Fair winds and lobster traps: Collecting ghost gear in coastal Maine for a clean ocean

Come set sail with us for the first episode of season two! A crew from Ocean Conservancy partners with Rozalia Project to retrieve discarded lobster traps and other ghost gear in the islands of Maine. We hear many sides of the story: Ocean Conservancy’s very own Global Ghost Gear Initiative, Rozalia Project’s mission and world-famous vessel American Promise, all the way to the key moments of our expedition with the lobstering community in Corea, Maine. All aboard!

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Alliyah Lusuegro

Welcome to Fish & US: Climate Stories from the Waterfront. This is a podcast series of recorded interviews and stories about the impacts of climate change on marine fisheries as told by the people who spend their days catching, managing and researching fish from the ocean. Today's episode is a special episode covering multiple perspectives on the topic of abandoned, lost and discarded fishing gear, also known as ghost gear on the Atlantic Coast. I'm Alliyah Lusuegro, and this is a production of Ocean Conservancy. 

Do you ever get those opportunities and think to yourself, “Wow, this, whatever is happening to me right now is probably a once in a lifetime thing.” This is how I felt when I sailed along the coast of Maine with an incredible crew of nine people, including me. We had a mission to retrieve abandoned, lost and discarded fishing gear, mainly lobster traps, in the remote islands of Maine and hundreds of them, in fact, a whopping 4,700 pounds. 

So welcome back. This is Alliyah, as you know, returning for season two of Fish & Us. I'm excited because our first season was wonderful and provided us a lot of foundation for fisheries and how climate change intersects with it.

And in season two, we're here to explore more topics and talk to more cool people. For this episode, I wanted to share the story of this special trip I went on in late June of this year. For five full days, a small but mighty group of us at Ocean Conservancy set out on a sailing and marine debris retrieval expedition with the wonderful crew at Rozalia Project.

What is Rozalia Project? Well, who better to talk about it than its executive director, Ashley Sullivan.

Ashley Sullivan

My name is Ashley Sullivan, and I'm the executive director of the Rozalia Project for a Clean Ocean. I'm also a captain, a sailor, an ocean lover, which I think all those things combined make me an ocean advocate.

Alliyah

How did you get started with your love for your ocean? Like, where's the origin story in that?

Ashley

I was fortunate enough to grow up on an island in Miami in a really magical place called Biscayne Bay. And the island was called Key Biscayne. It's still there. It's this beautiful little island and on the east side is the Atlantic Ocean. And on its west side is this beautiful, protective bay that is really full of sea grasses and a nursery ground for so much of the marine life in the Southern Atlantic Ocean.

And so when I was a little girl, my dad was a sailor, and he learned late in life. But by the time I came along, he was actively doing that. And so we spent a lot of time on his sailboat when I was a young girl and I learned how to sail at a young age. And by ten, I was sailing on my own.

Alliyah

Ashley’s love for the ocean was clear to me by the way she was all smiles about the expedition ahead of us; about the boat, the ocean, the weather, about us and the people we met along the way. It was really inspiring and refreshing to be around. And it also made sense that she dedicated her life to protecting the ocean as the leader of Rozalia Project.

Ashley

The Rozalia Project for a clean ocean. We are a nonprofit ocean conservation organization with a mission to clean and protect the ocean and conserve a healthy and thriving marine ecosystem. Marine debris is it's one of the ocean's greatest threats, and it's complicated.

There's not a silver bullet to fix the problem. And it's going to take a lot of different approaches, angles, strategies, disciplines. And so, Rozalia Project is focusing on cleaning, protecting the ocean. And we're doing that through a couple angles. So cleanups, of course, are necessary both to help mitigate the problem, but also to provide people with that hands on visceral experience of being in a beautiful place and doing a cleanup that really can inspire folks on their journey.

Of understanding their impact on the planet. We also do education programs because we believe that we can prevent the problem by working with youth and inspiring, emboldening youth to be the change makers of tomorrow. We embrace innovation and technology as a path forward as we look for solutions to marine debris. And we also do expedition science on our research vessel. Our marine debris is really focused in three categories.

So we deal with our clean ups focused on derelict fishing gear, which in the Gulf of Maine, we have a lot of related to the lobster industry, as you've seen being with us this past week. We also do we also focus on consumer debris. So those are things that you and I use every day. A lot of food wrappers plastics that are ending up in the ocean and also microplastics and microfiber pollution.

