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A Roll that Really Rules - A LOAD OF LOBSTER
Telegraph Journal, June 2000
 Few people have seen the earth move as John Quigley did during his university days, when this engineer and surveyor used his instruments to measure the tidal action of the earth's crust.
But compared with this, the job he will tackle on Saturday "is going to be bizarre," he tells you.
Mr. Quigley and his assistants have been asked to document the exact length of what organizers are hoping will be the longest lobster roll in the world.
Steamers Restaurant, the Fredericton-based Internet publisher DineAid.Com and the Saint John YM-YWCA are joining forces to build a crustacean sandwich 50 feet long, as an opening ceremony for both the seafood restaurant and the DineAid.Com web page, and as a fund-raiser for the Y's future Glenn R. Carpenter Camp and Outdoor Education Centre.
It will contain a minimum of 90 lobsters that weigh a total of 45 pounds - the target which sandwich organizers say they must meet in order to beat the present Guiness Book of Records holder, which a Boston service club built two years ago. The U.S. roll spanned a mere 47 feet, 11 7/8 inches, contained 89 lobsters and tipped the scales at 45 pounds total, including the weight of the mayonnaise, celery, other ingredients and the bun.
With visions of "Home of the World's Largest Lobster Roll", painted across the entrance to his Water Street restaurant, Steamers manager Pete Stoddard announced yesterday he is upping the recipe.
"We're going to try to put 120 lobster in it."
He has eight liters of mayonnaise and nearly 20 heads of lettuce waiting for the project. He will also bring in an extra six-foot section of bun as a back-up to the other five sections, but the extra bun could be put to us adding another six feet to the project, he said.
Auctioneer Tim Issac will try to auction off the sandwich at a starting price of $1,000 but if there are no takers, he'll auction off sections of it. The leftovers will sell at $10 per six inches. Festivities will go from 1:30p.m. to 4p.m. at Steamers.
But building and documenting the biggest lobster roll in the world and making the title official doesn't come without its challenges.
And weighing a 50-foot sandwich is one of the biggest. Lift it with scales tied to the middle, and you get a lot of lobster on the floor. That's why a staff of some four dozen volunteers will have to precisely weigh all ingredients as they add them to the lobster roll, so someone can later add up the individual weights.
The biggest challenge, Mr. Stoddard said, was in finding out what kinds of documentation Guiness will need in order to consider the project for its next record book.
After four months of corresponding with the famous Irish brewer and publisher, the group appointed lawyer Mike McCluskey as its notary public, who will file an affidavit reporting all the measurements. Saint John MP Elsie Wayne will fill the role of local dignitary, because the rules state that one must preside.
"Our number two challenge is finding space to put it all together," Mr. Stoddard said.
If Steamers tried to assemble its lobster rill in its longest dinning room, part of the assembly would stick out the door and across the first traffic lane on Water Street, he said.
That's why organizers hit upon the plan of assembling it in the restaurant's backyard. Even, so they will have to stretch it out diagonally from corner to corner in the yard, and some of the sandwich will protrude along the sidewalk.
If it rains, the roll will go together inside Pugsley Terminal.
The challenges that Mr. Quigley will try to meet won't be known until he faces the lobster roll on Saturday.
His first instinct is to place his tripods at either end of the delicacy and run a laser beam up the centre of it to get his measurement, he said. But he fears organizers may not want him to position his non-kitchen gear over the roll and risk having something fall off.
In this case, he would have to back his instruments a short distance beyond the ends of the roll, and subtract these extra distances from his overall measurement.
Or, he may have to position himself off to the side, at a location from which he can simultaneously view both ends of the lobster roll, and use triangulation to calculate the length.
"We'll size it up when we get there."
The project's biggest question mark has yet to solved, says Wayne Jagoe, the DineAid.Com president who first proposed the lobster roll project:
Despite many months of planning and four months of trading letters with Guiness, the team hasn't been able to find out yet whether the record book will accept a lobster roll that is assembled from sections of bun, instead of requiring one continuous bun. A 50-foot bun would have to be baked in a tunnel oven, of which there is no such thing in the Atlantic Provinces, Mr. Jagoe said.
The only parameters the team has been able to learn are those described in the record-book entries themselves, he said.
Although he will have his work cut out for him, John Quigley grins at the prospect that his essential but little-appreciated profession will finally stand in the limelight on Saturday.
"If everybody got their lobster rolls measured," he quipped, "it would be great for business."
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