By Doreen Leggett
The audience wasn’t quiet when Lisa Whelan began describing what she made for that night’s Meet the Fleet.
The recipe includes an Asian sweet and spicy sauce, said the owner and chef at Dancing Spoons, to a chorus of “mmms” and “mmhmms,” with wild onions and the leafy green tops of vegetables from her garden. Then came a round of “yums.”
Long-finned squid, also known as Loligo, was the centerpiece and received the most oohs and ahhs of all.
Impressive as the dish was, the audience was more taken with how difficult it is to catch squid commercially, detailed by Captain Phil Michaud, speaker at the event held at Nauset Marine East on a June evening.
Cool weather was fitting as most consider squid the poster child of spring. The colorful cephalopod arrives in early April and the season ends in early June.
“Squid is fun. You make nothing all day and then the last tow of the day you can make three days’ pay,” Michaud said. “It’s quite a fishery,”
Like most squid fishermen on the Cape, he only fishes for the mollusk (unlike other shellfish, the squid’s shell is inside) for part of the year. He also goes scalloping and in recent days he has been fishing for flounder, Michaud told the crowd gathered by Pleasant Bay.
Squid has a special place in his heart, and his crew needs to be experienced. The gear he uses for the small sea monster requires a lot of hydraulics for motors and winches, and scads of electrical wiring.
He drags for squid in Nantucket Sound using a small-mesh (two-inch) net known as a bottom trawl, which lets the smaller squid through but captures larger tentacled animals, found in schools.
“The net is like a horseshoe. It’s width, when it’s open, is 500 feet,” he said, adding that he only tows at “fair” tide, so the boat is helped by the strength of the tide.
The bottom where he fishes sometimes is marked by 30-foot troughs between sand hills, where squid like to coalesce, not to mention “live sand,” where frequent strong winds change the bottom and without warning unearth wrecks the net can get hung up on.
Michaud uses “rockhoppers,” which emcee Aubrey Church, policy director at the Fishermen’s Alliance, asked him to explain to the crowd.
Rockhopper gear are small rubber discs, often made from tires, interspersed with larger ones that help the net bounce over obstructions without snagging or getting torn, he said.
The strength of the Nantucket Sound tide also makes it far more likely that someone inexperienced can end up with their net stuck in their propeller. Michaud has more of an issue with vegetation in the water, from mung to invasive seaweed.
“My boat has two nets,” he said. “We constantly have to shake the weed out.”
“We keep an eye on the Sound with a NOAA temperature buoy,” Michaud said, explaining that squid prefer temperatures around 52 degrees. If a cold blow comes through and drops the temperature the squid will disappear, but they’ll be back.
“We could have zero squid, then the tide comes from the west and you have a flood,” Michaud said.
When squid are here, Michaud will leave his house in Sandwich at 2 a.m. and get home at 5 p.m. A good day is 10,000 pounds that takes six people two-and-a-half hours to unload.
Sometimes Michaud loses money and other times he can make a year’s pay in a short season. Managers monitor annual squid quotas closely, as there can be large fluctuations in abundance from year to year.
Virtually every animal, from dolphins to bluefish to black sea bass, eat squid, but Michaud keeps a particular eye out for scup, which he wishes people would eat more of.
“You could have the best squid fishing you have ever seen and then, ‘Oh no! The scup are here,’” Michaud said. “The scup come through like piranhas.”
Michaud is hoping for more flexibility in the volume squid commercial fishermen can catch and the time of year they can catch them.
“We aren’t even touching what is there,” he said.
Rhode Island fishermen are offered more opportunities, he said, which is why they are known for squid and have more processing infrastructure.
Michaud said Massachusetts can get there if given a chance.
“If they let me do it the buyers are going to come,” he added.
The audience was in favor of that idea as they enjoyed Whelan’s spicy squid with rice noodles and heard about other recipes; chorizo-filled squid, pan-fried with Aunt Jemima pancake mix, squid-ink pasta, and grilled squid, to name a few.