Charting the Past

Forty years ago — that Old Testament number meant to connote a long time (raining 40 days and nights, wandering in the desert 40 years) — Walter Baron built his workshop on a side road in Wellfleet. He knew what he wanted to do, he did it, and he still does:

Build boats.

He had been working in a two-car garage around the corner but needed more room. He had the land but hadn’t built his and Jane’s home yet; the shop came first.

“It cost about 15 grand,” he remembers. “We did it in a week and a half. It had the biggest swinging doors in Wellfleet at the time, special hinges and all that.”

If “jumbo shrimp” is an oxymoron, what is “very small shrimp”?

Whatever you call it, shrimp with the Latin name pandalus borealis, or Arctic shrimp, is big with flavor and eye appeal.

This crustacean does not come from the warm Gulf of Mexico or the coasts of our Southeastern states. Neither is it “farm raised” like cousins tiger and brown shrimp. Arctic shrimp are exactly what they sound like, a creature of the cold and dark waters of northern oceans.

Every year around this time, some of us think back to when skiffs from Stage Harbor to Ryder’s Cove were outfitted with bay scallop dredges.

David Jerauld stopped fishing decades ago, but stories of his boat, the Pocahontas, still find their way into conversations.

“A legendary name for a legendary boat,” said Paul Gasek from Brewster, who crewed for Jerauld back in the 1970s before going on to another kind of career in fisheries; producer of the popular television show, “The Deadliest Catch.”

Jerauld has landscaped for years – too many days at sea away from his family convinced him to jump ship – but he grew up fishing.

Imagine the following:

You have been out to sea for two days. It’s mid-December, the shortest days of the year and colder than usual. It’s been blowing northwest, 10 to 20 knots with three- to six-foot seas. Your catch of 7000 pounds of cod, haddock and flat fish are below, well iced to ensure best quality, and hopefully the best price. The trip to Joe Bragg’s ridge you and your three-man crew began earlier in the week is nearing its end.

Perhaps one of the most beautiful and moving experiences nature offers the human condition can be found at sunrise, at sea. The sunrise over the North Atlantic Ocean in summer can be extraordinarily beautiful. The breeze which is almost always busy at sea seems to pause for the moments it takes for the sun to rise above the horizon.

The heat that comes when the sun warms the air brings the breeze back to life and the silence that held sway during the dawn is ended. Day, night and sunsets have their own special personalities, but sunrise is a thing apart.

Bill Crockett wasn’t a bad kid, just mischievous, no fan of school, so he walked away from Fork Union Military Academy when he was 16.

“I read all the wrong books,” he said, like “On the Road,” the anti-establishment, counter-culture novel by Jack Kerouac.

Crockett hitchhiked all over the country, heard about the glories of Chatham from John Summers, and went there. Kerouac said he found his America (and God) on the road; Crockett found his in Chatham in 1961.