Those same conditions, however, could result in the end of the industry in Maine, he says. Since the book was published in 2018, signs have been pointing to another shift.

White selects Deer Isle as his base camp to study the industry in depth. He chooses Stonington because it is still an authentic lobstering village, i.e. you can see lobster traps in the front yards near the harbor.

"I could gauge a town's purity by how many Maine license tags appear on pickups at the town dock. Too many out-of-state tags and it's a lost cause," he says.

He also chooses Stonington because the apex of the lobster population where the stocks are most dense, is now located here in Penobscot and Jericho Bays.

"No one knows for sure when the march began. Lobster populations do not migrate in the classic sense," he says but each successive year, larvae establish themselves farther north or northeast.

The book is fascinating for the very thorough research he does covering climate change, price changes, unionization, lobster's life cycles, supply and demand, the huge rise of the Asian market (pre-Trump tariffs), backed by data, but mostly for the portraits of the charming, gritty, and delightful people who work here.

White rises at dawn to go along for the ride with several captains who become his main sources: Capt. Frank Gotwals and his sternman, Alyssa LaPointe, on the Seasong; Julie Eaton, captain of the Cat Sass, and her husband, Sid Eaton, captain of the Kimberly Belle; and the next generation, Gotwal's stepson Jason McDonald, who is known to sell a day's catch of nearly 1,000 pounds of lobster.

Besides being a leader in the community and working 750 traps, Gotwals is a celebrated Maine songwriter and guitarist in his 60s. He grew up in Northampton, Mass. His father was a music professor and his mother a choral director at Smith College. A love of music and the water are his two passions.

Julie and Sid Eaton both have their own boats and compete ferociously with each other for the most pounds of lobster caught per day, but both share a tendency to seasickness and eat no breakfast before their pre-dawn departure. Julie Eaton prefers to be called a lobsterman, as one of the increasing number of woman captains, even though women have only four percent of Maine's commercial lobster licenses.

White takes us through their day, picking up coffee at Harborview General Store which opens at 3:00 a.m., spotting the colored buoy, gaffing the buoy line, hauling up traps, removing the lobsters, freshening the bait, measuring the carapace for the legal limit (three and a quarter inches), and throwing back females with eggs (notching the tail fan if necessary as an indicator) and undersized lobsters, in a sustainability system imposed both by themselves and outside regulators.

White follows Gotwalls as he checks his 750 traps where 600 lobsters are a modest day's catch. Gotwals notes, "It's like playing blackjack with six decks in the shoe. The odds are always in favor of the house." By "house," he means nature.

Needless to say, the work is hard and dangerous. During this boom, lobstermen are fishing six days a week. They face the dangers of falling overboard without a lifeline (very few swim), flipping the boat in 16-foot seas, getting a foot caught in an outgoing line. The strong sense of community helps ease the risk.

The finances are also uncertain.

"The stocks seem secure," says Frank. "The fishery is sustainable. At least some would say that. Yet I worry about the economics of the lobster industry. That's not secure at all."

Says White, "In the summer of 2013, when temperatures were running high and the harvest was six times that of prior seasons, lobstermen reported seeing some shedders molt twice in the summer. They began earlier, too - in June. Rapid molting, say some scientists, brings more of the population to harvest size in a shorter amount of time. The timing of molting in lobsters - like that of crabs and butterflies - is brought on by temperature, nothing more. Turn up the heat and a lobster changes its clothes.

"Frank's words inspire me to search for answers. Is there a trend in the Gulf's temperature? How is any pattern in the ocean tied to local weather, if at all? How is lobster affected - not in theory, but actually on the ocean floor."

Follow along with White as he wrestles with these and other questions, combining as he does up to date research from the scientists at the Darling Center at the University of Maine and other recent studies, plus the ones who know best - the lobstermen themselves, who have seen boom and bust cycles through generations of their families and are nothing if not resilient.