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We’re on the cusp of a new era in collaborative research—an era where data is also helping fishermen make day-to-day decisions about where and when to fish, allowing them to be more efficient and help them adapt in the face of a rapidly changing ocean.
Andrew Spalt has been paying about $1.50 more a gallon for fuel for since April, about $40,000 a vessel, more than $100,000 across his three boats.
“You have to go fishing; you can’t really negotiate the price. It just hurts more,” said Spalt, working on his boats in New Bedford on a June day.
On a beautiful summer night on Pleasant Bay, close to 100 people gathered to hear a talk on lobsters by Captain Chris Townsend — and sample the delicacy as well.
A woman in the audience, who grew up in Maine, impressed the crowd with her tale of how to hypnotize a lobster and make it do a headstand, but it was Townsend who had a litany of relatively unknown lobster lore:
Fred Bennett remembers the first fish he caught more than 80 years ago. He tells the story with a smile.
He was seven or eight and fishing with his family off Menemsha, Martha’s Vineyard. He lived in Marion, but his dad went fishing whenever he could and that weekend they were after swordfish.
From May 17 to 22 I was a member of the science team aboard Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution’s R/V Neil Armstrong. The team was part of the Future Fisheries Alliance, a collaboration aiming to help fishermen adapt to a rapidly changing ecosystem by leveraging the latest technologies, real-time data, and climate models at WHOI. Come along for a full day of scientific research at sea!
Most of us don’t realize that Barnstable County, aka Cape Cod, is the only part of Massachusetts that has a department with public employees and heavy-duty equipment to accomplish what the old saying says is nigh on impossible (with a one-word substitution):
Shovel sand against the tide.
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