Making a Living on the Gloucester, Massachusetts Waterfront: Of Striped Bass, Bluefish and Herring

The owner of the herring plant was recently pilloried in the national press for exploiting the fishery. Roughly 400,000 pounds of herring were being landed every week that summer in this tiny port, sucked through vacuum hoses from the hold of the fishing vessel Dyrsten. Once in the plant the fish are graded and transported through the plant by a stainless-steel conveyor belt and sorting rollers. The fish are then stored in refrigerated silos with glass inspection ports at eye level.

Like most of the leased stalls, the operation consists largely of empty space oddly quiet throughout the day and confusing to enter. There is little bustle or clatter. The empty space is immaculate, still, cold.

Deliberately overbuilt by the state in the last century, Gloucester's State Fish Pier stalls are large cold rooms reminiscent of the refrigerators of the young or clichés of the refrigerator of the bachelor apartment: a few items stored here and there on otherwise empty shelves, and with a not-much-visited appearance.

Yet the flow of herring is constant. Much is food-grade, sold for canning. Some is vacuumed into tractor-trailer tankers, the type you see barreling down the highway filled with liquefied gas or milk.

What's not food grade is trucked to Maine, Rhode Island or New Hampshire and sold as lobster bait. The remainder is crated out at per tote or per barrel to local commercial fishermen, lobstermen, hag fishermen. Pickup trucks filled with totes until they sag on their chassis; checks written out to the wholesaler on the hood. The rest disappears into the bait buckets of local recreational fishermen at $12-the-bucketful. Bring your own bucket.
The rest is given away by day managers as favors to locals for bait: a hundred pounds here, fifty pounds there, in return for favors owed.

Each time I have fished on the boat it has been with chum and bait and often ice the captain has been given free by this or that bait or ice source. He has become accustomed enough to the treatment that he no longer offloads his fish to dealers who don't reciprocate with free ice or bait.