Bart Mansi used to haul a thousand pounds of lobster a day. Now he sets out just a couple dozen traps, out of curiosity — or force of habit — and he’s lucky to catch 10 lobsters.
“I’ve been doing it all my life. I gotta see for myself,” he said. “But as far as trying to make a living, you can’t do it, not any more.”
Mansi converted his lobster wholesale facility on the dock in Guilford into a restaurant in the early 2000s. In the upstairs office on a sunny September morning, there are a few reminders of the life he used to lead: a “Captain’s Quarters” sign, framed photos from his lobstering heyday, the mast of his son’s fishing boat swaying gently out the window.
His eyes lit up as he recalled the good days. “We saw a lot of lobsters, a real lot of lobsters,” Mansi said.
In the 1980s and ’90s, Mansi was making a killing, along with the roughly 1,200 commercial lobstermen on Long Island Sound. The Sound was the third most-productive lobster fishery in the country, with 10 million pounds of lobster landings at its peak in 1998, including 3.8 million pounds in Connecticut.
But in the fall of 1999, lobstermen pulled up traps filled with limp, sickly lobsters, and soon after, hardly any lobsters at all. It was an unprecedented mortality event, and the lobster population never recovered. Connecticut saw only 181,000 pounds of lobster landings in 2024, less than 5% of the 1998 peak. Now most seafood restaurants in the state — including Mansi’s — import lobster from Maine or Canada.
The catastrophic die-off is still an emotional subject for Mansi and so many former lobstermen. In addition to the painful memory of losing their livelihoods practically overnight, resentment lingers about how it happened. The scientific consensus is that warming waters, and an epidemic of a crustacean disease called paramoebiasis, were the primary culprits — and that pesticides used to combat West Nile virus may have had an additional effect.
But the catastrophe was complex and unprecedented, and not all scientists agree on which factors were the most significant. The lobstermen almost unanimously blame the pesticides, and they feel betrayed by the chemical manufacturers, the marine scientists, and the government — whose tightening regulations they resented and whose financial assistance they found inadequate.
In the early 2000s, as they fought for accountability and answers, the lobstermen had no choice but to adapt to the new reality. Some switched to fishing, clamming or catching conch, but most sold their boats and left the fishing docks behind entirely.
Now there are no full-time commercial lobstermen left in Connecticut.
But there are still a few part-timers. In the southeasternmost corner of the state, the Stonington port is home to seven active lobster boats. Other than one boat in New London, Stonington is the last bastion of commercial lobstering in Connecticut. Roddy Grimshaw is one of the few in Stonington still at it, a man of 29 who goes lobstering with his dad and a small crew a few days a week.
It’s not just lobstering that’s in decline — all forms of commercial fishing are under threat as luxury development supplants the docks once home to a vibrant blue-collar fishing culture.
Grimshaw put it this way: “The way I see it, if we don’t stay active … this will become just another yacht club.”
The heyday
Mansi has fond memories of fishing with his family as a kid growing up in East Haven in the late 1960s.
“I just loved being out on the water, the freedom,” he said. At that time, the Connecticut lobster industry was picking up steam after a decades-long lull around the turn of the century. His dad wasn’t a lobsterman, more of a recreational fisherman, but, eyeing the hauls of lobstermen down at the docks, he decided to give it a shot. He started working on a friend’s father’s lobster boat while he was in high school in the 1970s. Then, in 1983, he bought his own boat, the Jani M.— named after his wife — and went into business for himself. And business was good.
“When you left the dock, you knew you were gonna catch lobsters. It was exciting. You’re dying to pull that first trap to see what was in it. And, you know, they were almost always full,” he said.
In the ’80s and ’90s, Mansi was landing up to 100,000 pounds per year on just his boat, over 50% of the state’s entire 2024 haul. At a market price of $3 per pound, he was making a killing. He also started the Guilford Lobster Pound, a wholesaler that bought lobster from other fishermen and sold it to Connecticut retailers and restaurants.
Mansi described a vibrant waterfront community at the Guilford Marina and at fishing docks across the state. He pointed to a newspaper article framed on his wall, which told the story of a fellow Guilford lobsterman who suffered a heart attack.
“We got six lobstermen all together, and we ended up going out and pulling all his gear. We brought all his lobsters to the pound here, we sold his lobsters, and we gave him a check. We all stuck together,” he said.
