January 27, 2021 — The temperatures were awfully chilly this weekend.
On Saturday night, 27 degrees at Provincetown Municipal Airport, with winds at 25 miles per hour and gusts to 37. The low Saturday night was 22 degrees.
It felt like the first truly freezing temperatures this winter on the Outer Cape.
That chill is a reminder of what fishermen have to consider every time they leave the dock.
At a December training in Sandwich, 25 crewmen and captains from Cape and New Bedford fishing vessels sat down in slushy snow to wriggle into what could be the most important article of clothing they will ever try on.
They call them Gumby suits, or immersion or survival suits. A survival suit is bright orange with oversized hands and feet and a tight-fitting hood that reveals only a small moon of flesh: eyes, nose and mouth. The water temperature on that training day was 47 degrees, and Dan Orchard, the vice president of Fishing Partnership Support Services, had the men suit up and jump into the water within a half-hour of arrival. Going from comfort to cold, disorienting water temperatures was about as close to the real thing as could be had shoreside.