Last Updated on January 28, 2025
Curt:. . There’s not a much cooler way to grow up as a kid than going out on the boat and hauling. Your own traps and really getting that instant gratification and being able to spend time out on the water and see pretty magical things every single day, no two days out on the water, wherever the same new, no two traps coming up, whether you were an eight year old or a 40 year old are ever the same. And that’s really the magic of lobstering right there. Um, it was like to explain it, John and Brendan. Out in the boat. We’re always more interested in where the lobsters were going after we caught them kind of the lobster market side of things. I was always much more interested in where the lobsters were coming under the ocean surface. Kind of the Marine biology side of things. So that’s kind of where my passion lies and I was able to translate that after college went down, not too far from it, we were over at a union college out in Schenectady, New York. Um, but after four years of college, I couldn’t get there back to me soon enough. And, uh, I have degrees in history and biology there, and then wanted to get back to Maine and study Marine biology. University of Maine has a really great Marine lab in Dan SCADA. Really cool dual degree master’s program in Marine biology and Marine policy. So after college, I was able to start that program. Start a career in Marine biology, continue lobstering throughout that actually brought a skiff up to you. Maine’s Marine lab. Uh, right on the dam of Scott river. And it was, it was kind of fun to explore a new area of lobstering. Unfortunately, I had to follow all the university protocols, so I had a tiny little skiff that actually used to be Johnny that he. He named the tiger shark and painted like bloody teeth on the bowel of it. It was an ugly boat to wear a life jacket. The whole time I was out there, like a big university life jacket. And I went up to all the lobstermen in the area and just introduce myself and say, Hey, I’m not here to steal any lobsters from you. I’m just a student down the road. I’d always heard. That was a really territorial area that guy’s lost traps there all the time. But. I never lost a single trap that all time, the whole three years I fish traps in the Denver Scott river. I didn’t lose a trap the whole time. And I’m convinced it was because they felt sorry for me because I was calling trashed by hand out of a little skip and wearing a light jacket. They probably thought I was challenged, but ultimately, um, after graduate school, I worked at the Gulf of Maine research Institute for about nine years. And about six years ago. John and Brendan and I started a conversation about starting a research program at ready seafood focused solely on lobster and on two main priorities, quality and sustainability. I mean, if you think of the amount of R and D that goes into beef or pork or dairy in industries that you’re very familiar with, it’s astronomical, but when you’re talking fisheries, it’s next to nothing. So we saw potential on that front, but also on the sustainability side of things. The lobster, the lobster industry has a long history of sustainable practices, but we felt that we could do more as a company to help improve our overall understanding of the resource, especially at very early life stages so that we could not necessarily predict what’s coming down the pipeline years in advance, but have a better understanding of our resource overall so that we could make better decisions as a business and as a state. As to the future of our industry. So we’ve been working for the past six years on a collaborative research project with the university of Maine. To assess the distribution and abundance of one month old officers up and down the coast of Maine out in the wild. I actually should be out in the boat right now with the humane team setting out these collectors that we use to, uh, to assess that distribution in abundance. But it was, it was thick fog this morning, as I’m sure you saw your window. And it was also a little breezy, so we’re going to hold off till tomorrow. So this actually worked out really well. But it’s a really unique example of an industry, science, collaboration, working together to improve our understanding of our resource. It just doesn’t happen in our industry, traditionally industry and science butt heads. And we’re tying to. Change that, and really go that bridge between industry and science, because I think both stand a lot, stand to learn a lot from each other’s experiences. So we were the first in our industry to commit to sustainability as a business. We were the first to have an onsite Marine biologist. And over the last six years, we’ve developed a pretty. Substantial research program, collaborating with local universities throughout the state, some of the top lobster scientists in the world. And it’s been, it’s been a lot of fun. Um, and I think it’s opened people’s eyes to the potential. Nice.
