Keeping quality in lobsters ashore: How best to hold 'em

First published in Landings, June, 2013.

Millions of pounds of lobster are brought to Maine docks every year by hundreds of hard-working lobstermen. Those lobsters, however, don’t immediately find their way to a customer’s plate or a processor’s plant. In fact, most lobsters are stored for some period of time before reaching their ultimate destination. Those storage facilities range from the simple to the sophisticated but each has one goal: to keep the lobsters as healthy and vigorous as possible.

Perhaps the best known lobster storage technique is the tidal lobster pound. A tidal pound is an enclosure built in a natural bay or cove through which the tide passes easily. Lobsters are kept in the pound where they eat what the tide brings them or feed provided by the pound owner. Years ago most lobsters were stored in tidal pounds, then shipped as needed to customers. Years ago, however, lobster harvests in Maine hovered in the low millions, never coming near the 126 million pounds landed last year. With the increase in landings, buyers have had to expand their ability to keep unheralded volumes of lobsters.

Hugh Reynolds, owner of Greenhead Lobster in Stonington, remains a strong proponent of lobster pounds. While the company has a large short-term holding facility in Kittery, Greenhead stores most of its lobster in tidal pounds. “It’s the only way to store them for the winter,” Reynolds said. He can keep 200,000 pounds of lobster in his pound at one time. Depending on the temperature of the seawater, he might set up aeration devices to keep dissolved oxygen levels high. “I do think it’s the only way to do it,” he continued. “They need to eat into order to maintain good quality. If you want a lobster in March, it must be from a pound.”

Dorr Lobster Company in Milbridge also keeps its lobster in pounds as well as in an indoor tank, enabling the company to store 130,000 pounds of lobster at any one time. “Each serves a different purpose,” Chad Dorr explained, referring to his pounds and indoor tank. “We use the indoor tank to grade the lobsters and store them for the short term. Basically the tank makes them hardier and ready for shipping.” The lobsters are kept in cold water and not fed while being held in the tank, sending them into a type of hibernation. The lobsters in the tidal pound, on the other hand, are fed. “We stock the pound in order to supply our customers in the winter,” Dorr continued. “You feed them and build them up but you have to be diligent. You can lose a lot in a pound.”

Garbo Lobster of Connecticut operates a tidal pound in Hancock, Maine, another in Dipper Harbor, New Brunswick, and a huge indoor storage facility in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia. Manager Pete Daley underscores the continuing need for tidal lobster pounds while emphasizing the complimentary need for high-tech holding facilities as well. “Pounds are basically inventory control. You also need them simply to store lobsters, when other factors that you don’t have any control over like Mother Nature or the market come into play,” he said. He keeps three divers on staff to constantly monitor the conditions in the Hancock pound. Gaffkemia or red tail disease is a problem when the water grows warmer in the summer, but Daley explained that medicated feed generally keeps the disease under control.

Garbo Lobster can store 500,000 pounds of lobster in its Hancock pound and another 300,000 pounds in New Brunswick. The function of the Yarmouth facility is to grade, sort, and cull the lobsters before shipping. “Also in November and December Maine isn’t a source of supply because lobstermen are bringing their traps in,” Daley continued. “But you have the Christmas and New Year’s markets to meet and southwest Nova Scotia is where the lobsters are coming from at that time.” The Yarmouth facility is a “closed” plant, which means that all environmental elements are controlled. “We recycle the water and chill it to about 38 to 40^o F. After grading for size, the lobsters are kept in trays until shipped,” Daley explained.

Keeping lobsters alive and in good health in an indoor facility has become a sophisticated engineering feat. Ron Doane, of Atlantic Sea Tanks in Trenton, calls the lobster holding tanks his company installs “closed biologically correct systems.” “We design, install and inspect tanks,” he explained. “Anything from a 300 gallon to a 100,000 gallon system we put in in South Thomaston.”

His tanks are a blend of natural products and stainless steel. The huge tanks use aerobic and anaerobic filters to keep recycled seawater clean and its Ph levels balanced. The 100,000 gallon tank uses a dolomite (a form of limestone) filter 66 feet long by 25 feet wide and 6 inches deep to filter ammonia from the water. Filter pads are set on top of the dolomite and replaced as needed.

“You need one pound of filtration rock per one pound of lobster. We run 660 gallons of water per minute. If you see diminished flow, then it’s time to change the filters,” Doane said. Other water filters include bags of crushed coral. “This is the first agent on to which bacteria will attach,” he continued. Those bacteria in turn feed on the ammonia excreted into the water by the stored lobster.

In addition, Atlantic Sea Tanks recently installed a spray system for a lobster company in Owls Head. The system uses 84 spray nozzles to keep an entire tractor trailor-load of lobsters constantly covered with water. “It can do up to 1,200 gallons of water a minute. Each one of the nozzles cost $5,000 a piece and comes with its own computer so you can vary the rate of spray,” Doane said. “It’s quite a system.”

The goal of any lobster storage system is straightforward: to keep the lobster alive and well until shipped. Many buyers admit, however, that the quality of the lobster when it first comes off the boat influences greatly the quality of the lobster when stored. “We all have problem with shrinkage,” Daley said. “Handling can ruin crates of lobsters.”

One of the problems faced by buyers is the common practice of storing lobsters in crates overnight or longer off the wharf once they are taken off the boats. If many lobstermen offload large numbers of lobsters at the same time, say in the middle of summer, and those lobsters are crated up and held in a harbor with less than vigorous water flow, the lobsters’ quality will suffer. “You’ve got harbors with not much flow and lots of crates there and that takes the oxygen out of the water,” Daley explained. “That makes a weak lobster.”

“As a buyer my job is to minimize risk after I procure the lobsters. That means I have tanks with aeration so they get enough oxygen, I teach my crew how to handle the lobsters, we stack them on pallets to move in the trucks, we try to minimize stress during transport.”