The Working Lobster Harbor

For all the fame of its mountains and its millionaires, Bar Harbor has always been, at its core, a working harbor. Down at the town pier, past the sightseeing boats, you will see lobster boats loaded with stacked wooden and wire traps, their buoys painted in the bright, unique color patterns that let each fisherman claim their own gear. Maine leads the entire nation in lobster, hauling in on the order of one hundred million pounds in a good year.

The method has barely changed in a century and a half. Baited traps are dropped to the rocky bottom, marked by a floating buoy, and hauled back up days later to see what has crawled inside. In the eighteen hundreds this coast lived off herring and cod as much as lobster, and lobster was once so plentiful it was often dismissed as poor people's food.

Traps as we know them came along in the middle of the nineteenth century, and lobster pounds, pens for keeping the catch alive, followed. Today lobster is the prize of the coast, and the boats that leave this harbor before dawn are part of a fishing tradition far older than the resort that grew up around it.