Lobsters and Lobstering, Gloucester, Massachusetts: The LoriO at Gloucester Marine Railways

Yearly maintenance is a fact of life in commercial fishing, especially in saltwater's highly corrosive environment, where the combination of salt, naturally-occurring chemicals and oxygen create rust, weaken metal and deteriorate wood, paint and fittings.

Add into the mix a wooden lobster boat like those commonly seen along the New England coastline, and just as often hauled out on the ways at Gloucester Marine Railways, located in residential Rocky Neck at Gloucester, Massachusetts, and you have more than rust. You have the potential for rot: that softening of wooden plans and ribs that arrives via seeped-in moisture. Wood-eating organisms live in the water, too; as they pry their ways into between planks and boards, then the wood's very cells and pores, they chew their way back out.

The LoriO, one of many wooden lobster boats that make their home in Massachusetts, hails from Nahant, north of Boston and a 45-minute trip by water to the Gloucester Marine Railways, America's oldest working shipyard. The railways are compact cluster of wharves and docks, sheds and steel work areas services by cranes, blocks and tackle robust and powerful capacious enough to lift and berth boats ranging from the heaviest of steel-hulled midwater trawlers to the ruggedest of small and shallow-drafted, wide-beamed lobster boats such as the LoriO.

LoriO's crew put up at the railways recently, to make the finishing touches required to convert the lobster boat from winter gillnetter that hauled cod and haddock into a scurrying lobster boat ready to take on the busy lobster. First, a fresh coat of paint on the bottom, from the keel fore and aft and then to the waterline, at the white paint stripe known as the bootstripe, where the boat is separated aesthetically and truly from the sides and tops, the definite line between the submerged and what rides above the water. The LoriO's been in drydock for a couple of weeks, undergoing painterly touch-ups, some major maintenance and a few repairs, and finally a retrofit as she shifts from netting fish to hauling lobster.

It's a painstaking job, especially at the waterline, that requires a sharp eye and a steady hand. Not only does a sharp waterline paint job between bottom and topsides make a fishing boat look trim and tidy '" the contrast in color between hull and undersides set off by bootstripe '" the two paints provide different kinds of inoculation against winds and waves on the one hand; one the other, the large and microscopic, the wet and the sun-borne.

The dark bottom paint, expensive by the gallon and a necessity, both inhibits and sloughs off off fuel-wasting seaweed and barnacle growth. The topsides paint, showier, less expensive, and with high gloss, protects the wooden hull from nicks, scratches and gouges and from the deteriorating effects of sunlight.

Like all wooden commercial fishing boats, the LoriO is known for being comfortable: the shock and shudder, the jolt of passing waves and heavy seas, are absorbed by wooden planks' forgiving flexibility. The entire hull eases and flexes subtly, in the waves, flexible as a giant shock absorber, and makes for fishing trips easier on the hips and knees. Fishermen with good knees and a young crew tend towards fiberglass boats, but pay in the long term with a more jolting, stiffer ride out to and back from the fishing grounds. Wooden lobster boats are cushier, a little more comfortable. The flipside is that require maintenance more demanding on the wallet.

The LoriO will be back on the water soon, pulling lobster traps from the cold waters of northern Massachusetts between Marblehead and Boston. All that stands now on the crew's work list are to repaint her name and home port on the transom '" that vertical rise from the stern -- and to replace on the cabin sides and roof the large black numbers that announce the lobster boat's federal registration number. The crew will rewire some electronics, and test them all: the depthsounder, vhf radio, the radar and gps units.

That will get done all in good time, and as launch day approaches, in a clustered hurry. Lobster season has opened, and is already underway in Maine, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island. Time for this Massachusetts lobster boat to make its showing.

Just one crucial maintenance job remains now for the crew. The captain will scuttle down, on all fours, and with a battery-powered drill and a mouthful of nails and screws, to fashion a new bedding the zinc electrolysis plates, then screw the plates on. He'll screw the plates in close to the the propeller, drive shaft and rudder post, the only areas of the underwater hull made of metal. Zinc plates are attached to all commercial fishing boats, regardless of what they fish for.

The zinc plates are sacrificial: the attract from the water around hull the free-ranging hungry electrons that mill about looking for something metal to set their teeth on and nibble into. On lobster boats plated with zinc pads, only the zinc deteriorates, giving the electrons something else besides the stainless steel drive shaft and brass or copper propeller to chew on. Zinc protects the seven or eight inches of drive shaft, the rudder post, and that all-important apparatus: the propeller, without which no one is going fishing or is going to come home without calling for a tow.