So what does sustainability mean in the lobstering industry? I think it’s, to me, sustainability means leaving more than you take so that ultimately, as Brennan explained, and as I explained, we had a really unique. Childhood a very, very unique way of growing up. And what’s most important to me about sustainability is ensuring that the new, the next generation of kids growing up along the Maine coast has that exact same opportunity. If not more of an opportunity. I think we see that as our responsibility, as a business, as a big lobster of company here in Maine, that started out from very humble beginnings. Is to ensure that that next generation has those same opportunities. If not more ensuring that the lobster population is going to be there doing our best as a company to ensure that markets are going to be there for those lobsters, sustainability can get complicated. But ultimately when it’s boiled down, you have to leave more than you take to ensure a future for not only the next generation of lobsters, but lobster harvesters. So there’s that like the one month, uh, tracking project, like how does that fit into that? Like how does that fit into that story? The state of Maine does a very good job means. Department of Marine resources does a very good job monitoring lobster. The population’s up and down the coast at different life stages, they have a ventless trap survey to monitor juvenile lobsters. They do a sea sampling program where they go out on commercial vessels and measure every single lobster that comes up in the traps of these vessels. I still lobster I’ve in my own boat, about 500 traps and every year I’ll take sea samplers out of my boat as part of that program. Mmm. But that kind of black box in terms of our understanding of the lobster resource, is that really, really early life stinks. I mean, lobster is after they hatched in the first month of their lifecycle at the surface of the ocean going through four different larval stages. And after about a month, they settled down to the bottom of the ocean. They’ll actually do test dive down to the bottom of the ocean. And what they’re looking for those test dives is suitable habitat. And you can imagine if you’re a lobster, the size of a thumbnail. Suitable habitat is anything you can hide on here. That’s the limiting resource for them is habitat. So once they find out rock that they can hide under, they’ll spend the first year or two of their life under that same rock. So they’re really hard to sample at that age. And that was really the black box in terms of our understanding of the lobster resource. So we’ve developed a way to sample them at that size. And essentially we designed baby lobster traps and instead of using vape, Like we do for adult officers to get them in traps. We use habitat, we throw cages full of rocks. This is past Saturday in the 90 degrees. He’d already seafood team. And new main team spent about six hours at the rock piles, filling in cages, full of rocks so that we could get this project going for the six years in a row. And essentially these cages go out, up and down the coast and I can send you associated literature pictures from this project. But what we do is we set out these basically habitat collectors. Every June, we come back October, haul them up, go through all the rocks, measure, all the associated Fonda that’s in there. And record the data and it gives us a good sense of how that young of the year, the population that newly recruited population of baby lobsters is doing year in and year out so that we can know if there’s going to be a banner year coming five to eight years down the road, or if we need to tweak management a little bit, um, you know, it’s just, it’s just a good early indicator kind of Canary in the coal mine. Indicator of what our resource is doing, how it’s doing overall to give you how it ties in. Um, you know, one of our values at ready seafood is let’s think about tomorrow, not just today. And that’s been the driver since, you know, Kurt night, Jack, we were kids living up here. And when I stayed, we were spoiled. We’re spoiling, growing up with what I call the perfect childhood, because we learned that our jobs were a way of life, not a place where I had to punch in with a time clock. That’s really rare and really special. You guys probably see it in the farmers that you work with and the same values that was uni. What we found second nature in our industry was. We were throwing back more than, than we were catching, just because of sustainable manner, which we use a trap fishery. And the way that the industry is set up in regards to standards of what size you can keep, how you have to be Nazi X lobsters. Nobody told us when we were seven years, eight years old, nine years, 10 years old that you had to do that. It just became a way that you did it because of the right thing, because. You learn, that’s what everybody else was abiding by. Cause they were thinking about tomorrow now as the company is we’ve grown, we’ve learned we’ve kind of room or into a, a larger company. Those values are really simple. If you just think about tomorrow, as much as today and you realize, wow, well, we throw away back in the ocean is just as important. If not more important about what we catch today. Hertz, right. Our mission is we need to provide our customers, our team members and our harvesters in the state of Maine, the same opportunities that we have as kids. If you’re not. That means access to the best tasting lobster for our customer around the world. So they can enjoy what we enjoy to that. I mean, as far our employees a safe, great place to work and for the harvesters who are catching these lobsters markets and the ability to make sure that that resource on the bomb dealers remains stable so their kids can do it. The tying in messages, there is no sustainability without education. You can’t become sustainable unless you know exactly what’s going on in the bottom of the honesty within your resource. So you can make the right decisions. So you can teach the next generation of students, kids, chefs, consumers, out there what’s really happening. And I think what’s unique where it correlates to the program we put in the program that we put in place. When Kurt was working on this program where the URC of Maine, it was first funded through a sea grant program where it was a grant program that you made. Um, and dr. Rick came up with a plan to say, you know, sustainability is great, but we need more education about our resource to make the right decisions, to teach people, to do the right thing. Um, and for two years with funding and Kurt came to us about three, four years ago now and said, Hey, the funding’s running out, but I think this is what needs to be done to create a sustainable approach for the next generation of harvesters customers. Um, and what we did is we said, all