Sixty Days on the Northumberland Strait

Lobster season on the Hayley & Noah.

The Bayview Wonderer takes on a new adventure as a deckhand on Northumberland Strait lobster boat, the Hayley & Noah.

I took extra care while sipping my coffee this morning.

I’ve done most of my drinking over the years with my dominant hand, but Ol’ Lefty was wrapped around a bag of frozen peas to start the day. The dog snored away on the living room floor as I wondered when the swelling would go down enough to make a fist again.

My grandmother on the Akin side is a left-hander. My dad would’ve been too, but that was swiftly corrected by authority figures who used rulers to enforce their worldview. You know, back when the United States was first getting involved in Vietnam. Back when America was great.

Oh, JJ, some readers will think, why do you have to bring politics into it? I look to Bayview Wonder to escape all that.

Well, some readers, I get it. The whole Nova Scotia move is a form of escapism, right? Leaving a good career as a higher ed administrator at a college I love, leaving Minnesota after a lifetime, moving away from my family for the first time, using wry observation as a tool to positively reframe the emerging understandings of early middle age and related questions of meaning and purpose. That’s the kind of escapism that Bayview Wonder is about. But there’s no escaping politics right now. We need to be uncomfortable with what’s happening and confront it whether we want to or not because politics touches every corner of our lives. Look around, people. It’s bad out there.

Now, I’m probably not the only one in Pictou County, Nova Scotia with a sore hand on Sunday morning. The causes for such circumstances vary—dust-ups outside the bar, busted knuckles from turning a wrench on an engine, maybe even the crack of a ruler from a zealous authoritarian. In my case, it’s from the first week of lobster fishing season on the Northumberland Strait.

Until the end of June, you can find me on the Hayley & Noah, my late father-in-law’s lobster boat. The hired gun running the gear is Captain Eddie Lyons, who you may recall from an eventful trip to Pictou Island last summer. His son Austin and I are serving as crew.

I’d been pestering Eddie since March to let me help prepare for the season, not that I knew what that entailed. I finally ran into him one afternoon in early April when I pulled into my mother-in-law Margo’s driveway. I was there to let out her dogs and catch up on a few emails. He’d taken a half-day from his job at the shipyard and was replacing broken doors on lobster traps before loading them on the trailer. Eddie wiped his brow and lit a cigarette as I walked over. We traded small talk for a few minutes before getting down to business.

“You excited about fishing?” he asked.

I told him I was.

“I got a job for ya,” he said.

Music to my ears. I prepared to put my laptop in the Jeep and roll up my sleeves to start hauling traps. Visions of Popeye forearms danced in my head. But that would have to wait.

“Can you count to fifty-six twice?” he asked.

I promised I could.

“Dig them buoys out of that shed and lay ‘em out from number one to number fifty-six.”

I told him I’d be happy to do that.

“One-one, two-two, like that,” he said.

I nodded.

“Go over the numbers with a permanent marker. I think there’s old ones in the boat.”

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll take care of the buoys. I’ll let you know if I can’t find the markers.”

“If you can’t find markers, just buy new ones,” Eddie said. “Let me know when they’re ready.”

He dropped the cigarette butt and grabbed the new door for his next trap.

Gathering that our conversation was finished, I went to the old shed.

I was pretty confident in my ability to count to a two-digit number, so I figured it’d be a quick job. But by the time I dragged out all 112 buoys, laid them in order, replaced a few broken plastic sticks, and spent an average of 60 seconds marking each one (don’t worry, I timed it to check), it took over three hours. I didn’t realize that this expansion of time would be the case with many fishing-related tasks. More on that later.

Captain Eddie Lyons at the wheel of the Hayley & Noah

The timing for this next chapter of my professional journey worked out perfectly. I wrapped up my work at Gustavus Adolphus College on Friday, April 17 as the college celebrated the inauguration of its new president. I spent that week back in Minnesota, helping out with events and communications before turning in my laptop. I flew back to Nova Scotia the next day and began my fishing preparations in earnest.

Eddie and I spent a couple days together running errands and getting equipment down to the wharf. He was more talkative now that we were almost ready. Quite talkative, in fact. There were plenty of things still on his mind, of course, but it seemed to me that the excitement of fishing was finally outweighing the stress of preparing for the season.

Last Sunday, we loaded the first set of traps on the boat. We hit the water on Monday morning when the season in Lobster Fishing Area (LFA) 26A officially began at 6 a.m. Fishing families and local residents lined the wharf as the fleet sailed into the Northumberland Strait. Monday’s work was taking three trips from the wharf to place our 280 traps on the ocean bottom between Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island. As we sailed out for the first day of fishing on Tuesday, I took a quiet moment on the back of the boat to reflect on everything that led to this—the coincidences, experiences, love, loss, timing, luck, and so much more.

Setting day before and after: loaded with traps at the wharf in the morning and all set for fishing by late afternoon.

After squeezing and twisting the banding tool hundreds of times that first day, I woke up to my 3:15 a.m. alarm with a painfully swollen left hand. I mentioned it to Eddie a few hours in when we took a quick pause for breakfast in the cabin.

“Was it all tingly?” he asked.

It was.

“How’s about now?”

“It still hurts, but not so bad since I started using it,” I replied.

Eddie grinned.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “You’ll feel better in a couple weeks.”

In other ways, I already am.

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