Lanny Winchenbach at high tide. If it were low tide, hed be out digging for bloodworms.
Winter is Lanny Winchenbach’s bloodworm season. In the other months, April to November, he fishes for lobster. Bloodworming is a profession that dates back to the 1920s in Maine. For Lanny, it dates back to when he was 15. The clams were plentiful, but the market was terrible so he switched to harvesting bloodworms.
When the clam market bounced back, it helped Lanny pay for college where he earned a degree qualifying him to teach high school math, but it was 1974, and there were no teaching positions here. Lanny, the math teacher, ran the numbers and concluded clamming was a safer bet — a better salary without the risk of a layoff.
A few years later, he got the bug for lobster fishing from his father-in-law. He hasn’t stopped since.
In the off-season, Lanny dove for sea urchins or scallops (depending on the market) for 23 years. Diving took a toll on his body and those fisheries had new regulations and limits. After a week of thinking about his off-season, he landed on digging for bloodworms again, joining about 1,000 other bloodworm harvesters in Maine. Twenty years later, Lanny’s still at it.
Bloodworms live in mudflats, making Maine and the Canadian maritimes the principal places where they are harvested. Named for the blood inside of them (and not for sucking your blood), they are a bait prized by recreational anglers along the Atlantic Coast for attracting croaker, surfperch, striped bass, and jacksmelt. What’s made it a year-round business for the harvesters is expansion into international markets including Spain, Italy, Greece, France, and Portugal.
“Any time you are dealing with weather and Mother Nature, it’s almost like they’re controlling you, telling you, ‘Here’s what’s on your plate today.’ You always have to have a Plan B and a Plan C, too. Plan A might be reading your tide chart and saying, ‘Okay, I can get there, and the tide works’ but then when you get there, the tide’s not leaving the mud, so you have to go somewhere else. Then, that place is all froze in. It can be challenging, but that’s Mother Nature’s way of protecting the species.
“I use a hoe and gloves for digging. My hands are part of my equipment, so I try to protect them, but we never take good enough care of our bodies. We push things way past the limit because it’s self-employment. Nobody gives us a paycheck. Nobody matches our income. Nobody gives us health insurance. We have to make the money ourselves to afford all that stuff. So we push ourselves in a kind of gambling manner, so to speak.
“We say, ‘We can do this,’ and suddenly, we’re faced with an adversity that we didn’t expect. In the worm business, it could be the skiffs and outboards we use to ride the rivers to dig when we don’t walk in places. In wintertime, you might get caught in the ice thinking, ‘I know I can get through.’
“Maybe you could or maybe you could get in a place and break down with your outboard caught in an ice-jam and nobody around who could give you a helping hand. At least now, we have cell phones, so you can call someone, if he can get there in time.
“The big question always is, ‘Where are the worms?’ Worms don’t make holes in the mud like clams. You just dig blind and hope you find them. If you do, you hope for another day there.
“Worms can be in a very small area where the mud stretches for acres and it’s all the same type of mud. It makes you wonder, ‘Why aren’t they anywhere else?’ Maybe they were, years before, and it just got dug out, or maybe the food isn’t there. Nobody knows what the variable is.
“The little creatures have their own way of showing up or not showing up for the dance, so to speak. You could try a bunch of areas and come up with nothing, and that’s Mother Nature again. You could come back a month, or maybe even a week later, and do good.
“To be good at it, you have to go out consistently and take in the variables and obstacles like tides and ice. A good wormer also digs in a quick manner. There’s some diggers that are fine-tuned machines, so to speak. I consider myself very average.
“You gotta be fast, but you can’t hurry too much, because you might break that worm when you go after him. Now you can’t sell him. You got to leave him. Or you might pull him apart, or hit him with your hoe. If any of those things happen two or three times within five minutes, you gotta say, ‘Okay, slow down and be precise in what you’re doing.’ That helps sometimes.
“Even though you’re not covering as much area, you’re getting the worms by taking your time. A lot of times patience will help you out.
“Maybe you’re not catching worms because you’re too far out. You think because the tide is out, you gotta be as far out as you can get, but you’re not doing well. Maybe the worms are in halfway to shore, or maybe close to shore.
“It’s like a hunting expedition. They are not going to come to you. You have to go find them, and if you’re not finding them, you have to go elsewhere. You keep looking. The patience comes back into play because you may get discouraged.
“You have to tell yourself, ‘Don’t give up. They gotta be here somewhere.’ You may find them in the last half hour the tide is up, or you might not find them at all that day. So, the next day, you go somewhere different.
“They can be six feet away from you and you don’t find them, and that’s the way it is.”
