A Speck in the Sea

by John Aldridge

  It wasn’t pretty. Little girls at young ages were exposed to hints, at the very least, of adult misbehavior and some of the very real problems and grievances of grown-up life. Ugly accusations were exchanged, grown-ups and children had to undergo psychological evaluations, and the state of California exacted past-due child support from Anthony to compensate for the welfare benefits its citizens had doled out to his wife and children. But he prevailed. He was able to bring Melanie home with him that year, 1995, and when Emma came to live with them in Montauk full time in 1996, he became the sole parent, raising both daughters throughout their childhood.

  The consequences of those years reverberate today in Anthony’s life and into the adulthood of his daughters, now grown, independent, gracious women who have excelled in education and in everything else they do. But of one thing they could be sure: their father never let up his relentless efforts to get them back. His persistence may be one reason why singer-songwriter Nancy Atlas, the troubadour of the “real Montauk” and composer of “East End Run,” its classic theme song, says of Anthony that he’s the guy you call when your life has suddenly fallen apart—“Because you know he’ll be there in ten minutes. He follows through.”

  Johnny and Anthony were not closely connected through this period. Anthony didn’t have the time, for one thing. But for another, their lives had gone in different directions. Johnny had tried college after high school; he spent two semesters at Suffolk Community College and realized academe wasn’t for him. Instead, he went full time into construction, working with a lot of the guys he grew up with in the industry that seemed the obvious and logical choice. His family was pleased, and as a good son, Johnny perhaps deferred to their pleasure. “Fishing is not catching fish,” John Aldridge senior liked to say; “it’s fishing for fish.” Construction, by contrast, at least back then, promised a steady income, and with custom homes sprouting up all across Long Island, Johnny had plenty of opportunity for on-the-job training framing out the new houses.

  One of the houses he worked on—he and his buddies in essence built it—was an Aldridge family outpost in Jamaica, Vermont, on a beautiful piece of property on Cole Pond Road that John senior and Addie bought. The guys would build the house on weekends when they had time off from their paying jobs, so it took a couple of years to finish, but when it was done in the late 1980s the house became an irresistible magnet for family and friends for a decade or more. The young people would set out after work on a Friday, drive hard, and arrive five hours later in the middle of the night. But who cared? This was heaven. Theirs was the last house on the road, in the woods, a short walk away from a river, half an hour at most from the shops of Manchester and from mountains for skiing and hiking.

  Johnny loved getting himself lost in the woods, testing his wilderness skills in the mountains, and challenging himself to find his way home. He’d venture out alone—cell phones and GPS were still in their early, clunky stages back then—with nothing except his wits, his sense of direction, his patience, his mind working out the path home as he went along, analyzing problems as they arose, solving them because he had to. Later he would parlay this interest into a fascination with survival stories in books and on film, an enthusiasm that—who knows?—might pay him back one day.

  The wilderness weekends provided a refreshing break from the steady work of construction, for in this period—the late 1980s and early 1990s—construction workers were in demand. Even the brief recession of 1990 didn’t make a dent in construction employment, and what followed was the longest-running economic expansion in the nation’s history, so a carpenter like Johnny Aldridge, who had lots of friends in the contractor community, had it made.

  Except that what he really wanted to do was go fishing for a living.

  After a while he did just that, splitting his work life by fishing part time out of Montauk and doing carpentry part time for private contractors. He had been living in an apartment in his parents’ house in Oakdale, but now he got his own apartment in Sayville. He sealed the deal in 1994 when he got a job on the offshore dragger Wanderlust and became a full-time fisherman—no more construction work. The Wanderlust trawled out of Montauk to net squid and fluke, so Johnny got an apartment in Montauk too. But he spent little enough time in either apartment. Mostly those next few years were spent “fishing, fishing, fishing,” as he says, working so much that there was little chance for a social life in either community. As if crewing on the Wanderlust wasn’t enough, he sometimes filled in for Anthony, who was working a lobster boat at the time. In between the four- or five-day trips on the dragger he might spend a fifteen-hour day hauling traps as a lobsterman. Not surprisingly, after a number of years he started to burn out.

  Still, he didn’t let up. By the late 1990s it was becoming tougher to make a good living in the commercial fishing industry in general and in lobster fishing in particular. To stay in business at all, let alone turn a profit, you just had to work harder. A fall-off in the lobster population had prompted the regulatory authority—the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, which sets commercial fishing policy for the fifteen Atlantic states—to tighten restrictions, toughening the limits on traps and on permissible lobster sizes and advocating a moratorium on lobster fishing permits. One of the most articulate spokesman against the proposed regulations was Al Schaffer, a legendary lobster fisherman out of Three Mile Harbor in Easthampton. So when, in 1996, Johnny got an offer to crew for Schaffer on his lobster boat, the Leatherneck, it seemed an offer he couldn’t refuse. Even then he didn’t cut back on his wider self-education in commercial fishing: he’d lobster with Al on the Leatherneck from spring through fall, then fish on the Wanderlust in the winter months.

