March 11, 2013 — Just as big eat the little fish in the sea, Cape Cod’s fishing fleet is being swallowed by larger pockets that are buying the available quota of cod and other catch.
Can the small family-owned boats survive or will the remaining fishermen wind up as sharecroppers for someone else’s fleet?
“It would be nice to think if we wanted to go fishing we didn’t have to work for anybody else but with consolidation it doesn’t seem to be going that way,” said Jason Amaru, who fishes ground fish put of Chatham.
“Who Fishes Matters” held a forum at Cape Cod Community College Tuesday to grapple with the problem.
“This is a family industry,” observed 26-year-old Nick Chaparales, who has been fishing since he went tuna fishing with his father Bill in fourth grade. “I see father and son teams. The industry was always about family and tradition. We’d go off Chatham and come back with two or three thousand pounds of fish. But looking to the next generation – is there going to be a next generation?”
He recalled a friend set 2,000 hooks and caught just one codfish.
Read the full story at the Cape Codder