The Long Haul: Rockport’s Lobstering Story, from Colonial Shores to Roy Moore’s Kitchen
Walk down Bearskin Neck on a summer afternoon and it’s easy to see Rockport as a postcard town — galleries, ice cream, that famous red fishing shack everyone photographs. But look past the gift shops toward the harbor, and you’ll catch the real story: boats that have been hauling lobster traps out of these waters for well over two hundred years. It’s a big part of what makes this town what it is — a working identity that’s outlasted booms, busts, and generations of families who’ve made their living from it. Worth knowing before you sit down for your first lobster roll.
A Harbor Built on Fish, Then Lobster
Cape Ann was feeding people off this coastline long before there was a country to feed. When Captain John Smith sailed through in the early 1600s, he came back describing water so thick with cod, haddock, crabs, oysters, and lobster that colonists didn’t even bother eating most of it — they used it as bait to catch better fish. It’s a funny thing to sit with: the food we now save for special occasions used to be considered barely worth the trouble. Lobster was so plentiful along this coast that it got fed to prisoners and servants, and in nineteenth-century cities, street vendors sold it by the dozen to dockworkers and bank clerks alike, baked into pies and stews without a second thought. It took the Victorian era — and railroads that could carry fresh seafood far inland — to turn lobster into something fancy. Grand hotels started serving it on silver trays as a symbol of refinement. The lobster hadn’t changed. Everyone’s attitude about it had.
As popularity of the hard shelled crustaceans we love to dip in butter grew, Rockport began regulating its lobstering waters to protect the lobster population by 1824, with a protected stretch running along Sandy Bay from Gap Head to Pigeon Cove. But it took until the early 1900s for lobster to really take over as the town’s main catch. Town records from January 1906 show 35 fishing vessels, 19 smaller boats, and 143 dories working out of Rockport — and everyone could feel the shift toward lobster, especially after a “fish (lobster) trap” tested off Turk’s Head Inn in 1901 turned out to work a little too well. A local writer at the time called it “a new industry for Rockport” and hoped it would pan out. It more than did — within a decade, by 1912, people were already writing worried letters about “an alarming decrease in lobsters” and calling for the catch to be regulated. A 1920s postcard advertising Howard Hodgkins Co.’s “Fresh Fish & Lobsters” is a nice little artifact from right around this era — proof that a proper local lobster trade, storefront and all, was already up and running on Cape Ann decades before Roy Moore ever opened its doors. If the whole pattern sounds familiar, it should: Rockport’s lobstermen have been having some version of this same conversation — too much, then not enough — for well over a hundred years.
Boom, Bust
For a long stretch of the twentieth century, Cape Ann’s lobster trade really centered on Gloucester as much as Rockport. The Consolidated Lobster Company, once billed as the largest lobster operation in the world, ran for roughly three decades — probably opening in the late 1930s and closing in the early 1960s — out of a five-acre man-made peninsula off Washington Street in Gloucester, built from leftover granite fill from the area’s quarries. At its height, the company moved millions of pounds of lobster a year, much of it brought in aboard specialized “lobster smacks” (a traditional sailing or motor vessel featuring a built-in seawater live well used to transport live lobsters from traps to markets) from as far away as the Canadian Maritimes, then packed live into wooden barrels and shipped by rail to New York and Philadelphia. It survived lobster shortages in the 1950s before finally shutting its doors — proof that even the biggest operators in this industry have never had it easy for long.
The Tools and Tricks
To understand the trade, you need to understand the tools. A lobster trap — sometimes called a “pot” — is a rigid cage, traditionally wood and now mostly vinyl-coated wire, baited with fish or other scraps and dropped to the ocean floor on a line. Lobsters crawl in after the bait through a funnel-shaped net entrance called a “head,” which makes it easy to get in but hard to find the way back out, and most traps are divided into two chambers — a “kitchen” where the bait sits, and a “parlor” where lobsters end up trapped after feeding. The trap sits on the bottom, sometimes alone and sometimes strung together with several others in a line called a trawl, until the fisherman returns to haul it back up.
These traps are protected and marked in ocean waters via buoys. Back in the 1950s, most lobstermen fished under a hundred traps apiece, marked with square wooden buoys — 4x4x16 inches, spruce or cedar, sold for about a quarter apiece by places like the Gloucester Building Center and J. Raymond Smith’s lumberyard in Rockport. Fishermen tapered the tips themselves, drilling a hole or nailing on a rubber strap to attach the line, then chiseled or branded in their initials before painting the whole thing a signature color — anything from yellow to white to pink to blue-and-white to red-and-green to orange-and-white, in two coats of oil-based paint that had to be redone every single year. Whatever the source, wooden buoys were a constant headache — hard to pick up, prone to rot and waterlogging, and liable to get pulled temporarily underwater by currents or chew up a boat propeller if they drifted into the wrong spot.
