News

On any summer day there are tourists at the Chatham fish pier who love seeing “adorable” seals cavort around the fishing vessels. There are also fishermen who have lost part of their catch to those seals. Both tourists and fishermen support protecting the ecosystem, but how they view that may differ. And those views may be wholly different from someone who enjoys surfing off Nauset, but is concerned about sharks...

Captain Ted Ligenza could have retired; he has been fishing for more than 40 years. But he was waiting. He remembers how good the cod fishery off Chatham was in the winter, before midwater trawls came and changed everything.

Peter Baker remembers when Nat Mason wandered into the office of the Cape Cod Commercial Hook Fishermen and asked if they needed an intern. “The Hook” was operating on a shoestring budget, and Baker, the campaign director, was about 30 years younger than this man who wanted to volunteer. “He ended up being our CFO – for seven years,” remembers Baker...

For Massachusetts native Tom Dempsey, Pacific Grove, California seems like home. “It’s a fantastic small town, feels almost like Chatham,” he says. “The coastline is stunning and beautiful, like on the Cape.” For the past four years, Dempsey, his wife and their three children have lived on this West Coast peninsula adjacent to Monterey, where he works as the California Oceans Program Director for The Nature Conservancy...

We buried my father last week, surrounded by family and friends, a gathering of events public and private, full of memories, sadness and joy.

Read our latest issue from November 2019!

On both sides of his family, as far back as he can trace, Charlie Dodge descends from commercial fishermen. Some roots go to Norway and England and then there is Tristam Dodge, of Newfoundland, hired by the settlers of Block Island in 1616 to teach them how to fish so they wouldn’t starve. Charlie Dodge was born on that small island 350 years later...

They have a name: Peter Pan scallops. And why? Because like the famous character, they won’t grow up. But these scallops don’t live in Never Never Land. They reside in a place called Nantucket Lightship South, roughly 20 miles east and 60 miles south of the elbow of the Cape; take the Great South Channel (rather than the second star to the right), and straight on until morning...

Captain Sam Linnell arrived from offshore around 1 a.m., unloaded his catch, ran it up to a New Bedford buyer in a borrowed truck, sold the fish, motored back to the Cape, cleaned up -- and met a contingent of people from Cape Cod Healthcare at the Chatham Fish Pier later that morning. Time to spare. The group included chief executive officer and president Mike Lauf, who leads the team that runs Cape Cod Hospital, Falmouth Hospital, Spaulding Rehab, and other crucial healthcare facilities across the Cape...

(Captain Fred Bennett, a Chatham stalwart, has seen a lot, done a lot, and caught a lot of fish. Now 82 years old, we asked him to take a look back and inform us as to what fishing life and times were like around here half a century ago. Here is his tale.) In 1964, I started work at Ryder’s Cove boatyard as a marine mechanic. Observing a few fishermen piqued my interest in striper fishing, but lacking funds to purchase a boat I built a flat-bottom skiff and got a 10-horsepower motor secondhand...

Some people do spring cleaning, fishermen tend to do a haulout in the winter when they are a bit less busy.

The year was 2000. The fisheries for the entire West Coast of the United States was declared a federal disaster. More than 90 species were in the plan and eight were in big trouble. Some of the stocks sound familiar to us, like sole or whiting or ling cod. But a lot of them were fish we don’t see; rockfish – canary, darkblotched, widow -- Pacific Ocean perch...