Fish Tales

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.

Neal Morris, captain of the F/V Fed Up, has been fishing for a long time, with a lot of captains and for a lot of different fish.
“I started in 1970 when I was 10, scalloping when I was 11,” he said.
Morris, who has gone for sea scallops offshore, started with bay scallops close to 50 years ago.
“I did five bushels a day. It was a nice thing everyone did, a community thing,” he explained.

“I wouldn’t have you here if it wasn’t the apocalypse.”
Those words from Wellfleet’s Assistant Shellfish Constable Johnny “Clam” Mankevetch as he motored through a plate-glass calm Chipman’s Cove on a bright blue late fall day.
He was heading to half a dozen converted eel traps he had marked with plastic-bottle buoys re-purposed from the dump, now designed to catch what Mankevetch, an upbeat nature-loving guy, calls a scourge:

Dan Ward of Ward Aquafarms has been growing oysters since 2012 and has experimented with a variety of other things over the years, bay scallops and sugar kelp for instance, and most recently tautog.  
“I started oyster farming because that is what we can do, growing oysters and clams is viable,” Ward said. “I need to keep the lights on and once they are on, you can branch out.”
Ward was standing near two tanks of a few dozen rotini-size brown and black mottled fish in a back corner of a hatchery on the Pocasset River in Bourne. The hatchery, the second on the Cape, came online last year and was prompted by a need to grow more bay scallops; it came about by investing in a marina to help pay the bills.
Ward’s professional life has been a meld of practical and visionary, academic research and the business of fishing.

Leaning against his grey pickup truck on a windy day at Point Judith, Rhode Island, Josiah Dodge looked at fishing boats in the busy harbor.
“I started right on that dock on a boat called the Betsy,” Dodge said.
Thirty years ago, his captain was an older Russian guy nicknamed Sunbeams, mainly because he did too much acid and would trip out when the sun came up over the water. He thought 17-year-old Dodge, stocky, tattooed, a father to be, was several years older so he gave him a shot. Dodge didn’t let him down.
“They weren’t bashful about hard work down here,” Dodge smiled.

A gleaming white fishing boat, clearing Chatham Bar, makes a wide circle to come into the Fish Pier and a gangly, red-haired crew member with a full beard makes sure the vessel is secured before a team onshore spring into action.
While dozens of people on the observation deck above crane their heads to see, thousands of pounds of skate are loaded into a man-sized metal bucket operated by Sophia Weinstock that slowly climbs tracks to be tipped into an enormous vat of ice.