right, we’re going to fund it. So from three years ago, um, within a five year plan, we’re expected to put almost a quarter million dollars into this program. That ready shoot that is funding through the sales of our products, to people like butcher box with the proper, to going back so that we can get interns students all across Maine at university of Maine to understand what we’re doing and why. And we’re also bringing this to all the harvesters up and down the coast of Maine to actually teach the students in every middle school, up and down the coast. Kurt actually goes to and explains why we’re doing this, why we’re studying so that if these kids in seventh, it used to be a lobster man. Well, we got to know what’s going on on the bottom of the ocean so we can make, make the right choices as an industry to keep it sustainable. All the practices we do in regards to the handling, to the catching, to the sizes. Those have been in place for a hundred plus years. These are, these are written rules, but they’re unwritten on the boat. You being here in maintenance, it’s a comradery group of 6,000 individual men and women in the state of Maine go lobstering that love what they do. It’s hard work. I think what’s unique with our company is. We just don’t want to think about that today. We have kids now and I want them to do just what we did and have the same opportunity until we have that education, that data. So people can make the right decisions to keep the sustainable practices and, you know, you kind of be lost. So that’s the part on sustainability, which is unique is that education piece of feeling people what’s really happening on the bottom. The last piece, I’ll say in regards to. How we got here and kind of this piece at the end of the day, you gotta factor it is it truly is where, when you’re a kid or even if you’re 40 years old, it’s still magic to be out in the water. It’s still, there’s no difference. When I go out, a Kirk goes out and you Hala trap up in the water. I still feel like I’m a 10 year old kid. When I’m out on the boat every day, you’re hauling up something. I’m a Bali ocean. And it’s different. It’s like opening Christmas presents 365 days a year. And you also, as you get older, you realize all the hard work and energy that goes in to that fine specimen of a lobster that comes up on bottom of the ocean. And as you get older, you realize that energy and effort that goes into it. And as our roles grow, as lobstermen and members are ready, seafood. It becomes more of a responsibility to educate the customers and B how do we make sure that whatever we sell to people across this country literally tastes exactly like Kurt. And I caught it in our traps, cooked in our kitchen and served it to that night. That has to be in the forefront of all of our minds every single day we come to work. So just to put a quick emphasis on that after two years, C grant funding ready? Seafood became the first private company to fund public lobster research, not just to improve, we’re standing as a company, but to improve everyone’s understanding so we could better manage the resource. After about two years of the project, we realized that the education component was going to be really important. This past school year, we reached over 800 school kids along Maine’s coast. After everything went sideways, we’d made the transition to remote learning and it almost made our outreach program even more effective because we could get to two or three different classrooms from. Swan’s Island too, you know, bass Harbor over the course of a single day. So the goal of that outreach Graham is really to show kids how it’s can be local, relevant and fun. These communities thrive on lobster and they’re there because of the lobster in communities. So we can use lobster as a vessel to show kids how science can be really fun, exciting, and bright in their own backyard. With remote learning. We’ve actually given schools, some of our collectors, so they can design their own experiment, augment our data set and do their own science experiment all through the lens of a lobster. So education science and outreach are three of the pillars that we really thrive on. That’s something that nobody else in our industry is even thought of doing. So it’s been a lot of fun.
Cool. That’s um, okay. That’s great. What about, uh, like you mentioned, um, not wanting your, um, like you thinking about putting your kids on the boat, like, what are you think about family in terms of like the next generation, but also like, like why? Like what, like what you like, what is like, uh, you know, what are some of the sketchy or experiences you’ve had out there? Uh, how many boats have been flipped over friends? Yeah, I say that because as a parent now, I worry about everything. That’s all I think about are my kids. And I worry every single. So the thought of my kids, I have literally a two and a half year old, this six month old. And my brother has a little one going into freshman year and he’s out on the boat now, lobstering for the first time. And I find myself watching them when I’m home with like, with all that, because anything can happen out in the boat. The fact that as you’re out there and usually alone, It’s easy to get stuck in the rope, go overboard. Um, accidents happen. Now. I say I would never my kids out there because I just cringed. Yeah. The thought of my kids being alone anywhere without my supervision. The reality is that trust in this industry, if you go coast-wide, you’re going to find ten-year-olds on the boat by themselves. Yeah. Every worker goes to Maine because they were brought up this way. They were taught and they were learned to respect the ocean, the power that it has until there’s trust involved. They’re not just putting out there. So I want my kids have the, hear you, if they want to become a lobster, you want to be there. Meaning I want to make sure there’s lobsters on the bottom of the ocean. I don’t want to make sure there’s customers there who want to consume our product. That’s right. That fear of just, you know, My grandparents watching me and the 10 year old out on the boat. I just can’t imagine it. I’m sperm. My kids get to 10 and they’ve been out there for the past five years. Maybe I’ll, I’ll be able to accept it. I’m just thinking it’s a dad right now in regards to every year, you’re going to see fishermen that are going to either fall overboard when they’re lobstering get stuck in the rope. Um, Boats, getting hit slipped by ways. Kirk can give you an experience and her Kurt’s lucky to be alive. Literally he should be dead, but he’s not, he can give his explanation, but no, there all sorts a powerful thing. And it’s dangerous out there where he’s men and women do every single day and Kirk shed light on it. But that was my reason of giving for the kids. I want them to be out there. Yeah. Yeah.
