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Captain Beau Gribbin calls himself a dinosaur when it comes to technology, but he’s always looking for more environmental sensors on his fishing gear.
“Why not put more of these into the ocean? I ask every scientist I see,” he said earlier this month after returning from a 38-hour scalloping trip. He has a sensor on his dredge and a few on his lobster traps.
In 1996 the mobile flip phone hit the market, Hubble Space Telescope captured the first surface photos of Pluto, Fox News was launched, Beanie Babies were big and John Pappalardo attended his first New England Fishery Management Council meeting.
“I went up with Fred Bennett. There were a couple of carloads of guys,” remembered Pappalardo, 24 at the time. “I had never seen anything like it. I knew from the fishermen these are the people who make the rules.”
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.
From 1983 to 2013 the “Maid of the Mist-V” operated as a 72-foot passenger boat that took guests for a tour among the swirling currents and numerous eddies that lie below Niagara Falls, New York. Some boat called the Maid of the Mist had been operating in the rapids below the falls since 1846.
You might be thinking, “What the heck does the Maid of the Mist have to do with Cape Cod and fishing?” Appropriate question. My wife did work for the Maid of the Mist Company when she lived in Lewiston, NY before we met in college. An indirect but significant connection.
A fishing method that dates to at least 9000 B.C. will likely still grace the waters of Barnstable.
When the only weir fisherman on the Cape decided to focus on other fisheries, it looked like the last of the poles and nets that trapped migrating fish would disappear.
Jake Angelo, 32, fishing since he was a kid, always thought trap fishing was interesting. He figured he could take it on.
An e-blast earlier this month from National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration warned about growing conflicts between lobstermen and draggers. The message came with a warning: It is unlawful to negligently and without authorization remove, damage, or tamper with fishing gear owned by another person.
In the early 1970s there was no such law, and when hundreds of lobster traps off Chatham were being destroyed by fishermen dragging for flounders, some lobstermen took matters into their own hands.
This is the story of a series of battles in “The Lobster Wars,” reported and produced by Angela McNerney of Lower Cape TV, told mostly through Captain John Our and edited for clarity and length.
When Braden Wilson christened his new boat and took a maiden voyage last year in Cape Cod Bay, his mom Judi was standing on the dock in Dennis with a bunch of his friends.
“I was able to say ‘Olive Juice’ when he left the harbor,” Judi Wilson said with a laugh. “I know it’s corny!”
Olive Juice is the name of Wilson’s 31-foot lobster boat and Braden named it after her. She has been saying the words instead of “I love you” ever since her son gave her the “defcon” stare back in middle school; if you mouth the two phrases you can’t tell them apart.
The Oreo was introduced by Nabisco in 1912 and is the most popular cookie in the world, but still subject of a $20-million marketing plan in the United Kingdom.
If a cream-filled cookie sandwich needs that much help, what are the chances for fish such as skate, thornyhead rockfish, the obscure Ta’ape, and monkfish?
Fish have another problem too.
“People are intimidated by a naked fillet.”
Back in 1990 I started hearing scary things about what might be lurking on the sea floor between here and Gloucester, due east of Boston.
For anything ocean-related, my first stop always was to Louie Rivers, Provincetown’s great fishing captain.
“Louie, you ever heard of a fisherman from Gloucester named Salvatore LoGrasso?” I asked. “Everyone calls him Sammy.”
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