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Provincetown celebrates 63rd annual blessing of the fleet, Portuguese Festival |
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Sunday's 63rd annual Blessing of the Fleet marked the culmination of the four-day Portuguese Festival. On the wharf and in the streets, costumed dancers, wearing the dress of their native villages in Portugal, twirled, sashayed and sang to the accompaniment of musicians playing ukuleles, tiny steel banjos, 15-string guitars called violas, multitudes of individually shaped mandolins, and the strangest percussion instrument of all time, kind of an umbrella made of tiny knit figures that touched their toes and clapped bottle caps as the musician pumped the handle.
But the real focus was the fishing vessels. Many in the crowd remembered back 40 years ago when Provincetown was mainly a fishing port and a tourist destination, and not a tourist spot that happens to have fishermen. Pairs of children and adults in the procession carried banners, each stitched with the names of fishing vessels like Jimmy boy, Stella, the Kathie-Jo. The banner was all that remained of some of them, as restrictive fishing regulations and the collapse of fish stocks have taken their toll on the fleet. Read the complete story at The South Coast Today.
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MELISSA WOOD, NATIONAL FISHERMEN: Meting out the meager
May 22, 2012 - Listening to the New England Council's Groundfish Advisory Panel talk about how that industry is going to pay for monitoring costs is kind of like trying to figure out how to pay your bills when you've just lost your job. Though monitoring is important keeping costs down is critical. As Panel Member Gary Libby pointed out, "If we had 100 percent monitoring we probably wouldn't have an industry."