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Fishing Vessel (F/V) Time Bandit, Kurt Martin at the helm, surged from Chatham fish pier at 4:30 am, leaving darkness to steam into a reddening sky and Nantucket Sound. The day’s target: Black sea bass.
At 42 feet long, more than 15 feet wide, Time Bandit is a great workboat with plenty of elbow room. Kurt smiled when asked how he came up with the name:
Captain Beau Gribbin calls himself a dinosaur when it comes to technology, but he’s always looking for more environmental sensors on his fishing gear.
“Why not put more of these into the ocean? I ask every scientist I see,” he said earlier this month after returning from a 38-hour scalloping trip. He has a sensor on his dredge and a few on his lobster traps.
On a mid-summer night, more than 400 people filled a big white tent behind the Harwich Community Center, drinking champagne, eating everything from dogfish and scallops to oysters and clams, bidding on excursions and auction items, and raising more than $350,000 for the Cape Cod Commercial Fishermen’s Alliance.
Like many people, Robert “Bob” Ryder has a few expressions he uses regularly and, in his case, they have steered his life.
The first is, “The sea will provide.”
“I’m not religious, but there are times where I read the Bible,” Ryder said on a recent summer day; relying on the sea has been his act of faith.
The second is less formal: ‘If you have a chance take it.’
“Twenty-five Hookers Balls. Thirty-five years of the Fishermen’s Alliance. Everything in this business has changed in that time -the fisheries, the rules, the markets, the price of every single thing.
Except the fish stories at the bar. Those have held up beautifully.
That’s the charm of this night. It’s always been serious work disguised as a good party,” — John Pappalardo.
Check out photos of the event.
Strategic plans can sound like documents designed to sit on a shelf. At best that doesn’t happen, because they force an organization to ask basic questions:
What are we here to accomplish? What has changed around us? Where can we make a difference? Where should we concentrate our limited time and resources?
The Cape Cod Commercial Fishermen’s Alliance is reaching that point again.
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