Over the Bar

Amid a flurry of executive orders early in President Trump’s second term, one stood out from here for obvious reasons:
“Restoring American Seafood Competitiveness,” April 17, 2025.
The order invoked language we have come to expect from the White House, as in “(O)ur Nation has the greatest seafood in the world,” while also adopting some content that could have come straight from this office:

If the Cape is anything, it is a place of migration, and migrants.
This time of year that’s obvious. You can look in the air and see where the birds are headed. You can look in the sea and trace fish movements as waters cool. You can even look down the street, and wave to neighbors headed south or back to “the other home.”

Our natural focus for the fisheries is on people who work the decks, captains and crew who face the sea, ply the bottom, and bring home the bacon – oh, sorry, the fish.
That’s fitting. But there is much more to this industry, not as dramatic or (sometimes) romantic, but crucial. The work at sea is by no means the tip of the iceberg, but then again it is not everything; much lies below the surface, more like ballast than ice.

As the months roll by, and we send these “Small Boats Big Ideas” emailed magazines 12 times a year, sometimes coincidence and fate create themes, topics or personalities that (as serendipity would have it) course through the issue.
So it is this month with Homarus Americanus, aka lobsters.
I bandied about a bunch of scientific fish names last month this one included, “homard” being French for lobster, and our Northeast cold-water version the best candidate for the American moniker, big claws and hard shells.

A few weeks ago one of my compatriots here at the Fishermen’s Alliance, Seth Rolbein, wrote in his personal column “A Cape Cod Voice” about the arcane, bizarre way animals are named.
The scientific standard is “binomial nomenclature,” two words for each creature, using Latin and/or Greek, the genus (category) first and then the species (the specific animal).
A Swedish botanist named Carl Linnaeus, in the mid-1700s, was the one who became obsessed with trying to attach two names to every living creature on the planet. As Seth noted, this guy was a creative, dogged genius, codifying, identifying, and inventing names that exist to this day.

At the risk of embarrassing her, I’m taking the opportunity to celebrate and thank Chris Menard, the executive director of the Family Pantry of Cape Cod, as she steps away from her amazing community service.
Chris has run the family pantry in Harwich since 2016, with a remarkable combination of dedication, creativity, attention to detail, volunteer organization, and emphasis on community support. Her small paid staff is buttressed by more than 650 volunteers, making this the largest volunteer-driven organization on Cape Cod. They serve more than 3200 households per month, also acting as a distribution hub for The Greater Boston Food Bank so smaller pantries across the Cape receive food as well.

With all the turmoil in federal government, it’s good to be able to share some good news coming from the state level.

A great meeting of people from across Massachusetts took place on April 16 in Boston, created by The Greater Boston Food Bank. Everyone at the gathering was involved in food production, distribution, and support for the remarkable work food banks and pantries undertake every day, supporting people who face what they call “food insecurity.” The shocking truth is that even here in Massachusetts, a third of all households, nearly two million people, do not always know where their next meal will come from, and what it will be.

The gigantic seafood expo in Boston is an annual event, and the 43rd version in mid-March was another sprawling, multinational verification that the seafood industry remains a major global force.

From our small though famous corner, it’s hard to appreciate the vast, muscular economy around fish. But when you step onto the floor of the huge convention center in Boston’s Seaport District, the scale transforms, and I’m not talking about kilos and pounds. In and around more than 3000 booths dozens of foreign languages are spoken by representatives from many of the world’s nations. Millions and millions of dollars and Euros change hands, millions and millions of pounds of finfish and shellfish are committed.

People across the nation – the world actually – are considering how President Trump’s dramatic new strategies and priorities will impact their lives and what they care about. We’re no different.
One example: Every year I join fisheries regulators from the United States and Canada to hammer out how the two countries should split up shared fish stocks (cod and haddock of major importance) that range across our maritime border on Georges Bank. The idea is to make sure a division is fair, and that in combination we don’t overfish.
This year we’ve been told that we will not be meeting. How that will affect our fishermen’s ability to harvest is unclear so far.