A Speck in the Sea

by John Aldridge

  The act also established eight regional councils to develop fishery management plans for offshore fishing under the aegis of the National Maritime Fisheries Service, the NMFS, while two lead agencies, the Atlantic and Pacific States Marine Fisheries Commissions, would manage inshore or in-state fisheries.

  Because 99 percent of all of New York State’s commercial fishing is launched from the ports of Long Island and because of the particular migratory patterns of the species these fishermen catch, Montauk fishermen like Johnny and Anthony are regulated by both the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council and the New England Fishery Management Council for federal offshore fishing, while the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission regulates their inshore fishing—the lobster and crab catches that are the core of how they make a living.

  Each fishery management authority—three, in the case of Montauk fishermen—is required to “specify objective and measurable criteria for determining when a stock is overfished or when overfishing is occurring, and… establish measures for rebuilding the stock.”* The law further defined what Congress meant by “overfishing, overfished, and fishing communities” and also added new national standards on “fishing vessel safety, fishing communities, and bycatch”† while revising existing standards.

  Simply put, what the law set out to do was empower regulators continually to measure fish stocks and, if and when a stock was determined to be dwindling, take action to stop the diminution and allow the stock to replenish itself. Once a stock was back up to the established standard, the fishery management regulator would theoretically ease up on the brakes that had been applied earlier. At the heart of this management issue, as the act makes clear, was the assumption that depletion of a fish stock was due to overfishing—an assumption the commercial fishing industry has been disputing ever since the act was promulgated.

  Anthony Sosinski describes the Magnuson Act as “the constitution on how to harvest seafood in the United States,” which may be one of the few statements about the act that does not trigger contention—often very heated—among and between fishermen, regulators, environmentalists, lawmakers, and all their relatives and friends.

  Johnny Aldridge and Anthony Sosinski do not believe there should be no limits on where and what to fish for. As master practitioners of the work of fishing—men whose livelihoods and, indeed, way of life depend on healthy seas filled with healthy fish—they have a particular interest in seeing to it that the seafood they catch will be there for a long, long time to come, as vital an interest surely as the wholesalers, restaurants, consumers, and even the regulators.

  What they emphatically do not believe is that fish stocks are being systematically depleted or that the official methods for measuring fish stocks show that they’re being depleted.

  How do you count the fish in the sea? The regulators of East Coast fishing do it by trawling a net through a particular piece of ocean. A net has holes through which fish “escape” and a bottom under which fish can slide. So how does the number of fish a net “catches” on a particular day tell you the size of a fish stock?

  Fishermen are in an area day after day. They know when there are fewer fish, and they figure it means that the fish have gone somewhere else. After all, fish migrate. They chase food. They move with the seasons. They flee from cold—studies have found that a drop of even a quarter of a degree of temperature will prompt certain fish to move out of an area. The problem for fishermen like Aldridge and Sosinski is that to the regulators, fewer fish mean the area has been overfished, and overfishing means fishermen are to blame and must be restricted.

  It is a stark conclusion. On a small operation like the Anna Mary and on the individual commercial fishermen who run such operations, the restrictions that flow from the conclusion can be devastating. Johnny was hung up for years because of limits on issuing state lobster licenses. Anthony lost the licenses he had been issued as a young man. Their operation is limited as to what and how much they can catch.

  If there is anything that is depleting fish life in the waters off Long Island, say the two men, it is ocean water pollution, not commercial fishing. Both men have fished these waters for decades; they see the change. Says Sosinski, “The New York City sewage treatment plant on the Hudson River, the people all across Long Island putting stuff on their lawns to keep them green—all these things hurt water quality. You won’t solve that by destroying the US commercial fishing fleet.” And Johnny Aldridge adds, “The collapse of fishing inshore had to do with pesticides or Mother Nature. But pesticides have lobbyists, and Mother Nature you can’t regulate. Fishermen are the only ones you can regulate, so that’s what they did.”

