Captain Craig Huntley, 55, a fisherman since he was 14, says a depleted stock and complex government regulations are making it increasingly difficult for him to earn a living from the sea.

Part I: The Hunt for Fish: The Struggles of Capt. Huntley

By Paul Davis
Journal staff writer

Craig Huntley spent the Fourth of July at sea. He didn’t even light a sparkler. In his four decades on the water, the 55-year-old captain has fished on Easter, Thanksgiving, New Year’s Day, a wedding anniversary and the birthdays of both his sons. At times, staring through the windows of the wheelhouse, a cigarette in one hand, he doesn’t know what day it is. Weekends mean nothing 26 hours from land. When you are that far out, it’s hard to tell where the gray sky ends and the steel-colored ocean begins. What matters is getting the net into the water and catching enough whiting or scup or squid to make some money.

At sea, Huntley remembers what an older man on the West Coast told him. “If you’re awake, you might as well be working.”

On this warm summer day, Huntley steams past the other fishing boats in Point Judith Harbor. Wearing a stained T-shirt that says “Eat Fish,” he heads for Munson Canyon, a remote spot near the Hague Line, the international boundary that divides U.S. and Canadian waters on Georges Bank, a spot Huntley calls “the armpit of the universe.”

It’s a long trip, more than 200 miles out, but that’s where the whiting are. So far, few captains are catching the knife-shaped fish, which feed along the shallower edges of the canyon. That’s good; if too many crews flood the market, the price at the dock will plummet. Still, Huntley worries that other fishermen, having met their quotas for other species, will soon join him. Already Mike Hornung, the owner of the Perseverance, is an hour ahead of him, a green blip on his radar.

Huntley grew up doing odd jobs around the port of Galilee and now captains the Miss Trudy. Facing financial pressures, Huntley has become a working captain and has reduced his crew by one. The boat is named for his late mother, Gertrude.

Huntley had a hard winter. In February, he ruined $11,000 worth of gear when a net snagged something — a rock, a sunken ship, he doesn’t know what — on the ocean floor. To keep his windows from icing, he hung plastic pipe above them, punched holes in the sides and used a hair dryer to blow hot air onto the glass.

In May, he blew a reverse gear and a buddy towed him in. To save on the $85-an-hour repair bill, he yanked the transmission out himself.

Now, with summer here, his costs are at an all-time high. Fuel is $2.31 a gallon. His 76-foot trawler, the Miss Trudy, will burn about 300 gallons to get to Munson Canyon. In the wheelhouse, he tallies up the other costs: $200 for ice, $100 for oil, nearly $430 for grub — chicken, Saugy hot dogs, chipped beef and Double Stuf Oreos.

At the same time, the federal government has reduced both the number of days Huntley can fish and the amount he can catch. The regulations are designed to rebuild overfished species, such as cod and flounder. But they’ve cut Huntley’s annual earnings by almost half, to $30,000 last year. He expects to make even less this year. “The government has determined my future,” he says, adding, “It’s not bright.”

Battling arthritis, skin cancer and a bad back, Huntley pops pain pills and vitamins, and chases them with Diet Coke and cigarettes.

He needs a big catch to get ahead. A recent trip failed to make even a tiny profit. The captain and crew, who share the costs on every trip, ended up in the hole. Fishermen call these disasters “brokers.” After four days at sea, they had nothing to show for it but a lack of sleep and sore muscles.

A few years ago, when Huntley took a short break, another captain helmed his boat and hung a card with four gold angels in the wheelhouse. Huntley isn’t a religious man. He doesn’t believe in the afterlife — just death and dust. He doesn’t wonder why the two communities that drift by his bow — Galilee and Jerusalem — are named after familiar places in the Bible.

Still, he’s never removed the angels.

“I need all the help I can get,” he says, the Harbor of Refuge behind him.

Jennifer McCaffrey, one of the few women working as a crew member on a fishing boat, returns to port with Huntley.

HUNTLEY IS PART of a group of men — older captains and deck hands who have fished all their lives — who are now as threatened as some of the fish they hunt.

After decades of unfettered fishing, they are grappling with ever-tightening federal and state regulations that limit where they can fish, how much they can catch, and how long they can spend at sea.

Conservationists say the measures are needed to rebuild New England’s declining fish stocks, some of them suffering from years of overfishing. In Point Judith, for example, the landings for all species fell last year to less than 44 million pounds from a peak of 72 million in l998. Overall, the commercial fishing industry in Rhode Island is a $70-million business, about half of what it was a decade ago, according to W. Michael Sullivan, head of the state Department of Environmental Management. The National Marine Fisheries Service puts the value of fish landed at Rhode Island ports last year substantially higher: $100 million.

