News

Not long ago, Faye Anderson was sitting in the office of the Fishermen’s Alliance chatting about her new lobster business with her dad, longtime fisherman Mike Anderson, while people across the Cape watched from home. Faye, who owns Chatham Lobsters with her fiance Brock Bobisink, was describing how many of the lobsters that get caught in traps are set free alive, too small for example, or laden with eggs...

Chef Michael Beriau, a two-time winner in the culinary Olympics, is no stranger to good food. So he was thrilled when he had the opportunity to create four recipes that would showcase the potential locked in a shucked, frozen oyster from the Cape. He prepared several dishes, including cumin-fried oysters with an enchilada vinaigrette-topped black bean, roasted corn, and rice tortilla bowl and butter-poached oyster tartlets with anisette and hollandaise glaze...

Every New Year’s Eve, Bill Amaru makes clam chowder for about 200 people at Chatham’s Masonic Hall for First Night. He takes it very seriously, adds just the right spices – and a lot of butter. But this year, on account of COVID-19, he won’t be making that chowder. He will, however, be part of a far more ambitious chowder undertaking, also born out of the pandemic...

There was a time when Chatham fishermen got three cents a pound for cod and since there was no fish pier they unloaded right on the beach. And when the price was too low they sold them salted. Hearing stories from that time, from those who experienced it first-hand, is a rare thing. But with oral histories collected by the Chatham Historical Society and more recently by the Fishermen’s Alliance, it’s possible to return to fishing in Chatham generations ago...

If it takes a village to raise a child, it also took a village to create a haddock chowder that will help keep local fishermen on the water and support food banks and pantries feeding friends and neighbors. In these photos you meet some of those villagers, and see some of the steps taken to create our first big batch. With philanthropic support from Catch Together, MIT Sea Grant and others, the journey went from Great Eastern Seafood in Boston for processing to the Plenus Group in Lowell for chowder making, both companies family owned and operated...

Every year around Hookers Ball time we create a video to share with people under the tent, part recap, part celebration, always providing glimpses of some of the great fishermen and personalities we work with. This year the ball had to become virtual, but that didn’t stop us from celebrating, or creating our annual video. So I wanted to share with you the thoughts I expressed in this year’s version, this most unusual time around:

Read our latest issue from July 2020!

Sean Leach is a second-generation fisherman who hesitates before saying how many boats his family has owned in the last 30 years. At least 8, he surmises. “We keep saying this will be the last one,” he said. Leach, 32, was standing in Cape Island Boats in Orleans, the strong, almost sweet, smell of fiberglass filling the air and a gleaming white, wide boat mostly filling the cavernous space...

In a greenhouse off a long, sandy road in Dennis, concrete pools are filled every spring to offer millions and millions of oysters a swim. Before the budding bivalves took the plunge this year, about 4,000 mesh bags of mostly sea clam shells, originally from a processing facility in New Bedford, were placed inside two of the empty pools at A.R.C Hatchery...

“One Fish, Two Fish … John’s Wish, You Fish!” That bumper sticker, with two codfish bracketing the words ‘Pappalardo for Council,’ was created almost 20 years ago. A lot has changed since then. But Pappalardo’s wish hasn’t. “Protecting a tradition, a resource and a way of life was central to why I wanted a seat on the council,” Pappalardo...

Picture this: Dozens upon dozens of boats moving in and out of Cape Cod harbors, all under sail, employing thousands of men, all with the same mission: Catch mackerel. So it was in the mid-1800s, when mackerel was king and Cape Cod fishermen led not just the state but the nation in bringing them home. Indeed it’s fair to say that mackerel, more than codfishing or whaling, created what was probably the most prosperous era in Cape Cod history...

A century and a half ago, in 1871, Congress created the U.S. Commission on Fish and Fisheries. The reason, even 150 years later, sounds familiar: Study declining fisheries and recommend solutions to reverse this trend. A famous fish scientist at the time, George Brown “G.B.” Goode, became one of the early commissioners and put together a team of more than 20 scientists, with a similar number of supporting clerical employees, to compile a massive, multi-volume work that investigated just about every fishery known to the nation, detailing the fish themselves, the effort and means to catch them, the ecology in which they lived, and how the fishermen lived and worked...