Tag Archives: William Dixon Skrobacz
Skrobie’s last hurrah on the harbor
William Dixon Skrobacz made his last trip on a boat on Friday. For once, he didn’t have much to say. But if he did, he probably would have wondered — profanely — from within his remembrance urn how all of his friends could have forgotten to bring along a few Miller High Lifes to lubricate the leaving. A little something, as it were, for the effort. Late Friday afternoon, three lobster boats — Mark Ring’s Stanley Thomas, Joe Mondello’s Tully IV and Pete Mondello’s Allison-Carol — ferried about a dozen family and friends to a spot off Half Moon Beach, where, under a perfect sky and on a calm sea, they released Skrobie’s ashes into Gloucester Harbor. >click to read<08:43
‘It’s really wicked bittersweet’ – Fair Wind, Billy!
Well, they could have just laid him out atop a wooden pyre and lit him up like a viking, but that might have been a tad extreme even for Bill Skrobacz’ friends at the Crow’s Nest. In his 63rd year, after more than four decades of being whipsawed by the life of a commercial fisherman, William Dixon Skrobacz has had enough. He’s had enough of the physical rigors of fishing that have gnarled his hands and hobbled and scarred his legs. He’s had enough of NOAA regulations up the ying and last winter’s snow up the yang. The view from where Skrobacz stands (or in this case, sits) is simple: He did not leave fishing; fishing left him, or perhaps more accurately, was ripped away by suffocating layers of bureaucracy and regulations that have stranded him with fewer places to fish and not enough fish to carve out a living. Read the rest here 08:01