So big stuff that's breaking up into little stuff. And then smaller, you know, pieces of plastic that were designed to be small and fibers from our clothes and other textiles and how that is affecting our oceans.

*transition waves audio*

Alliyah

Day one. Our sailing expedition started off to a rocky start, almost as rocky as the terrain of coastal Maine. We arrived in Portland, and before we could jump on the historically significant American Promise, the bathroom or in sailing terms “the head” was not working, womp. But that's OK. We waited it out on land and the next morning we were good to go.

So off we went. It was an amazing 6 hours of sailing school and I can't get to all of it if I tried. We learned how to set up the sails. They're complicated and heavy and it really takes a team to do it together. But I felt accomplished when I did it with my team. We learned how to keep ourselves safe, and we also started learning about each other and about the special vessel we were on, American Promise.

Ashley

American Promise presents our organization with a really unique opportunity. It's a 60 foot oceanographic research sailing vessel that enables us to put a team of up to nine people and do education programs, sail into coastal communities and provide outreach. And it also allows us to do expedition science, getting out into the wild and experiencing marine debris. It also enables us to do cleanups in really remote areas. We can use the boat as our base camp as we are doing the work. 

And the other thing that's really unique, I think, about spending time on American Promise is that she's the greenest research sailing vessel in the world that we know of, and we make all of our own energy on board from alternative power. We have four solar panels and two wind generators and a hydro generator, too. And we're storing all of that energy.

And it becomes a really wonderful example of the finite world. It's a beautiful metaphor. You know, everything we have on board is finite. You know, the energy that we make, the water that we drink, the food that we have. And collectively, the community that grows while we spend time together working on this problem forges really beautiful bonds. We learn so much from one another because there are so many different skill sets that are important to solve this challenging ocean problem.

And by bringing storytellers and scientists and teachers and engineers and sailors and just fishermen, people that are passionate about the ocean, you know, is a really great collective way to build a conversation and build unity around healthy oceans.

Alliyah

Getting there, it was a clear and beautiful day. We saw many, like so many lobster traps on the way. I got to steer the helm of the boat and loved it. Although steering clear of the lobster traps felt like I was in some kind of Mario Kart game except, you know, on a huge ship and no tokens to collect. Eventually we reached our destination Corea, Maine, Corea with a “c”.

When we got there, we scoped out Outer Bar island, the island where we were going to collect the lobster traps from. Here to describe it more is Ashley.

Ashley

A particular island that has been inundated with traps based on its geography. It's called Outer Bar, and so it has these natural sandbars and at low tide make it almost like a whirlpool kind of dead end. You know, it's like a perfect catcher's mitt in a storm, and it's covered with hundreds and hundreds of traps.

Alliyah

We were astonished by the traps that were, you know, these metal crates of all kinds of colors. They're the size of moving boxes. We also saw multiple plastic bottles and boating pieces like dock foam washed up on the shore. This is what is known as ghost gear. Our very own Jackie McGarry from Ocean Conservancy, manager of the Global Ghost Gear Initiative, explains what ghost gear is.

Jackie McGarry

So ghost gear is the common term for abandoned, lost or discarded fishing gear. So fishing gear that during the course of its use, it might get snagged on a rock on the bottom or it might get tangled with other fishermen's gear. Or you might be storing some gear that you're going to use on a pier and all of a sudden there's a big storm and it blows in.

All of those are forms of ghost gear, and it's called ghost gear, because even once it's been lost, it has the potential to continue to capture fish and other wildlife because it has been designed to catch fish. And so it's ghost gear because even though it's not actively being used, it's still kind of serving its purpose out in the water.

The Global Ghost Gear Initiative is a coalition of more than a hundred NGOs, for profit companies, national governments and folks with an interest in addressing the ghost gear kind of crisis. And it brings together people from all over the world who have different sets of expertise and different interests in addressing this issue. And we have active projects kind of all over the world.

So from places like the Caribbean all the way to Vanuatu and everything in between, and we try to set up solutions that are long lasting, they're locally relevant. They have the input of kind of the local and regional stakeholders who are, you know, know the region and and know the fisheries best. But we also take the data and information and are learning from partners around the world and apply those best practices to solving the issue.

