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The ocean doesn’t subdivide and segregate, that’s not nature’s way. Mixing and mingling, coursing and combining, always is the default.
But that fact of life can drive fisheries managers crazy. If everything always is in flux, interconnected in the complex play and way of life, how can we be smart and responsible, know what we’ve got and what to do, keep commercial fishing strong while thinking ahead and protecting both habitat and fishing for the future?
Captain Scott Rorro was on his boat, the Ernest and Michael, getting ready for back-to-back scallop trips when a couple from Lowell peered down from MacMillan Wharf in Provincetown. Rorro invited them aboard.
Standing in bright sunshine, Rorro answered a string of questions and said although he is a day-boat fisherman now, he had been on trips lasting two weeks or longer. The visitors, impressed, said fishermen must be the epitome of rugged.
“We just completed our third video trawl survey in the western Gulf of Maine this May. For three years we’ve tracked a large year class of cod from 2019 that has continued to show healthy growth without major mortality.
The 2019 young of the year were observed in multiple surveys (they slip through our net’s bigger mesh). Again in 2020 we saw areas with high densities of fish that were approximately the size we would expect if they had been young in 2019.”
Stephanie Sykes, after a day fishing on the F/V Peggy B II, stood behind a folding table at Nauset Marine East in Orleans with several conch shells and a trap.
She looked at a crowd gathered at the Meet the Fleet event and picked up a flat, mottled brown, oblong object. It was about the size of a thumb and looked leathery.
Longraking is hard work, hours in a skiff scouring for quahogs with a 25-foot-pole attached to a 30-pound basket, often in miserable weather.
Harvesters might get grumpy, exhausted, then dissolve into laughter when John Linnell takes a break for pushups.
“Or sit ups,” said Mike Anderson, who has longraked beside Linnell for decades. “You could see his boots in the air. And he used to run home in those boots.
“He was, is, bigger than life,” said Anderson.
We heard tons of positive comments about last month’s Hookers Ball, about how it truly was “Aboat Time.” Those sentiments were emphasized when we published a photo gallery and it was one of the most popular, if not the most popular, in the close to five-year-history of our emagazine. So we had to do an encore. Enjoy.
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