Mansi wasn’t the only one to turn a high school lobstering job into a lucrative career in those years. Some 30 miles down the Sound in Norwalk, Gary Whetmore grew up lobstering with his dad.
“My father lobstered on a very small scale, and then I got into it on a much bigger scale,” Whetmore said. “I remember swapping lobsters with a gym teacher to get out of classes.”
“It was fun. It wasn’t work. The money was great, but it was the freedom of it. You could make as much or as little as you wanted to make. And if you worked hard enough, you could have anything you want in the world,” he said.
One might think that the accelerating lobster hauls in those days — a roughly six-fold increase in Connecticut from the 1970s to the 1990s — risked depleting the lobster population. Counterintuitively, the reverse was true.
“There were a lot of lobsters,” Whetmore continued, “but it wasn’t natural.”
Connecticut lobstermen from that era describe their work not as catching lobsters but, rather, “farming” them.
“We were feeding them and letting them go,” Whetmore said. Indeed, in the ’80s and ’90s, lobstermen were stuffing millions of pounds of bait fish — pogy, mackerel, and others — into tens of thousands of traps in Long Island Sound.
The influx of bait represented a huge supplement to the lobsters’ natural food sources, artificially increasing the population to levels never before seen in the Sound. It was great for business, but scientists say the crowded crustacean conditions on the seafloor, combined with the unnaturally young population — lobstermen harvested them as soon as they reached the minimum size required by regulation — likely left them more vulnerable to the disease that decimated the population in the late ’90s. It was the boom before the bust.
“It was not sustainable. Something was going to give,” Whetmore said. “There were no big lobsters here. As soon as they were legal, we harvested them. We’re feeding them, we’re growing them, and we’re harvesting, and whoever worked the hardest harvested the most. And that’s as simple as it was.”
“It was really, really good, and when it ended, it ended,” Whetmore said.
Mansi spoke of the sudden die-off with a similar sense of finality. “You go out there one day, and that’s it. Overnight, it was done. It was ended,” he said.
The die-off
In the years leading up to the widespread die-off in the fall of 1999, there were early signs of trouble. Two localized lobster mortality events occurred in the western Sound, from Norwalk to Greenwich, in 1997 and 1998.
Whetmore, just a few miles further east, took heed of those early warnings. “I heard about the die-off getting as far up as Greenwich in ’98. And I told my guys that were working for me: If it happens next year, and it comes this way, we’re done. And sure enough, it got here,” he said.
In August 1999, dead lobsters started washing up on beaches along the Sound. On Sept. 16, Tropical Storm Floyd hit the region, dumping up to 12 inches of rain into the Sound in just two days.
By the following week, Long Island Sound’s lobster industry practically collapsed.
“A week after the storm, when I went out, the lobsters in the pots were nothing but goo. It smelled. It was nothing but lobster parts,” said Tony Carlo, a Darien lobsterman.
The Western Sound was hit the hardest, that fall experiencing a 99% reduction in lobster landings compared to the previous year. Ports in the east of the Sound saw reductions of 64% to 91%.
At first, neither the lobstermen nor marine scientists had a clear understanding of the cause. A New York Times headline on Oct. 18, 1999, read, “Scientists Are Mystified by Deaths Of Lobsters in Long Island.”
But there was a suspicious coincidence. In August, just a month before the storm, the government began applying pesticides, including resmethrin and methoprene, across Connecticut and New York to curb the spread of West Nile Virus. Because lobsters are related to insects, which the pesticides were designed to kill, many suspected that the runoff from the storm poisoned the lobsters.
In January 2000, a “commercial fishery failure” was declared in the Sound, and the federal government authorized $13.9 million to provide economic relief for the lobstermen and to fund research into the causes of the disaster. Over 20 research projects across a slew of institutions and agencies were approved.
When the studies concluded by 2004, a clearer picture emerged. A parasitic amoeba, Neoparamoeba pemaquidensis, had infected and killed the lobsters. But it wasn’t just the disease. Researchers referred to a “perfect storm” of contributing factors. Years of above-average water temperatures weakened the immune systems of the lobsters, which are extremely sensitive to temperature increases. The storm may have accelerated the die-off by churning up the waters, bringing warmer temperatures to the already sick lobsters. Furthermore, the unnaturally high and primarily juvenile population was particularly vulnerable to infection.