Alliyah

After we explored Outer Bar Island that evening, we were greeted by a gorgeous orange sunset. We then returned to our quarters and rested in anticipation of two long work days ahead of us.

*transition waves audio*

Alliyah

Days two and three. These next two days were the most community filled days, which I loved. We were prepared to take on the mission with what we had, but there were some things that came up, and in retrospect, we achieved so much and couldn't have done it without the support of locals at Corea.

We observed just how lobsters were a huge part of the way of living in Maine. Definitely making it a prominent seafood economy there and overall in the U.S. 

Ashley

So the Gulf of Maine has a really awesome creature that lives here. The lobster and everyone loves Maine lobster. And so we have a really thriving commercial industry here. And it's an economic engine for these coastal communities. And in order to fish lobster they use traps and those you know, they're big metal traps, and they have lots of parts to them.

And they also use rope. So they deploy it from their boat. And the trap sits on the bottom of the sea floor. And then there's a long rope that goes up from the trap to the surface of the ocean. And at the surface, there's a buoy. And so what happens sometimes is there may be ship strikes that, you know, a ship goes over a sailboat, a motorboat, and can cut that trap line

So the trap then gets lost underwater. And the lobstermen can no longer find it. There may be weather events that cause this gear to be lost and blown off course, so to speak. Actually, in Maine, there are about 4000 licenses that are given out every year.

Alliyah

That's a lot.

Ashley

That is a lot. And each license can have up to 800 traps. So if you do the math, that's over 3 million traps in Maine waters. So and on average, they think that there's about a 10% gear loss. Some studies say that number is higher, but at 10%, you know, that's over 300,000 traps annually that are lost. If we were able to drain the Gulf of Maine, if this was a bathtub, what this seafloor would look like would be shocking, I think.

Alliyah

And why is that?

Ashley

Because on the bottom there is tons of lost gear. Mm hmm. And so there are methods that people use to identify, you know, the gear when it's lost. We can use underwater robots, underwater drones to help us find this gear underwater. And obviously, the lobstermen themself you know, you have to understand these traps are valuable. 

Alliyah

Yeah. 

Ashley

They cost money and they're not, they don't want to lose them.

Alliyah

In addition to learning from the folks who were on the trip with me, I was so excited to learn from the community members around me. In particular, I was stoked to meet a 99 year old lobsterwoman by the name of Morna Briggs, who shared some of her story, learning how to make a living from the water with her family, and also just how, you know, lobster traps work. A very talented videographer and photographer from the Rozalia Project crew, Gigi Veve, joined me in talking to her. 

Gigi Veve

That's super interesting that you had been fishing for that long with your husband and.

Morna Briggs

Well, I went with my father years ago because he had two () up in the bay. And I used to get up in the morning and according to the tides, we had to go up and sail in the water to get the herring out. So I would lot of times, it was dark and thick fog when dad would go out.

Gigi

How long have you been living here?

Morna

I've been living over here since 1952. 

Gigi

Oh, wow. 

Morna

We bought a cabin here and we had an underpinning put under it and then finished it off. Now my home was over there where the fences, the little bungalow up from the yellow one. And that one on the point. The one that's got the white windows, the one upstairs. That was mine. My dad built in 1945 when I came home from Bar Harbor, from graduating high school.

Gigi

And what do you love about lobstering?

Morna

Huh? 

Gigi

What do you love about lobstering?

Morna

I love every bit of it. You don't know what you're going to get when you haul a trap. That's what I went for skiffing on motor with my two boys. And then when they went to school, lots of times I'd take the skiff and haul them by myself. I was 84 when I stopped. My husband was sick at the time and I was having hip problems and we stopped and he sold the boat.

Gigi

Did your dad teach you or did you start with your husband lobstering?

Morna

Oh no. I had no lobstering. I was seasick when I first started with my dad and I couldn't fill the bait bags. But with Junior I could drive the boat and because I was only five foot five and he was six foot three, so I had to stand on something and look out through the window.

Gigi

That’s amazing. Do people reuse the traps if you return them?

Morna

If they're in good condition, and a lot of them are behind the ice house, I call it out there, they've got numbers and things on them, and some of them come from Stonington and way up in that way. Because as Darryl said down there, he didn't know what he was going to do with all of those because they're piling up and piling up and nobody comes along.

