From the Sunday July 12 Boston Globe magazine: Frustrated with the old catch limit system, a Chatham fisherman signs on to a new quota system and allowed his boat to be outfitted with cameras that prove that he’s following the rules.
John Our drives a gleaming black Ford pickup truck with one bumper sticker plastered on the back in sharp white contrast. It reads, “National Marine Fisheries Service: Destroying fishermen and their communities since 1976.” Our believes government scientists don’t know as much about the ocean environment as they’d like to think and have created useless regulations. He blames them for the decline in fishing jobs. And yet Our may represent the government’s latest and perhaps last hope in its efforts to save not just the fish in New England’s sea but also the fishermen whose livelihoods they support.
The 47-year-old Our is tall and fit, with hair bleached strawberry blond and a faint sunburn streaking the bridge of his nose. He grew up by the same Chatham harbor that now houses his boat, the 42-foot Miss Fitz. His father worked these waters, says Our, and he saw the sea as an endless supply of bounty. Most fishermen in his father’s day navigated the waters in wooden boats loaded with hand-baited hooks. They’d drop those to the bottom of the sea, and each hook would attract a single fish, usually one of the species in demand: cod, haddock, halibut.