March 23, 2020 — We here at FishOn are just as exhausted as everyone else by this otherworldly health crisis that has us tenaciously in its grip. We’re sick of staying indoors. We’re sick of not having any sports to watch. We long to go to the Sawyer Free Library and Pratty’s — which are far more similar than you think. And just once more, we’d like to touch our face. Or somebody’s.
But we are healthy, as are those around us. So we stay the course because we are New Englanders and we give in to nothing.
Still, it was a tough week hereabouts for our fishermen in both the lobster and groundfish fisheries.
As you may have read in the pages of the Gloucester Daily Times and online at gloucestertimes.com, some of the the restrictions enacted to try to halt the spread of the novel coronavirus – principally the shuttering of all in-situ dining at Massachusetts restaurants and travel restrictions that have made it difficult to move product around – have crushed the fishermen.
In the lobster fishery, already high inventory coupled with the loss of the restaurant trade – where the great preponderance of live lobsters are consumed – sent prices down into the root cellar and rocked everyone from harvesters to dealers and processors.