Plumbing the Depths

John Pappalardo’s keynote speech at the annual Big Blue conference was a call to action.
Many coastal communities find themselves caught between “tradition and tourism,” he said. “Between working waterfronts and rising property values. Between local families trying to stay and outside markets willing to pay more. Between climate change and systems of governance still built as though land and sea were separate worlds.”

Nearly 200 people packed a spacious, blue-carpeted room in the Dirksen Building on Constitution Avenue NE, where members of Congress mingled with administration officials and fishermen from across the country, enjoying dishes ranging from red snapper and black cod to Cape Cod skate stew.
In the crowd, enjoying respite from a 90-degree humid day in Washington D.C., Captain Bill Amaru received two pieces of historic memorabilia from a man who crewed for him close to 50 years ago, Jeff Pike.

When Stephanie Ridenour was commercial fishing and vessels were coming in for the day, no one wanted to be the first to navigate the changeable, risky Chatham Bar.
Ridenour, now natural resources director for Harwich, found herself in a similar situation as she navigated the town’s first planned harvest of river herring in more than 20 years — while a ban remains across the Commonwealth.

After a presentation on ocean acidification, fishermen Beau Gribbin and Jesse Rose joined scientists and others at a table where a nautical chart of the ocean off the Cape was unfurled. The captains pointed to a spot near the northern part of Georges Bank.
Some scallops they had harvested from that area had the same twisted shells researchers had presented moments before, impacted by ocean acidification.

If no one catches fish in the ocean, are they still there? Commercial fishermen say yes, but fisheries science has been saying otherwise.
The disconnect between what fishermen experience on the water and the information regulators use to manage stocks has always been a bugaboo, but it’s a particular problem when it comes to monkfish.

Captain Bill Amaru has seen a lot of changes in 40 years on the ocean. One of the biggest is warming waters, in part prompting talk about changing the name of Cape Cod to Cape Dogfish or Cape Skate.
“In the past, great schools of cod existed on our shores,” he said. “Now, if you order cod, it is probably not a domestic cod fish.”
Amaru was speaking at Wellfleet Preservation Hall on a panel convened by Massachusetts Climate Chief Melissa Hoffer, who is holding listening sessions to hear about how climate change has impacted lives and businesses.

When Caitlin “Caity” Townsend was in elementary school she divided her free time between her family’s seafood business on Cabral Wharf in Provincetown and her dad’s lobster boat.
Close to 20 years later, her world has widened to fishing for salmon in Alaska, selling sockeye on the Cape, recycling fishing gear, as well as advocacy, but lobstering with her dad is still at the heart of it.

“So you’re going on an acid trip?” asked my captain, Dean Pesante, as we threw lines aboard the gillnetter F/V Oceana and prepared to head out of Point Judith Harbor into Rhode Island Sound to haul gear one late July morning.
Acid trip? It took me a moment, then I remembered: The afternoon before, I had looped him in on a group text as I tried to find a fill-in for August 13, when I hoped to join a team from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute as a fishing industry observer for their “Locking Ocean Carbon in the Northeast Shelf and Slope” (LOC-NESS) research cruise.  

When Samuel de Champlain visited Wellfleet Harbor in 1606, he named the place “Port aux Huitres,” Port of Oysters.

A lot has changed, but the name still rings true.  

“Oysters are ingrained into the fabric of our community,” said Nancy Civetta, Wellfleet shellfish constable. “We prioritize that way of life.”