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Part V: The dreams of Captain Bowen By Paul Davis Brent Bowen fishes eight hours a day, trapping scup and sea bass a mile from the Newport shore. His wife often waits at the dock so he can grab his daughter and she can get to her waitressing job. At night, in a housing project that once housed Navy men, he struggles to sleep, and dreams of fishing. Sometimes the dreams are good, but mostly they’re bad. In one recurring dream, the 36-year-old fisherman drives to the dock and can’t find his boat. Suddenly, he spots the top of it. It’s under water. The vision is not farfetched. A year ago, Bowen ran into trouble near the southern tip of Jamestown when a hydraulic line in his engine room burst. “It was a runaway engine, screaming, black smoke everywhere,” he says. A Coast Guard cutter escorted him home. In many ways, Bowen represents the future of Rhode Island fishing. Across the bay in Point Judith, most of the boat owners are in their 50s. Some, discouraged by tightening regulations, soaring fuel costs and bad backs, are getting out. A former boss has his boat up for sale. But in the City by the Sea, Bowen is struggling to stay in the business. He wants a house with a yard but he can’t afford it. His boat bill arrives every month, but profits are down. State regulations have reduced his daily catch of fish and lobster to a few hundred pounds, just enough to cover fuel and repair costs and leave him with a few hundred bucks in his pocket. When he steams out of the harbor, he passes big yachts with names that hint at money, class and leisure: Nefertiti, Majestic, Never Never Land. In the summer, he’s jostled by their wakes. His own boat, a fixer-upper, features a cheap captain’s chair that lurches around a cramped wheelhouse. A piece of raw plywood serves as a door. The 36-foot boat doesn’t even have a name. Bowen blotted out the old one, The Good Hope, with gray paint. One day, he’ll hire someone to paint the name of his 2-year-old daughter, Brenna Rose, on the transom. But right now, money is tight. Instead, he keeps a photo of Brenna in the wheelhouse. In it, she smiles and poses on a scraggly strip of lawn. A BOAT OWNER since 2005, Bowen still fishes with other captains to make ends meet. Last winter, he caught fluke with Craig Huntley, the owner of the Point Judith boat Miss Trudy. The year before, he fished on squid boats, on weeklong winter trips during which his face froze. Today, he’s working for a former boss, Ronnie Fatulli, the owner of Aquidneck Lobster on Bowen’s Wharf. The 73-year-old business owner, a stooped man with bushy eyebrows, is one of the last wholesale and retail fish dealers on the harbor. Bowen is collecting fish from Fatulli’s nets outside Newport Harbor because Fatulli’s boat has a blown gear. He tows three steel longboats, a skiff and 17 men behind him, a taut rope between them. He heads for Trap 5, a large underwater net filled with fish about a mile from shore. For 300 years New England fishermen have fished in much the same way, dropping nets in waters from Stonington, Conn., to New Bedford, Mass. Newport was Rhode Island’s center for much of this time. Fishing boats, a chandlery, an ice company, a fish plant and a handful of dealers crowded the wharves and harbor. As late as 1971, 57 percent of all commercial landings were in Newport. A few years later, Point Judith, with its new docks and marine businesses, surpassed Newport in importance. Now, the future of fishing here is cloudy. “Newport’s groundfish fleet has dramatically declined over the last twenty years,” says a l991 report by Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers. “Soaring property values have restricted the growth of the industry, and recreational boat owners are fighting for dock space.” After years of buying and selling millions of dollars worth of fish and lobsters, Fatulli is looking for other ways to generate profits from the wholesale and retail fish business he bought in the 1960s. During the 1970s and 1980s, he made good money. During peak years, his crew packed $2 million worth of fish into boxes topped with ice. “If you had a nose for it, and you had the gear, and you were willing to work endless hours, you made a fortune,” says Fatulli, who started fishing at 15. “Back in the mid 1980s it was an open ball game. The government wasn’t in it.” But less than a decade later federal regulators started closing some fishing grounds, limiting catches and changing net sizes to protect some stock. “Now,” says Fatulli, “they got limits and quotas on every fish that swims.” He says he’s lucky to make half the money he once did. On a cold day in 2003, Fatulli junked an older boat. A backhoe tore apart its rotted hull and tossed the splintered wood into a trash bin. A few months later, Fatulli came up with a plan to convert half of his 7,200-square-foot building into a restaurant and shops. “As a result of decreasing fish stock and additional government regulation, the fishing industry in Newport has decreased,” Fatulli told the Newport Zoning Board of Review. The board balked at the idea of another restaurant on the harbor, but gave Fatulli permission to push aside dozens of old lobster tanks to make room for three stores selling pearl necklaces, glass fishing boats and wild coconut-embellished handbags. He still dreams of opening a restaurant. Fatulli shrugs. “You’ve got to survive.” FATULLI’S SHRINKING BUSINESS is one more worry for Bowen, who for years has unloaded his fish at Aquidneck Lobster. “If