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Costs keep climbing, less rapidly in recent months but never to subside back to where they were just a few years ago. We are in the new normal.
When it comes to the fishing fleet, these cost hikes are close to catastrophic. Fuel, equipment, maintenance, repairs, insurance, even basics like gear and ice have shot the cost of doing business to another level.
What has not kept pace is what fishermen are paid for their hard work, for the great food they bring to port.
A gleaming white fishing boat, clearing Chatham Bar, makes a wide circle to come into the Fish Pier and a gangly, red-haired crew member with a full beard makes sure the vessel is secured before a team onshore spring into action.
While dozens of people on the observation deck above crane their heads to see, thousands of pounds of skate are loaded into a man-sized metal bucket operated by Sophia Weinstock that slowly climbs tracks to be tipped into an enormous vat of ice.
The Rose family has a long history on the Outer Cape, and a fishing heritage that extends back centuries.
“Our family, since the Mayflower, has been eating clams,” said Keith Rose, who captains the sea clammer F/V Kimberly Ann.
Rose looked out at the crowd of close to a hundred people gathered at the Fishermen’s Alliance for Meet the Fleet and smiled.
“If they found clams in Provincetown they wouldn’t have sailed to Plymouth,” he said to laughter.
While Formula One go-karts whizzed along a track, and Radar Love blared, emcee Matt Pitta kept up a running commentary for thousands gathered at Mashpee Commons to watch the 23rd annual Seaside Le Mans. Sometimes, he said, he felt like he was at the Superbowl.
“As I walked up to some of the tents they covered their mouths with clipboards,” chuckled Pitta.
“I love it,” said Stephanie Viva, a Cape radio personality helping him keep the crowd entertained. “They take it seriously. They are in it to win it.”
From a dusty racing track around a pond, a mill by a small river, and a marshy natural inlet, over the course of a century the town of Harwich crafted three important harbors opening to Nantucket Sound’s rich fishing grounds.
Allen, Wychmere and Saquatucket Harbors are strung along several miles of coastline in Harwich Port, and none of them originally offered full access to the Sound.
“Allen was a trickle, Wychmere was a salt pond with limited inflow and outflow, and Saquatucket was really just the Andrews River meandering from cranberry bogs down to a marsh,” says Tom Leach, who was Harwich’s harbormaster from 1973 to 2012.
The Chatham Fish Pier deserves its own book. Better yet, if those old wooden pilings could talk they would share a wealth of history, history that would both delight and inform us. But, for the moment, we will have to satisfy ourselves with a snapshot of a few hours at the pier, a series of images that give a sense of the world that exists at the edge of the harbor, but by no means does it come close to doing it justice. Because as packing house lease holder Jamie Bassett says, the pier has a pulse of its own.
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