Pilot David Gray and Vito and Mike Calomo regularly commanded, "Get ready; come ahead; steady, steady, get ready; let it go; close it up; they are in the middle" over CB radios to captains of purse seiners in the 1970s and 1980s.
From the air, the trio served as spotters for such vessels, helping them catch surface schools of pogies, or menhaden, and bluebacks - non-edible industrial fish along the coast.
The Gloucester men talk about how they got started with this unique job, their routines when they were flying and how their fish-spotting came to an end.
Background
Large-scale pogie seining in Gloucester began in the 1950s "when the mackerel disappeared," recalled retired local fisherman Vincent "Jimmy" Saputo.
Mast headsmen then did the jobs Gray and the Calomos did later, scouting for schools of fish from crow's nests atop their vessels' masts, and brawny crews hauled in fish-filled seines by hand from the same type of double-ended seine boats used in today's St. Peter's Fiesta sporting events.
But the seining ended "when the pogies disappeared from Boston Harbor and off of Revere Beach and Quincy," Saputo said.
The Italian fleet soon filled that fishing void with year-round dragging for groundfish, whiting and shrimp.
In the beginning
Great numbers of pogies seasonally returned to Massachusetts and Maine coastal waters by the early 1970s.
Elsewhere, spotter planes had replaced mast headsmen, and hydraulic power blocks did the hauling work of seine crews. The "dehyde" - the dehydration plant at the Jodrey State Fish Pier - also looked for tons of industrial fish to reduce to fish meal and oil. The same company operated poultry farms in Maine and needed the fish meal to help nourish its chickens.
The company soon asked the captain and co-owner of the Ida & Joseph, Joseph "Sandy" Calomo, to harvest industrial fish. The 78-foot Ida & Joseph - "The Ida" - was a highline pogie seiner in the 1950s.
Calomo and the rest of the crew - William and Dominic "Mickey" Parisi, Steven and Joseph D'Amico, James Orlando, Joseph Loiacano, alternate captain Larry Scola, James Interrante, Gerry Nicastro, Rico Strescino and their prospective pilot and also the captain's son, Mike Calomo - were receptive to the idea.
But just before the fishing was to begin, "Mike broke his leg playing ping-pong," recalled his brother Vito, and Capt. Calomo had to tell the dehyde, "without a pilot, we can't make any money (and go)."
"I said to my father, 'why not?' He asked, 'Who will be the pilot?' I responded, 'me.' He then asked, 'What do you know about spotting fish?'"
Vito soon got a pilot, David Gray, and "We went up spotting fish."
"That was my first flying job right out of college," said Gray.
The routine
During the mid-May through mid-October seining season, the pilots routinely took off from Beverly Airport early in the morning in Cessna 105 planes and chugged around about 1,000 feet up in the airspace somewhere between coastal Rhode Island and mid-coast Maine to not only spot fish but also to direct their seiner there and lastly once on-site, to further guide it to best set its 1,200-foot-long by 120-foot-deep purse seine around the fish.
The planes, which traveled about 85 knots, had about three hours of air time between refuels. Two to three aircraft sometimes worked in the same air space and flew at different altitudes to avoid collisions.
The pilots communicated airplane-to-airplane over VHF radios and plane-to-ship with CB radios.
Much eavesdropping occurred, and the competition to get the fish was keen.
"Sometimes we played tricks on our rivals to prevent them from getting to the fish first. We said we were here when we were actually elsewhere. To prevent the competitors from hearing where the fish were over the radio one time, Vito and I even glided our plane right alongside the Ida & Joseph, and Vito opened the plane window and shouted to his father on deck, 'The (Ipswich) Bay, the Bay!'," Gray recalled.
Incidentally, Vito went by the call name "Red Devil," his brother by the "Green Hornet."
Gray added, "The seiners called me 'The Pilot'. I don't think anyone knew my name. I was like the adopted crew member."
"The schools of fish looked like a shadow of a cloud from the air. They were often jagged in shape," Gray said.
The pilots could accurately estimate the sizes of schools that often ran in the hundreds of thousands of fish in the 10-inch to 12-inch range.
Seiners were paid $26 per ton in the early 1970s and up to $40 per ton later on.
Vito and Mike got paid a crew's share for their efforts.
"David got paid by the hour," Vito explained.
During their annual migration from the mid-Atlantic to mid-coast Maine and back again, "the main body of pogies would mostly follow the shore to the north and parts of that body would break off along the way," Mike said.
"The schools always circled clockwise when heading north and counterclockwise while swimming south," Mike explained. He added, "After a while, you got to think like the fish. You had to frequently outsmart them."
"Boston Harbor was most productive for us. We were not allowed in there at first, but Mike talked with Mayor (Kevin) White and got the go-ahead from him. Gov. (Michael) Dukakis even called us for help one time after huge schools of pogies suffocated in Boston Harbor and washed up and rotted on area beaches," said Vito.
The pilots sometimes worked closely with the control tower at Logan Airport to direct pogie seining in the waters between the airport's runways.
Plane on fire
All of this flying did not go without some drama.
One time David and Vito were spotting fish together for the Ida & Joseph in Casco Bay when "the cockpit suddenly filled with smoke, and flames and sparks flew out of the main electrical panel. We had to pop the windows," said Gray.
During the excitement, Vito got a frantic message off to his father before the radio went dead: "Dad we are on fire. We are going down. I love you."
But Gray reassured Vito, "We're not going down if I have anything to say," and he soon made an emergency landing at the Portland airport that involved skillfully flying over a Delta DC-9 that was readying to take off.
The trio flew for a number of mostly Gloucester vessels over the years, including the St. Anthony, Rockaway, Ida & Joseph, Agatha & Patricia, and even Vito's own vessels, Natalie III and later Italian Gold.
But "the Ida was the boat to beat," said Vito. "That was Mike's main boat. No one could beat the crew of the Ida, and my brother."
The Ida & Joseph landed 22 million pounds of industrial fish during one of those pogie seasons. On some days she loaded up twice with more than 200,000 pounds of fish stored below and above deck and came to port each time half-sunk..
"When Lipman's (the dehyde) closed in the mid-1980s, that's what killed the pogie seining here," said Vito. "Those were the best years in my life."
Vito has since gotten out of fishing and selling used cars and has since served on local, state, and federal government bodies. He is the current chairman of the Massachusetts Fisheries Commission.
Mike later bought his own Cessna and made his last flight spotting fish for boats in Cape May in 1999. He has since retired as a lumper in Gloucester.
"I always look in the water for fish every time I fly in a jet," he said.
Gray, who captains Boeing 767s for U.S. Airways, also still finds himself today "looking out of the window for fish."
He added, "A lot of people made a living off of the pogie seining. That's all gone now."