The story is much the same throughout New England.

Some say the region’s fleet of about 800 boats needs to shrink for its fish to survive.

But fishermen — and even some regulators — say the current approach isn’t working. And fishermen say the marine scientists don’t know what they’re talking about when they say some species are declining. While the debate continues, a 300-year-old economy is facing disaster, threatening not just fishermen but boat repair shops, net menders, fuel and ice suppliers and fish buyers and wholesalers.

Even landmark businesses such as the Portland Fish Exchange, in Maine, are in trouble. In the last decade, the amount of seafood sold at auction there has fallen from more than 30 million pounds to 9.5 million pounds last year.

Worried about the industry’s future, the governors of Maine, Massachusetts and Rhode Island are seeking federal aid to subsidize fishermen while they wait for the stocks to rebound.

In April, Massachusetts Governor Patrick blamed groundfishing regulations for a $22-million loss in revenue in the Bay State from 2005 to last year. While conservation is important, he said, the impact on fishermen has been a “true economic disaster.”

In a June letter to U.S. Secretary of Commerce Carlos Gutierrez, Governor Carcieri also blamed the regulations for the serious problems Rhode Island’s fishermen are encountering. In the last 13 years, he wrote, groundfish landings, which include cod, fluke, flounder and other fish that swim close to bottom, have declined 66 percent in Rhode Island.

Groundfishermen are not the only ones coping with declining stocks and new regulations.

Lobsterman Robert Campanale, of Narragansett, who fishes in deep waters off the New Jersey and New York coasts, says the catches he brings back to Point Judith have fallen sharply from a decade ago. He may hang a For Sale sign on one of the four boats he owns with his brother.

Fluke, a fish historically caught ouf of Galilee are sometimes bled immediately so they can be sold for sushi and grab a higher price.

Still others — those who fish closer to shore — are suffering from new state restrictions. Frustrated and angry, some of these fishermen have gone to court to halt a regulation that limits how many lobster traps, if any, they are permitted to use. Of the nearly 500 state-licensed fishermen who applied for lobster pot permits earlier this year, 226 got zero.

“There are a lot of long faces out there,” says Eric Reid, president of Deep Sea Fish, a Narragansett fish wholesaler. “It’s getting harder and harder to make a living.”

Support businesses also are feeling the pain.

At Trawlworks, a Narragansett fishing equipment company, fishermen are struggling to make payments, says owner Robert Taber. “Our accounts receivable are about 100 percent higher this year — and it’s people who have been doing business with us for years.”

To stay profitable, Taber now carries other merchandise and deals with customers as far away as North Carolina. “The bottom line is, there are possibilities for good things in the future, but not today.”

Jay Gallup, a third-generation owner of Rhode Island Engine, sees the same decline. For years the Point Judith company, started by his grandfather in the 1940s, has served mostly local fishermen. When the fleet expanded in the 1980s, the engine repair company did, too. Sales and services jumped to $2 million and the company boasted 22 workers.

“Then, all of a sudden, our business dropped,” says Gallup, a co-owner. The company hasn’t fired anyone, but top employees have swept the floors at times, he says. Recently, the company found a new market: It builds generators for tool sheds that are shipped to U.S. soldiers in Iraq.

This spring, the New England Fishery Management Council, which regulates commercial fishing in the region, met in Portland to talk about different long-term approaches for saving the fish. But, in the short term, the council will probably do more of the same: cut more days at sea and close more grounds. “The industry has been in pain for some time and it will continue to be in pain for some time,” says Dennis Nixon, a marine affairs professor at the University of Rhode Island. Some fishermen will have to find other work as the fleet shrinks, he says.

“The stress level is unbelievable around here,” says Huntley. “Everybody I know is on some kind of mood elevator or high blood pressure medicine. There are a lot of fishermen out here that are one blown engine away from bankruptcy.”

SLICING THROUGH A DENSE fog on an afternoon in July, the Miss Trudy steams southeastward at 8.4 knots. The steel bow rises and falls and sea water sprays the windows. On deck, crew members Robert Kenyon and Jennifer McCaffrey work on the net, adding a new piece of wire.

After they’re done, Kenyon and McCaffrey pass the time by napping, eating raspberry Pop Tarts and smoking cigarettes.

