Fishermen: Patiently waiting for something to bite
Eric Hesse is a fisherman based in Cape Cod. Here’s how he describes his job:
When I started, there were hundreds of boats that would go out especially in the winter chasing codfish. But there aren’t really any codfish left.
They were severely depleted by overfishing and it’s made for kind of a bleak picture. There’s no telling when it’s going to come back. We’ve started to look for alternatives and the dogfish is one of those that’s really hard to ignore since the ocean is full of them.
Dogfish is a good tasting fish but a hard one for us to market. The name isn’t particularly attractive and right now the only market for dogfish is in Europe. In Italy, it’s spinarolo and in Britain and Spain and France, it’s fish and chips…or fish and chips.
It’s great that we have a market. It’s unfortunate that the market we have results in a very low price to the boats here on the order of 15 to 20 cents a pound to the boat. It’s hard to make a go with those prices.
My kids are about to go off to college. And from the time they were about 4 years old, they said ‘we’re going to be the best fishermen ever!’ They haven’t said that the last few years because they’ve seen that it’s been getting harder and harder and there’s not a lot of excitement or great moments anymore. I think the next generation probably enjoys fishing as much as I did or any other generation did. I think if the dogfish took off and we had domestic markets, there is room for younger people to get involved.
It’s one of the greatest jobs you can have. You can’t beat the view, nobody tells you what to do, and the harder you work, historically, the better you do. It’s a great way to go about making a living when there’s something to catch.
Hear more stories in our Disappearing Jobs series:
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