Gloucester's Jack Flaherty is one of those remarkable fishermen who remains fit and just doesn't seem to age over the equinoxes and solstices.
Flaherty formulated what he calls an interesting "retirement" plan 25 years ago. He has recently been somewhat soured by fisheries regulations and enforcers and even hypocrisy within one of the groundfish sectors, but he still remains positive and has no plans to hang up his boots soon.
Flaherty's 41-year fishing career, which has taken him from Venezuela to Newfoundland, began in 1969 at the ringing in of the new year.
"I came up to Gloucester to attend a New Year's Eve party with an old Cambridge friend stationed at the U.S. Coast Guard base here," he recalled. "At the party, I got talking with a guy from Nahant, Ted Butler, who ran the 86-foot offshore lobster boat Western Ocean," explained Flaherty, who grew up and was educated in Cambridge. "He needed a man on the boat, and he offered me a job that night. I had already been laid off for the winter as a union pile driver."
Read the complete piece from the Gloucester Daily Times.