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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...

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...

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...

(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...

Some people do spring cleaning, fishermen tend to do a haulout in the winter when they are a bit less busy.

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...

Read our latest issue from October 2019!

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.

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...

Mario Stark spends his summers helping run his uncle’s boat, the Hindsight, out of Rock Harbor in Orleans. But now he is back at the Massachusetts Maritime Academy, and when he saw a booth the Fishermen’s Alliance had set up at the Academy’s bi-annual career fair he immediately walked over.

Lobsterman Rob Martin was out with a crewman years ago when the fellow tried to gaff a sea gull that landed on the boat. Martin told him to cut it out. Not only was it illegal, it was bad luck. Moments later, the stern man was gone.

A partnership between the Cape Cod Commercial Fishermen’s Alliance and the Pew Charitable Trusts has been a through line for Peter Baker’s career. Son of a commercial fisherman, Baker was raised in Portland, Oregon but moved east to work in politics. After stints with Senator Bernie Sanders in Vermont and the Sierra Club in North Carolina, Baker accepted a fisheries campaign position at the Alliance in March, 2002...