Fish Tales

Everyone in Jamaica has a nickname, a familiar name. For Anthony Hill it’s “Jelly,” and has been ever since he was little.
The name carried to Cape Cod, where he met his wife Sarah Robin 20 years ago and the two carved a life first working in Provincetown then owning and running the Flying Fish Restaurant in Wellfleet, busting ass season by season, investing in community and property, living what some might call the American Dream, understanding that the dream is not simple, easy, or clichéd.
“All de while,” as they say in Jamaica, Jelly kept Jamaican roots and aspirations.

Steve Gennodie, owner of Chatham Pier Fish Market, was flying to Florida recently and saw an in-flight advertisement for scallops – from Japan.

“It’s a frozen, farm-raised product. It is just comical,” he said.

But Hokkaido Bay scallops sell for at least $3 less a pound than the ones buys fresh from Cape fishermen.  

When Japanese scallops are cooked it becomes clear local scallops are much better, but how do you get the average person to buy more expensive fish?

With river herring populations rebounding, Harwich selectmen heard a proposal to open that town’s Herring River to harvest.
“This is a legacy,” said Selectman Don Howell, a member of the board when they shut the run down in 2004 because of low numbers. “We are good stewards.”
While the town has done its part, too many river herring heading to runs across the Cape are being caught offshore, beyond the limits of town and state regulations.
Ray Kane, outreach coordinator at the Fishermen’s Alliance, was at the Harwich meeting in early February. He supported Brad Chase from the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries, and Don Yannuzzi, natural resources director in Harwich, in developing a re-opening plan.

Sam Bradford, tall and lanky, stood in a crowded hallway at the Lobster Trap in Bourne, dwarfed by hundreds of stacked white boxes printed with lobster in red letters and destined for places all over the world. 
Bradford, chief financial officer at Mac’s Seafood, had climbed the narrow stairs from the concrete floor below where lobsters were being sorted in an enormous, chilly room.
“We have a really good system; they are grading for shell quality and size,” Bradford said as gray crates filled with lobsters moved along watery tracks in a tank that can hold 100,000 pounds. “We have a 20- to 25-person crew during the day and eight at night. The first job is to pack the international stuff.” 

When John Our was a kid, he’d go out to sea with his father and see enormous factory trawlers from Russia and Poland catch so much herring it would take days to cut all the fish.

Small boats from the Cape that relied on groundfish wouldn’t stick around because once herring were gone, so were the cod and haddock that fed on them.

More than 50 years later, the foreign fleet is a memory, pushed beyond 200 miles by federal law. But there still is no herring.

Anyone standing near the side door of Chatham Pier Fish Market this summer may have heard an unusual phrase as totes of glimmering black sea bass were brought into the building:

“Delivering the science!”

On one hot, sunny day Mike Holubesko, who works for Captain Ron Braun, was standing in the cool back section of the market with two totes of black bass, lobster-filled tanks gurgling in the background.

Holubesko, smiling after a day fishing, was waiting for Josh Goodrich, the market’s manager, to measure, weigh and assess 30 sea bass, while Braun was delivering the rest of his 500-pound catch to Red’s Best across the parking lot.

John Pappalardo commercially fished for close to a decade until fishermen thought he should quit his day job and focus on his volunteer work: Being a voice for the fleet at the Cape Cod Commercial Hook Fishermen’s Association.

Fast forward 20 years and Pappalardo is chief executive officer of the successful organization that is now the Fishermen’s Alliance. But during COVID Pappalardo had a recurring nightmare: