Ebb & Flow

Peter K. Prybot

The mackerel fishery for the mid-water trawl fleet had been dismal most of the winter, but it turned like the tide about 10 days ago.

A Gloucester boat finally found the fish. Unpredictability is nothing new for this small pelagics fishery.

"The mackerel have just not been on their usual grounds. We just haven't had any quantity yet. We have packed only about 25 percent of what we normally do," Dave Ellenton, vice president of Cape Seafoods Inc., reported about a month ago.

Gloucester is home to two mid-water trawler fleets: Those of Peter Mullen and Western Sea Fishing Company's three large mid-water trawlers - Voyager, Challenger and Endeavour - seasonally supply Cape Seafoods at the Jodrey State Fish Pier with mackerel and herring, which the company processes whole and sells frozen as food to overseas markets or fresh, salted, or frozen for domestic bait.

The mackerel season for about 25 mid-water trawlers from New Jersey to Maine usually runs from January through April. The Gloucester boats try to find and stay on a main body of this trans-American and Canadian fish as it migrates to and from its mid-Atlantic wintering grounds. In the past, the trawlers have found the mackerel masses south of Cape Cod anywhere from just three miles offshore to the submarine canyons along the continental slope. Fishery biologists deem this stock healthy, and the fishery is open access.

The winter scenario

"(The season has) been a lot of searching and a lot of fuel. We have gone down to Baltimore and to the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay. We have just found small batches and not a main body of fish. You can tell when you are on a main body; this can run from 10 to 50 miles," explained Gerrard McCallig, skipper of the 149-foot pair trawler Endeavour from the Western Sea Fishing fleet. This Irish-American small pelagics fisherman, like his brother Danny, who captains the Endeavour's sister ship, Challenger, is backed by generations of Irish herring and mackerel fishing know-how.

"We have been focusing on mackerel the last three months and have passed up a lot of herring doing so. Our biggest set of mackerel so far has been 270 tons for a two-hour tow. We thought we were finally on them then, but this turned out to be just a small school or tributary that didn't hold up," McCallig said. He and his brother later targeted any herring they happened upon to come back with at least some kind of a catch.

Gerrard's theories

"I don't know what the mackerels' deal was this winter. The weather was different to start with. I saw flowers in my yard in early January, and then it turned cold. The fish are there, but we just don't know where. It's all a matter of the right water temperature and where the feed is. The fish could have stayed on the Canadian side," McCallig said. "That's a big ocean when you can't find anything."

Jim Gallagher, a veteran mid-water trawl fisherman in Gloucester, added, "Mackerel and herring fishing is about 80 percent searching and 20 percent fishing." Mid-water trawlers are equipped with sonar that helps find the fish.

Most of the mackerel summer off the Maritimes and often pass by Cape Ann either in the spring while coming from their southern wintering grounds or in the fall or early winter while returning to them. Gillnet fishermen such as B.G. Brown and Mike Faherty reported catching some mackerel in their 7-inch mesh gillnets on Middlebank in early January.

"We didn't see any big clouds (of mackerel, either in the water column or on the bottom) like other years," Brown said.

"The mackerel might also be deep - 1,000 to 2,000 fathoms down and close to the Gulf Stream. All I know, they haven't been at their traditional spots," added McCallig.

Nothing new

"We had some good years mackerel seining and some bad years, especially in 1947. It was feast or famine in this fishery," recalled retired Gloucester purse seine and dragger fisherman Vincent "Jimmy" Saputo, who spent 47 years of his life in the business. Saputo was one of several hundred brawny fishermen who crewed on Gloucester's approximately 30-strong Italian fleet of seiners in the 1940s.

"We used to start (mackerel seining) in the spring, often just before Easter, from Cape May, New Jersey or off of the Virginia Coast, and follow the fish back. Everything (from hauling in the seine to rowing the seine boat) was mostly by hand," he said.

Mast headsmen then spotted schools of mackerel from crow's nests atop their vessels' masts and the crews harvested the schooling fish mainly at night with long and less than 100-foot-deep purse seines.

But McCallig never lost hope this winter, knowing any fishery isn't over until it's over. "The mackerel might move in late. There are still several weeks left in the season," he said.

Voyager finds 'em

One of McCallig's theories recently proved true.

"The fish must have come from the deep," explained Jeff Garrison, skipper of the 140-foot, single boat mid-water trawler, Voyager, which finally found a main body of mackerel south of Nantucket Island about 10 days ago.

"We (the crew, along with gear specialists and company shareholder John Bach) saw them; there was solid fish. But the weather was so bad we couldn't fish at first," recalled Garrison.

Once the weather cooperated, the Voyager made several sets of 200 tons and filled up. "The deeper you went, the bigger the fish. The catch was 100 percent clean mackerel," Garrison said.

The handsome vessel recently arrived in Gloucester "stuffed" with nearly 900,000 pounds of mackerel below deck. Past catches this winter have included mixtures of herring and mackerel.

Word of the Voyager's find quickly flowed to about 16 other mid-water trawlers, including the Challenger and Endeavour and the Maine-based Starlight and Sunlight. Jody Martin from Gloucester skippers the Sunlight, while a former local native son and now Maine resident, Ned Lakeman, captains the Starlight. They and the other mid-water trawl fishermen fear these mackerel are on the move, and this windfall could be short-lived.