- If there's one thing that Maine is known for,
it is lobster from the cold, clean, rocky shores.
(lobsters clattering)
In an average week we are processing,
I would say anywhere
between five and 600,000 pounds of lobster.
(lobsters clattering)
It's always grounding to remember
that those lobsters you're catching
sometime within the next week
will be someone's dinner somewhere around the world.
(gentle upbeat music)
We're gonna haul some traps round Portland Head Light,
but the majority of my traps are out here,
out behind Richmond Island,
which is off the coast of Cape Elizabeth.
So the first thing we do every morning
is grab our fill of dead fish to put in the traps.
This is like the gas station stop.
Most of my money on a daily basis lobstering
is spent on dead fish.
This is a pogy or a menhaden.
Lobster is the economic driver of the coast of Maine.
Communities rely on this fishery for their survival.
Without the lobster fishery,
Maine would be a very different place.
(bright music)
Right here, we have John Leavitt, my helper for the day.
Nobody sells more lobsters around the world
than this guy right here.
These fish are actually used
for production of fish oil sometimes,
and that oil is what the lobsters smell
and sense underwater.
That's what attracts them into the trap.
- The stinkier the better, as Curt says.
We're gonna catch a lot of lobsters with these.
(upbeat music)
- So they smell and see the bait in the trap
and they crawl in through these two side heads right here.
It's difficult for them to get back out,
and this is a requirement on all traps
is to have a biodegradable escape vent.
Traps are designed to let juvenile lobsters
and other critters, whether they're crabs or fish,
right out of the trap right there.
(upbeat music)
Everybody has their own buoy colors,
and that's how we identify whose traps are whose.
These are my buoy colors right here,
green and kind of a tan color.
We are in 20 feet of water.
We're gonna see what we catch out of this trap.
All right.
So here we have two lobsters, a male and a female.
Females grow wider tails to hold more eggs.
Males, they put more energy into bigger, stronger claws.
This right here is a crusher claw,
and then its ripper or pincher claw right here
has much sharper teeth.
That is designed for kind of tearing the flesh
of those same clams and muscles.
What she's doing is breathing right now, blowing bubbles.
Lobsters also can pee out of their faces.
There'll be two streams of water
that it shoots right at you.
That's what they do in the wild
to kind of establish dominance.
So two male lobsters
will end up just literally getting in a pissing contest.
This is our measuring gauge.
In Maine, the minimum size for a lobster
is 3 1/4 carapace length.
We take this tool, start right behind the lobster's eye.
And if it were to touch the carapace of the lobster,
it would be legal size.
This one goes past the carapace,
so she goes back into the ocean.
And the minimum size is designed here in the state of Maine
so that by the time they've reached 3 1/4 carapace length,
they've had the opportunity to breed
for at least one or two years.
So this one right here, legal-sized.
That's a nice pound and a half male lobster right there.
Oh, finally.
Four, if we're doing four lobsters out of a trap,
it's about five pounds of trap.
It's a really good average for the day around here.
So then we take our bander and our main wedding band,
take the bander, put it over the claw just like that,
twist, pull, and it goes on just like that.
I get bit all the time,
and honestly it's the smaller lobsters
that you gotta watch out for.
They use like a ratcheting pressure too,
so it kind of pulses.
Not a good feeling.
So Ready Seafood
is a company that was founded by my cousins,
John and Brendan.
We grew up on the coast of Cape Elizabeth
starting at a very young age catching lobsters,
but I can assure you it's something you have to love
if you are gonna do this for a living.
So this is a female lobster with about 10,000 eggs.
So obviously, when we catch a female with eggs,
we have to throw back into the ocean.
But before we do, we're required to cut a notch
into this tail flipper right here,
and that signifies she's a proven breeder.
So if she's ever caught again by another harvester,
even if she doesn't have eggs but she has that notch,
she's illegal to keep.
So we're gonna do this quick,
and you can see that notch in her tail right there.
And female lobsters will release anywhere from 10,000
to over 100,000 eggs,
mostly depending on their size.
(bright music)
This is actually the shell of a molted lobster right here.
Molting is the process by which a lobster grows.
Imagine if we had to shed all of our bones every year
in order to grow.
That's what every single lobster does.
When this part of the carapace of the lobster splits
and a lobster will actually back out of its old carapace,
out of its old claws,
and it will pull right out
and start over with a very soft, new, bigger shell.
This right here is a baby lobster,
probably one or two years old at this point in time.
It takes a lobster five to eight years to reach legal size.
Two to three years old right here,
probably six or seven years old right here.
So the baby is gonna go back into the ocean,
find a nice hiding spot,
and we'll see you in three or four years.
- [John] That's right. - Go back.
Ooh, crab infestation.
They get to the bait very quickly.
Last trap of the day right here.
We're gonna set this one back,
head for the barn, and unload our lobsters.
This is a generational fishery.
So much of what I learned, I learned from my father.
Really, the key to that is maintaining a sustainable fishery
to ensure that
not only will there be a next generation of lobsters,
but a next generation of lobster harvesters.
Overall today, we hauled about 30, 35 traps
and probably have 40, 45 pounds.
So much of what we do is ensuring that a lobster stays alive
from when it is harvested,
right up until it greets that pot of boiling water.
