Alumni revisited: Catching up with Tom
For Massachusetts native Tom Dempsey, Pacific Grove, California seems like home. “It’s a fantastic small town, feels almost like Chatham,” he says. “The coastline is stunning and beautiful, like on the Cape.” For the past four years, Dempsey, his wife and their three children have lived on this West Coast peninsula adjacent to Monterey, where he works as the California Oceans Program Director for The Nature Conservancy...
Remembering my dad
We buried my father last week, surrounded by family and friends, a gathering of events public and private, full of memories, sadness and joy.
Charlie Dodge was born to fish
On both sides of his family, as far back as he can trace, Charlie Dodge descends from commercial fishermen. Some roots go to Norway and England and then there is Tristam Dodge, of Newfoundland, hired by the settlers of Block Island in 1616 to teach them how to fish so they wouldn’t starve. Charlie Dodge was born on that small island 350 years later...
What to do with ‘Peter Pan’ scallops?
They have a name: Peter Pan scallops. And why? Because like the famous character, they won’t grow up. But these scallops don’t live in Never Never Land. They reside in a place called Nantucket Lightship South, roughly 20 miles east and 60 miles south of the elbow of the Cape; take the Great South Channel (rather than the second star to the right), and straight on until morning...
Bringing the Cape’s healthcare leadership to the pier
Captain Sam Linnell arrived from offshore around 1 a.m., unloaded his catch, ran it up to a New Bedford buyer in a borrowed truck, sold the fish, motored back to the Cape, cleaned up -- and met a contingent of people from Cape Cod Healthcare at the Chatham Fish Pier later that morning. Time to spare. The group included chief executive officer and president Mike Lauf, who leads the team that runs Cape Cod Hospital, Falmouth Hospital, Spaulding Rehab, and other crucial healthcare facilities across the Cape...
Pleasant Bay Chatham As I remember
(Captain Fred Bennett, a Chatham stalwart, has seen a lot, done a lot, and caught a lot of fish. Now 82 years old, we asked him to take a look back and inform us as to what fishing life and times were like around here half a century ago. Here is his tale.) In 1964, I started work at Ryder’s Cove boatyard as a marine mechanic. Observing a few fishermen piqued my interest in striper fishing, but lacking funds to purchase a boat I built a flat-bottom skiff and got a 10-horsepower motor secondhand...
PHOTO GALLERY: Anatomy of a haulout
Some people do spring cleaning, fishermen tend to do a haulout in the winter when they are a bit less busy.
From the Pacific, a great case study in recovery
The year was 2000. The fisheries for the entire West Coast of the United States was declared a federal disaster. More than 90 species were in the plan and eight were in big trouble. Some of the stocks sound familiar to us, like sole or whiting or ling cod. But a lot of them were fish we don’t see; rockfish – canary, darkblotched, widow -- Pacific Ocean perch...
The lament of a Bourne shellfisherman
Rob Curtis is proud to be a shellfisherman and can’t imagine doing anything else, but when he and some fellow Bourne comrades see commercial guys from Falmouth selling an abundant catch, they cringe. “We are almost embarrassed to go into the fish market when there are other guys there,” Curtis said.
Getting old gear out of the water, and out of our waste stream too
This winter, when he’s not fishing, Tom Smith will spend time in his backyard replacing some of the webbing in his nets. The nets he uses to catch bluefish are 500 yards long, and he switches out a section of them every year. “I actually enjoy it. It’s like winter therapy,” said Smith, of Orleans. Later this winter, or maybe this spring when Smith is back on the water feeling the bite of the wind, he can take satisfaction thinking about someone being cozy and warm on account of electricity generated from his old nets...
