August 24, 2013 — PROVINCETOWN, Mass. — Eddie Ritter takes a large plastic bucket off his bicycle, pulls the lid from it and grabs a bag of tobacco and some papers from among his things. He rolls a cigarette quickly, unconsciously, not unlike the way he baits a line.
He is Provincetown’s fisherman, the artist’s perfect model. His mostly white beard reaches to his chest and his ponytail to his back. His lined face is tanned brown-red, though his straw hat shadows the sun that bounces off the water as he fishes from his orange dory.
Ritter leads a different life from the one he might have expected. He was born in New York, where he had no thought of fishing. He was raised on “the continent of Brooklyn. Right where the horizontal bridge is. I watched them build it,” he says.
Then came the Vietnam War. Ritter was drafted into the Army and was part of a reconnaissance platoon until 1967. Two years after he got out, a friend told him about Provincetown. He came to town as a visitor for a few years. Then he and his son Sasha’s mother split. She moved to Provincetown permanently with their son in 1974 or ’75. And then she called on Ritter because she needed help. He’s been here ever since, and it is here that he found his sea legs through a friend who was working aboard the commercial vessel Cap’n Bill.
“And he asked me if I wanted to go scalloping,” Ritter says. It was a life-altering trip — he was hooked.
He thinks back to fishing in the 1970s and ’80s, when tractor trailers loaded with seafood exited MacMillan Pier daily. Fish, he says, used to be stored in beautiful wooden boxes. The ocean was wild, the job scored an amazing view. It may not have been an easy one, but, Ritter says, “fishing was a way of life.”
Though he was taken with fishing, he didn’t want to spend all his time on big commercial vessels. He wanted to do it his own way. What Ritter wanted more than anything was a dory, a boat with a flat bottom, high sides and a sharp bow — the kind tough guys row.
Read the full story at the Provincetown Banner