Boil. Crack. Box. Repeat for 300 lobsters.

That’s how many the Mattapoisett Lions Club bought, prepared and sold at their annual lobster dinner, part of the Harbor Days celebration that has been keeping Shipyard Park packed with people all week.

“We bought 300 of them, we’ll sell them all. Definitely,” said Janet Rego, a member of the Lions Club who has been involved in food preparation and support all week.  From cutting strawberries for the shortcakes to assisting with the lobster dinner, Rego and her granddaughter, Marissa Parker, have been fixtures in the Lions Club operation.

“I would say between Lions and volunteers we have about 50 people working here right now,” said Mike King, who’s idea it was in the early 90s to start the lobster dinner.

“We had a ham and bean dinner originally,” said King. “We lamented the diminishing turnout year after year and I was a fish dealer in New Bedford so I thought of doing a lobster dinner.”

The Lions have put on the lobster dinner since 1992. As a former cook for fishing boats out of New Bedford, King made the perfect brain behind the lobster dinner.

King stood, wearing a poncho made of a garbage bag, enormous knife in hand, cracking each lobster after it rolled off the assembly line.

“It’s been an evolutionary process to get to this point,” said King, remarking on the massive and well-oiled line of Lions and volunteers boiling, packaging and serving lobsters.  With about six stations, each with a different function from throwing the lobster beneath King’s blade to ensuring there’s a pack of butter in the Styrofoam container, the Lions have turned the lobster dinner into a science.

“It takes, obviously, a team to pull this off,” said King. “And it’s gone quite well.”

The dinner was quite a success, as usual, with the white tent in Shipyard Park being packed with a crowd of eager lobster lovers.

“It’s going great,” said Don Bamberger, the Immediate Past King Lion and Chairman of Harbor Days. “We’ve got a crowded tent.”

“It’s an annual tradition,” said Kimberly Ward, an attendee who brought her entire family.  “It’s excellent, we try to come every year.”

“Doesn’t that make the prettiest picture? Red lobster, yellow corn.” said King, cracking another lobster so that a volunteer could lay it out beside the corn the Lions served it with.

"This is the best lobster," said Christine Mckay, another attendee there with her family. "They need to do this twice a year."

Harbor Days is an annual celebration of Mattapoisett and its heritage organized by the Mattapoisett Lions Club. The Lions club is an organization devoted to blindness prevention and sight retention and all the proceeds from Harbor Days go towards Lions-supported charities or the Town of Mattapoisett.