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Jamie Bassett runs a packing businesses at the Chatham Fish Pier, a fulcrum building for the industry since the 1940s.
“My grandfather probably brought fish into this port a time or two,” Bassett told a crowd gathered on a frigid January morning.
In his grandfather’s day the pier was known for cod. Now Chatham is known for skates.
“We did three million pounds of skate last year,” Bassett said.
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.
With 130 people gathered for an international virtual workshop, a cautionary story was told about a fishery in North Carolina shut down because “little old ladies in tennis shoes” found dead birds on the beach.
Fisheries closures through political pressure is an extreme and often avoidable outcome that didn’t sit well with fishermen, and others focused on more collaborative approaches to protecting birds.
This has been an historic winter. We just went through a blizzard that many compared to 1978 with tree damage that rivaled Hurricane Bob. Before that, our harbors were iced in, with fishermen unable to go to work. See some of the images along with efforts to set the fleet free in this photo gallery.
While much of the nation ponders the role of ICE, here on Cape Cod we also have confronted the dramatic natural version, not witnessed like this for more than a decade.
Oldtimers will tell you that Nantucket Sound and Cape Cod Bay once froze to the horizon with some regularity, and historical accounts prove this is no “times-were-tougher-when-I-was-a-kid” kindah talk. Call it global warming, call it cycles, call it both, but we had thought those days were behind us.
The first day of a 50-hour Marine Resource Education Program, a presenter said something that stuck with me the entire week:
“I am here teaching this topic to a grandson of someone I worked with in this industry.”
The enduring way of life and deep personal connections commercial fishing provides is one reason I chose to work at the Fishermen’s Alliance, and heck, that’s one of the reasons I have chosen to do almost everything I have done in my life.
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