A voice crackled through the walkie-talkie on Vern Mossman’s shirt at the Maine Lobster Festival Wednesday afternoon.
“We need a single!”
Surrounded by the steam of eight giant lobster cookers, Mossman, 64, and other volunteers brought a crate of 100 pounds of lobster from a truck onto a conveyor belt and dumped it into one of the cookers.
Mossman has been doing this for 56 years, since 1967.
“He’s like the big lobster cooker since long before I was born,” said Mike Hall, a volunteer lobster cooker for the festival from Thompston.
Mossman, a Rockland native, is the cooker director for the Maine Lobster Festival in Rockland. He’s in charge of the preparation of hundreds of pounds of lobster each day for the festival. For his day job, he’s a firefighter and works at Walmart.
But the people at the festival and the volunteer cookers keep him coming back to lobster cooking year after year.
“Favorite part is just teaching the people how to do this,” Mossman said. “Cause eventually when I get climbing up the ladder, I’m gonna retire from cooking and have somebody come in and show them how to do this, and maybe they will like it. I mean, I enjoy it, but I’m climbing up the hill.”
He learned to cook lobster at the festival at a time when there was one lobster cooker cooking on six burners, he said. Now, there are eight vats that can each cook 200 pounds of lobster at a time.
Mossman thinks he’s still got 11 years of cooking left in him, though. He wants to retire from volunteering at the world’s largest lobster cooker at 75, he said.
But cooking so much lobster throughout the years means Mossman has lost a taste for it.
“I used to love ‘em and eat ‘em, but no more,” Mossman said. “I’ve cooked too many of ‘em.”
Mossman hasn’t lost a taste for the people. He likes to talk to the festival-goers who come to see the world’s largest lobster cooker in action.
“And I come down, see all the people come down and have a good time and ask questions about the cooker, how we do it,” Mossman said. “You meet a lot of people.”
Mossman likes to make people laugh. Quick-witted and sarcastic, he spits jokes about lobsters throughout the day. Holding one lobster in each hand, he said, “They talk to you once in a while.”
What do they say?
“Don’t cook me,” he quipped.