Styrofoam buoys showed up in the early 1960s as the obvious upgrade — bullet- and acorn-shaped, with a center hole for a stick or rope. The first generation had its own problems, though: the foam was made from pellets that shattered easily on propeller impact, and gulls took a particular liking to pecking them apart, in some cases reducing a buoy to nothing but its bare stick. The late Squam lobsterman Captain Winthrop “Bunt” David is remembered locally as the man who helped push Massachusetts legislation banning wooden lobster buoys outright — a law which quickly spread throughout the East Coast. Buoy rules kept evolving from there: for years, Massachusetts law required each buoy to be branded with the last four digits of its owner’s Social Security number, a requirement since replaced by a state-issued permit number instead. Even the shape of a working lobster trawl has its own logic — a single buoy typically marks the western or northern end of a line of traps, and a double buoy (sometimes two buoys on one stick, sometimes a buoy with a small flag or float) marks the other end, so fishermen working crowded grounds can tell at a glance which way somebody else’s gear runs and avoid setting their own trawl right on top of it. Modern rigs favor 7×7 and 5×11 colored plastic buoy sticks, about three to four feet long and sold for around two dollars apiece, which have largely replaced the old wooden oak sticks — though the plastic ones still get finished in the same high-visibility, fade-resistant paint that’s been part of the trade for decades.
Buoys weren’t the only technology that met resistance. When the first trawl — a long line strung with multiple baited hooks or traps instead of a single line per buoy — was set off Cape Ann sometime in the nineteenth century, it caused a genuine uproar among fishermen who were convinced it would ruin the industry by overfishing the grounds. It didn’t, though the debate over how much gear one boat should be allowed to run in a given stretch of water has never really gone away; it’s just moved from trawls to modern trap caps.
Roy Moore Lobster Co.: A Rockport Institution
If Rockport’s lobstering story has a heart, it’s beating on Bearskin Neck. Roy Moore Lobster Co. has been cooking lobster there consistently since 1918, and the family has never once bought a lobster from outside town — not even from Gloucester next door. Everything comes off local boats. The place has had a few different owners over the years. Kenny Porter’s father took it over in 1947. Kenny — who grew up in Gloucester, started working at Roy Moore in 1979 the year he graduated high school, and bought the business himself about a decade later — has run it ever since, with his son John now stepped in alongside him, carrying the business into its second century in the same family’s hands. Around here it’s referred to as the oldest continuously operating lobster company in America. Regardless of others making similar claims, but it’s a testament to how long Roy Moore has quietly outlasted its neighbors either way.
That kind of stubborn neighborhood loyalty is rare, and Roy Moore has never lacked for company on Bearskin Neck over the years — Donovan’s Lobster Pool operated there for decades, and other lobster shacks have come and gone with the tides. None of them, though, has stuck around quite like Roy Moore, which has now run continuously on the Neck for over a century. A 2012 write-up in Yankee Magazine’s Travel Guide called it one of the twelve best lobster shacks in New England, and a Cape Ann Magazine profile from that same fall went further, quoting a visiting food writer’s verdict that it might be “the friendliest lobster shack anywhere.”
Part of that friendliness runs in the family. Kenny Porter learned plenty of the trade from Charlie Woods, a mentor who taught him the ropes early on. He lived on Bearskin Neck himself for a decade, where he met his wife Karin at a nearby chowder house; she went on to open the Fish Shack restaurant just up the road, in the space once occupied by a place called Lobster in the Rough. Porter has a phrase for the whole tangled, everybody-knows-everybody feeling of it all: “a small-town Mayberry thing.”
Ask Porter what sets the place apart and he’ll point to the basics done right — quality, reasonable prices, and customer service that doesn’t cut corners. There’s also the water itself: the cold, clean water off Rockport is genuinely well suited to good lobster, closer in character to the cold Canadian water lobstermen prize than to warmer water further south. And there’s a house secret nobody advertises outright: a salted butter sauce, made in-house, that regulars swear is a big part of why people keep coming back. The menu stays deliberately small — eight or nine items, tops — with the lobster roll, whole steamed lobsters, and Wellfleet oysters doing most of the work. On a busy day, that still adds up to several hundred lobsters boiled, a couple hundred oysters shucked, and at least fifteen gallons of chowder ladled out the door.
That short menu and unpretentious setup hasn’t stopped an unlikely clientele from finding their way to a picnic table on the Inner Harbor. Over the years Roy Moore has served Mexican businessman Carlos Slim — one of the wealthiest people in the world — alongside the prime minister of Thailand, the founder of Starbucks, the owners of Fiji Water, and, most afternoons, a rotating pack of thirty or forty neighborhood dogs who show up like clockwork for a bite of smoked salmon, practically pulling their owners down the street to get there. In the summer, Porter estimates as much as a third to nearly half of his customers are visiting from Asia, on top of a loyal base of local regulars and the same crew of lobstermen — several of whom have been supplying the shop for thirty years running.
