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Maritime trade, forecasters, fishermen, scientists, the Coast Guard and many others rely on ocean models to make predictions, and those models can be wrong.
George Maynard, a marine resources specialist at the Northeast Regional Science Center, said without real world information those models can become further and further “divorced from reality.” That’s where commercial fishermen come in. Sensors on their gear gather data about the ocean’s current conditions every time they fish.
Fisherman Will Nicolai, a tall, long-haired, easygoing 21-year-old, has two older siblings engaged in high finance, but the Sturgis West graduate tried college (two colleges) and decided that wasn’t for him.
Captain Eric Hesse has a degree in physics and a graduate degree in civil engineering, but the lure of harpooning bluefin tuna and longlining for groundfish was too strong.
Jake Angelo of Barnstable Seafood Company went to Massachusetts Maritime Academy, toyed with being a private yacht captain, but found his dream job on the water fishing for black sea bass and clams.
There is no one way to get into commercial fishing and opportunities abound if you know how to work hard, the trio told dozens who stopped in at the Cape Cod Commercial Fishermen’s Alliance table at WaterWORKS at Cape Cod Community College.
Josh Stoll is steeped in fisheries research and policy and has often heard how the United States imports 90 percent of its seafood.
“Everyone from my mother to members of Congress have referenced that statistic,” said Stoll, an assistant professor in the School of Marine Sciences at the University of Maine. “If you always talk about the problem, there is not really space to imagine something different.”
So, he, and other researchers, Tolulope Oyikeke and Sahir Advani, are giving people that space. The trio recently published a treatise, “Seafood independence is within reach: a multi-scale assessment of seafood self-reliance in the United States,” in the journal Ocean Sustainability.
Eric Hesse majored in physics at Bates College and in addition to his normal courseload he did computations about refracting light on the ocean, and how the bending light shifts the image of Atlantic bluefin tuna.
“My old physics notebooks are filled with fishing diagrams,” Hesse, a tuna harpoon fisherman, told nearly 100 people gathered at the Fishermen’s Alliance last week for Meet the Fleet.
“I am uniquely qualified,” he said to laughter.
The Rose family has a long history on the Outer Cape, and a fishing heritage that extends back centuries.
“Our family, since the Mayflower, has been eating clams,” said Keith Rose, who captains the sea clammer F/V Kimberly Ann.
Rose looked out at the crowd of close to a hundred people gathered at the Fishermen’s Alliance for Meet the Fleet and smiled.
“If they found clams in Provincetown they wouldn’t have sailed to Plymouth,” he said to laughter.
Caroline Williams remembers the video well:
Summer intern Ana Brown, smiling and dotted with fish slime, was standing at Chatham Fish Pier talking about her work with the Fishermen’s Alliance after a day aboard F/V Constance Sea.
Will Nicolai, a friend of Williams, had sent the video last winter as she headed into her last semester of junior year at University of Virginia. Williams, an Economics and Global Studies major, had been applying for internships and wasn’t sure she wanted to go into the finance realm. Nicolai, a mate on the Constance Sea, knew Williams was focused on the environment and sustainability as part of her major.
One piece of advice passed around for decades in Chatham, attributed to old salt Charles “Tiggie” Peluso: No matter how good things are going, no matter how much money you are making, never, ever, sell your shellfishing skiff.
Peluso meant that in tough times, Chatham residents could always scratch or dredge up enough money to get by on the strength of the town’s wild fishery.
John Pappalardo, CEO of Cape Cod Commercial Fishermen’s Alliance, looked out at revelers at the 23th annual Hookers Ball and mentioned that while the event always is a celebration, this year was particularly upbeat.
The reason? More and more people see a bright future for commercial fishing on Cape Cod and are getting into the industry, he said.
“I see a lot of young fishermen, more than in a long while. This is one of the truest ways to judge the health of the industry and the value of our work,” Pappalardo added.
The first printed “Hooked on Cod” newsletter published in November 1997, about six years after “the Hook” was started by Fred Bennett, Mark Leach, Bob and Tom Luce and many others.
All the newsletters opened with a letter from the director, the inaugural penned by Lori LeFevre, a former fisheries researcher who led the organization. She announced she was taking a job as a fisheries analyst with New England Fishery Management Council and Paul Parker, who would then lead the organization for more than a decade, would be the new director.
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