Morna

And my son said, well, it's getting to the point so that nobody's chasing the traps. They just turn around, buy a new one.

Alliyah

How do you track all of the lobster traps besides the numbers? Because we met someone who had like.

Morna

They all have different buoys on the top of them, different colored buoys on the top of them. And of course, they know my son has all yellow and some have red and white, some have maroon. And other ones will have different colors that way. Because I know when my son first started up the bay, they called it the Yellow Brick Road when he moved to ().

Alliyah

It was all yellow.

Morna

It was all yellow. My dad's was red and white.

Gigi

And what if somebody puts out a yellow one or does everybody in the community know that this person's yellow, this person's red?

Morna

Well, they have the names on that. I suppose branded into one.

Alliyah

Here, Ashley describes how other awesome locals at Corea, shoutout to the lobstermen, supported us.

Ashley

Working with local landowners and the community from the Corea Lobster Co-op to local lobsterman Dan Rogers who let us put our dumpsters on his property.

Alliyah

Thank you, Dan.

Ashley

Thank you Dan! And stage out of his wharf. It was so valuable, you know, that community effort of all of these different entities coming together to accomplish a cleaner coast and really get this gear off the shore of our ocean. 

You know, this trip was unique because when you're sailing, you know, into a really small coastal community and you know, we sailed in there and dropped anchor and there were some locals that knew we were coming.

You know, Dan, for one, the lobster co-op for one, and the word got out. You know, there were wives of lobstermen that had contacted me that wanted to get involved in the project. Obviously, the landowners that owned the islands just off shore that we were going to be working on were involved. And it's important to have that community support to be successful. We all have common ground and we recognize that there's a need to get these traps out of the ocean.

Alliyah

The collection process was tough. We were looking at dozens of pounds per lobster trap, and we had to haul them from one island to another and get them into an enormous dumpster. And this is all to keep them in one place before it was going to be recycled. Like Ashley said, we had to remove the rope and the buoys that were tied to the traps, since that wasn't recyclable. Doing this for like seven, eight hours, I definitely think we gained a lot of muscles during the trip.

Once the work was said and done. Wait, I'm forgetting something really important. Before we sent off the lobster traps, we recorded data on them. We did this with the other types of marine debris that we found as well. The plastic single use bottles, random shoes, microplastics…

Ashley

I think another important part about Rozalia’s work is that we're collecting data on everything that we recover from the ocean down to, you know, I should say up to, you know, big pieces like dock foam and lobster traps to the smallest pieces, you know, bottle caps and cigarette butts and fibers and microplastics because depending on where we are in our world cleaning up, we are going to be able to use that data to tell a really important story about where this trash is coming from. 

And we can identify solutions locally, but also connect that data to global datasets like Clean Swell with the Ocean Conservancy and also the NOAA Marine Debris Map Portal, which is also has a huge database.

Alliyah

It took a few hours to separate the debris into the different categories and count them up. We finally removed them from the island along with the lobster traps and took what we could to be reused and recycled and disposed of the rest. Ashley takes note of something that the lobstermen specifically requested to be reused – ergo bricks.

Ashley

And we were fortunate enough to, you know, put people in place to be able to recycle these traps rather than sending them to landfill, which I think is a really great step in trying to create more circular systems for the materials that are used in this industry. Mm hmm. Unfortunately, right now, you know, it's really the metal traps that are considered light iron that we're able to send off for recycling.

There's really no recycling happening with anything else. I mean, you saw those other than, of course, those ergo bricks that apparently are a real hot commodity right now.

Alliyah

Oh, what are ergo bricks? Can you describe that Ashley?

Ashley

Yeah. So I just kind of learned about this, but I guess also because of the pandemic and supply chain issues all around, new lobster traps are really hard to come by because of the materials that go into making them, and which also puts a super high demand on the used ones, the used gear. So a couple of the lobstermen were like, “hey, while you guys are out there cleaning up those traps.

If you find any of these ergo bricks.” And I said the same thing, “what’s an ergo brick?” And the lobster traps have to be weighted with bricks. Sometimes they can have as many as six bricks and they can be the typical you know, bricks that you build a house with. Or they have these ergo bricks that are kind of customly made for traps and they're covered and coated in metal, so that they last longer and they sell for six to eight bucks apiece.