The green-eyed Kenyon, who owns a cap that says “I’m Irish,” is sociable but glum. Earlier, he was arrested for grabbing his girlfriend during a nasty argument. “She says fishing makes me angry,” says Kenyon, who has worked on more than 30 boats in 18 years. His girlfriend wants him to stop fishing, but Kenyon, 34, loves it. He’s been on boats chased by sharks and he’s seen things office workers don’t, including whales, dolphins and even a surfacing submarine. “It’s a great feeling of survival,” says Kenyon.

Huntley, who is going through a difficult divorce, stays with friends, where he picks up laundry to drop off at the cleaners.

Kenyon is part of an ever-changing crew aboard the Miss Trudy. Huntley is thankful to have help, but he grumbles that it’s getting harder to find experienced crew members. Standing at the door to the galley, he needles Kenyon about the simple assault charge. “Bobby’s going to jail,” he sings. Later, he shakes his head. If you drink and it gets you into trouble, then you stop living that way, he says. Huntley also has a pending court date, one for a divorce.

His other crew member, McCaffrey, is one of a few women working on boats in Southern New England. Lean and tanned, she wears shiny earrings, even on deck, and sports a rose tattoo above her left ankle. A blond ponytail waves from the back of her Titleist golf cap.

When she takes the wheel from Huntley, she props her feet up on the bridge. She wears pink flip-flops. Her toenails are pink, too.

Her fishing roots go deep. Her grandparents owned a tackle shop in Galilee in the 1940s. She’s fished for lobster with both her father and brother, has worked in fish markets and on other boats. In the spring, she stood on deck handling fish until her hands became swollen. “I enjoy it,” McCaffrey, 35, says. “I’ve got a few years left.”

To kill time, McCaffrey feeds DVDs into a television strapped to a corner of the galley. She and Kenyon sprawl on an L-shaped padded bench that runs along the starboard wall and watch the last season of Deadwood, HBO’s profanity-laden Western about a lawless mining town in South Dakota in 1876.

For hours, they watch killers, whores and a corrupt saloon keeper battle encroaching civilization. For supper, McCaffrey cooks eggplant. The swearing on the TV mixes with the talk in the galley, punctuated by the click-snap of cigarette lighters. When Kenyon heads for his bunk below the wheelhouse, McCaffrey grabs a fat Stephen King novel, Desperation, about a group of people struggling to survive in a Nevada town with a haunted mine pit.

AT NIGHT, the wheelhouse resembles a scaled-down airplane cockpit, filled with glowing dials, screens and gauges. Once, Huntley used houses and shorelines to orient himself. Now, he relies on nearly a dozen instruments — some of them backup devices — to navigate and send messages and find fish. A paper map is fastened to a board behind him, but he rarely uses it. Instead, he watches computer and radar screens to get his bearings. Other instruments keep him on course. There’s no wheel; a black knob is used to steer the boat, and two gears move it forward and reverse. To the right, a fish-finder screen shows activity below the surface. Fish appear as pale blue splotches.

For the next few hours, Huntley and his crew pass over an eerie terrain deep beneath the ocean waves: unexploded depth charges from the 1940s and 1950s, sunken ships, wrecked nets, crashed airplanes, cargo containers and dangerous shoals.

The underwater hazards appear on a laptop computer screen as tiny yellow squares — spots where other captains have lost nets and gear. Huntley has described a few of them in a battered ledger he keeps in the wheelhouse. “Bad,” says one entry. “Bad, bad,” says another.

As the hull man, Leo Croteau's responsibilities include packing fish after they are shot down through a hole in the deck, where they are stored on ice. At sea, crew members work continuously, dragging their nets to catch fish and then spending hours sorting and placing the catch in totes.

The worst thing Huntley ever pulled up was a mattress. He had to cut his net to free the box springs. Everyone aboard has seen his or her share of unusual items caught in nets: a shark, a TV set, a torpedo that was later detonated by the Coast Guard on the shore. The blast blew a hole in the sand.

Around midnight, the boat passes to the southwest of the shipwrecked hull of the Andrea Doria. On July 25, 1956, the 697-foot-long luxury liner — the first to feature three swimming pools — carried 1,134 passengers into a thick fog off Nantucket. Around the same time, the Stockholm, a smaller liner, entered the same fog bank. Both vessels had radar. But the men aboard miscalculated the paths of the two ships.

Shortly after 11 p.m., the Stockholm rammed the Andrea Doria and tore a hole in its side. The Doria tipped far to the right and sank about 11 hours later; 46 passengers and crew members died.

“Bad things happen to good people on these boats,” says Huntley. “You can prepare for a lot of things, but it’s the unforeseen that gets you.”

