The artist and owner of a new West End art gallery, two captains on the same dragger, and the owner of a popular waterfront restaurant along Rogers Street have creatively displayed some of the northeast's maritime history, as well as history in the making with a heavy emphasis on Gloucester.

Could one of the displays even become a memorial for the Cape Ann groundfish fleet after Amendment 16 takes hold in 2010?

Printmaker

The grand opening of reduction woodcut print artist Don Gorvett's DonGorvett/Gravure Gallery came last week in the former Gloucester Used Furniture building at 51 Main St. His artistic creations primarily center upon architecture, seaports, including Gloucester, and ships of the past and today.

Gorvett, who was born in Boston and now resides in Ogunquit, Maine, lived upstairs in that very granite Main Street edifice for nearly 20 years starting in the 1970s. He also runs a gallery in Portsmouth, N.H.

"One can only marvel at the delicate artistry, disciplined craftsmanship and sheer physicality inherent in the beautiful reduction woodcuts of Maine artist Don Gorvett ... the printmaker fashions compositions rich with movement and texture.

"With a painter's eye for color, Gorvett produces prints with elegant and evocative tonal harmonies ... and with a sculptor's sense of light, he creates dramatic contrasts between color and carved hard edge, giving great solidarity to both form and space.

"What emerges are masterful woodcuts containing images of such power and grace that they place Gorvett among today's most accomplished regional printmakers," writes Dr. Michael Culver, curator of the Ogunquit Museum of American Art.

Anchors away

Mark Carroll and Sal Russo Jr., the two captains of the 39-foot Gloucester stern trawler Harvest Moon, inadvertently netted a heavy chunk of sailing-vessel maritime history on the 130-feet-deep, mud bottom off Boston while conducting a Massachusetts winter flounder trawl survey this spring.

"We were towing (our funnel-shaped groundfish net and doors), and whammo! We hung down solid," said Russo.

The men immediately began to haul back their fishing gear. The vessel's trawl winches managed to yank up the doors to their respective gallous frame blocks, but whatever snagged the net was too heavy for the net reel to haul in.

The crew used an overhead boom, blocks and tackles, and straps to slowly get the net to the surface.

As the net finally surfaced, "I suddenly heard a thump as something hit the bottom of the boat," said Russo. "I looked over the stern and I saw it was an anchor."

An approximately 2,500-pound anchor encrusted with coralline algae got snagged mid-point in the sweep of their net. The sweep is the bottom part of the net's opening, or mouth.

"It took us 21âÑ2 hours (as opposed to the normal 20 minutes) to get the gear aboard. The anchor didn't break a mesh in the net," said Carroll.

The men later motored the Harvest Moon to the Rocky Neck Marine Railways where a crane hoisted the steel anchor onto the dock. A Tally's wrecker later transported the anchor, which did not have any chain, to Russo's front yard, where it remains on display.

How the anchor was lost is anybody's guess. The anchor probably came from a large merchant sailing vessel waiting to go into Boston Harbor around the turn of the 20th century.

Chronicling the present

Latitude 43 restaurant owner Mark McDonough of Magnolia has modified his artistic wall hanging of an authentic otter trawl on Vito Giacalone's adjacent building at the old Fishermen's Wharf off Rogers Street, since Ebb & Flow reported on it last May.

"Lots of people come to town (interested about the fishing industry), and there's no place here where they can get the current state of the Gloucester fishing industry," McDonough said.

He recently authored an illustrated document on this very subject titled "Gloucester's Fishery — Frontlines in the Battle for a Sustainable World" and including the industry's fishing methods and grounds, landings, targeted species, rules, as well as some of the industry's history and where it's headed.

McDonough transfered his opus onto 17 18-by-30-inch styrene panels that now hang at eye level on the wall with the net for public viewing. The package is now "... a tribute to the Gloucester fishermen as well as an educational exhibit about the state of the Gloucester fishery."

"It is also dedicated to the heroic fishermen of the present whose lives and livelihoods are tossed by unpredictable seas and regulatory confusion," McDonough explained.

Hopefully, his wall creation will not also become a memorial to Gloucester's groundfish fleet after Amendment 16 sets in next year with a new sector management plan. Many groundfishermen in town, especially those who have permits with limited landing histories, fear Amendment 16 will put them out of business.

Gloucester lobsterman Peter K. Prybot writes weekly for the Times about the fishing industry and related issues.