December 17, 2025 — Over the past 60 years, Cape Cod’s fisheries have undergone dramatic change, mirroring broader shifts across coastal New England, wrote longtime fisherman William Amaru in a retrospective for The Cape Cod Chronicle. Amaru notes that his own fishing career spans the same six decades as the newspaper, a period when “virtually all aspects of life on Cape Cod saw more change than had occurred in the previous centuries on this peninsula.”
The region’s fisheries had evolved from hemp line and handmade hooks to synthetic netting, spectra rope, and stainless-steel wire, while once dominant cod and haddock fisheries gave way to “robust catches of dogfish, skates, and monkfish.” At the same time, grey and harbor seal populations have surged. When The Chronicle first published, Amaru wrote, “even seeing a seal was rare. Today they number in tens of thousands in our waters,” a shift he shared has hindered fish stock recovery.