Around 2 a.m., Huntley smokes a last cigarette and leaves the wheelhouse to Kenyon. The ship rocks and bounces and the diesel engine thrums. In another 10 hours, the crew will reach Munson Canyon. Huntley crawls into his wooden bunk off the galley and drifts into a fitful sleep.

LIKE MOST CAPTAINS, Huntley started fishing as a boy. By 14 he was working on day boats in the summers; by 16 he had dropped out of South Kingstown High School to join the Merchant Marines. He spent time in Trinidad, Puerto Rico and Florida, and grew up fast.

His father drank and wasn’t always around, so Huntley sent money home to his mother. After a stint on the West Coast, Huntley fished on Rhode Island boats. It was a different era. Deck hands shared in the profits, but beginners only got a quarter share. As they gained experience, they earned more: a half share and finally a full share.

“It made you want to learn how to do the job a lot quicker when you were getting $500 and someone else was making $1,000,” says Huntley, who learned how to knot a rope, splice wire, work on engines and mend nets. “The older guys would teach you,” he says.

In 1988, Huntley and his brother, Dennis, bought their first boat, the Catherine Louise. A broken shaft their first year set the brothers back $21,000. The Coast Guard had to pump water from their boat.

“There were times I didn’t take a check,” Huntley says. “But back then, you could work harder and get ahead.”

He captained the boat for years, then Dennis took over. They bought a second boat, which they renamed Miss Trudy after their mother, Gertrude, died. For a dozen years, the brothers made good money. But in 2000, their earnings began to wane because of tightening regulations. A few years later they sold the Catherine Louise. “I was working harder and harder and making less and less,” says Dennis.

Following a trip at sea, work continues for Huntley's crew, Brent Bowen, left, and Leo Croteau, center, who must clean and mend the nets once in port.

Frustrated, Dennis got a job with a New York tugboat company, where he works 12-hour days. On his first assignment, he sailed on a barge carrying corn and soy to Puerto Rico. “At 50, I’m making a career change,” he says, adding, “but at least I’m on the water.”

Huntley muddles on. In the last five years his allocated groundfishing time has been cut nearly in half, to 46 days at sea a year.

He took another hit in January, when the DEM — under pressure from federal regulators — reduced the amount of fluke he can catch from 700 pounds to 100 pounds a day. For the first time, the state also limited catches for monkfish and cod, two other species Huntley seeks.

“For years and years the government has kept taking away and saying, don’t worry, you will be rewarded for your sacrifice, there will be fish in the future, we’ll give you back fish. I’ve heard it for so long I’m starting to believe it. But in the 10, 12, 14 years they’ve been taking fish away they haven’t given us anything back, nothing.”

He agrees the stock should be protected, but he bristles at the number of federal and state regulations that govern his time on the water.

“I’m all for good regulations, closed areas and bigger mesh sizes. But we don’t need 3,000 regulations. We just need two or three good ones.”

Huntley’s solution is simple: paint the tops of half the Point Judith fleet blue, the other half red. Every month, the red boats fish for two weeks and the blue boats fish next. That will cut the fishing effort in half and make enforcement simple. If the captain of a red boat is fishing on a blue day, fine him, Huntley says.

That’s a much better system than reducing fluke amounts for each trip. Fishermen can’t limit how much they catch per haul, he says.

If he has 1,800 pounds and the limit is 2,000, he needs to make another haul to make the trip worthwhile. But if that tow produces 2,200 pounds, he has to throw 2,000 pounds back into the sea. By then, most of the fish are dead. But if he returned to shore with the excess, he’d be fined and the whole catch could be confiscated.

And federal and state enforcement officers are always watching. He must report when he leaves the dock and when he returns. His catch is monitored through sales reports and in the logs he keeps. His boat could be boarded at any time.

Fish are sorted by size and species and are priced accordingly once they reach the market.

“I’m throwing things back that are dead, that nobody’s going to use, that are going to rot, that the crabs are going to eat. It’s a lose-lose situation. I don’t want to do it. I try not to do it. It doesn’t make sense,” he says. “It’s not conservation.”

To stay within the limits and avoid throwbacks, Huntley finds himself in an Alice-in-Wonderland world where, to comply with regulations, he must find a spot where the fish are scarce.

“I was trained by all these pros years ahead of me how to catch fish, what to do to get better at it, how to get better at it. And now, I’m going places were I don’t think there’s fish. It’s mind boggling, it’s really confusing.”

TWENTY-SIX HOURS after leaving Point Judith, Huntley gives the order to start dragging the sea for fish.

“Let’s roll one over,” he says.

On deck, Kenyon and McCaffrey unfurl a $7,000 net coiled around a drum above the stern. The net — part twine, part chain and part rubber-encased line — slides into the water like a long tail, then disappears.

