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Although it was more than a decade ago, Aubrey Ellertson Church has clear memories of standing at the Chatham Fish Pier with other fisheries observers waiting to be picked up by boats they were assigned to that day.
Church lived outside of Boston at the time, working out of ports from Maine to New Jersey gathering data about fishing trips used to help monitor the health of fisheries.
“I remember Chatham being a cool port to go into,” she said.
“It was a moon tide, flat calm. There wasn’t a ripple to be seen,” said Gordon Peabody. “I knew it was a tuna fin. The fish was behaving a little strangely. I was thinking it was driving tinker mackerel onto the beach.”
Maura Healey and Kim Driscoll – days from becoming Governor Healey and Lieutenant Governor Kim Driscoll — joined a line of volunteers dishing up chicken, rice and lentils, Brussels sprouts and more lovingly-prepared food boxed and delivered to waiting cars in the parking lot of the former Riverway restaurant in South Yarmouth.
Nearly 50 years ago, a massive historic structure on Stage Harbor in Chatham that served as a cold storage facility was being knocked down when things went awry.
Captain Fred Bennett was there.
“I came in from bass fishing and there it was, burning,” Bennett said, and he captured it on film.
Fresh off a weekend pop-up raw bar serving oysters from their farm, lobster rolls from their Sea State food truck, and “Small Boats, Big Taste” haddock chowder from the Fishermen’s Alliance, Pat and Jenny Ross stood in their market in Bourne as fishermen showed up at the back door with fresh local product.
“This wasn’t on the life plan,” laughed Pat, who grew up in Bourne but only shellfished recreationally, occasionally, with his dad.
Both Pat and Jenny went to art school before they met, Pat for photography in Boston, Jenny for design in New York. They met at a Halloween party in 2009.
The ocean doesn’t subdivide and segregate, that’s not nature’s way. Mixing and mingling, coursing and combining, always is the default.
But that fact of life can drive fisheries managers crazy. If everything always is in flux, interconnected in the complex play and way of life, how can we be smart and responsible, know what we’ve got and what to do, keep commercial fishing strong while thinking ahead and protecting both habitat and fishing for the future?
“We just completed our third video trawl survey in the western Gulf of Maine this May. For three years we’ve tracked a large year class of cod from 2019 that has continued to show healthy growth without major mortality.
The 2019 young of the year were observed in multiple surveys (they slip through our net’s bigger mesh). Again in 2020 we saw areas with high densities of fish that were approximately the size we would expect if they had been young in 2019.”
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.
As soon as he was old enough to ride a bicycle around Barnstable, Connor Rogan was fishing. After he got his driver’s license it was easier and he started working on charter boats when he was 16.
“Once I started making money at it I was like, ‘Wow, this is perfect,’” he said.
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