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Nearly 50 years ago, a massive historic structure on Stage Harbor in Chatham that served as a cold storage facility was being knocked down when things went awry. Captain Fred Bennett was there. “I came in from bass fishing and there it was, burning,” Bennett said, and he captured it on film.

We are lucky to have many different ports with varied personalities on Cape Cod; they all add to the economy, culture and beauty of the peninsula. The Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries, partnering with UMass Urban Harbors Institute and us, will soon publish a report that profiles every port in the state, highlighting commercial value...

Scallops. Most everybody loves them, so much so that the scallop fishery is considered among the most lucrative in the world, making New Bedford the port with the highest value of fishing landings in the United States every year for the past two decades. More than $430 million worth of seafood hit the docks there in 2018; more than 80 percent of that was scallops...

Read our latest issue from October 2020!

Forest and sea. East Coast and West. Cubicles and ocean. Fishing and retail. Those may seem like opposites, but in the case of Tracy Sylvester they are wrapped up in one individual.

Adrien Kmeic owns Hatch's Fish Market in Wellfleet and has spent a lot of time thinking about how to give second life to fish waste that doesn’t end up as bait in lobster traps. “It breaks down and makes a terrific fertilizer and it was driving me crazy throwing it out,” Kmeic said. His conversations with town boards and others always dead-ended until this year when he got a call from Nicole Cormier, who had just started a new business, Cape Cod Ferments, with Nicholas Frechette...

Ben Martens, executive director of Maine Coast Fishermen’s Association, said that for too long fishermen have been undervalued. Like farmers, they are essential to feeding the country, but they receive far less support. “The hard work is being done right now to protect our marine resources, but we aren’t as a nation stepping up to protect the people and the communities that harvest that seafood,” Martens said...

As the Fishermen’s Alliance is now working with food banks and pantries around New England to provide nutritious, delicious haddock chowder to people having trouble putting food on the table, we began to wonder about the history of haddock, the role it has played in the region’s history, why it has always seemed to be even more popular in New England than elsewhere...

Cape Cod Ferments is launching fermented fish fertilizers, which are available through Delicious Living, and the first few batches are made from fish heads and fish carcasses that, since they couldn’t be used for bait, were just going to waste. Now, thanks to Nicole Cormier and Nicholas Frechette, the fish waste from Salt Seafood Company and Hatch's Fish Market is working on its second life as a fertilizer for farms and gardens across the peninsula...

People old enough to remember 1968 tell me that for upheaval, crisis, confrontation, and angry division, the year we are living through now most closely resembles that momentous one. My guess is that history books will agree. In a far smaller, more specific way, when people reflect on New England’s fisheries years from now, they might also see 2020 as an historic, fulcrum moment...

Read our latest issue from September 2020!

Captain Mike Abdow has walked across the busy parking lot of the Chatham Fish Pier many times with a couple of big, beautiful striped bass, and people will call out and ask if they can buy them. Abdow will say “Sure,” then walk into the back door of the Chatham Pier Fish Market where that bass will soon be in the case. “I think that’s important to people,” Abdow said...