“It is too short,” he said. “We are not allowed to bring them in as small as that.”
“Aren’t they good to eat?” asked Ann.
“They’re the sweetest and the tenderest. But if the lobstermen began selling them there soon wouldn’t be any left to grow up. Lobsters under ten inches long aren’t allowed to be sold in the state of Maine.”
“What a lot you know, Jo!” exclaimed Ben admiringly.
Jo looked a little surprised. “That’s my business; of course I know that, about boats and lobsters. There’s a plenty of things that you know and I don’t.”
He dropped the three big lobsters into a wooden box in the dory. “Now hand me one of those bait bags, Ben, if you please; out of the keg behind you.”
He took the bag, wet and dripping, from Ben’s outstretched hand and fastened it into the trap, taking out the half-empty one that had been there. Then he closed the cover, hasped it, and let the trap slip gently down, down, away from sight in the clear green water.
“Now for the next,” he said as he spun the wheel, and the dory once again pointed her course up the coast.
Jo visited twenty of his pots that morning, replacing the bait in each before he dropped it back into the water. Ann soon learned to fill the little bait bags which he handed across to her as he pulled them out of the pots and she always had them ready for him by the time the next pot had been hauled to the surface. They had taken pity on Ben and forbidden him to handle the bait, for the smell of the fish was a little too much for his slight attack of seasickness.
“I’m all right now,” he insisted.