  It means that individual commercial fishermen like Aldridge and Sosinski are simply being pushed out, forced to cede the business they love to large-scale fishing corporations with the resources to buy the permits and operate the increasingly strictly defined equipment.

  The work is tough enough: three guys on a small boat, out for thirty hours at a stretch, working flat out for most of that time, then packing out and delivering their catch when they get back to the dock. These are self-employed guys—freelancers—which means they don’t have access to unemployment insurance during the months they cannot fish or workmen’s compensation if they get hurt or sick. Weather conditions and market demand regulate their work lives. Their finances are subject to the high costs of equipment and fuel, not to mention licenses and permits. Most banks don’t leap at the chance to extend loans or provide mortgages to guys whose incomes tend to be irregular, unreliable, and wholly unpredictable.

  There is no formal infrastructure of support behind them. Officially, nobody has their backs. In the cases of Aldridge and Sosinski, they don’t even have a heritage of local fishermen families to fall back on; rather, they emerged full blown from landlocked legacies onto their forty-four-foot fishing vessel. Yes, their families would rally to them in times of need, financial or otherwise, but their real support network is the other Montauk fishermen they have come to know over the years, the fraternity and the kinship of others who go down to the sea in ships and who are in the same regulatory boat.

  The brotherhood of fishermen is not a huge group nor necessarily a powerful one—although it would show its might on July 24, 2013. But it is a brotherhood, albeit one utterly lacking in sibling rivalry. “We’re not big enough to fight one another for position,” says Johnny Aldridge. “We’re not in ‘the game’ like the big guys. We fish inside the big guys, and we fish for scraps, and each of us knows everybody else—from the Florida Keys up to Maine—and we’re not fighting one another.”

  Maybe it’s because, as Anthony adds, “most fishermen are loners.” Being on your own, after all, is “the great draw of being out on the ocean.” So for this fraternity of small-operation commercial fishermen—those who still exist—the ocean is their clubhouse and meeting place. “We gather out at sea,” says Anthony, “maybe the same way truck drivers meet at truck stops on the highway. We know each other’s boats the way they know each other’s rigs. We visit each other out on the ocean.”

  Everybody has a nickname, the reasons for which are either lost in the mists of time or too foolish to relate. The men of the Anna Mary, for example, are Little Anthony and Johnny Load. Anthony got his because the nickname fits: he is slight, narrow boned, and tautly muscular. Johnny’s moniker, its origin as silly as it is salacious, is one he used for a fellow workman on a construction job; the guy was a monster chick magnet. Over time the nickname got thrown back at Johnny, mostly because he used it a lot. Little Anthony and Johnny Load—that’s what people call out when one or the other of them shows up at The Dock or Liar’s, where Montauk’s fishermen do their drinking, bars that make a statement as much as they provide food and drink.

  “No Yapping Mutts! No Sensitive Drunks! No Cell Phones!” orders the management of The Dock, just a few on a long list of prohibitions. As much attitude as watering hole, The Dock is right there on the harbor, so lobstermen, draggermen, scall
opers, sport-fishing charter fleet operators, and crew can move seamlessly from boat to the bar, which is just what they do. Presided over by owner George Watson, a man of legendary and sometimes suspect crankiness, The Dock serves as a campaign headquarters for the way of life that guys like Johnny and Anthony represent, a war room for the values and behaviors and outlook they all share, and a forum for the concerns they all worry about.

  Much the same can be said of Liar’s Saloon, a small, low-slung tavern nearly hidden in the back of a boatyard. The bar’s got a view, though: through the big windows—and in summer from the outdoor deck—you’ve got a scenic wide-angle vista straight out to the water where most of Liar’s customers go to work. In winter, when The Dock and many other of Montauk’s eating and drinking establishments are shuttered, Liar’s is still going strong. On a gray afternoon in February or March the same fishermen who appear in the photos that line the walls, dressed in slickers and holding their prize catches, are at the bar—or if not exactly the same guys, their descendants or current counterparts. They’re as roughhewn as the wide boards of the saloon’s floor and walls, and they expect you to know it.