“When you have a bunch of young animals all together, just like a cold in a classroom at school, the disease spreads through them pretty quickly,” said biologist Nancy Balcom, associate director of Connecticut Sea Grant, who was involved in research after the die-off and published several articles summarizing the findings.
In the decades since 1999, the lobster population would appear to rebound in some years with a new crop of juvenile lobsters.
“But then a few years later, you didn’t see the adults,” Balcom said. This is consistent with the finding that the water is just getting too warm for the lobsters to tolerate, even though the paramoebiosis epidemic has passed. Long Island Sound has historically been the southernmost tip of the inshore range of the American lobster. With global warming, that map is being redrawn, and their range may soon terminate in Massachusetts.
The pesticides
The role of the pesticides loomed large immediately after the die-off. Toxicology testing and several modeling exercises were conducted, but even the “worst case scenario” model indicated that the concentration of the chemicals never reached lethal levels for the lobsters. The scientific consensus is that the pesticides were not the primary cause of the die-off.
That consensus, however, is not ironclad, and most of the lobstermen don’t buy it.
“The pesticides are what killed them,” Mansi said. “We actually see what’s going on. We were there, and we’re telling you what we saw. They [the scientists] have never been on the water, they just sit in a lab and they make up these models that we have to adhere to.”
The timing of the pesticide application and the storm runoff was uncanny, and the lobstermen observed strange, hyperactive behavior in some living lobsters they caught after the die-off, as well as in certain species of crabs. Mansi helped recruit a biologist the lobstermen considered one of their own, Dr. Robert Bayer of Maine’s Lobster Institute. Bayer came down to Connecticut, performed his own tests, and concluded that the lobsters hauled alive during the 1999 event “showed the behaviors, classic behaviors, of pesticide poisoning — which is hyperactivity.”
In the months and years that followed, while the government-funded studies were still underway, the lobstermen initiated a class action lawsuit against Cheminova and other pesticide makers, eventually receiving two settlements, for $12.5 million and $3.75 million. The lobstermen see the settlement as a vindication of their hypothesis, while Balcom says the pesticide makers never admitted to causing the die-off and merely settled to make the lawsuit go away.
“If the pesticides were the primary cause of death, they would have received probably lots more money,” she said.
Tarsila Seara, a social scientist who studies fishing communities, views the science as less settled, and she understands the animosity Mansi and many other lobstermen still feel towards the biologists, the pesticide companies and the government. In 2019, while a professor at the University of New Haven, she interviewed 20 former lobstermen and published two papers about the social impacts of the die-off.
“There was a dismissal of their experience and the knowledge that the fishermen were trying to bring to the table,” Seara said. “It should have been dealt with differently.”
“The reality is that it was a very complex combination of factors, and the lobstermen really wanted to find the one thing that they could blame, and they were naturally upset because there was no backing of that one culprit,” she said.
Tony Carlo and Roger Frate, cousins who started lobstering in the 1970s in central Connecticut, were active in the fight against the pesticide companies in the early 2000s. Frate now runs the Darien Seafood Market with Carlo’s help. Alongside tanks with live lobsters (now imported from Maine or Canada), the store has multiple display cases with newspaper articles documenting the die-off and ensuing legal battles. On a warm August afternoon, Carlo wore a red baseball cap with an image of a lobster, and Roger wore a T-shirt with the Darien Seafood Market’s lobster insignia.
The two cousins are still angry at the chemical makers, politicians and marine scientists they see as responsible for causing — or failing to address — the destruction of their livelihood.
“We lost everything within a three-week period,” Carlo said.
“We fought in Washington, Hartford, Boston … we fought against some big people at the chemical companies. We kept going for years and years,” Frate said.
Frate and Carlo see the government’s regulatory response in the 2000s — mandating an increase in “gauge” size (a device used to measure the minimum-sized lobsters legal to catch), as well as a 90-day moratorium imposed on lobstering from early September to early December — as harmful and misguided.
“From beginning to end, it seemed like they were always against us, to slow us down one way or another,” Carlo said.
