April 23, 2026 — The sun is just starting to peak through the dense clouds on this late morning in April, as Buzz Scott hoists up a heavy wire lobster trap.
Scott is working with a small crew of fishermen, and the traps, and the jokes, are flying.
“See this is why fishermen have big bellies,” Scott says, as he uses his stomach to lift one of the traps and heave it onto the bed a trailer.
Very few of these traps are useable. Some are caked with moss and mud. Others have been crushed. Curt Bryant, known to the guys as “Chief,” said the traps on this property have been sitting idle for years.
“This was all traps and it was all five high, four and five high like that,” Bryant said. “This whole thing was solid.”
This is a common scene up and down Maine’s coast — battered wire fishing traps piled high in a front yard, tucked back in the woods, or strewn along the shore after a storm. Wire pots wrapped with polyvinyl plastic replaced wooden, biodegradable traps in the 1980s, and they’ve been piling up since, shedding microplastics and creating hazards for birds and other creatures.