Every day, when you on tie that boat from the dock. There’s a level of uncertainty that goes along with what we do. And there’s no doubt about that. I think it was, I know it was September 12, 2006, six. I don’t think I’ll ever forget that particular date. So on the boat perfectly calm day, there was a hurricane that had gone by way off shore. So there were big swells, but literally not a breath of wind. And then all of a sudden, two swells back to back, kind of just swamp. My stern flipped my boat over and within 15 seconds of everything being normal, I was in the water struggling. Let me get my boots off when oil skins off, because it’s not an easy task when you’re submerged under water, my boat was upside down and I figured I’d swim to shore. And I remember my initial concern upon getting in the water was. Cause I was just a Coldwell over from our grandparents’ house. Oh shit. Nana’s is going to be pissed off. That’s what went right through my head initially 45 minutes later. Well, I should say five minutes later after I figured I’d just swim to shore. Oh, swimming hard for five minutes and getting absolutely nowhere. It kind of dawned on me that this isn’t a very good situation because I was only about a hundred yards from shore, but the current in that Cove always goes out for some reason. So my next thought was okay, where’s the buoy. I can hold on to the hold myself up and hopefully catch my breath and puke up all the salt water. I just swallow. Luckily I grabbed onto a buoy. It was for me to the end of this table and it was all I could do just to get to that. Hung onto it. It was enough to keep me up. And like I said, catch my breath, puke my guts out and kind of just regained my sentence. Another boy, closer to shore again, the same distance, not that far, but it was all I could do to get to that brewery. Do the same thing all over again. I made it to a third brewery and realize they’re right chance in hell. I’m going to make it on my own to shore. And after about five minutes of hanging on to that, boy, I literally took the rope on that boy and tied it around my arm. So that at least they’d be able to find my body because there was no one around waves crashing on shore and no one was going to like, you don’t want to, was going to see me. And I wasn’t going to make it to shore by myself. Crazy enough, someone, another cobalt or saw my boat upside down and it floated around the point and had the presence of mind to call the proper authorities and then realize, okay, that’s not a good situation, probably about 45 minutes into being in the water. I remember looking up towards the shore and seeing someone. Onshore waving. And I remember waving bye arm and seeing them wave back. And I can tell you, there’s not a feeling like that in the entire world, that recognition where you think it’s the end and you just realize, okay, someone sees me and knows the situation I’m in. They sent a boat. The local water rescue team sent the boat out, grabbed me, brought me to shore. There was an ambulance waiting right there and the nurses and doctors, I literally stripped my clothes off faster than anyone has taken clothes off of me in my entire life. That’s a joke I’d like to tell us. They took my body temperature right there in the ambulance. My core body temperature was 86 degrees. Wow. No. I was very fortunate that that was September and not November, December or March, because Brendan’s absolutely right. There’s not a chance in hell. I would have made it if it wasn’t the warmest water temperature time of year, that being said two days later. So in someone else’s boat catching up on hauling my trash, because there’s nowhere else that I would want to be then right there, out on that water. And that’s the culture that we’re apart. You are a part of a community here in Maine of people that respect the ocean treated gently, but also treated sustainable. Totally. And what’s unique about our industry is you go to any Harbor up and down the coast of Maine, and there’s going to be ten-year-olds going out and skips and hauling traps by hand. There’s no other fishery in the world like that, where you learn sustainability, Severens how to run a business. Had a very, very young age. And that’s what I love about our industry. More than anything, I have probably six or seven apprentices working under me right now who are middle school and high school. And I think that’s the coolest thing in the entire world. there’s not a better way to learn the right thing than to learn that at a very young age. And that’s what we have here. And that’s, what’s super cool about what we do.
Dennis Keohane is a writer, editor, and former Editorial Director for ButcherBox with a passion for storytelling and food. Combining his love for high-quality ingredients with engaging narratives, he crafts content that inspires home cooks to explore new flavors, techniques, and the joy of cooking.
