July 23, 2024 — The legendary Fish Alley in Sea Isle is humming on a sticky afternoon as Eric Burcaw Sr. navigates Townsends Inlet and drifts the “Heather Nicole” slowly into port. The 35-foot vessel is laden with a colossal catch of black sea bass not seen a generation ago.
As soon as Burcaw’s ship hits the dock, the crew gets to work — stapling together cardboard boxes, pouring caches of ice, plopping fish onto scales. The smell of steamed mussels wafts over from the Oar House Pub as a noisy, floating tiki bar glides past. But Burcaw, who has owned his own boat since he was a teen, is all business.
After today’s trip, he will process 3,700 pounds of black sea bass. The fish will be shipped off for tabletops from Baltimore to Manhattan.
“This time of the year the black sea bass are running very heavily,” says Burcaw, closing out a grueling day that began at 4 a.m. Burcaw is one of many New Jersey fishermen reaping a bounty precipitated by a rapid rise in sea temperatures. The Atlantic Ocean in the northeast has warmed by about 2 degrees Fahrenheit over the last 15 years — much faster than the global average, said Malin Pinsky, a professor in the Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Natural Resources at Rutgers University.
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