Ronnie sells, it will be one less company I can sell to, and that will be the end of Newport,” Bowen says. At least the state pier is left, he adds. The collection of docks and stinky bait barrels sits at the north end of the harbor, an asphalt field bereft of condominiums, dockominiums and shops. “If it wasn’t for the state pier, we’d all be gone.” Tired of mowing lawns and hauling weed whackers, Bowen left a $4.25-an-hour landscaping job in 1988 and, at 15, landed in Newport in a tie-dye T-shirt and $5 in his pocket. He got a job with Fatulli and his son, catching lobsters and picking out the meat. For a year he slept in a bunk at the Seamen’s Church Institute, founded in 1919 to help wandering servicemen, fishermen and sailors. “I was making sixty dollars a day, and we worked six and seven days a week.” he says. After a year he could afford his own apartment. For the next dozen years, Bowen worked for other captains, catching squid, lobster and fluke. But he always dreamed of owning his own boat. After he turned 30, he fished in the day and worked on a business plan at night. The state stopped issuing the type of commercial fishing license he wanted, so Bowen had to buy a skiff and some gear just to get his hands on the license that came with it. He then sold the boat. With a license, he convinced lenders to give him $30,000 to start a business. In 2005, he bought a used boat berthed beneath a bridge in East Providence. “She was ugly as sin,” says Bowen, who wrote a check the next day. His wife, Tracey, was pregnant. By her own admission, the Newport waitress was anxious and a little crazy. “I need you to pay attention to me,” she told Bowen. “I’m trying to have a baby.” “And I’m trying to start a business,” Bowen shot back. Bowen stood in the hospital room when Brenna Rose was born. A few days later, he was back on the water. HALFWAY TO TRAP 5, Bowen glances back at the men in the longboats behind him. Two are in their 60s or 70s. One man wears a Red Sox cap; another holds his arms out, hands shaking. At the head of the first boat, a young man — possibly seasick — stares at the horizon. Bowen knows the look. Hard luckers, he murmurs. Some have worked for Fatulli for more than a decade. Others probably woke up in a halfway house, he says. “The pirates of the Caribbean.” It’s a good gig for Bowen because Fatulli has promised to pay him $400 or more a day, even if the catch is small. It’s a short day, too, from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. After a harsh winter, Bowen welcomes the slanting sun that warms the wheelhouse. Wearing an orange T-shirt, sweatpants and a trim goatee, he beams. “This is the easiest fishing I’ve ever done. I’ve always gotten the hard end of the stick.” When he nears the trap, Bowen dons bright orange waders and yellow-and-orange gloves. Another crew member releases the thick tow rope and the three longboats circle the submerged trap. Bowen’s boat creates a fourth wall overlooking the net. The men on the three boats begin shouting and pulling up the net with their bare hands. Small scup appear, ghostlike at first, then silvery and jerky, as the net tightens between the four boats. The black and brown netting piles up in the boats and the fish shimmer like oily coins in the late morning sun. “There’s a lot of fish in this trap,” says Bowen. His ship can only hold 15,000 pounds, and he figures they’ll never reach the bottom of the trap before his boat is full. Standing in the stern, fisherman Jimmy Coite helps guide a big net with a wooden handle into the middle of the catch. The scoop is attached to ropes held by Bowen and some of the men in the other boats. Coite drags the open end through the carpet of fish. The men pull the scoop back up and Coite swings it to the stern. Heavy with fish, it scrapes against the boat side, swings clear and hovers over the middle of the stern. Hundreds of fish splash onto the deck. Coite and the men repeat the action, again and again, until the flapping fish pile up and threaten to spill over the stern and sides. After a couple of hours, they’re done. BACK IN THE HARBOR, Bowen pulls along Fatulli’s dock below the ground floor of Aquidneck Lobster. He sidles up next to a metal chute, where he and Coite unload the fish. Above them, Fatulli, in khaki pants and green shirt, eyeballs the catch. A worker drops a plastic tub tied to a rope, and Bowen and Coite fill it with big black sea bass. Then they start shoveling the scup onto a conveyor belt that carries the catch from the bottom of the pier to the ground floor of Fatulli’s business. Once the fish reach the top, Fatulli’s men toss away undersized fish and pack the rest into cardboard boxes filled with ice. Nearby, the season’s first tourists — sunburned men and women in shorts, T-shirts and sandals — move through the air-conditioned shops and outdoor restaurants. In the stern, Coite pulls off his shirt but keeps his waders on. He’s ankle deep in fish. Sweat pops out on his arms and back and glistens on his shoulder, where he sports a tattoo of a red-eyed skull with a green snake wrapped around a dagger. This is the grunt work, and to make it easier, Bowen turns on the boat radio, loud. A Tom Petty song, “I Won’t Back Down,” blares from two black speakers. In the song, Petty describes a man with few options, his back to the gates of hell. “Hey, baby. There ain’t no easy way out,” he sings. “In a world that keeps pushing me around, I stand my ground. “And I won’t back down.”
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