DONATE
BUY STEW + CHOWDER
For many years I have spent a lot of time thinking about different aspects of one big, complicated, often-frustrating question:
How can the American fishing industry be managed in a better way?
Of course this begs another question:
Better for who?
Fortunately I’ve been able to answer the second one with certainty
Glenn Svenningsen said when he was born, his father had already fallen in love with lobstering and left construction to pursue it full time.
“I hated it,” said Svenningsen, standing in front of a stack of lobster traps at his house in Orleans. “I always went when I was little and I got really seasick.”
So Svenningsen, now 18 and a senior at Cape Cod Regional Technical High School, did a lot of landscaping, freshwater fishing, but had no desire to follow his father, also named Glenn.
When Caitlin “Caity” Townsend was in elementary school she divided her free time between her family’s seafood business on Cabral Wharf in Provincetown and her dad’s lobster boat.
Close to 20 years later, her world has widened to fishing for salmon in Alaska, selling sockeye on the Cape, recycling fishing gear, as well as advocacy, but lobstering with her dad is still at the heart of it.
To create the documentary “The Hand that Holds the Line,” Geoff Bassett and Kim Roderiques spent more than a hundred hours with Cape Cod’s commercial fishermen, capturing life on the water, the impact of difficult weather, long hours, variable markets and onerous regulations. One thing stood out:
“They all have a love for it,” said Bassett. “That’s fantastic to see, the majority of the film is people smiling.”
Jonathan W. Walker was one of many Cape Cod men whose early times were all about the sea, born in 1799, Harwich captain of a fishing vessel. But then his life took a turn that led to infamy:
He became “the man with the branded hand,” an anti-slavery crusader whose handshake bore proof of his actions and beliefs. Branded by a United States marshal after caught at sea trying to smuggle slaves, the scalded letters “S S” were meant to stand for “Slave Stealer.”
There are a lot of fishy connections between Cape Cod and Alaska, many stories of fishermen from Chatham and Provincetown spending several months to several years there and coming home with enough money to buy a boat. Also common are tales of those who fish summers in the Pacific and come home to fish here the rest of the year.Caitlin Townsend, who lobsters and scallops, is in that category after salmon fishing in Bristol Bay. This photo gallery captures scenes of the Alaskan fishery that draws people from all over the country and provides a glimpse of her gear recycling work through Net Your Problem, which started in Alaska and now has a presence on the Cape. Salmon fishing photos by Sofia DeWolfe others courtesy of Caitlin Townsend.
e-Magazine PDF’s