 On the cold, clean waters of Maine's rugged rocky coast works the equally rugged Maine lobster bait. His day begins well before the sun rises, preparing his boat for the day's haul. He inventories his equipment, fuels his boat, and loads the boat with the necessary lobster bait in preparation for the long day's work ahead of an open ocean. 80 million pounds of Atlantic herring are caught every year to supply Maine's lobster industry. While the basics of lobstering have remained the same for the past 200 years, there have been many advancements that make the lobstermen more efficient and safer on the water. Modern day marine electronics allow lobstermen to create maps, record the bottom, optimize fuel consumption, monitor all pumps and engines, and to operate the boat in complete fog or darkness with virtually daylight vision. The bait bags and getting ready to make the day easier. I fill them ahead of time. We don't really have to, but I fill like a hundred ahead of time so during the day, you know, in case I get behind, I have a few filled, you know, you put in about three or too little so it don't fit. On average, the 6,000 licensed Maine lobstermen catch 125 million pounds of lobster a year, driving the $460 million industry. Every lobster man in Maine has a unique color and pattern on his buoys that only he is allowed to pull. Once located, the captain hooks his buoy with a gap and feeds the rope into a hydraulic column. Being many miles from shore, he fishes trawls of traps. A trawl is several trapped fish in one line connected with two buoys. This is a federally mandated regulation which reduces the number of vertical buoy lines in the water column to reduce entanglement with waves. Most lobster men are allowed 800 traps in the respective zone. In this particular zone, lobster men are allowed 600 traps. The crew will be fishing 300 traps today. The stern man or first mate removes all lobsters from the trap, separating the shorts by immediately trawling them back into the ocean while keeping anything close to keeper size in the crate behind him for a measurement. It is the second mate's job to remove the old bait bag and replace it with a fresh bait bag and ready the trap for resetting. After the last trap is hauled into each trawl, the captain repositions the boat to where he wants to fish a line of traps. He may be looking for a soft or hard bottom transition, a gravel bar, or a crack or crevice in an underwater ledge he found within the electronics. This is where knowledge and experience separates the successful and the not-so-successful lobsters. As the captain positions the boat with the traps still on board, the first mate measures on either keeps or folds the lobster. Lobsters are measured from the rear of the eye socket to the rear of the body shell. All short lobsters must be released to be caught another day. In Maine there is also an oversized measurement. Any lobsters over a certain size must also be released. The size regulations have been in effect since 1934. When the captain is positioned his boat over the spot he wants to fish, taking this hide and depth into account, he signals the first mate to send the trap overboard. The second mate bans the keeper lobster claws and releases them to the live well below deck before readying more bait nets. The traps are set in reverse to how they were hauled, and the captain steers the boat where he wants the trawl to land on the bottom. Some trawls might be as long as several football fields long. The first mate guides the ropes and traps to prevent any entanglements or traps from going upside down. One of the many dangers of the job is rope entanglement. Getting a foot or limb caught in a deploying rope could be disastrous, and a fisherman could be dragged down to Babydome's locker in a matter of seconds. Since 1872 there has been no harvesting of egg-bearing females to protect the industry. When a lobsterman catches a female with visible eggs, they take a V notch from the same tail fin, which tells other lobsters she is an egg-bearer. She can never be kept with a V in the tail or with an egg visible. It takes roughly seven years for a lobster to reach keeper size in main water. It takes five one-pound lobsters to make one pound of lobster meat. And some cost bandy thing. That's the thing of the past now. Sleek-Aryson, how do you do? Just like that. Somebody's going to be good. Nice, hard shell. Somebody in the world. They're going to bring it into port for you. There it goes now.