Harry Hunt, with a friend, and a lot of halibut. Photo courtesy of Harry Hunt Jr.
By Bill Amaru
“I’m going to Panama. Maybe I’ll do what the old man did back in the day. Land is plentiful and cheap, just like it used to be In Orleans when he bought all this. No regrets”
Those were the last words Harry Hunt Jr. said to me from his driveway two years ago. I have no doubt he did what he intended.
Harry Junior was the only son of Harry Hunt Senior, a man of unusual nautical and other talents.
The Hunt family lived on Tonset Road in East Orleans. There was Harry, wife Gertrude, and three kids, Harry and two sisters. They were all tough and hard working. Harry was a lobsterman and a cod and halibut fisherman.
He fished out of Nauset only a short distance down the road from his front doorstep. He was a man of great power and determination. I saw him splice half inch wire rope, which usually takes a vice and metal fids, with his bare hands. His fingers were like steel marlin spikes. In the 1950s he fished in his 40-foot Novi year-round, in the cold of winter through the heat of Cape Cod summers. His catches were prodigious and a “site,” a job to a landsman, on his vessel was highly prized. Harry expected as much from his sternman as he did from himself—as Harry Jr. could tell you.
Back in the 1950s and 60s Nauset inlet was located below Nauset Heights, not very far from the north end of the bathing beach. It’s now way up north in Eastham. The distance from where it was many years ago to now is, in part, the reason Nauset Estuary is oxygen deprived and filling in. There is a small fraction of the flow of water there was back in Harry’s day. Old maps show where it once was, and how extensive the interior of the harbor was compared to today. The harbor and the bar that separated it from the sea were deep back then. Channels leading into Mill and Salt Ponds as well as Town Cove were deep, a strong current sweeping cold ocean water in and out two times a day. Sea life was prodigious. Striped bass in summer, flounder and cod in winter, all manner of shellfish in great numbers. Sadly, some things don’t change for the better.
Harry kept his Novi lobster boat at Snow Shore on a mooring about 100-feet out from the low water mark. Traps were loaded in spring for the summer season and the excellent lobstering it would bring. In fall, just as is done today, the traps came home and were stacked in neat rows alongside the house and out back. The cold weather brought the cod close to shore and the longlines that held the thousands of hooks needed for the catch were readied. Harry Jr. went to a private school in Marion so fishermen from town who could handle themselves on a small boat in winter came aboard.
Men like Witt Scott, Russ Chase, Brian Gibbons, Freddy Fulcher and Danny Chase, all “men of the sea” went out on cold, rough days to fish with Harry. He had a sixth sense about where to set his gear and brought home more fish than just about anyone fishing the “backside.” He landed several 300-pound halibut, creatures so big he would often tow them home rather than struggle to bring them aboard.
Harry was the first Cape Cod lobsterman to take the fishery to the canyons 50 to miles south of Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard. The canyons were cored out of what was the edge of land some 20,000 to 50,000 years ago as the ice of the last ice age melted. That melt water filled the oceans to present depths, about 200 to 300 hundred feet above where they had been.
Harry found unbelievably good lobster fishing in the deep water on the edges of the canyons. He had built several big-for-their-day lobster boats of 45-feet or so. He moved his boat to Wychmere Harbor, Harwich, as close to the grounds as he could get on the Cape. He finished out his career in the mid 1970s, still going full tilt to the end. He suffered a stroke from which he survived, but made it clear he did not wish anything less than to live a full life.
Harry placed a mark on the fisheries of the Cape. In a town full of men of the sea, he managed to stand above most if not all. I have always felt he was a legend for any time.
Bill Amaru writes from his fishing shanty in Orleans. A version of this story appeared in the Cape Cod Chronicle.