Time of Year

by Captain Perry Wrinkle

Originally published in the Fishermen’s Voice in 2010.

It’s that time of year again, “The Forum.” We can all head for Rockport. I always look forward to going there and finding out about my optimistic future. I just know that everything is really looking up for 2010. Never mind that I got 25 percent less for my seafood catches last year and the expenses were 20 percent more. Think positive, there were some great tax benefits.

I was thinking back to the start of the National Marine Fisheries Service. I can’t remember when they actually started that, but I heard of them in the ’60s. They were loaning out big bags of money. They were coining a phrase they called “optimum yield.” I asked what that meant, and I got a lot of different answers. I thought it meant that we would be rich. Now, 40 some years later I find out what it really meant. It meant that, 40 years from then we would have about four managers for each fisherman. The managers would all have fat salaries, paid health insurance, and paid vacations, sick days and full retirement. It meant that I would have less and less until I got done fishing, and then my license would go back to the state and the only one who could get a license would be the president’s campaign manager.

Don’t despair, I hear rumors that the environmentalists have found some kind of a rat. They say that they could be managed for optimum yield. They breed rather well and when mature they may be skinned and the fur ground up to produce an aphrodisiac for market in the Orient. It should take about four million managers, eight million committee members, one rat person and three or four skinners. That would leave a shortage of fishery managers because these guys are versatile, they know just as much about management of rats as they know about fisheries, maybe even more.

They could all be paid for just by adding a little more promotion charge on all of the fishing licenses. The fishermen would hardly notice that, with all the tag fees and surcharges. It should take about three hundred years to do the study and research and then we would have a new industry where we could get all the rats under one roof.

Now on the lighter side, I read somewhere that we fishermen are going to have to tighten our belts so that we can increase the number of lobsters on the bottom. Never mind that we have tightened them so much now that my belt buckle is rubbing on my backbone. With v-notch, trap limits, oversized escape vents, limited entry, and all the rest, we are going to have to do more because there are 50 million codfish coming to the shores this summer for a vacation and they will be having lobsters, three meals a day. The managers have been predicting the collapse of the lobster industry for years; it’s taken the fish longer to rebound than most of them thought. I wonder how Mother Nature ever managed before she got all of this help?

Good Fishing.