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In 1996 the mobile flip phone hit the market, Hubble Space Telescope captured the first surface photos of Pluto, Fox News was launched, Beanie Babies were big and John Pappalardo attended his first New England Fishery Management Council meeting.
“I went up with Fred Bennett. There were a couple of carloads of guys,” remembered Pappalardo, 24 at the time. “I had never seen anything like it. I knew from the fishermen these are the people who make the rules.”
Six years ago, Dan McKiernan, Director of Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries, got a call from Captain Domenic Santoro who couldn’t get a winter berth at a port on Cape Cod Bay.
That meant he couldn’t access fishing grounds.
“It dawned on me how important municipal policies and decisions are for accommodating the commercial fishing industry,” McKiernan said. “These are state and federally managed activities, yet it is the municipalities that can be the choke point relative to the business being successful.”
Maureen Salam jumped in her car the last Thursday afternoon of June and drove from Dennisport to Eastham to meet the Family Table Collaborative’s traveling food van in the Elks Lodge parking lot off Route 6, a trip she makes every two weeks.
“Did you ever really love something? We had a community. We got what it was that fascinated us.”
Mike Anderson is talking about commercial fishing during a certain time and place with certain people.
He describes his heydays, the late 1960s through the late 1980s, although he fished for decades after and still quahogs, as “idyllic, Hemingway-esque.”
On a Tuesday morning in early summer, Cod Fish II is already hard at work in Wychmere Harbor. The dredge’s long mechanical arm, called a “ladder”, extends down to the seabed, where spinning blades loosen the sediment before a pump sucks up the “slurry” through a tube, depositing it on a nearby beach to rebuild the shorelines from the stormy winter. Wychmere, in the town of Harwich, has been a particularly difficult case.
The Fishermen’s Alliance recently accomplished a profound breakthrough, combining three key goals into one new initiative:
Support independent fishermen and improve economic opportunities.
Engage with great scientists to help protect stocks and the industry’s future, bringing fishermen hands-on into the research.
Convince federal regulators to support us, creating smart policies and financial incentives.
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