News

This year, the Family Pantry of Cape Cod expects to serve 10,000 clients and distribute 100,000 bags of groceries valued at $4.2 million. “We call ourselves a sustaining pantry,” said Christine Menard, the dynamic director of the Harwich facility, meaning that the pantry’s clients do not fit a stereotype of people in total collapse. “They are landscapers, fishermen, nurse assistant ...

“Mackerel rejoice. Sardines fling their shining scales in the air. There is joy in the pools where minnows swim. Fish-net, their oldest and deadliest enemy, has become a fashion. Women – to the astonishment of the fish – are actually wrapping themselves up in the stuff. Deliberately.” -- From an article in “Picture Post,” a leading international magazine of the era, May 3, 1939 The reason for this whimsical, ersatz fish celebration was the success of a remarkable Cape Cod business that linked our fishing community to the world in a unique way – using fish net as fabric to create high women’s fashion...

Southern California native Azure Cygler (neé Westwood) had just finished getting her undergraduate degree in marine biology at University of California Santa Cruz in 1999 when she happened to meet Mark Pappalardo, brother of Fishermen’s Alliance CEO John Pappalardo. “I was getting interested in wild harvest fisheries issues and he told me his brother was doing some of the same work on Cape Cod,’ recalls Cygler...

Of all things on this big old planet that could be divided and put into boxes, the ocean is the least likely. Yet people find ways to box off and subdivide even the waves, and once you push past holistic and romantic objections, there are reasons for it: We are at a point in our relationship to the world where (like it or not) we need management, we need to understand our impacts and where to focus and avoid...

Picture a fancy gown worn by a top model, sold in the late 1930s at one of the most famous luxury department stores of the time. A handwritten note on the page, signed by Bergdorf Goodman, reads: “lovely, new and strange.” Strange indeed, the gown was created out of real fishnet, produced at a company known across the globe, headquartered in North Truro...

Read our latest issue from March 2019!

The parking lot at Ryder’s Cove boatyard was virtually empty on a cold March morning when several pickup trucks pulled in and waited with engines running. Soon a trailered boat so white it was temporarily blinding in sunlight pulled around the corner. “I don’t even think she was that white when I originally had her built,” said John Our of his boat Miss Fitz...

Chris Clark has made a life of listening to whales and was invited to a Congressional hearing to speak on the threat seismic testing for oil reserves poses to the highly endangered North Atlantic Right Whale. The repetitive loud explosions, comparable to how the launch of the space shuttle sounds to bystanders, has been shown to make a mess of how whales communicate, feed and breed...

Many people notice shells in tide pools or at the edge of the sea and don’t give them another thought. Not Max Furman. “I think, What are they doing in their shell? Are they trying to find food?” Furman says he has never eaten shellfish, but he knows they are important to the way the Cape’s environment works. Just how important he isn’t sure, but the Harwich third grader is about to find out...

The floating lighthouses that once occupied the channels around Cape Cod are long gone, lost to storms, failed moorings, collisions, disrepair and the inevitable forward march of technology. But for more than 100 years, from the mid-1800s to the late-1960s, lightships marked the way for thousands of sailors, fishermen and commercial mariners. Positioned strategically on navigation routes, lightships resided where land-based lighthouses could not be erected...

Twenty six years is a long time, older than a few captains in the fleet, older than his own children, almost older than his wedding vows. Just about as old as this organization. John Our has had a long, long history in the fishing industry, that started when he was five. His boat, Miss Fitz, has been with him most of that, certainly the vast majority of his career...

When the Fishermen's Alliance helped pull together a solid group of funders – public, private, and non-profit -- to save the Cape’s one and only shellfish hatchery in Dennis, some people wondered why we would bother. After all, shellfishing nearshore is a whole different reality from finfishing offshore. Why would a commercial fishing organization get involved? Was there some kind of ulterior motive? Is the Fishermen's Alliance trying to push for more aquaculture, drive out wild harvesters, change the historic local use of flats and shallows that for generations have helped families subsist?