Okay.
This guy I know was on his farm. He had 5,000 acres in Brownsville--or Brownsomething...north of Edmonton. He sold part of his wheat to the Wheat Board and he kept part of it, hoping the market would improve through the year.
I don't know if we could ever make it work. It's hard to get fishermen to join associations. The New Brunswick government set the legislation up such that you have to get all the fishermen in your area to vote for an association. Fishermen are very independent. Only about 20% of the fishermen in our area belong to an association. In northern New Brunswick they do more, but even up there someone is always coming to a war in buying the lobsters and breaking it....
I, for one, have always held my lobsters in lobster cars, and they're sold about twice a season. I wait for the price to go up. Now it doesn't seem to go up anymore. Through the years, except for two years, the price has increased every year between November and close to Christmas. Now it doesn't happen anymore; there are too many lobsters on the market.
I do wonder if we could ever sit down with the buyers, as they do in Newfoundland, in the shrimp and crab fishery, and set a price--a minimum price, and even a maximum price--in October that we could all live with. So Clearwater or Paturel or whoever can take those lobsters to Europe and say, we'll deliver our lobster in Spain on this date for a certain price. I think it's worth trying to look at this. When you have buyers paying $3.50 a pound and then $7 or $8 a pound within two weeks, it makes me wonder if the price was ever that low or if they just took us for a ride last fall. I'm suspicious at this point that the big guys really used all this pessimism we were hearing about the economy and took us for a ride. That cost me between $60,000 and $70,000 on my catch last fall--maybe $80,000.
I had two fellows with me last year, and I gave them 25% each. My son just got through high school, so I gave him a full share and I gave another fellow a full share. This year I'm giving my son a third share and just the two of us are going lobster fishing. That was the agreement, and the fellow that went with me before knew that. I pay all the expenses above that. My expenses run about 25% of my stock--a normal stock--a year. Last year they ran higher obviously because the price was down.