At 75, Frank Chamberlain is still as strong as an ox, lugging hefty lobster pots from his shack in Ravenglass, just a stone’s throw from the water’s edge or stacking them up in the back garden of his small cottage just a few yards behind - a cottage whose front door, with the coiled rope mat, is almost hidden by a Secret Garden-like tangled web of flowers and foliage.

It was Frank’s life-long love of fishing, which first led him to Ravenglass back in 1960 and where some 33 years later he retired to, to realise his dream of “buying a boat and doing a bit of fishing.”

What Frank actually ended up doing was lot more than a “bit of fishing” – he turned his passion into a thriving little business, making lobsters his new labour of love. Although he hadn’t done any lobster fishing before retiring at 62, he was soon supplying markets in Carlisle and Manchester, as well as flying his Cumbrian catch out to Madrid with Monarch Airlines.

Nowadays he only sells direct to Taste of the Lakes in Maryport and to a man in Spain.

“It’s a hobby with me – but it keeps me in whiskey and salmon fishing holidays,” he jokes.

Frank, who is always accompanied by Flo, his 13-year-old Jack Russell – his “best friend” – is also a keen huntsman and goes shooting four or five times a year.

If you look closely enough, you can see his passion for field sports in the motifs on the worn braces, which hold up his work pants, tucked into his large green wellies.

Originally from Hertfordshire, Frank first fell in love with Ravenglass when he visited on a fishing holiday and stayed with Hugh Falkus, an entrepreneur and, said Frank, “a very good fisherman” who used to write books on sea trout fishing. “I thought, what a wonderful place – but with a wife and kids it was too early to come here to retire to,” Frank said.



But Ravenglass has cast its spell and Frank had taken the bait – and he always knew that one day, he would return. Frank became hooked on fishing when he was child growing up in his grandparents’ house in Watford near the Grand Union Canal.

His aunt, one of his “two mothers” who had been widowed during the First World War, used to take him down to the tow paths to go fishing for Gudgeon with a stick and a bent pin. From those humble beginnings, he was to later graduate into trout and salmon fishing in The Spey in Scotland, before eventually buying boats and turning fishing into a post-retirement career.

Frank’s working life also began down south. In his late teens he started working for his father, a market gardener, selling their produce on the markets at Spitalfields in London.

He stayed there until he was 32 and was “fed up of the 3am starts every morning to get to market.” So he opted for a complete change of career, bought a partially developed caravan site in mid Wales and ventured into the holiday business.

It was a brave move – but one which paid off. “At the time I had a wife and three children, nowhere to live, an overdraft and a potential income of £50 from two caravans that were paying £25-a-year,” he said. But that didn’t faze Frank and he built the park up to 170 static caravans before buying a second caravan park in the next village.

He modernised that, had about 180 caravans there, and then sold both businesses on and bought another one in Laugharne, which surrounded Dylan Thomas’s boat house. This park consisted mainly of log cabins for letting and also boasted a country club.

During his time there he went to a little fishing village near St David’s and met a chap called Peter Voyce, who had opted out of the rat race some years earlier and was fishing for lobsters. The two became good friends and Frank learned a lot about fishing lobsters from him, off the islands.

After six years developing his holiday complex business in Carmarthenshire, Frank was bought out by a company and moved with his family to the Lake District. They settled in Low Heskett in 1985 and Frank changed trades again, going into partnership with his youngest son in a land drainage business.

At the same time, Frank bought what is now his home – his cottage in Main Street, Ravenglass - which he modernised, vowing to himself that when he retired, he was going to live there full time, buy a boat and go fishing.



When he and his son’s land drainage business petered out, as grant money dried up, they went into civil engineering and set up the family business, Grant Limited, based near Wigton. Frank retired from there as MD when he was 62, headed for Ravenglass and went to do that “bit of fishing” he’d always promised himself.

But as he said, “It didn’t just stop at a little bit of fishing!” His first boat was a 22-footer with a small inboard Volvo, three-cylinder motor, and he just fished a few pots and a few nets. He gave that up for a bigger boat and did some trawling but didn’t enjoy that as much. His third vessel, a second-hander, proved to be trouble and eventually he had his current boat – the bright yellow, appropriately-named Lady Primrose – made for him on the Isle of Wight.

He’s enormously proud of the 10-metre long catamaran - “It has give me hours and hours of pleasure,” he says – pointing her out affectionately as she sits anchored in the bay, waiting – like Flo - to go out for the next lobster catch.

Frank uses a mix of medley pots with ‘soft eyes’ and ‘parlours’, where the lobsters are held, and ink wells, which will hold four or five lobsters when they are on the move.

He used to have as many as 600 pots in the water at any one time, but now he’s cutting back and has only about 350 out for the bulk of the year. A good fishing day is a 30-35 percent catch, while a bad day is down to 12-15 percent.

Frank said it all depends on the time of year – the best time being July and August; the worst being June. “I don’t know why that is. I’m still trying to work that out yet!” admits Frank, who says the best way to eat lobster is freshly boiled.

That said, he doesn’t actually eat lobster himself – he prefers a different type of mollusc - crabs. “I catch a lot of crabs and I don’t have a market for them, so I throw them back. It’s not uncommon to throw 75-100 kilos of crabs back in a day.”

As anyone who works on the sea knows, wind and weather are your masters, and Frank, who has a small team of helpers, isn’t going to get on the wrong side of either at his age. “If it’s not very nice, I won’t go out. I don’t need the money. It really is a hobby and a bit of fun.”

He’ll have probably gone out about 50 times this year, heading a couple of miles north and about five to six miles south.

He’s always joined on his fishing trips by little Flo, the dog he said he’ll never replace. “I won’t get another dog after Flo – chances are it would outlive me, and I’ve seen what dogs are like when they lose their masters – they’re totally lost.”

Flo isn’t fazed by the lobsters, who’ve nipped Frank once or twice – “Yes,” he says, “I’ve been nipped, but not badly. Though I reckon a big one could bite your finger off” – but she does have her own nautical nemesis. “The only time she ever shows any interest in fish if it’s a dog fish – and then she gets quite vicious,” said Frank.

* Frank Chamberlain’s Cumbrian-caught lobsters are available at Taste of the Lakes in Maryport.