Dean Karoblis, Ray Rowell, John Soposki and Glenn Svenningsen at WaterWORKS.
By Doreen Leggett
Many students who attend WaterWORKS, an annual event at Cape Cod Community College, want to hear from different employers in the Blue Economy, explore job and career options from wastewater treatment to mosquito control to tagging sharks.
Not Barnstable High’s Theresa Wait. She knows exactly what she wants to do: commercial fishing.
Wait, one of the close to 300 students that attended the event, has never been commercial fishing, although she’ll go down to Barnstable Harbor to see boats come in and out, watch the men working.
“I like long days. I like hard work,” Wait said. “I’m not really in it for the social part… I like having something to do, and not some frivolous thing.”
One of her first stops at the January gathering, organized by Cape Cod Chamber of Commerce’s Blue Economy Foundation, was the Cape Cod Commercial Fishermen’s Alliance table, in the science building which has hosted for the last several years.
Wait talked to Captain Dean Karoblis who has been lobstering out of Sandwich most of his life. He told her that two of his crew are women; she seemed surprised.
“I am an equal opportunity employer,” he said with a grin.
Wait was interested in Fishermen Training courses the Fishermen’s Alliance puts on regularly; safety and navigation, training for captains, even welding.
The Fishermen’s Alliance launched the trainings in 2020 to help stem the tide of a greying fleet: Many fishermen are more than 50 years old, and it is difficult to find crew.
A lack of young fishermen was not evident in volunteers who manned the table. Karoblis, in his 40s, was the oldest. Ray Rowell, 30, is a former sea clammer who runs the training programming. Glenn Svenningsen, 18, and John Soposki, 20, also spent the day.
Svenningsen, a senior at Cape Cod Regional Technical High School, has been to WaterWORKS before as an attendee. He has fished for most of his life and last year invested in a larger vessel and more traps.
As juniors and seniors from half a dozen Cape schools stopped by the table, Svenningsen ran through a typical day lobstering, gear and hauler work, the impact of regulations. The latter part of the day was open to the public to learn more about opportunities in the Blue Economy from 50 exhibitors.
Several high schoolers had already been introduced to the fishery through parents or friends, commercial tuna fishing, gillnetting for skates, unloading catch at the Chatham Fish Pier. Others had a student lobster license, how Svenningsen started.
Svenningson owes his presence in the industry to Soposki, from New York, who moved down to the Cape because he loved fishing. Soposki crews on a 40-foot boat out of Chatham and fishes for black sea bass, lobster and Jonah Crab, and has his own smaller boat as well.
Some students were impressed when Soposki mentioned that he was in a movie, “The Hand that Holds the Line,” which has sold out multiple times at Chatham Orpheum and Cape Cinema.
The goal of the event is to reach those interested in a career in the industry and explain challenges fishermen face – often not offshore.
“It isn’t a problem to go catch the stuff,” said Soposki.
One student said her mom worked for lobsterman Jon Tolley, who almost had his lobster business shut down by the Yarmouth Zoning Board of Appeals before voters rallied and protected his right to sell lobsters from his home.
Soposki had a related experience when he ran into someone at a yard sale complaining about improvements at Rock Harbor in Orleans. He asked if she liked bay scallops. When she replied she loved them, he pointed out that fishermen brought them to the port she was complaining about.
“It seems kind of crazy to me,” said Svenningsen. “This place was built on commercial fishing.”
To meet environmental challenges the industry faces, the Fishermen’s Alliance is working with partners to track changes in the ocean. The program, entitled eMOLT, environmental sensors on lobster traps and large trawlers, measure temperature, salinity and other variables.
Sensors on boats also feed into weather models and other research.
Through the Fishermen’s Alliance, a curriculum built around eMOLT is available to local high schools.
Dennis-Yarmouth teacher Emma Ethier is teaching it to several of her classes. Ethier, who has a fisheries background on a federal research vessel, was at WaterWORKs with her students.
She explained fish are temperature-dependent and will move if conditions aren’t ideal, like people seek someplace cooler when they’re hot. Fishermen can’t usually tell what warm or cold spots are in the waters around them, but they know the temperature fish prefer.
Svenningsen, who doesn’t have sensors on his boat yet, knows lobsters react to different temperatures.
“If you get in a cold pocket, you can feel it on the runner,” he said. Sometimes one trap has no lobsters and the bait hasn’t been touched. In other traps the bait is gone and there are lobsters.
He thinks the untouched trap may have landed in a spot with less salinity, but would like to know for sure. The sensors provide information so fishermen can make informed modifications. These include resetting gear away from areas of low oxygen or targeting a specific temperature band.
Hour-long panels gave students the opportunity for a deeper dive. Ray Rowell joined one, telling the audience that commercial fishing days can run 8 to 12 hours, with some 32. He said the average start is around 4 a.m. and if you are good at what you do, working on a good boat, you can make $500 to $1000 a day.
“It’s good to expose young folks here on Cape Cod to the Fishermen’s Alliance, and opportunities that exist,” said Rowell. “Some young people I talked to were conservation-minded and telling them about stock assessments, how quotas are set, gave them a better understanding of how the fisheries here operate sustainably.”