Alliyah

And we found maybe how many?

Ashley

We found, I'm going to say close to 40.

Alliyah

Wow. And what did we do with them?

Ashley

Well, we gave about eight of them to a lobsterman who gave us a ride. Remember the harbor master from Winter Harbor when we had to move the boat to, we had to move the boat over to Winter Harbor, and we needed a ride over there. And there is no Uber and there is no taxi anywhere down east. So I called up the local harbor master and he was like, “I'll come get you.”

And and so I threw eight of those in the back of his truck and he said, “That'll be good. I'll take as many as you can give me.” And then we gave about half of them a five gallon bucket to Dan Rogers, who lent us the wharf. And then I also took some buckets, not buckets. I also took some bricks over to the co-op as well.

*transition waves audio*

Alliyah

Over the course of five days spending time with the communities in the islands of Maine, one thing was clear to me: climate change is impacting the waters in the North Atlantic and the Gulf of Maine. And so, how exactly is that? What's the warming waters doing to the fisheries? How is it affecting the lobsters? Here to answer this question are both Ashley and Jackie.

Jackie

So we know that with climate change we're going to be experiencing more frequent and more severe storms. And so in places with active fisheries, this means that the weather becomes more unpredictable. And so as an example, if you are a fisherman who uses traps for lobsters or crabs or things like that, it's not uncommon to go out and set your traps in a specific spot that you've maybe marked with GPS on your boat's computer system.

Lay out those traps. You let them sit for two or three days, and then you go back and you check them and you take, you know, lobsters or crab out, reset them and kind of keep doing that cycle. Well, if all of a sudden you have a really big storm roll in and it's unexpected and you don't have the time to go and pull all of your traps out or make sure that they're kind of anchored down appropriately, that storm can blow your traps off course. And it might only be a mile or so, but in kind of this huge ocean setting that is a really, you know, you don't know where that is all of a sudden. 

And so as you have more and more frequent storms that are more severe, you're going to have more instances of ghost gear. And there are, of course, other interactions with climate and fishing gear as well. But that's kind of the most tangible example.

Ashley

So far, it doesn't appear that the lobsters are really adapting to the warmer climate. So the Gulf of Maine is warming faster than any body of water in our world's oceans, which is quite amazing, which means we are in a very important spot right now. And what's happening is that these lobsters are starting to move further north in the Gulf of Maine.

So the challenge is for the lobstermen that are in mid-coast Maine and downeast they're making hay because the sun is shining. The lobster industry is booming here. And will it stay? We're not so sure.

There are fish that are moving north into this ecosystem that have never been found here before. And nobody better to tell us these changes than the fishermen themselves.

Alliyah

Yes.

Ashley

Because they see it. They're encountering fish that they've never caught before. And beginning to see the impact of climate change on this region. And it's a hard thing to reckon with and I think the younger generation that is getting involved in this industry definitely is very aware that they need a plan B, and this may not be a career that will last their lifetime.

Which is really sad because lobstering goes back in this region for generations.

*transition waves audio*

Alliyah

I had a truly wonderful and surreal time on this trip, learning how to sail with a great group of people. More than anything, it was an eye opening experience to the trash that can accumulate in the ocean. We were on only one island, but it blows my mind to think about that trash amplified - to other Maine islands, to the entire Atlantic coast, to the rest of the U.S. and the world.

Debris, trash. It doesn't only disrupt the aesthetics of such a beautiful place. The wildlife and practices of people that are so dependent on the ocean ecosystem are, too.

Ashley

To experience nature and experience the ocean in the sea. It's really a beautiful thing because people will protect what they love. 

Alliyah

Exactly. 

Ashley

If we all can learn to love the sea and realize how connected we are to the ocean, and how the ocean is such an important part of our life on this planet, I think we're all heading in the right direction.

Alliyah

So what can we do? Well, we can raise awareness by telling the people we know about the issue of ghost gear. And some other things you can do: If you head to the beach or out on the water, you can record ghost gear you see on the app Ghost Gear Reporter. You can also join local organized cleanups such as Ocean Conservancy's International Coastal Cleanup that takes place every September.

Make sure to check out Rozalia Project at rozaliaproject.org. And you can read more about the Global Ghost Gear Initiative at ghostgear.org.

This is Alliyah signing off. Till next time.