A Doryman's Day

The dorymen that R. Barry Fisher celebrates here are men with whom he shared duties on a series of high-masted fishing schooners in the late days of the Depression and early World War II. Growing up as a "wharf rat" on the Gloucester, Massachusetts, waterfront, Fisher and three ten-year-old friends were lured to the docks almost daily, where they reeled gill nets, stacked pen boards, and scrubbed galleys and fo'c's'les in exchange for fish, some of which they took home and some of which they peddled in the streets from homemade go-carts. The "fraternity of the wharf" provided them with a view of real life they could not learn from books--the camaraderie and respect the fishermen had for each other, their rowdy humor and courage, and the grief they and their families felt when their friends were lost at sea. Fisher eventually became a doryman, which was "the highest word of respect and affection that one man could use for another." In two-man dories (usually ten to twelve dories per schooner), men worked fourteen hour days, each dory crew baiting two thousand hooks on a series of lines which they would set into the water and later haul in by hand, filling their small boats with fish and then returning to the schooner. They often did three of these "sets" a day, gutting and icing the fish between sets, and rebaiting hooks. Helpful drawings and diagrams allow landlubbers to understand this fishing method, while historic photographs of children and fully rigged schooners make these now-abandoned fishing methods come alive.Fisher's final tale, "Mysterious Ways of the Lord," tells of a trip he and a few adventurous fishermen took in the fall, after the swordfish had supposedly migrated from George's Bank (the same sort of trip which Sebastian Junger describes in The Perfect Storm). Here, however, the vessel was a schooner, and each swordfish was harpooned with an eighteen-foot harpoon by a single man hanging over the bow of the vessel, the rest of the crew standing in the rigging locating the fish. On this trip, the captain "finds religion," a tale that Fisher insists is "No B.S., it's the clear truth, me sons." A fascinating glimpse of a lost way of life, this account of a doryman's day is an important contribution to the lore of the East Coast fishing industry, written by a man who devoted his life to fishing and to preserving its history. Mary Whipple