They argued for years that the real culprit was toxicity from the pesticides, as well as an accumulation of other pollutants from decades of runoff into the Sound. They asked for money to “clean up” the Sound and more financial support for the struggling lobstermen. But their pleas fell on deaf ears.
Frate and Carlo hold a litany of grudges against the Connecticut and New York politicians of that era.
“Schumer would never call us back … Blumenthal’s telling lies … Chris Shays, that piece of shit. You got your money. The state got their money. Now the fisheries’ money’s not there,” Frate said.
Frate and Carlo did eventually collect checks from the pesticide maker settlements. “But it wasn’t about the money,” Carlo said. “We’d give it all back to them if they could give us back Long Island Sound. We want our lobster back.”
A difficult adjustment
Seara, the social scientist, understands the animosity towards the government in the years following the die-off.
“They were not being supported when they were going through something that was very impactful, very traumatic,” she said. “Some of the programs the government put in place were not well received. They didn’t seem to make sense to a lot of the fishermen.”
Over the years, there were some experiments with lobster trap buyback programs, which paid lobstermen to recover the thousands of abandoned pots littering the seafloor. In September, these programs received a $1.8 million boost of federal funding.
Other programs included various job retraining efforts, which lobstermen like Mansi scoff at to this day.
“They said, ‘We’ll train you.’ Well, there’s no retraining. You don’t take a guy that’s been fishing on the water all his life and retrain him to go work in an office. It’s something that you can’t do,” Mansi said.
What made the prospect of retraining particularly unappealing is that, for so many lobstermen, lobstering is not just a job but a deeply held identity and beloved lifestyle. Seara, along with her mentor, Professor Richard Pollnac, have studied fishing communities across the world, and they’ve found that self-employed fishermen experience some of the highest levels of job satisfaction of any workers.
“It’s the freedom, being out in the water, being close to nature, and some aspects that are thrilling. It’s a gamble, right? You’re out there, you don’t know what you’re going to get. Every day is different. You have encounters with nature, whales, and beautiful sunsets, and, on top of it, this adventure and this challenge, and this camaraderie,” Seara said.
“A fisherman once put it to me like this: ‘What other profession in the world do you know that people pay to do over the weekend?’” she said.
Each lobsterman took their own path after the die-off. Some turned to clamming or catching conch, but most couldn’t find a way to support themselves on the water. Many struggled.
“We had a lot of guys who became alcoholics or drug addicts,” Mansi said.
“We had to move on,” Mansi said. “I am still bitter about what happened, because not only did they wipe out an industry, they wiped out a way of life,” he said.
Mansi turned his lobster pound on the docks in Guilford into a seasonal restaurant. He considers himself lucky, as he’s still able to work down by the water, and his son runs a fishing boat out of the same port.
Carlo initially got a job doing manual labor down at the docks in Norwalk for $10 an hour, “just to do something and stay near the water,” but it didn’t pay the bills. He was forced to find a new career, so he started a landscaping business, which he still runs.
“Landscaping, being on land … I hated it. Hated it. I hate it to this day,” Carlo said.
One of the few who seemed to transition smoothly was Whetmore. Immediately after the die-off, he got into marine construction, and he now runs a successful business out of Norwalk, G&C Marine, which primarily builds residential docks.
Whetmore was included in Seara’s 2019 study; notably, he was the sole lobsterman out of the 20 interviewed who said they believe that warming waters and the disease were to blame for the die-off. Even his own son insists it was the pesticides.
“You can’t argue the numbers. You know, the bottom temperature, it’s there,” Whetmore said.
He attributes his ability to adapt — and his acceptance of immovable forces like global warming — to a feeling that he is lucky to be alive. In the last two decades, he’s had two kidney transplants, cancer and multiple heart attacks.
“I’m still here,” he said. “And I think that’s allowed me to bounce back a little bit more than these other guys. Yeah, you lost your lobsters. That’s too bad. Get a life.”
The last lobster fleet
Stonington’s working docks smell like diesel and bait.
On a sunny September afternoon, a flock of gulls circled the docks as the Lady Lynn cruised into the harbor — 42 feet of scuffed fiberglass, stacked with crusty lobster traps. The Lady Lynn is one of seven lobster boats still operating out of Stonington, the last commercial lobster fleet in Connecticut.
