Tangled Up in Pots

I learned to sail on the Maine coast as a boy, and one of the things my elders taught me was to respect fishing gear. If you got caught up with a lobster pot, you did everything you could to get clear without cutting the pot warp. It represented a family’s livelihood and thus was sacrosanct.

I crossed a Rubicon of sorts in the late 1990s, when the lobster fishery was booming and lobster