  A couple of years later Al and Johnny became partners, together purchasing another lobster boat called the Sidewinder and hiring as its captain a colleague with a state license, one permitting fishing within three miles of the shoreline; at the time such a license was out of reach for Johnny. Al was now full owner of the Leatherneck, which fished in federal offshore waters, and half owner with Johnny of the Sidewinder, for fishing inshore in state waters—the first three miles of ocean off a coastal state’s shoreline, which are officially within the jurisdiction of that state’s government. The capability to fish in both jurisdictions—both sets of water, inshore and offshore—is a smart, productive tool to have when running a fishing operation, which is probably why it is not uncommon. Any boat, as the notorious saying goes, is “a hole in the water into which you pour money,” for repairs can be both costly and time consuming—a double detriment if you make your living as a commercial fisherman. With two boats, you have, first of all, a backup if one goes down, and second, if the two can ply different waters or achieve different goals, you may be able to double your income if you have the ability—and can hire the right people—to run both at once.

  While Johnny and Al fished inshore for lobster, Anthony was working on another Montauk lobster boat, the Lady K, or, in the winter months, was clamming and oystering in the waters of Easthampton. But when, in 2001, Al Schaffer decided to sell his share in the Sidewinder, Johnny and Anthony saw this as the perfect opportunity to go into business together, and that’s exactly what they did. Anthony left the Lady K and became a full partner with Johnny on the Sidewinder. Now the two men were both living in Montauk and working together full time. It was like a replay of childhood in Oakdale: backyard neighbors spending each day together at school.

  But of course they were no longer children, and nobody was getting any younger. In 2005 Anthony’s father suffered a massive stroke. John Sosinski had given up driving the big rigs by then but was working in “the yard,” operating a forklift, when suddenly the pallets he was loading began to look to him like big yellow splotches. When a supervisor suggested he lie down, Sosinski’s head hurt so much he was sure he needed to go to the emergency room. The next thing he knew, he was coming out of a coma ten days later at North Shore University Hospital, a celebrated Long Island teaching hosp
ital. John spent two years in treatment and a year in a nursing home, recovering just about all his capacity except the use of his left side, which remains paralyzed. Then Anthony brought him home to his house so he could care for his father. But it was a challenging time for Anthony: the worry, the regular commute to the hospital, even the transition to life with his now-disabled father. “Johnny helped me through all that,” Anthony says simply. If he needed assistance—someone to check on his father, someone to pick up the girls after school—he knew he could call on Johnny and it would be done. No questions asked.

  Around that same time, in 2003, the two men took another collective and fairly momentous action: they bought the Anna Mary, which is, according to Anthony, a “classic down-east lobster boat.” Forty-four feet long and with a fiberglass hull, the boat was built in 1983 by the John M. Williams Company of Hall Quarry, Maine, after a design by Lyford Stanley, a quintessentially traditionalist wooden boat builder out of Deer Isle, a man who kept designing wooden boats for fiberglass construction even after he realized there was no stopping this new technology.

  What makes it a classic lobster boat is that spacious aft deck, which, at nineteen feet long and fourteen feet wide, creates sufficient room for the work of lobster and crab fishing, affording plenty of floor space for big, heavy traps; for ropes; for all sorts of other gear that needs to be at the ready; and for the crew to move around among all this stuff and do the work they’re there to do.

  The best way to understand that work is through the gear required to do it. Think of it in two parts—the traps on the sea bottom, which is where the lobsters are, and the flotation system on the surface that marks and identifies a particular fisherman’s “spot.” The markers both help the fisherman locate his gear and, presumably, prevent territorial conflicts with other fishermen.

  Each lobster trap the Anna Mary uses measures four feet long by twenty-one inches wide by thirteen inches high and weighs sixty pounds. Twenty-five of them are roped together, spaced about a hundred feet apart, in a single line—a long line, as even a quick calculation makes clear. This roped chain or string of traps is the fisherman’s trawl. The rope used for the trawl is, by law, sinking rope, which means it is heavier than water and therefore less likely to become entangled with other underwater creatures. The traps themselves, even when empty, are more than sufficiently heavy to keep the trawl grounded to the ocean floor.

  From each end of this groundline on the ocean floor a buoy line—also called an up-and-down line—wafts up through the water to the flotation system that marks the trawl. Just about all lobstermen mark their trawls with a combination of a polyball and a highflyer. A polyball is a brightly colored marker buoy—typically a big, bulbous, pear-shaped or round ball—that moves up and down on the ocean surface, bobbing on the waves. A highflyer is a long vertical pole, typically made of aluminum so it won’t corrode easily, that is weighted at the bottom, tipped with a radar reflector, and buoyed in the middle by a float. It usually sits about thirty feet away from the polyball, but both it and the polyball attach to the same buoy line extending up from the trawl’s ground line. The polyball catches the eye, as it is designed to do, because it is a bright orange or red or yellow object bobbing up and down on the surface of the water, held there by the buoy line looped onto its tapered underside. The highflyer’s visibility is in its height; it can extend as much as nine feet or more above the water. If a flag marks its reflector tip, that tells you that the highflyer is on the western end of the trawl line; a highflyer on the eastern end of a trawl line will not have a flag, so if you’re at the end of a trawl line that has no flag on its highflyer, you’re east.

