One Fisherman’s Take on Bait

by Sandra Dinsmore

Since 1966, when he started, Rockport, Mass., lobster fisherman and trap designer and builder Bob Morris has analyzed every aspect of how he earns his living and how to do it better and more efficiently. If there were a course on lobstering, Morris could teach it.

“When it comes to bait,” he said recently, “I’ve used moose, deer, cows, turkey, squirrel, hogs, sheep, herring, mackerel, codfish, pogies, redfish, and haddock.” To hang his bait, Morris has used bags, spikes, strings, wire cages, flea bags, and hooks. “I put a huge emphasis on how a trap is baited,” he said.

Baiting needs change from day to day, according to Morris, who said, “You can go from an area where a herring would last on a string or a hook for three nights, then move two fathoms down, and it won’t last an hour because there are different animals at different depths.” As an example, he said that sometimes, when a trap goes off the bottom, off the rocky ledge, it might end up in sand fleas which, Morris said, “tear a bait down in no time.” For this fisherman, “There’s no perfect scenario for bait” but, “if a fisherman chooses to have one bait bag or one system of bait and to go with that all the time, I have little doubt that part of that time, he’s not being as effective as he could be. Period.” If the fisherman is setting one bait bag, and it’s a large mesh bag that’s not holding bait long enough to fish, Morris said it can’t be good if the trap is spending some of its set unbaited. If he’s got small mesh bags, when the bait is not flowing very well, then it’s not going to flow enough to effectively attract bugs. In fact, because Morris has seen the results of his tests himself, he said that until he goes to his grave, he will disagree with any fisherman who says his way is the best way and that fishermen need only one way to bait their traps.

Part of the reason Morris has put so much effort into his trap designs is because he said he doesn’t want to make working with bait a misery, but at the same time wants the best possible offering down there. With his system, he sees how a certain method fishes, then time-tests it. He wants to make sure that every time a trap slides off his stern, when it lands on the bottom, it’s down there in the proper mode, the mode that’s going to maximize his ability to catch lobsters. “That’s my mission,” Morris said. “I take it very, very seriously.” He added, “If I were hunting deer, I’d be out at the shooting range, two days before the opening of the season sighting my rifle. That’s the exact way I look at a lobster trap. I want this thing working perfectly and under all conditions.” He added, “I will state openly that I have had my share of failures as well in my testing, but as the saying goes, ‘Try nothing, learn nothing.’”

Part of Morris’s plan is to have whatever bait he is using to chum out from the trap, establishing a good perimeter and attracting lobsters to the nucleus of that source. Back when he was devoted to earning all his money from lobstering, he fished with a crew and ran a larger gang of traps. Now with a bum shoulder and ticker, he uses what he learned in those hard fishing years to design and build his traps. In the summer, he closes his trap shop and fishes alone inshore. (Morris does not accept orders for his traps. He builds them in the off-season and sells them to friends and customers who show up to buy them. Had he taken orders when he closed last spring, he would have had orders for over 5,000 traps. His methods really work. His traps are widely used locally.)

Morris has been using animal hides for bait for 25 years and said they are becoming more popular in his area each year.

When he uses hides, he starts one on a 15-inch aluminum bait spike bent into a U-shape. (The hook with its sharpened tip comes with the traps he builds. He noted that most of his customers use the U hook now at some point during the year.) He made a double-edged stiletto-type knife to penetrate the three-inch-thick cowhides. He pops a hole in the hide and slides it down the hook so all the hairs will wash off out in the open. He said, “If you went right into a bag with it, it could, under some conditions, take longer to break down and not leach out as well.

“I start it out in the open current and let it wash clean. Then when all the hair is gone, I will fish it as long as we can on this hook. When it’s so soft it’s like Fluffernutter, it’s still a great attractor for lobsters, but I don’t want to lose it; the next haul, it might be gone. That’s when I slide it off the hook, bag it, and put it on a bait string between the side heads while a new hide goes on the hook.”

The minute that now-white and Fluffernutter-soft hide hits bottom, the trap needs no time for any bait to re-hydrate or season and will fish right away. Morris said when he hauls back there will be 1 1/2-inch white threads leaching off that seasoned bait visible in the water.

“When I haul a lobster trap and look over the rail,” he said, “I want to see a trail of bait particles coming behind it. That’s telling me up at the surface that when the trap hits bottom, I have a wide perimeter of attractant away from the source. I want the lobsters to come back to that source.” He added, “Of course, none of this matters when you fish in an area with an overabundance of lobsters, but if you happen to fish in a geographic area where things really count at times, then I believe you can increase your take by being particular.”

Over the years, Morris said, he devised a way for the trap to have bait on it that would fish as soon as the trap hit bottom so the bait would leach out as he wanted it to the entire duration of the set until he hauled: If he saw a third of the bait left when he was hauling, he knew two-thirds of the bait was leaching out from the trap while it sat on the ocean floor. That was his goal. But he insisted, “I would not suggest for a minute that what I am saying is ‘right’ or the only way to do things. It is simply one example of what I did to increase my trapping effectiveness.”