Roddy Grimshaw was on deck with his crew, Ian Crimm and Bubba Dolith, his 10-month-old puppy, Bailey, who ran back and forth excitedly, and his dad, Mike, who bought the Lady Lynn back in the ’70s. They were in a rush to haul out all their traps before Sept. 7, when the season closed for 90 days.
After unloading all the traps into massive stacks on the dock, Grimshaw took a breather.
“When I’m on the boat, I’m always active, doing something like hauling lobsters, driving the boat, hauling the gear, seeing interesting things. I just, I love it, and I love to tan,” he said, laughing. Grimshaw showed off a new tattoo of a lobster on his very tan forearm.
“It’s been a good year,” he said.
Grimshaw was averaging 160 lobsters (totaling about 200 pounds) each time he pulled traps. Though it’s a far cry from the quadruple digits his dad used to haul back in the ’90s, it’s an improvement from last year.
“It could last this winter. We could have another great season. But we also could have a really shitty season. Let’s hope,” he said.
It’s not a coincidence that the last remnants of the state’s lobster industry are located in Stonington. Just outside of Long Island Sound, only a few miles from the Rhode Island border, the area has somewhat cooler water, and its fishery wasn’t hit as hard by the die-off in the ’90s.
These days, Grimshaw lobsters two to three days per week and the rest of the week goes out “dragging” for fish — flounder, whiting, sea bass and others. But lobstering is his true love, and he’d like to dedicate himself to it full-time, though he says the catch is just too variable to rely on. His eyes lit up when he considered the possibility. “It’s a big, big idea, and it would be so great,” he said.
One of his other struggles is fetching a reasonable price for the lobsters he lands. Lobster imported from Maine and Canada for roughly $3 per pound dominate the market, which just isn’t enough to cover his costs. So he sells directly to the public on the docks in addition to selling to wholesalers who are willing to pay about $7 per pound, this year’s going rate for Connecticut lobsters.
His crew members, Crimm, 18 and Dolith, 19, kidded around as they fixed up the engine and organized tools. They’re new to working with Grimshaw, who recently had to replace his entire crew after he discovered that one was drinking on the job, and the other was a registered sex offender.
Crimm and Dolith love the work, even though Grimshaw can give them a hard time. Neither of them has had what they’d consider a “normal” job — they’ve bounced between farming and other forms of manual labor — and they want to keep working on the Lady Lynn as long as there are lobster to be caught.
“It’s not a normal 9-to-5, which I hate. I can’t do them,” Dolith said while pulling up lobster pots hanging off the side of the Lady Lynn in the harbor.
“I love this. It’s pretty fun shit,” Crimm said while removing and sorting the lobsters. “Who else gets paid to go out on a boat all the time?”
Their boss, Grimshaw, plans to take over his dad’s lobstering license in January. At 29, as the youngest active commercial lobster captain in the state, he’ll represent both the next generation and the last of the line.
Grimshaw understands the weight of his position.
“There’s not many other people here that does it, that wants to do it,” Grimshaw said.
He pointed to a seafood restaurant and yacht club visible in the distance. “If this harbor wasn’t here, it wouldn’t make a difference to the tourists and out-of-town people. And I just don’t want to see that,” he said.
“I want to continue,” he said. “I don’t see myself doing something different.”
Whetmore expressed a similar unease with the luxury development and tourism taking over the waterfront that used to be home to so many fishing and working docks. While walking around his construction yard in Norwalk one August afternoon, he pointed to the neighboring lots.
“There were oil tankers on this river. There were fishermen going down the river. Now it’s condos and rowing clubs. It’s definitely changing. It’s been very gentrified.”
The Norwalk Planning & Zoning Commission just approved a 59-unit mixed-use complex, with luxury apartments and a boardwalk, on the property adjacent to Whetmore’s construction yard. He said the town government has applied enormous pressure on him to move his business.
In town after town along the Sound, the working waterfront is giving way to luxury housing and recreation. A 2022 mid-Atlantic fisheries briefing flagged “persistent trends toward gentrification of working waterfronts,” noting that the loss of maritime space can upend the cultural identity of fishing communities.
“They don’t want equipment like this. They need us when we build their docks, their yacht clubs, their rowing clubs, and they love us when we’re building them, but they don’t want to see us,” Whetmore said.
“There was a community, a waterfront community, and that’s gone,” he said. “That way of life is gone.”
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