Saving Seafood

Sea Watch founder Barney Truex passes at age 70

August 23, 2022 — Leroy “Barney” Truex, a New Jersey surf clam fisherman who built Sea Watch International into the fishery’s biggest integrated harvesting and processing business, died Aug. 11 at age 70.

A lifelong resident of Mayetta, New Jersey, Truex grew up on the shore of Barnegat Bay with its traditional small-boat bay clamming fishery. In the mid-20th century entrepreneurial fishermen were building an offshore surf clam and ocean quahog industry. Truex went to work with his father Leroy Truex as a deck mate on surf clam vessels at age 16.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

 

Clam chowder calamity as fishing crew pulls up unexploded ordnance

August 12, 2016 — DOVER, Del. — A fishing crew apparently pulled up unexploded ordnance while clamming, leading to a fisherman being hospitalized with second-degree burns and the destruction of more than 700 cases of chowder, officials said.

It’s unclear what the ordnance was, but fishing vessels along the Atlantic Coast routinely dredge up munitions, including mustard agent, that was dumped at sea decades ago when environmental laws were far more lax.

The injured fisherman was treated at a hospital in Philadelphia for burns and blisters, said U.S. Coast Guard Petty Officer Seth Johnson. Such injuries are consistent with mustard agent exposure.

The crew of the fishing vessel the William Lee found what they believed was an old or discarded ordnance canister on Aug. 2 and threw it back into the ocean 30 miles east of Barnegat Inlet, Johnson said.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at the Providence Journal

SUSAN POLLACK: Fishing For Progress: Saying No To ‘No Women On Board’

June 10, 2016 — In 1982, as supporters of the Equal Rights Amendment fought claims that that the proposed amendment to the Constitution would destroy the American family, I confronted an older mythology: Women are bad luck on boats.

I was a young maritime reporter for The East Hampton Star on Eastern Long Island. I loved boats and the sea, and I’d always loved adventure. That summer, I planned to join local fishermen aboard a state-of-the-art Japanese squid ship. This was several years after the United States enacted its 200-mile limit, but before American fishermen had fully developed a squid fishery of their own. In exchange for sharing their technical know-how, the Japanese would be permitted to catch squid in our waters.

I was game.

But as I was readying my boots and gear, I received an unexpected warning from the American sponsors of the U.S-Japan venture: no women on board.

Surely, something must be wrong: I’d spent the previous five years in gurry-soaked oil skins reporting on life at sea on American draggers, lobster boats, bay scallopers, gillnetters, long-liners and clamming rigs. I’d photographed the sun rising over the stern of a dragger hauling its catch of yellowtail and blackback flounders, cod, haddock and scup. I’d spent bone-chilling winter days in an open skiff, culling bay scallops – separating the delicate fan-shaped bivalves from whelks, rocks and seaweed. I’d danced on the boat, not for joy, but to keep warm.

On summer evenings, I’d helped my neighbor lift his gillnets, gingerly plucking out sharp-toothed bluefish and the occasional striper. And I’d finally succeeded in filleting a flounder without mangling the fragile flesh.

Read the full story at WBUR

NEW YORK: Woman Among the Baymen

October 23, 2015 — “Clam Power” read the T-shirt on the sturdy woman carrying gear from her pickup to her no-frills work boat tied to a ramshackle dock in Patchogue, on the South Shore of Long Island.

The woman, Flo Sharkey, 72, works full time on the bay, and on Wednesday morning, she and her son, Paul Sharkey, 36, a bayman himself, loaded rakes, hip waders and bushel baskets into the boat and headed out through Swan Creek into the open bay.

People who make their living on these waters are known as baymen, and it’s a dwindling profession. A woman doing it for a living is nearly unheard-of.

Ms. Sharkey said she knew of no other baywomen. Her sister and mother could hold their own on the water but elected not to make it their life’s work.

Ms. Sharkey has often kept side jobs — these days, she moonlights as a school custodian — but clamming has been her mainstay on the Great South Bay, just off Fire Island.

“Years ago, this was the most productive bay in the country, except for the Chesapeake, for crabs, clams and fish,” Ms. Sharkey said as the boat bounded across the shimmering flat water toward a shallow spot. “But then came the brown tide, the road runoff and fertilizer off people’s lawns.”

With those factors affecting the abundance and health of the clams, much of the bay is now off limits for shellfishing. Weaker market prices and the ever-rising cost of living are other reasons that there were a mere two other clam boats off in the distance, compared with the hundreds that would have been seen years back.

Read the full story at The New York Times