February 6, 2016 — Aboard the Cap’n Bert — A harbor seal pokes its mottled head out of the water, soulful eyes visible above a bristly mustache, before diving back down to snatch fish from the net being winched aboard the trawler.
“Gettin’ a free meal,” Captain Tom Puckett remarks with a shake of his head.
As the otter trawl net is hoisted up on the A-frame across the boat’s stern, it’s clear that it’s nowhere close to full. But it doesn’t matter. The Cap’n Bert is not a commercial fishing trawler. It’s a research vessel owned and operated by the University of Rhode Island’s Graduate School of Oceanography.
The 53-foot stern trawler is out on Narragansett Bay on this winter day carrying out its weekly ritual of testing the water temperature and other indicators and taking samples of marine life.
Doctoral student Joe Langan pulls open the net, spilling fish and shellfish unceremoniously onto the deck. He sorts the catch, just as he has done every week since September and as others have done before him, stretching back more than five decades as part of one of the oldest continuous marine research projects in the world.
From the wet and writhing pile, he picks out sea robin and skate, silver hake and red hake, rock crabs, spider crabs and lobsters — all species that are normally found in the Bay this time of year.
But when Langan gets to the bottom, he carefully picks up a flat, light-brown fish and pauses to study it.
“A Gulf Stream flounder,” he finally says. “Which should not be here.”
The little flounder is a warm-water species that shows up in May but would usually be gone by the time the temperature drops in December.
It is of course only one fish, but its presence here in the waters off Whale Rock on this January morning is yet another sign that Narragansett Bay is changing.
“And we’re seeing it happen,” Langan says.