Two steel doors, attached to each side of the net, also plunge into the water. The net unfurls 63 fathoms beneath the surface, like a bag suddenly filled with water. The doors, which weigh 1,100 pounds each, move apart under the force of the water created by the boat, now pushing forward at 3 knots.

The doors and ground wires kick up sand on the ocean floor, creating a corridor of clear water in the middle of the net. The fish head for the undisturbed water. Orange floats keep the net open.

“We get ’em with their head down and their tail up, while they’re eating shrimp or krill or worms — their last meal,” says Huntley. “They’re in the kill zone.”

Once the net is in the water, Huntley returns to the wheelhouse and calls Mike Hornung, captain of the Perseverance, who is in the vicinity. Hornung reports that his first haul was a good one. If things keep up like this, he says, he may even go back early.

Huntley radios back he is hoping for a big catch, too. “Even a blind squirrel finds a nut sometimes,” he says.

Two hours later, the crew pulls up the net. The chains and lines groan and clang as the bottom of the net swings above a square area in the stern called the hog pen. Hake and whiting squirm in the bulging net, spraying water and scales everywhere. They know immediately it’s an OK catch. Kenyon loosens a tie and the fish crash into the 4-foot-high pen. Huntley picks up a female lobster and grins: it has a fish in each claw.

Kenyon bands the lobsters that are big enough to keep; others, including the females with eggs, are hurled overboard. Across the deck, McCaffrey stands at a conveyor belt and sorts. Legal-size fish are thrown into black tubs, or totes. The rest slide down a trough and into the sea. After more than an hour, McCaffrey, in rubber hip boots, dumps the last of the fish below deck. In the hold, amid 8 tons of crushed ice, Kenyon stacks the fish and covers them with ice and salt.

For 36 hours, their routine will not vary.

Huntley, Kenyon and McCaffrey will scramble roughly every three hours to let out the net, tow, haul the net in, sort fish and let out the net again. They’ll tow an extra hour so they can eat dinner. They grab short naps when they can.

THE FISHING ISN’T great. After the first haul — about 1,500 pounds of fish — the next catch is a mere 270 pounds. The next one is even worse. Huntley swears.

The fourth tow, at 11:15 p.m., is a good one, the first decent haul in 10 hours: 28 totes, or 2,500 pounds. Still, it’s about half of a good catch.

For the next five tows, the results are again disappointing. “The fish are winning,” Huntley says about 6 p.m. the next day.

In the wheelhouse he swaps his “Eat Fish” T-shirt for another one hanging on a peg behind his chair. Huntley keeps four T-shirts on the wall. When one gets wet and dirty, he exchanges it for another. If one gets too funky, he wears it inside out.

A few years ago, Huntley fished with a three-member crew. But rising fuel costs cut into profits, so he dropped the third hand. The fuel supplier, says Huntley, “is the fourth man on the boat.”

With a smaller crew, Huntley now spends more time on deck and less time in the wheelhouse. “We’re working harder and putting in more hours. Everybody’s tired and going short-handed.”

The job takes a toll. At 55, Huntley works with two damaged disks. When his doctor warned him to slow down, Huntley asked, “What am I going to do? Quit working?”

Kenyon has had his share of stitches and crushed bones. He once fished one-handed after a chain broke and smashed the other.

Handling fish for hours at a stretch causes McCaffrey’s hands to swell.

Still, no one wants to be anywhere else.

When McCaffrey says she hopes for a big catch so they can go home a few hours early, Kenyon replies, “I am home.”

The last catch is the best one. In one 45-minute tow, the crew pulls up 7,000 pounds of fish. Sorted, it amounts to 3,400 pounds worth keeping. A 30-mile-an-hour wind kicks up 8-foot waves. The totes of fish and the crew slide across the deck. Huntley says it’s too dangerous to keep fishing and ends the trip. After the fish are packed away, the captain sleeps for the next seven hours.

The three-member crew nets about $8,777 worth of whiting, hake and lobster. After operating expenses are subtracted, they each get $667 for the nearly four days at sea.

It’s not the big haul Huntley had hoped for.

A FEW WEEKS later, Huntley puts his boat and federal fishing license up for sale.

Around the same time, he talks to his wife and lawyers about the final terms of their divorce.

A 40-year-old friend offers to buy the boat and license if he can borrow $500,000.

What will Huntley do if the sale goes through?

He may work on a tugboat, like his brother.

Or maybe, he says, he’ll fish on the Miss Trudy, slogging it out as deck hand.

pdavis@projo.com

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