Over the Bar

The Fishermen’s Alliance recently accomplished a profound breakthrough, combining three key goals into one new initiative:
Support independent fishermen and improve economic opportunities.
Engage with great scientists to help protect stocks and the industry’s future, bringing fishermen hands-on into the research.
Convince federal regulators to support us, creating smart policies and financial incentives.

Most of us don’t realize that Barnstable County, aka Cape Cod, is the only part of Massachusetts that has a department with public employees and heavy-duty equipment to accomplish what the old saying says is nigh on impossible (with a one-word substitution):
Shovel sand against the tide.

There is a man I know who has been pulling lobster traps out of the same harbor for more than 30 years.
He gets to the dock before light. He knows where the channel silted last winter. He knows which moorings have gone empty, which families sold, which are holding on. He does not call himself an environmentalist or economist. He is a man who works on the water and pays attention.
I think about him when people talk about the coast as a policy problem.
Because for him it is not a problem. It is where he makes his living and his father made his.
Places like his are easy to love from a distance. They are beautiful, historic. They smell like salt, diesel and bait. They are full of light, water and memory.

The “Office of Seafood” is open for business.

Well not business exactly, though the idea is to support and promote American fishermen, the industry, and their businesses. This is a new, formal carve-out in the United States Department of Agriculture, created April 15, 2026. Here is the mission, as described by US Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins:

People from all over the state gathered to talk about how we can provide better, healthier, local food to public school cafeterias feeding kids K-12. School nutritionists and dieticians rubbed elbows with farmers, public officials, and the likes of the Fishermen’s Alliance, because we had come to offer our Small Boats, Big Taste chowders and stew as part of this noble, healthy and nutritious goal.

While much of the nation ponders the role of ICE, here on Cape Cod we also have confronted the dramatic natural version, not witnessed like this for more than a decade.
Oldtimers will tell you that Nantucket Sound and Cape Cod Bay once froze to the horizon with some regularity, and historical accounts prove this is no “times-were-tougher-when-I-was-a-kid” kindah talk. Call it global warming, call it cycles, call it both, but we had thought those days were behind us.

Our meeting room, what used to be a dilapidated barn beside an old sea captain’s home in Chatham, both handsomely restored thanks to help from so many of you, was full of great people and spirit on Wednesday, January 22.
The occasion? An annual meeting of the Cape Cod Commercial Fishermen’s Alliance to pull us together and share a sense of life and times.
This moment has become a great tradition. We’ve been doing it for 35 years now, which sometimes I find hard to believe. If I want to boggle my mind, I ponder that this had been happening for 14 percent of the time this nation called the United States has existed.

On a frigid December morning the Hyannis marina was quiet, buttoned up for winter, only a few pleasure boats left to be pulled, very different from the typical summer bustle.
Inside Tugboats, a restaurant with a handsome harbor view, the scene was quite different: Warm, active, full of people from across the Cape and Commonwealth, convened to celebrate the commercial fishing industry.
There was a specific reason to gather:
Our Alliance was accepting a $500,000 “big check,” symbolic of support we received in the most recent state budget to buttress our work, which in turn strengthens the small-boat, independent fleet.

For many years I have spent a lot of time thinking about different aspects of one big, complicated, often-frustrating question:
How can the American fishing industry be managed in a better way?
Of course this begs another question:
Better for who?
Fortunately I’ve been able to answer the second one with certainty