Fish Tales

The first day of a 50-hour Marine Resource Education Program, a presenter said something that stuck with me the entire week:
“I am here teaching this topic to a grandson of someone I worked with in this industry.”
The enduring way of life and deep personal connections commercial fishing provides is one reason I chose to work at the Fishermen’s Alliance, and heck, that’s one of the reasons I have chosen to do almost everything I have done in my life.

Family lore has it that when Clint Austin was a baby his mom, Barbara, would drag him around in a fish tote when she harvested shellfish; his first memory, when he was around four, is watching his mom shuck hundreds of oysters.
Other childhood memories: On his mom’s grant watching sunset and playing with crabs, getting his junior shellfish license at 13, harvesting in the wild fishery and on farms. Austin likely spent more time on the flats in Wellfleet than anywhere else; when he graduated from Nauset Regional High School he headed to Westfield State to pursue an environmental major.
He wasn’t gone long.

Glenn Svenningsen said when he was born, his father had already fallen in love with lobstering and left construction to pursue it full time.
“I hated it,” said Svenningsen, standing in front of a stack of lobster traps at his house in Orleans. “I always went when I was little and I got really seasick.”
So Svenningsen, now 18 and a senior at Cape Cod Regional Technical High School, did a lot of landscaping, freshwater fishing, but had no desire to follow his father, also named Glenn.

On Wednesday, Aug. 13, Ray Rowell got up before his 2 a.m. alarm. Rowell has worked for the Fishermen’s Alliance for a year and a half, but much of his adult life has been spent fishing and he always woke up before the chimes on his phone. He hates the sound.
That day he was going sea clamming, something he spent years doing on boats out of Wellfleet – where he lives – and Provincetown.
The trip had been set up at the Hookers Ball, the annual fundraiser and celebration put on by the Fishermen’s Alliance. Rowell was talking to Mike Van Hoose, captain of the sea clamming vessel Nemesis, owned by Jesse Rose, a Wellfleet native now Chatham transplant.

Captain Jon Tolley was off the water and the sun was beating down in an empty dirt lot in Yarmouth, but a bad storm was forecasted.
He stood by his grey pickup truck, three big coolers filled with lobsters and ice packs and a billboard advertising just-out-of-the-ocean crustaceans. Thunderous booms 17 miles away didn’t drown out shrieks of joy and thumping of waterslides from Wicked Waves waterpark next door.
A customer asked if weather would close Tolley’s sales window; he spends seven days a week, from 4 to 6:30 p.m., on the corner of Route 28 and West Yarmouth Road.
“I sell them rain, snow, sleet or hail. Nothing stops a Tolley,” he said.

Keith Wilda was sitting at a butcher block table at Aquaculture Research Corporation, ARC, looking at Chase Garden Creek and a line of upwellers full of clams.
“I’ll be right there,” he said, pointing with a grin, about to begin his next job: “Grading seed.”
Wilda started work before sunrise and recently marked his 100th day at the Cape’s epicenter of shellfish production, which lies hidden among northside Dennis dunes not far from Chapin Beach.

Will Nicolai and Ray Rowell had been talking a lot of sports, starting at 2:45 a.m. when they left the Cape for Washington D.C. and between meetings with Congressional representatives on Capitol Hill through a warm spring day.
Walking into the office of Representative Rob Wittman, R-Virginia, Nicolai, who fishes on the Constance Sea, and Rowell, working at the Fishermen’s Alliance, kept at it, bonding with interns and staff over a conversation about Texas A&M legendary quarterback Johnny “Money” Manziel and the dashed playoff hopes of the San Antonio Spurs.
Later, at a meet and greet at a restaurant called Mr. Henry’s on April 29, the two had another in-depth conversation about Boston sports with Matthew Sheffield, whose job interview with his boss Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey started with a conversation about the Red Sox and Indiana football.

Captain Kurt Martin is your typical old-school Cape Codder: He has been fishing for decades, owns a few boats, is a commercial landlord and can fix or build most anything.
But he can’t weld nearly as well as his father could, which means if he needs gear repaired, a skiff fixed or equipment to last another few months, he needs to hire someone and wait.
“Everybody is busy,” Martin said. “There is no urgency,”
Knowing time and tide waits for no one, Martin always had the urgency; now he has the welding skills.