  Montauk fishermen also gather—maybe a little bit more sedately, a tad more demurely—at the annual Blessing of the Fleet, where they pray together. At least, it’s a bit more sedate and demure since the respectable types got hold of the event and dressed it up a bit. But no veneer of respectability ever really smooths the sharp edges of fishermen’s lives or can undo the core of toughness—real toughness, the ability to absorb external strains and pressures without fracturing—that marks those lives and bonds them to one another.

  And guys like Johnny and Anthony may well be the last of their breed. “Who’s going to get into this business now?” asks Johnny. “How?” He estimates that to start up as a lobster fisherman today would cost half a million dollars, 2 million dollars to begin a scallop-fishing business. How many individuals today can gather that kind of money? Can a young, inexperienced man or woman starting out—as he once did, as Anthony once did—obtain a bank loan to start a lobster-fishing business? Can he or she find backers? The barriers to entry are simply too high for an individual not born to the purple, and it’s a question whether anyone born to the purple would want to work as hard as a start-up lobsterman would have to work to succeed. Lobster fishing as a toy for playboys? Just doesn’t sound right.

  Anthony concurs. Lobster fishing is certainly “a tough business to get into,” he says. “One or two guys in our area have tried, I think. Nobody in the other coastal towns.” He labors to remember the names of the “one or two guys,” but he can’t.

  The two men manage even as they complain. They work through the regulations. They comply. The Anna Mary has been boarded by regulatory authorities, as all boats are boarded, but has never been found in violation of any fishing or safety regulations. They make it work—but making it work isn’t easy.

  There is one other thing that must be said about the work that fishermen do—actually, about the entire commercial fishing industry, the industry in which John Aldridge and Anthony Sosinski have invested so much of their financial, physical, and emotional wherewithal and to which both have long been passionately committed as a way of life. It is that according to the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, commercial fishing is “one of the most hazardous occupations in the United States, with a fatality rate thirty-nine times higher than the national average.”* The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which also tracks data about industry deaths, adds that the hazard is particularly high in the waters off the northeast coast, the most dangerous fishing grounds in America—more so than the Bering Sea.†

  The near misses and narrow escapes from numerous and varied hazards “never stop,” says Anthony Sosinski, and the dangers are never far from any fisherman’s mind. Seven months nearly to the day before Johnny Aldridge fell off the Anna Mary, fellow lobstermen and scallopers Wallace “Chubby” Gray and Wayne Young, on Gray’s boat, the Foxy Lady II, were lost at sea not far from where the two normally fished off the Massachusetts coast. Chubby was twenty-six, Wayne Young fifty. Chubby had routinely brought the Foxy Lady II to Montauk in the summer to go sea scalloping, and the boat and crew had become part of the fishing community there.

  Among the members of that community theories abounded as to what might have happened to cause the disaster, but no explanation was ever officially determined. The fishermen of Montauk—fishermen everywhere—are haunted by that. What made the loss particularly unnerving for Sosinski and Aldridge, apart from their fondness for Chubby, was that the Foxy Lady II was an exact match for the Anna Mary—designed and built in Maine by the same designer and boatbuilder in the same year, 1983, that the Anna Mary was built. A month after she went down, the wreckage of the Foxy Lady II was identified, via underwater camera, on the ocean floor. The bodies of the two men were never found.

  If you’re John Aldridge and Anthony Sosinski, an involuntary and inadvertent shudder may seize you fleetingly when you look at the boat that is your means of livelihood, your major financial asset, and the only solid floor between you and the deep, and you find yourself thinking of its twin gone down to the bottom of the sea and a guy you knew and liked lost forever.

