Electronic monitoring first seen as a pariah, converts more fishermen
Captain Eric Hesse had left his home port of Chatham and was fishing out of Gloucester because it was closer to where the haddock were biting, and also closer to his buyer.After driving two and a half hours in his pick-up truck, he was carrying gear to his boat, F/V Tenacious II, when he passed Chris McGuire who was talking to one of the Gloucester captains...
Where and how to bring windpower to the shore
“These animals are pumping 50 gallons of water a day,” says Yarmouth aquaculture farmer Ed Janiunas of his oysters in Lewis Bay, the harbor that straddles Yarmouth and Barnstable and is the maritime gateway to Hyannis. “So anything upsetting the habitat and creating a whole lot of silt in the water could kill every oyster out there.” This disturbance of the natural environment in and around his three-acre grant, located off a little isthmus near Great Island, is what concerns Janiunas when he contemplates the impact of the Vineyard Wind offshore wind turbine project...
When bird dung, aka guano, powered Falmouth’s economy
There is a common refrain among Cape Cod locals that (during the summer months at least) no one wants to have to drive “over the bridge.” So it is all the more impressive to realize that 160 years ago, local ship captains typically ventured to the far side of the globe. Sometimes their mission was, in retrospect, surprising, even bizarre --- for example, to mine bird dung and bring it back to Woods Hole...
Fisherman Profile: Mike Anderson
“I will tell ya, this was the most romantic place I’d ever laid eyes on in my life,” says Mike Anderson about Cape Cod, circa 1968. “This was rock-n-roll and fishing.” Anderson came after getting a college degree in English in Boston and spending summers on Plum Island, where he earned money commercial striped bass fishing. “I rented a house on stilts on the marsh there above brackish water...
Students share stories and gain perspective from a long-time captain
“If we are representing the last generation of commercial fishermen on Cape Cod, we have failed.”Those words are often said by John Pappalardo, CEO of the Cape Cod Commercial Fishermen’s Alliance, but one of the reasons there are fewer fishermen on the peninsula is that there are fewer role models. When Captain Mike Anderson began his fishing career in Chatham 50 years ago, virtually everyone in town had a pair of boots...
Shanties by the Sea
The “tiny house” phenomenon has been all the rage for several years, but one type of mini-structure is fading into Cape Cod history: the fish shanty. You can still see a few in places like Harwich’s Wychmere Harbor, where a line of small wooden storage sheds for lobster pots fringe the parking lot, capped by a slightly larger wooden building at water’s edge that houses the town’s shellfish upweller...
Little fish, of big importance, packs meeting hall
Patrick Paquette of the Striped Bass Association, one of the last to speak, called attention to the varied backgrounds of those who had testified – charter boat fishermen, recreational anglers, hook fishermen, gillnetters, lobstermen, environmentalists, river herring counters, selectmen – and said that these groups seldom agree. But they do now...
Doing what it takes to avoid extinction
Let’s put it on the table: What do we, an Alliance committed to keeping commercial fishing alive while at the same time committed to a vital ocean, think we should be doing to keep the North Atlantic Right Whale from going extinct?
A frozen past in Sandwich
A century ago, the largest commercial buildings on Cape Cod were most likely massive freezer plants that supported the local fishing industry. According to historical records, in 1922 at least 14 of them dotted our coastline, from Provincetown’s East End (the building is now fancy condominiums) along the Bay to the Canal Fish and Freezing Co. at Sandwich Marina, built in 1916...
The seal deal: How do we respond to “success”?
As anyone who spends time near the water knows, seals have made a dramatic comeback. Check out Google’s aerial images of Monomoy National Wildlife Refuge; see all those little ant-like blobs on the beach? Each one is several hundred pounds of ocean-going carnivore. We’re a long way from the early 1900s, when both Maine and Massachusetts paid bounties for seals, and we nearly exterminated them from the region...
Fishermen across the country come together in nation’s capital.
Sitting in a Washington, D.C. airport, getting ready to board a delayed 10:30 p.m. flight back to Providence, travelers from the Cape talked about visiting nearly a dozen legislative offices in their efforts to improve commercial fisheries. “Well, we set the gear,” said Sean Leach, using an apt metaphor for their outreach, and the phrase was fitting not only because Sean is a lobsterman, but because it was unclear what the hours of advocacy, like gear left to fish underwater, would actually harvest...
