November 3, 2015 — He is up before the dawn, and, a creature of steady habits, he heads for the seashore.
It’s dark when Frank Mirarchi jumps into his black pickup truck, and dark still when he reaches Scituate Harbor. He parks on the town pier and stares at the ocean. But his 55-foot stern dragger is no longer moored there.
Actually, the boat is there. But it’s no longer his. It was renamed last June after he sold it — a poignant punctuation point to Mirarchi’s half-century career as a commercial fisherman.
“I’m down here every morning to watch the boats go out,’’ he told me Monday as we sat on a bench overlooking the dazzling harbor and under an unseasonably warm autumn sun. “I did it for 52 years. And I still love it.’’
I first met Mirarchi in early January when the harbor was icy and fat flakes of snow gently fell as if one of those snow globes had been softly shaken.
He is the son of a scientist and is something of a self-taught scientist himself. When I suggested Governor Charlie Baker would do well to pick his brain and appoint him to an ad hoc group looking into the travails of the cod fishery in the Gulf of Maine, the new governor took my advice. And soon Mirarchi was shaking hands with Baker on Beacon Hill.
When the latest news arrived last week about the depths of the cod collapse, the numbers were so alarming that I instantly thought of Frank and those like him who found their livelihood at sea.
Read the full story at Boston Globe