Lobster Bake, Burnt island, Maine

The highlight of our sailing trip on Penobscot Bay was the lobster bake. It started with the captain picking up a huge container of live lobsters while at our stop at the Wooden Boat Store. We held them for the night in a container lashed alongside the Angelique in the seawater, then moved them to another container and hooked up a hose to keep them alive until we found the perfect spot to have our picnic.

One of the purposes of an Elderhostel program is education, so we learned a lot about lobsters. We had a naturalist, Barbara, on board to instruct and entertain about the nuances of lobster life...

Here Barbara is transferring the lobsters to a container for the sail to Burnt Island. The container had to have openings to allow fresh seawater to flow over them to keep them alive until it was time to cook.
Barbara and Bud are holding a lobster to demonstrate the parts of a lobster and where the eggs are held.
See, you need a really big tub with a lot of seawater brought to a rolling boil...


Once the water is really hot, transfer the lobsters to the pot...

Cover them with seaweed, to act as a lid and steam the contents.
Once the cooking is finished (about half an hour) the water must be drained out.
The trick here is to keep your toes out of the water!


Create a platform with the seaweed that was used as a lid just moments ago
dump the lobsters very carefully and keep them all on the seaweed platform
Get on line and grab a lobster... (I know you will find this hard to believe, but this lobster is the same one they used as a demonstration one earlier in the post) see the broken claw and same color bands?

All good things come to an end...we helped carry all the stuff back to the boats and rowed to the Angelique and continued our sail. Yes, it was very much like a piece of heaven.