  Worse than a fleeting shudder, the dread of such dangers can change minds and upend traditions as much as the dangers can destroy a career, if not a life. They’ve even been known occasionally to turn a born-and-bred fisherman against the job he loves. Ask Cameron McLellan, a man well acquainted with Anthony, who spends his winters in the same part of the world where McLellan spends his. A sixth-generation commercial fisherman out of Maine, Cameron McLellan has trawled for cod and haddock across the northern Atlantic, fished for pollock in the Bering Sea off Alaska, and worked in fishing grounds as far afield as Iceland and Chile. In thirty-seven years of it he saw enough of the dangers of commercial fishing to get out of the business altogether, retreating to the British Virgin Islands and the calmer life of a charter yacht captain.

  McLellan lost an uncle and a nephew to accidents at sea. His brother, a cod fisherman, suffered a severe head injury from falling ice. Cameron watched as new rules and regulations that limited the size of a catch and the hours of permissible fishing forced him and his fellow fishermen to spend less on maintenance and equipment so they could still make a living at what they loved. He saw fewer fishermen and fewer boats taking more and bigger risks, going out in scary weather, fishing through perilous storms in pursuit of a more profitable purse. In a single year eighteen of Cameron McLellan’s fellow fishermen—all friends and acquaintances—died from the hazards of commercial fishing. That’s when McLellan traded in his cold-weather survival suit for shorts and topsiders and exchanged the dangers of commercial fishing for the rewards of providing hospitality to well-heeled tourists aboard his “luxury catamaran.”

  His current work environment consists of warm weather and lilting breezes all year round, as he sails the two-masted catamaran off the Hamptons in the summer and, in winter, heads south to ply the azure Caribbean around the islands of St. John, St. Thomas, and St. Barthélemy. For Captain McLellan of Heron Yacht Charters, that means coming back each evening to a home and a comfortable bed instead of days or weeks of perilous seas, galley chow, and a narrow, rolling bunk at night. It means that the height of command anxiety is deciding whether a trip should be canceled “due to unpleasant weather,” thereby necessitating either a rescheduling or a refund—a far cry from incessant worry over weather, the catch, the market, the regulations.

  Which is not to say that Cameron McLellan doesn’t miss the commercial fishing he did for those thirty-seven years. He does miss it. He misses the danger itself, and he misses the fraternity of fishermen, a fraternity linked by equal parts camaraderie and competition. After six generations and nearly four decades of his own life, wrenching himself away from commercial fishing felt like tearing out the roots of his past.

  But as Johnny and Anthony prove, you don
’t have to go back six generations to be in thrall to the lure of making your living as a fisherman. The lure is as inexplicable and unfathomable as it is overpowering. It is the passion both men feel for the particular freedom and adventure they can find nowhere else as powerfully as they can find it on a small boat on the ocean, trying to pry shellfish off the floor of the sea. Anthony says fishing is “always an adventure because it is always changing.” The sea is never the same, conditions are never the same, the catch is never the same. The thrill is in the search itself, and Johnny Aldridge agrees, likening his profession to a treasure hunt. It is “the unknowing,” Aldridge says, that stirs the equivalent of gold fever in his soul: “You never know what the hell you’re going to get.” And for both men there is no charge as electric as the one you get when you hit the jackpot and haul up traps full of lobsters.

  Start with this passion, then add persistence, colossal effort, endless amounts of time, and all the money you have, and, if you’re lucky, you too can get the job to which the Bureau of Labor Statistics has awarded the very highest index of relative risk for fatal occupational injuries. You heard right: the highest risk of death from work-related causes. The BLS gives commercial fishermen a “fatality rate” of 104.4, beating out timber cutters, who run a close second, and in fairly distant third place, airline pilots.

  Most of the fatalities come from vessel disasters, but falls overboard are the second leading cause of death. Between 2000 and 2014 there were 210 fatal falls overboard among America’s commercial fishermen. In the very early morning of July 24, 2013, Johnny Aldridge was on track to be one of them.

  Chapter 3

  A Speck in the Sea

  5:14 a.m.

  I am floating in the middle of the ocean in the middle of the night, and nobody in the world even knows I am missing. Nobody is looking for me. You can’t get more alone than that. You can’t be more lost.