Once in a Blue Lobster
Carl Roper didn’t win the lottery, but he stumbled across something just as rare in the waters off .
Carl Roper didn’t win the lottery, but he stumbled across something just as rare in the waters off .
As usual, the 66-year-old fisherman was working just off Kings Point, Victoria County, during the early-morning hours. But not as usual, he got quite the surprise when he realized he had caught a bright blue lobster in one of his traps. Mr. Roper said he was hauling up the string of traps and noticed something, well, a little different in the very last one.
"I hauled it up — it was only in about six feet of water — and just before I got to the boat I knew there was something strange in it," Mr. Roper said from his Ingonish home.
"So when I got aboard the boat, I knew it was a blue lobster."
He said he has never come across anything quite like this colourful crustacean in his more than 50 years of fishing, although two years ago he caught a black lobster speckled with yellow dots. "I took him out and I looked at it for awhile," he said of how he reacted upon discovering his most recent unique catch. "I had a helper with me in the boat and showed it to him. "Then we took it where I sell my lobsters down at the other wharf. All the guys there, they’d never seen one like it before."
Mr. Roper said the aggressive male lobster, which weighs about a pound and is market size, undeniably sticks out like a sore thumb."It’s really blue," he said. "He’s blue from one end to the other."
He said he has never come across anything quite like this colourful crustacean in his more than 50 years of fishing, although two years ago he caught a black lobster speckled with yellow dots. "I took him out and I looked at it for awhile," he said of how he reacted upon discovering his most recent unique catch. "I had a helper with me in the boat and showed it to him. "Then we took it where I sell my lobsters down at the other wharf. All the guys there, they’d never seen one like it before."
Mr. Roper said the aggressive male lobster, which weighs about a pound and is market size, undeniably sticks out like a sore thumb."It’s really blue," he said. "He’s blue from one end to the other."
Suddenly Famous
Mr. Roper said he became a bit of a star Saturday in the local fishing community. "You get a lot of attention down on the wharf with all the other fellas coming and checking it." He planned to donate the lobster to Fisheries and Oceans Canada, the Fisheries Museum of the Atlantic in Lunenburg or another museum.
Mr. Roper’s daughter, Shauna Robbins, said her father is "pretty proud" of his finding and has been showing it off to his grandchildren in Ingonish. The kids named the oddball critter Grampy, after their grandfather. "They thought it was pretty neat," said Ms. Robbins, who lives in Kentville with her two young children.
Blue lobsters are considered about a one in a million occurrence, although some sources suggest they’re even less common than that. "You don’t normally get to see that," she said. "Especially when I went on the (Internet) and just Googled it and realized how rare it is. It’s like winning a Lotto ticket."
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