Template for future found in ‘Doryman’

A DORYMAN’S DAY, by Capt. R. Barry Fisher, Tilbury House Publishers, Gardiner, 2001, $15.

This trio of tales told by a true Yankee fisherman earns its keep because these are fine stories, splendidly written. But there is also a subtext in each of these sea stories that provokes thoughts about today’s commercial fishing that managers of the embattled industry would do well to consider.

Capt. Fisher (can you think of a better name for a man who made his life aboard fishing boats?) starts his readers at the beginning, those times back in the Depression days of the mid- and late 1930s when he still had several years to go before he reached his teens. He lived in Gloucester, Mass., the nation’s quintessential fishing community. “If you didn’t go fishing,” he tells us, “you got out of town.”

He and his several wharf-rat friends hung around the docks, ready to do any chores offered them aboard the schooners docked rail-to-rail in Gloucester Harbor. Paid in fresh fish, the boys made their “coin” selling their hard-earned product door-to-door around town. When he was 11 years old, Barry was offered a worn out dory from Capt. Walker’s schooner.

“It seems to me,” Capt. Walker tells young Fisher, “if some smart young fellahs had their own dory fit to go, well, maybe they could run a few lobster pots or a couple of skates of longline gear to catch black backs or yellowtails in the harbor.” Which is just what the boys did after they’d worked long and hard to get their vessel shipshape.

Even at 11, Barry Fisher must have known after that first fishing season in Gloucester Harbor that he would be spending much of his future in dories, even though, as he tells us, “… fishing was a hard, cruel, mean way to make a living.” Which mattered not a whit to Capt. Fisher, who, for the rest of his many years, never stayed away from the sea for very long.

In 1948, when he had just turned 18, he signed on as a doryman aboard the schooner Marjorie Parker out of Boston. I don’t know about you, but 1948 doesn’t seem that long ago to me. I was running a small boat that year, yet when I read Capt. Fisher’s story (and he is a superb storyteller, the words coming as purely as a mountain spring) I have to wonder at the primitivism of the methods.

Although schooner rigged, the 78-foot Marjorie Parker was powered by a small gasoline engine, carried 11 dories on board and a crew of 17 fishermen. Offshore for a week at a time, fishing the channel between Georges Bank and Cape Cod, the Marjorie Parker cast off her dories and their two-man crews early each morning. Setting two or three “tubs” of longline gear with its endless strings of baited hooks, the dorymates hauled up the groundfish that once flourished so lavishly off New England: cod, hake, haddock and halibut. Loaded with up to 1,800 pounds of fish, the dorymen rowed or sailed back to their ship, unloaded their catch, cleaned it, iced it down, stowed it in the hold, baited more tubs and went back to sea again. Fourteen to 18-hour days were routine.

“Those men I fished with,” writes Capt. Fisher, “were the finest I have ever known. They were tough and yet gentle. They were polite and considerate in their behavior, and yet rowdy in their humor. They were courageous. Most were generous to a fault. And they were, without a doubt, the best small-boat seamen I have ever seen.”

These were the same men who went swordfishing with doryman Fisher aboard the Lorna B during the early fall of 1948, a trip the longline dorymen considered a kind of vacation. Harpooning swordfish, the captain explains, was a way of fishing that gave the crew plenty of time for eating and sleeping, something longlining never did. The adventures of the men aboard the Lorna B are far too entertaining and much too colorful to be spoiled by any advance notice here. The story, as each of the others in this wonderfully fresh book, will hold you in place from start to finish.

And when you do finish, many of you will realize that if commercial fishing had stayed with the gear and the philosophies so lucidly set forth in this forthright narrative, the sea would not have been scoured to sterility, the resource would have kept replenishing, and we would not now be living with a fishery in crisis. If fishery policy-makers want a model from the past for the future, they would do well to read this book.