We have two holding tanks,
each capable of holding about 100,000 pounds
of live lobster.
These holding tanks are kept at 40 degrees,
so by holding them in cold water,
we are preparing them for their journey
by bringing their metabolism down,
by bringing their oxygen consumption down,
brings their stress level down.
This is the first stage right here.
This is our purge tank.
So lobsters come here,
immediately go into this tank for 12 to 24 hours.
So in this facility right now,
we have about 150,000 pounds of lobster.
(pensive music)
These lobsters here have a little bit of a softer shell.
So these lobsters in this crate, in this row right here,
their next step is our processing facility.
(bright music)
So once the lobsters reach our processing plant,
kind of the first step in their journey
is on a conveyor and through our stunner.
(bright music)
And a stunner is designed specifically
for killing lobsters humanely.
Essentially, it sends an electrical charge
through the lobster
and kills them instantly.
(lobsters clattering)
So after the lobsters have been stunned,
they're broken down right here.
Tails go in one direction,
claws and knuckles and bodies and legs
go up this conveyor right here into our steam cooker.
(bright music)
So this fun piece of equipment here is weighing
and separating our raw in-shell lobster tails by weight.
So there are sensors in that conveyor
that actually weigh each individual tail.
Depending on that weight,
they get shunted off into one of these totes
and then sent over here to get frozen.
(bright music)
They enter our nitrogen tunnel right here.
So this is essentially a pizza cooker
on the other side of the temperature spectrum.
(nitrogen tunnel whirring)
This is probably the highest-quality way
you can freeze a lobster tail.
It maintains the quality of the protein, they get a glaze,
and they are frozen solid and ready to transport.
This piece of equipment is registered as a bomb
with the city of Saco.
So we're talking insane pressure.
We can go from zero to 45,000 PSI in about 90 seconds.
That pressure kills all those bugs
associated with breaking food down.
When you put lobsters in there,
that pressure separates the meat from the shell,
so we can produce our cold-cracked raw lobster meat.
(upbeat percussion music)
The machine actually separates the meat from the shell,
so that when we get it here,
you can see that meat literally just falls
right out of the shell.
(upbeat percussion music)
If you ask me that personally,
I love the claw and knuckle meat,
and tender, and briny, and really just absolutely delicious.
(upbeat music)
This right here is our steam cooker.
It's about the size of a subway train.
The temperature inside is constant,
different products are brought through at different speeds,
(upbeat music)
and then they enter this chill tank right here,
which is 38-degree water
and essentially stops the cooking process.
(upbeat music)
Those bodies and legs go on our mince line
where we produce minced lobster meat.
(upbeat music)
(lobsters clattering)
And then the rest of this line right here
is all team members picking claw and knuckle meat.
It goes through two levels of quality control
where every single piece of meat is picked over,
and make sure that there are no little pieces
of shell or cartilage.
(pensive music)
We have a great machine here that enables us
to utilize more of the lobster on a daily basis.
All that body meat and a lot of that leg meat
and meat that gets stuck on the shell after it's been picked
would just go into the waste stream.
And with this,
we're able to produce 10,000 plus pounds every day
of minced lobster meat
that otherwise would be a waste stream.
It's 100% lobster meat,
so you can use it in anything from ravioli,
to arancini, to lobster egg rolls.
(lobster shells clattering)
So this is one of the coolest parts of our plant in my mind.
And these shells are full of amazing minerals, compounds,
all kinds of good stuff.
My goal in the next 10 years is to turn these shells
into the most valuable part of this plant.
They are full of chitin and chitosan,
and other mineral components that have real value.
That chitin and chitosan is antibacterial.
It can act as a biopesticide, it can act as a biofertilizer.
We're working with scientists
looking to develop rechargeable batteries
from the chitin and chitosan in our lobster shells.
So everything that we produce on a daily basis
that is gonna be sold fresh
is packaged, weighed, sealed,
but nothing leaves here for two days.
We send samples from each lot of lobsters
that we produce out to a third-party lab for micro testing.
And until we get those results back
saying that product is okay,
it stays here for food safety reasons.
We're really proud to supply
a lot of local restaurants here in Portland
with their lobster meat.
And so being able to work with chefs
in the culinary side of lobster
is something that we're really proud to do.
- 61 and...
- Eventide is an amazing restaurant.
They take our lobster product
and they put their own spin on it.
- So we receive lobster every morning
and our commissary will poach that meat down there.
And once it's processed,
it comes up in these five-pound bags.
We start by heating up our brown butter sauce.
Get it coated in the butter, a little bit of salt.
The richness of the butter, that nice, nutty flavor,
all of that really just complements the lobster meat well.
It needs a little bit of lemon juice to finish.
Put it in our house-made bao buns finished with chives.
(upbeat music)
It's delicious, well-balanced, definitely nostalgic.
We sell about 700 lobsters rolls a day in the summer.
People come from all over to get them.
(upbeat music)
(indistinct chattering)
Two sandwich, dairy-free buns.
(upbeat music)
- On a daily basis,
you're up early out on the water before the sun comes up.
One of the things that I love most
about being on this planet is being able to untie my boat
and harvest lobsters.
(pensive music)