©Photo by Sam Murfitt

The strength of the Maine lobster fishery is the result of owner operator fishermen, good resource management and innovation. The icons of the industry are the lobster boat and trap. The wood trap, in use since the beginning of commercial lobster fishing, rapidly changed to wire in the 1980s.

Wire manufacturers supplied the wire, but it was Maine trap builders along with fishermen who came up with the innovations that made the wire trap the success it has been.

The transition to wire started slowly in the late 1970s. A combination of the wooden trap tradition and the cost of replacing what might be 1,200 or more traps affected the pace of change. In the beginning some fishermen replaced worn, damaged or lost wood traps a few at this time, fishing both wood and wire.

By the 1980s the transition went quickly to wire.

“Once they caught on it changed everything, revolutionized the fishery. It allowed fishermen to fish large gangs of gear, in some cases year round, and the wire traps were found to fish better,” said Mike Wadsworth, manager of Friendship Trap in Friendship, Maine. The company, which started in the 1970s, now sells to a broad range of fishermen including offshore, inshore and out-of-state, and they all have different requirements.

The forgotten factor, said Wadsworth is maintenance—wooden traps needed a lot of it. Some fishermen fished part of the year and pulled their traps. The traps were allowed to dry out, which killed the worms that went after the wood and slowed the inevitable rotting. Traps fished year-round needed to be hauled for treatment with preservatives and to be repaired. A lot of fishermen may have fished 150 to 200 wooden traps in the early days, but some fished a lot more and they needed people on shore just to maintain those traps.

Storms would bash up the lighter wooden traps or sweep them away. The wire traps hold the bottom better in a storm and the maintenance problem has practically disappeared.

Friendship Trap is one of the largest companies building lobster traps with customers from Grand Manan, Canada, to Maryland. Their traps are all built in-house in two locations by 60 employees.

Wadsworth said, “from the very beginning we not only built traps, we were on boats to better understand how these new traps worked.”

The lighter buoyant wooden traps, with the bridles near the bottom would land right side up. But the new wire traps were made of steel and would not always land right side up.

Wooden traps were weighted with bricks and early wire traps were similarly weighted. Experimenting along with fishermen led to the discovery that wire traps would land right side up if the ballast weights were moved toward the hauling end and the bridle attached higher. In deeper water the total resistance of the length of the rope moving in the water column also came into play. The total surface area of what might be 100 to 1,200 feet of rope, depending on whether fishing inshore or offshore, added up and affected how a trap hung at the far end.

Trap performance has changed, as has price. In the beginning, wire traps were selling for $15. The major price increase has been from the cost of materials, but those materials have also brought improvements. One of the early wire manufacturers used a liquid coating on the wire that left air pockets which resulted in wire corrosion. The newer powder coatings have greatly extended the working life of traps. Another effect on cost, is the much greater number of options available.

It was through working with fishermen over the years that many wire trap innovations were made,Wadsworth said. “In the beginning of the wire trap era we designed and built a lot of the equipment we used in making traps because that equipment didn’t exist on the market.”

Wadsworth also said the number of innovations in his 31 years at the company is too long to list. The rock bottoms—poured concrete ballast runners, PVC ballast runner, and the easy clip ergo system are a few recent innovations. In the early days they made the aluminum clips used to hold the trap together. Friendship Trap cut and tumbled these clips in a cement mixer to remove burrs that could cause cuts or snags while in use. The clips were installed using a pair of manual clip pliers that were also custom made. The company was more than happy to have air power tools come along to do this part of the job.

“We build to customer specs,” said Wadsworth, “We have never lost our focus on quality and the custom products lobstermen require. We have a reputation for being leaders in the industry because we are innovators.”