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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.
Longraking is hard work, hours in a skiff scouring for quahogs with a 25-foot-pole attached to a 30-pound basket, often in miserable weather.
Harvesters might get grumpy, exhausted, then dissolve into laughter when John Linnell takes a break for pushups.
“Or sit ups,” said Mike Anderson, who has longraked beside Linnell for decades. “You could see his boots in the air. And he used to run home in those boots.
“He was, is, bigger than life,” said Anderson.
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.
There once was a man named Stanley Bishop who worked for an outfit called Railway Express, similar to FedEx, and his route included Chatham.
The year was 1936 or so, and Bishop knew a lot of fishermen, including Captain George Bloomer, who told him that the best, freshest fish was being unloaded in Chatham. Bishop’s route also included Fulton Fish Market in New York and he didn’t need much convincing to launch a new business: Old Harbor Fish Company.
The romantic view of Cape Cod has always involved fishing and the waterfront.
Going to sea for 50 years you get to experience some remarkable events.
As Riverview Bait and Tackle in Yarmouth celebrates its 50th anniversary, owner Lee Boisvert says the secret to success has been the ability to evolve.
Once upon a time there was a writer named Joseph Mitchell.
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