News

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...

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...

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 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...

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...

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...

When Sean Leach graduated from Suffolk University with a degree in accounting he had a few job offers right away. But since he had been lobstering from the age of eight or so, and his dad needed some help running the boat, he said he’d do a summer. Come fall, the firm he hoped to work for called and offered him the job he wanted --- but the answer changed...

June 8, 2018 Press Release New legislation would engage fishermen to protect right whales FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE For more information contact:Community Journalist Doreen Leggett 508-945-2432 ext. 111 CHATHAM -- The name of a new piece of federal legislation is an echo of a successful movement in the 1980s, although far more specific: SAVE the Right Whales...

Your support allows us to uphold the rich heritage of commercial fishing and its significant impact on the working life of our neighbors and cultural fabric of Cape Cod. Click here to read more.

All harbors have echoes, and in Barnstable those reverberations include the sounds of packet ships carrying goods and passengers to and from Boston, a busy trade in ice, fuel and fish at Freezer Point, commercial fishermen harvesting bluefin tuna from weirs a few miles offshore or gathering sea scallops in the Bay. Even the nineteenth century shore whalers, whose loads of blubber were rendered into oil at the try-works located on Sandy Neck, have a place in the harbor’s past...

At 4:30 am the Chatham Fish Pier had been awake for a few hours, but the town was still quiet as a cameraman and television series host strode down a metal gangplank that led to fishing vessel Noah II. “I’m just going to grab a survival suit,” said Captain Doug Feeney as he jumped off his boat.

Try this delicious mackerel recipe!