  The Anna Mary’s trawls are marked with polyballs and highflyers at both ends of the line and with a yellow flag on each trawl’s western highflyer. Both polyballs and highflyers bear the vessel name and permit number. When the Anna Mary arrives at one of its trawls, a crew member hooks onto the highflyer with the long-handled hook, sets the highflyer itself aside, and starts pulling up the attached buoy line and feeding it into a winching apparatus on the boat called a pot hauler. When the winching gets to the polyball, the crew member stacks the polyball in a corner next to the highflyer, then winches again until the groundline comes up with the first trap; after that, all the line that gets winched up is groundline trawl with traps. The pot hauler raises each trap in turn just about up to the railing—on the Anna Mary, always the starboard railing—at which point human hands haul it the rest of the way, disconnect the trap from the pot hauler, and slide it along the railing to the next crew guy or guys, who open the trap, retrieve the mesh bait bag, and extract and distribute the catch into the appropriate receptacles: lobsters here, crabs there, lobsters and crabs that don’t make the cut of what’s allowable—too small or female, plus any other fish that got in there somehow—back into the sea. Then the crew members rebait the empty traps with the bunker and skate—the bunker because it exudes an oily scent that attracts fish for miles around, the skate because it lasts a long time in the trap. The baited traps are then stacked up on deck, ready to be sent back into the ocean.

  A crew of three people needs about half an hour to haul up, empty, and rebait the twenty-five traps of one trawl. At that point the Anna Mary spins around the buoy, and the crew pays out the string of newly baited traps, shooting the line off the open stern of the boat one trap after the other every hundred feet or so to start all over again to catch lobster and crab along the ocean floor. Then the Anna Mary moves on to the next trawl, then the next, and so forth for some thirty-five trawls in all. The trawls are about a mile apart, but the precise distance typically depends on the condition of the bottom and the depth of the water and what is necessary to not get in the way of other fisherman with other kinds of gear. It’s an imperfect and imprecise method for measuring distances and placing traps, one that shifts as conditions and circumstances shift, but it works.

  The Anna Mary’s thirty-five trawls are in an area about ten miles by ten miles square, and the process of hauling and resetting half of them, or about 420 or 430 traps per trip, typically takes about fifteen-plus hours, working nonstop, whatever the weather and conditions, which will range from brutally cold to beastly hot and from wildly windy to deadly still. Underfoot on the deck while this work is proceeding is fish slime you don’t want to know about and miles upon miles of curled and coiled rope; both can be tricky to navigate, but that too is part of the job.

  At the end of that workday the captain turns the boat around for the eight- or nine- or ten-hour trip home to deliver the catch, rest briefly, then regroup, repair, and resupply for the next trip out maybe a day or two later, weather permitting. Ideally the owners of the Anna Mary want to return to a string of traps seven days after those traps have been rebaited, and they devise a rolling schedule based on that objective. It doesn’t always work out. If a storm is forecast, the partners might decide to revisit a string of traps on Day Five rather than take the chance of being forced by the weather to wait till Day Nine or later. The longer the time between rebaiting, the greater the chance that the pecking order of the food chain will kick into action and the traps will have filled up with all kinds of fish, the weaker species becoming food for the stronger fish that survive—not the ideal way to haul in a catch.

  The financial rewards for the work they do enable both men to live well enough without having to work for anyone else—a kind of freedom that is a reward in itself. “We’re our own bosses,” says Anthony, owners-operators of their own enterprise. This also means that the risk is theirs alone, as is the expense. How much they spend on equipment depends on how much they make in a season, and however much equipment they lose during a season—due to wear and tear, sliced lines, and other eventualities—is subtracted from the total. Very much on the plus side, however, they love the work they do, the business of commercial lobster fishing, and their fifty-fifty partnership as joint owners of the Anna Mary.

  Commercial fishing is a regulated business, and like man
y people who earn their livelihoods in regulated businesses, both John Aldridge and Anthony Sosinski chafe under the regulations, which they find not just onerous but ill-conceived and misapplied.

  The regulations derive their force from a law originally passed in 1976, then twice revised and reauthorized: the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act, named for its two most prominent Senate sponsors, Warren G. Magnuson, Democrat of Washington, and Alaska’s Ted Stevens, Republican. The Act was a response to what had become a free-for-all of probably unsustainable fishing by foreign vessels called factory trawlers, huge floating factories that pretty much vacuumed up the fish off coastal America and processed the catch right on board. US fishing interests replied to this threat by launching an American fleet of factory trawlers, which doubled down on the volume of fish being scooped up and, in the process, pretty much pushed out the smaller, local fishing operations—single individuals like Johnny and Anthony on boats the size of the Anna Mary. It also raised the issue worldwide that a food supply once thought inexhaustible might be confronting a tangible threat.

  The Magnuson Act’s response to this was multifaceted. The basic facet was jurisdictional: the Act extended US economic jurisdiction over fisheries to two hundred miles* from the baseline of the shore, typically measured as the low-water line along the coast. States would still have jurisdiction over miles zero to three off their coastlines—their inshore or in-state waters—while the feds would be responsible for the rest.