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We’re on the cusp of a new era in collaborative research—an era where data is also helping fishermen make day-to-day decisions about where and when to fish, allowing them to be more efficient and help them adapt in the face of a rapidly changing ocean.
On a chilly late April night, half of Sandwich Marina was quiet, empty docks waiting for summer visitors, pleasure boats with names like Knot Working filling the parking lot.
The other half was packed with commercial fishing boats, flags flying, names like Resolve and Southpaw.
Next to the harbormaster’s shingled office, in a maintenance building with garage doors facing the parking lot, the smell of fuel heavy in the air, more than a dozen folding chairs were organized in a circle on the concrete floor.
A lot of people look forward to signs of spring, daffodils, peepers, river herring and the chance for new beginnings. I’m no different, but what flips the switch on a long winter for me is NGOM – the Northern Gulf of Maine scallop season.
NGOM, a high-stakes, fast-paced fishery, is the kickoff event for my fishing season. I start with NGOM, then my dad sets his lobster traps in May, and then in June, I fly out to Bristol Bay, Alaska to harvest sockeye salmon. When I arrive home in August, the timing lines up perfectly with the lobster run.
A group of commercial fishermen and industry advocates from across the country sat down at a table in NOAA’s Silver Spring, Maryland headquarters with Assistant Administrator Eugenio Piñeiro Soler, who runs the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS). Like many meetings they have had with policymakers, the fishermen talked about unnecessary regulatory burdens, needless closures, an unequal playing field, under-investment, instability, inadequate science, lack of training and other barriers to their success. It was clear that the leader of NMFS, on the job for a little less than a year, had been having many similar conversations around the country.
Piñeiro Soler nodded and said those hurdles “distract you from what you do well, which is fishing.”
Jamie Bassett runs a packing businesses at the Chatham Fish Pier, a fulcrum building for the industry since the 1940s.
“My grandfather probably brought fish into this port a time or two,” Bassett told a crowd gathered on a frigid January morning.
In his grandfather’s day the pier was known for cod. Now Chatham is known for skates.
“We did three million pounds of skate in 2024,” Bassett said.
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.
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