Allan Appel Photo
This crustacean is more than 3 3/8 inches long from eye socket to where the carapace meets the tail — which means that under new rules, New Haven lobsterman Rich Gambardella can make the catch and the sale.
But the lobster’s smaller cousins, even 1/16 of an inch smaller? Gambardella now must toss back all those back into Long Island Sound.
As a result of a change in state and federal regulations that took effect in January, Gambardella has had to throw back about 10 percent of his daily catch.
Still, the man believed to be New Haven’s last working lobsterman remains an optimist.
In part that’s because he has found new waves of customers for the lobsters and other crustaceans at his New Haven Lobster business at the Mill River and Chapel Street.
Customers like Raymond Hernandez and his cousin Dondo. They came in on Saturday and bought, count ‘em, 15 lobsters for a family dinner in Branford.
The tally for the fish dinner: $163.
Most of Gambardella’s sales are more like $10 for four rock crabs, or a three-pound bag of Maine shrimps — which Hernandez also bought for his family party.
The crabs come from Rhode Island and the eponymous shrimps from Maine. Gambardella catches the lobsters and the conch himself. The haul comes from 3,000 traps that he maintains in a yard just north of Chapel by the river and deploys out in the Sound.
Gambardella described the new state regulations increasing the minimum size by 1/16 of an inch a “big hit.” Previous increases ran more like 1/32 of an inch. That little bit, he said, can make a big difference.
In a phone interview, state Department of Environmental Protection supervising fishery biologist Mark Alexander said the increase is simply Connecticut’s way of catching up. Other states, signatories to a conservation plan agreed upon by the regional Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission in 2007, have instituted similar increases.
Alexander said the gauge increase was forestalled between 2007 and 2008, when the legislature provided $3 million for a “notching” program. That went to students at three high schools, including New Haven’s Sound School, to go out on the boats and to notch the tails of female egg-bearing lobsters and then toss them back in the Sound. The lobstermen were paid as well. Insufficient funding came through last year for a similar “conservation equivalent,” and so a gauge increase resulted, he said.
Gambardella, who’s 40, trained as an electrician. As a sideline he worked as a deck hand on his uncle Alfonse’s boat. The work grew on him. He opened his business in in 1992.
Other lobster fisherman left the business since then, in part because of a die-off of lobsters in the 1990s.
“Am I the only dummy who stuck to it?” Gambardella asked rhetorically.
He fishes every day in season sells lobster and conch, which he also catches, mainly to area residents.
Gambardella’s stuff is alive and well in tanks he maintains in a small brick building across from Criscuolo Park. You hear about it from friends or see his lobster-clawed signs festooning his pick up or the side of the building.
Hernandez and other Latino families make up about 90 percent of Gambardella’s business.
“Latino families love the fish with soup,” said Gambardella.
Gambardella struggled to remember the name of the iconic lobster, pork, vegetable and green banana soup that’s a mainstay of Hispanic families. Hernandez helped him out: “Mofongo!”
“The price of the lobster could be better,” added Hernandez. Two weeks ago, Gambardella’s price per pound was $5.99. Today it was $7.99.
“It’s all supply and demand,” he explained.
Hernandez and his cousin Dondo, who’s been to Gambardella’s shop a half dozen times, shrugged. Hernandez said the lobster party was no special occasion. “You got to treat yourself once in a while.”
He said the evening would include family, dominoes, lobsters, and beer (Corona).
According to Gambardella, between the mid 1980s and 1990s New Haven had perhaps a dozen lobstermen. At least seven used the docks at the Mill River Bridge; three worked the Quinnipiac.
With the mysterious die-off of lobsters in the late 1990s, fishermen like Alfonse Gambardella retired or went out of the business. Not Rich Gambardella. He fishes from his boat the Gail-Ray. His wife Donna helps out in the store when he’s at sea.
His 12-year-old daughter sometimes accompanies him on the boat, but he doesn’t think she’s going to grow up to be a fisherwoman. Times can be tough;d you’re at the mercy of the sea and the viability of the lobster harvest. Still, he said, “It’s in my blood.”
“You don’t know what’s going to come up in that next pot. You can’t wait to get to the next one. It could be a fish or a bag of money. No boss, no alarm clock.”
The recent increase in size of allowable lobster to catch was on his mind as customers came and went. A typical weekend brings 50 to 60 customers, he said. He said he understands the state needed to increase the size in order to increase the harvest, but previous increases were smaller.
His friend John Ciardi said he thinks Gambardella has stuck with it because he remembers the heyday when a good living could be made. In the old days, when lobsters were more plentiful, he fished for them, and conch came up. That’s shell fish from which scungili is made. Now he mainly targets conch, and lobsters also come up.
In the non-lobster season, the rock crab and shrimp carry the day; Gambardella said it’s a challenge to keep the crabs from killing themselves in his tank. Unlike the more valuable lobsters ($7.99 a bound) whose pincers are banded, the crabs just murder each other. Those that survive he sells at four for 10 bucks, “The crabs are a big hit,” he said.
“If all the lobsters we throw back egg out, that’s good. But it’s [up to] Mother Nature. The striped bass are back and the stripers are real predators.” They and just about everything else eat lobsters and lobster eggs, which is why nature has made the lobster so prolific.
Then there’s Mother Nature, as in climate change. If the sea temperature rises too many degrees, it may be curtains for the lobster.
Gambardella said it takes two molts, or two seasons, for a lobster to gain that sixteenth of an inch. Game wardens who patrol the waters enforce the regulations.
DEP’s Mark Alexander said a committee is studying the lobster’s future. “Unfortunately, the fishing is one of the few things that we can control. As a result, unfortunately, fishermen have to bear that burden. It doesn’t seem fair, and we can understand their frustration.”
“You take the good with the bad. Hopefully they’ll come back,” Gambardella said, describing himself as basically optimistic.
Especially when Raymond Hernandez and his cousin Dondo just happened to return. They’d heard by cell phone that an uncle and another relative were coming. Rich Gambardella sprang into action and fished two more crustaceans out of his tank.
The decision to eat a lobster is a decision to engage in animal cruelty. As most people know, lobsters are generally boiled alive, in some cases they are cut to pieces while still alive and then boiled. Traumatic experiences like this do not send lobsters into “shock” as would happen with a human being consequently they feel pain until their nervous system is completely destroyed or until they are dead.
There is no more need to eat lobster than there is to attend a dog fight…both are acts of cruelty which humans engage in for no better reason than that they take some pleasure in it.