“Gloucester: When the Fish Came First.” New coffee-table photo book captures legacy of the Gloucester fisherman
“I wanted to get to know the place so I picked up 35-millimeter cameras,” Nubar Alexanian recalled. “I wanted to find one of the most successful fishing families and follow them. So from 1979 to 1981, I followed the Brancaleone family. I literally became part of the family.” Alexanian braved 10-day trips at sea, with much sea sickness, and he still wanted to immerse himself more in their world on the frigid northern Atlantic. “The captain would say, ‘I’m not coming in for you.’ But when you are young and determined with a story that you are trying to tell, you forge ahead,” he said. Decades later, Alexanian is now telling his Gloucester story in a large-format book titled “Gloucester: When the Fish Came First.” Read the rest here 09:46
The book sounds wonderful…but please stop fostering the idea that the fish are now all gone. “But that way of life could not be sustained with the development of technology that brought in fish in quantities never before imagined.” That’s simply no longer true—if it ever was! That is mostly an eco-NGO “overfishing” talking point.
At any rate, fish are more plentiful now than ever, and it is not helping anyone—including the fish—to leave the general impression that the stocks are in bad shape! What needs to be said is that the regulations are outdated and based on stale and inaccurate science. The fish come and go and have done for eons; currently the stocks are healthy and abundant in the Gulf of Maine and on Georges Bank and in Southern New England.
The defensive and unwieldy bloated management bureaucracy is either unable or unwilling to ease the regulations and recognize the cooperative research submitted by the U Mass. School for Marine Science and Technology which documents the health of these important stocks. Archaic and ridiculously constricting federal regulations, steered by anti-fishing lawsuit happy “conservationist” law firms, coupled with the corporate sponsored privatization and commoditization scheme of “catch shares” are the factors that are dismantling this industry— the “steady and inexorable” coastal fishing industry’s “crash” and “collapse” is certainly not due to the lack of fish.
And the loss of these vital clean food producing, independent, local family fishing operations is occurring not only in the Port of Gloucester, but also in New Bedford, Point Judith, Montauk, and up and down the East Coast and throughout the entire domestic fishing industry.