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Our natural focus for the fisheries is on people who work the decks, captains and crew who face the sea, ply the bottom, and bring home the bacon – oh, sorry, the fish.
That’s fitting. But there is much more to this industry, not as dramatic or (sometimes) romantic, but crucial. The work at sea is by no means the tip of the iceberg, but then again it is not everything; much lies below the surface, more like ballast than ice.
Captain Jon Tolley was off the water and the sun was beating down in an empty dirt lot in Yarmouth, but a bad storm was forecasted.
He stood by his grey pickup truck, three big coolers filled with lobsters and ice packs and a billboard advertising just-out-of-the-ocean crustaceans. Thunderous booms 17 miles away didn’t drown out shrieks of joy and thumping of waterslides from Wicked Waves waterpark next door.
A customer asked if weather would close Tolley’s sales window; he spends seven days a week, from 4 to 6:30 p.m., on the corner of Route 28 and West Yarmouth Road.
“I sell them rain, snow, sleet or hail. Nothing stops a Tolley,” he said.
Jon Grabowski played a video of a cute baby lobster in a tank, scuttling out of his rocky hideaway only to be quickly eaten by a blue crab with a black sea bass looking on.
The stuff of nightmares, joked Grabowski, professor and assistant director at Northeastern University’s Marine Science Center. Grabowski, along with several other researchers, was speaking as part of the National Sea Grant American Lobster Initiative, meant to address critical knowledge gaps about lobster in a changing ocean.
The initiative was launched in 2019 and focuses on increasing the industry’s resilience to biological, economic, and social impacts of ecosystem change.
Captain Dean Karoblis has a close relationship with the John Deere engine that powers his fishing vessel Molly May. He trusts it; as with all fishermen that’s crucial, for lobstermen perhaps even more so.
“Everything I fish is right whale critical habitat,” he said, adding the season is so short, missed days are disastrous. “If any lobsterman is down and out when it’s on, you’re screwed.”
Still, he is willing to experiment with something new.
An e-blast earlier this month from National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration warned about growing conflicts between lobstermen and draggers. The message came with a warning: It is unlawful to negligently and without authorization remove, damage, or tamper with fishing gear owned by another person.
In the early 1970s there was no such law, and when hundreds of lobster traps off Chatham were being destroyed by fishermen dragging for flounders, some lobstermen took matters into their own hands.
This is the story of a series of battles in “The Lobster Wars,” reported and produced by Angela McNerney of Lower Cape TV, told mostly through Captain John Our and edited for clarity and length.
Kim Roderiques and Geoff Bassett have spent the last several months following fishermen as they go about their daily lives and earn their living from the sea. The result of their work is a documentary, The Hand that Holds Line, a kaleidoscope of stories from local fishermen, the challenges they face and the success they realize through hard work and determination. A trailer of the documentary will premiere at Hookers Ball on Aug. 2; this gallery gives a glimpse into the stories about to be unveiled through stunning photographs taken on scene by Roderiques and Bassett.
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