To anyone who has spent a languid summer afternoon tumbling in the waves on South Beach or watched the earth’s closest star dip into the horizon at Menemsha, the ocean can seem eternal and unchanging. But scientists are increasingly discovering that human activity is transforming what was once thought to be an invulnerable resource. The ocean is getting warmer, more acidic, louder and filled with the detritus of civilization. What effect these changes will have on the ocean’s inhabitants in the decades to come is unclear.
A smiling Alec Gale hops onto his 52-foot steel fishing boat, The Retriever. “We’ll see what happens today. Something always goes wrong,” he says. It’s 7:30 a.m. and Al has already been up for two hours. He spent the early part of the day with his eight-month-old son Riley. “It’s my only quiet time,” he says. Now he is bounding around his boat, starting one of its three engines, unhooking dock lines and moving the neck of a truck crane around.
The Katama Bay oyster is the talk of Island raw bars. Lovers of
seafood now have a local oyster available through most of the year. This
Island oyster is making its way across the eastern seaboard to
Washington, D.C., New York and Boston.
Vineyard Haven and Oak Bluffs shellfishermen saw a banner start to
the bay scalloping season, and they share their reason why: Lagoon Pond.
Derek Cimeno, shellfish constable for Tisbury, is watching
shellfishermen surrounded in bay scallops. "Six hundred bushels of
bay scallops were taken in the first two days by family
shellfishermen," Mr. Cimeno said.
Several shellfishermen and fishermen are taking a first step on a long road to raise blue mussels for market in Vineyard waters.
Rick Karney, director of the Martha's Vineyard Shellfish Group, the project's principal investigator, has applied for a state grant to fund half of a $28,730 feasibility project.Blue mussels are a highly prized shellfish. Island consumers buy plenty of them in local fish markets, but nearly all the mussels come from Canada.
On this November morning, the Menemsha lobster boat Shearwater has made its way three and a half miles south of Noman’s Land.
Noman’s tall cliffs rise above the treacherous rocky waters. Sea birds are adrift in the moving current farther north.
Waves roll from the open ocean and raise and lower the boat in a gentle fashion, like a mother rocking a sleeping child. The sky is blue and metallic; the color of the sea beneath is a darker version of the sky. A gentle cold breeze freshens. The bow points towards Spain.
Island fish, like Island tourists, come and go with the seasons. Striped bass, bluefish, false albacore, bonito and scup and summer flounder all migrate.
Yet there is one species of fish that once were caught here year-round. Winter flounder stayed in Island waters through the changing seasons.
Next week the Chilmark Public Library is hosting a forum with a top New England authority on the raising of juvenile winter flounder.
As the Chilmark shellfish department wraps up its first summer, efforts at spearheading restoration projects have been successful. Selectman Warren Doty, chairman of the board and liaison to the department, reported a low mortality rate among planted scallops and a very high production rate.
“It has been a very successful season,” he said.
To date, 100,000 scallop seed have been set to grow in an upweller, purchased by the town this spring and located in Menemsha, as well as in spat bags and pearl nets.
The late Foster Silva, longtime superintendent for The Trustees of Reservations on Chappaquiddick who loved to tell perfect strangers that he had received his degree from Katama University, had an opinion on the subject of bay scallops. Cape Pogue scallops, he said, were the sweetest. No arguments.
The Vineyard bay scallop season is underway and the news is mostly good for local consumers and commercial fishermen alike. Chilmark is having one of its best seasons in years; Edgartown is having one of its worst. Oak Bluffs and Tisbury are doing fine and on Monday another banner year is set to open in Aquinnah.
