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Michael Chute has been shellfishing his entire life and loves it, but when he got his first aquaculture farm it was a grind.
“I found a lot of ways to do it wrong,” Chute said.
He was fighting time and tide, constantly under pressure, feeling he was involved in a solitary pursuit. It wasn’t suiting him, “keeping your head down and not looking up,” said Chute, who has never met a stranger.
Meghna Marjadi looked at a map of proposed wind farms off the Cape, areas she is studying to see how turbine arrays would impact fishermen.
“These are now changed. The maps are changing every couple of weeks,” said Marjadi, a researcher at UMass Dartmouth, who is using data from National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Northeast Fishery Science Center.
Marjadi, speaking at a Small Boats. Big Science. event at the Fishermen’s Alliance, said efforts to install wind energy off the coast of New England have accelerated, outpacing scientific research designed to gauge its effects.
Over the course of months, multiple focus groups and close to 40 conversations, myriad reasons why people aren’t eating more seafood were revealed.
“I don’t want the smell in my house, and I don’t always know how to cook it.”
“I don’t feel comfortable buying fish at Stop & Shop and other chains.”
Before draggers, schooners dotted our harbor. Double-ended dories were used to row captain and crew from moorings to wharfs. Schooners operated by sail only.
Then came the 1940s, 50s, 60s and 70s, the decades of draggers, also called Side Trawlers or Eastern Trawlers. Alarms would go off at 3 to 4 a.m. every morning, all over town. Later, when telephones came into play, captains phoned the telephone operator. She plugged in, by memory, a call to each crew’s home number.
Provincetown’s Blessing of the Fleet has been a tradition for 77 years and this year Beau Gribbin, captain of F/V Glutton, led the procession of fishing boats past Bishop Edgar da Cunha, standing on the ferry Provincetown II, to be sprinkled with holy water. The Glutton carried a statute of St. Peter, patron saint of fishermen, on her bow. As every year, fishermen carried the statue from St. Peter’s church on the hill down to MacMillan Wharf for the celebration.
“(Fishermen) went into inclement, unpredictable, dangerous seas to fish, so they could bring food to so many people and support their families,” said da Cunha. “They wanted God’s blessing to go with them.”
Hopes for a year of fair winds, following seas and bountiful catch.
When BOEM issued a 259-page EA in the FR last month, kind of like an initial EIS, it was all about a PSN and SAP in the WEA.
Got it?
Too bad there’s not a phone app that translates government acronyms the way they translate languages. It would send back the following:
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