Some details about the place haven’t changed and probably shouldn’t. There’s a 1963 painting by local artist George “Frenchie” Hilliard — an art instructor at Rockport Art Association who moved to town in 1946 and became a fixture of the Cape Ann art scene — still hanging over the lobster tank. The building itself is believed to date to around 1850, framed in part with reclaimed timber from an old shipyard. No white tablecloths here — you eat at picnic tables and lobster crates overlooking Rockport’s Inner Harbor, off paper plates, same as everyone else who’s ever sat down there, billionaire or not.
Today’s Lobstermen: New Challenges on Old Waters
That worried letter from 1912 about disappearing lobsters could almost be reprinted today, just with different causes. The biggest one right now is regulatory: to keep the critically endangered North Atlantic right whale from getting tangled in vertical buoy lines, Massachusetts closes its state waters to lobster trap gear every year, typically from February 1 through May 15. It’s a Massachusetts-specific rule (322 CMR 12.04), so neighboring states don’t run the same calendar — Maine, New Hampshire, and Connecticut manage their own waters independently, and federal waters a few miles further out tend to stay open. For a Rockport lobsterman, that means every trap has to come out of the water for months at the height of the season, with nothing to do but wait it out until the closure lifts.
Once the season reopens, lobstermen scramble to reset all that gear at once — precisely the kind of disruption that drives prices up each spring, as fishermen try to catch up with demand after weeks of empty traps. On top of the seasonal closure, commercial permit holders fishing inshore waters are capped at 800 traps each, and every trap has to come out of the water entirely once the closure hits — no gray area, no fishing through it. Add in the day-to-day economics — rising fuel, bait, and lobster prices have pushed the cost of a lobster roll from around $18 to $30 over the past five years — and it’s easy to see why a Rockport lobsterman answering “how’s the season going?” will almost always say it’s the worst year, half joke and half genuine worry.
The rules around the lobsters themselves have shifted too. Current Massachusetts law sets a legal size window of 3¼ to 5 inches, measured along the carapace — regulators floated raising that minimum a few years back, but backed off when Maine, whose fishery is deeply intertwined with Massachusetts’, decided not to move first. It’s a looser standard than the one described in an old Gloucester Daily Times clipping, which put the legal minimum at three and three-sixteenths inches “back from the eyes” — a slightly different measuring convention from an earlier era, and a good reminder that even something as basic as “how big does a lobster have to be” has been refined more than once. Any lobster that doesn’t measure up goes back in the water, and so does every egg-bearing female, regardless of size. On some days, on some boats, that means throwing back more than you keep.
It’s a version of the shedding process that makes all of this possible in the first place: a lobster grows by literally splitting its own shell as it outgrows it, then hides among the rocks, defenseless, until a new shell hardens in — smaller lobsters may shed six or seven times a year, while a large one might go several years between molts and live to a genuinely old age.
Warmer water is the newer, slower-moving worry layered on top of all this regulation: several longtime Rockport fishermen and guides describe lobsters drifting north toward Maine and Canadian waters as the Gulf of Maine warms, even as the catch close to shore still holds up fine for now. The one genuinely encouraging sign is that young people keep entering the trade — student permits, which allow a limited number of traps (commonly cited around two dozen per permit), still bring new lobstermen onto the water most years.
See It for Yourself: Rockport SeaVenture
For visitors who want more than a plate of lobster, Rockport SeaVenture will take you out on the water to watch the whole process happen. The tour runs out of Tuna Wharf aboard The First Lady, a classic 35-foot lobster boat built in 1974 in Beverly, which spent time afterward as a tuna boat out of Newburyport before John — a lifelong boater and former educator — found her for sale on Craigslist in May 2022, and he and Captain Jim Beauvais brought her to Rockport. Tours now run Wednesday through Saturday, with Beauvais at the helm and John doing most of the talking, drawing on both his teaching background and decades of hands-on fishing experience — he first started lobstering himself back in 1989, running a small string of traps as a student under a special permit.
Guests get to watch a real trap hauled, sorted, and measured up close, with plenty of Rockport fishing history worked in along the way — including the same regulatory realities Roy Moore describes from the dock. It’s a rare chance to actually see a female lobster carrying her eggs before she goes back over the side, and to watch firsthand how a gauge decides what’s legal to keep — a good way to understand, up close, why some days on some boats mean throwing back more than you keep.
Pair the tour with a stop at Roy Moore and you’ve got the whole picture — one shows you the industry as it ends up on your plate, the other shows you where it actually comes from.
A Town Still Tied to the Tide
Rockport’s relationship with lobster has never really sat still. It went from bait-grade nuisance in colonial times, to a boom-and-bust industry through the middle of the last century, to today’s tightly regulated fishery working against warming water and rising costs. What’s stayed constant through all of it is how local everything remains — family boats, a handful of lobstermen who’ve supplied the same shop for thirty years, a lobster shack that’s kept the same sourcing rule since 1918, and a harbor small enough that everyone still seems to recognize everyone else’s boat on sight. That’s probably the real story here, more than any single date or regulation: a town that’s kept doing this, its own way, for two centuries and counting.
For readers who want to go deeper into the science and history of the animal itself, The Secret Life of Lobsters is worth picking up.
