Quote:
Originally Posted by Flaptail
So many factors that are not mentioned when the fishing goes bad, water quality is a big one that gets overlooked, so many oceanside trophy homes with ChemLawn treated lawns leaching into the water....
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Bingo! That's dead-on-the-nuts accurate, Flap.
Three years ago I helped my wife work on a documentary on the history of the Newport waterfront for the annual meeting of Friends of the Waterfront, an organization here in Newport that fights to ensure that ROW's are maintained to continue the public's right to access the bay as guaranteed by the constitution of the State of Rhode Island. It's a great organization whose basis in law is predicated on the concept fisherman's rights dating back to the 1600's. It's amazing to me that ROW's get co-opted by developers and private landowners and then long and expensive court battles are necessary to open the access points up again. Anyway, my bride is on the board of directors and I'm proud of her efforts.
The documentary was her first effort and very well-received, a Ken Burns sort of thing that included lots of old Newport photographs and illustrations from my collection. We also interviewed and videotaped a number of older Newporters on their recollections, some of which dated back to pre-WW I. Sadly, half of those we interviewed and filmed are now dead.
Among the people we interviewed was George Mendonca now in his late eighties who formerly owned the Tallman and Mack Fish Trap Company a block from my family home. If you don't know George's company, you may know the famous 'Kissing Sailor' photo taken in Times Square that has become an iconic image of the end of the Second World War. The sailor is George and he gave my wife and I an autographed copy of that photo. But I digress -
George is also well known for having gotten into an enormous battle with recreational fishermen back in the '60's over an old comm vs. rec issue on bass. Although I am a firm believer in the comms equal rights to to our common resources, I didn't want George to know I was a rec guy in sheep's clothing right off the bat. I even asked Johanna not to reveal that to him during the interview because I didn't want to taint it. I've known him for over 50 years and
still have vivid memories of George chasing us kids off his docks because we just wanted to see what came up in the traps just off Ocean Drive and Cliff Walk. Even at his age now he's still an imposing figure and I remember all to well how he intimidated us as kids.
On his own, without prompting, the man who had spent his entire life fishing the waters off Newport started to talk about the reasons for the decline in fish stocks. His parents lived on 'Portagee Island' in the Prices Neck area of Ocean Drive in the summer to be closer to the traps they worked. In the winter the family moved back to town and for several winters lived here in my family home that I still own that my Portuguese grandmother ran as a boarding house. George's mother lit the shack they lived in with oil lamps and food and casks of water had to be rowed back and forth across the cove. As a young boy he and his brother were given the task of manning the oars and ferrying the supplies over to the island. George said, " You know, the eel grass was so thick there, we could barely row through it. You couldn't have gotten an outboard through it. Today you couldn't gather enough to fill a bushel basket. And you know who the real culprit is? I'm sorry" he said to Johanna, "but it's the housewife with her detergent."
If you're looking for a culprit, as Flap said, it's the green grass on the waterfront homes, the housewife and her cleaning products, the detergents we use for our vehicles, the pesticides we use on our gardens. Oil run-off from the roads and finally, the raw sewerage from our tourist industry that flows into Newport Harbor every time it rains by the hundreds of thousands of gallons, overwhelming a system that was inadequate
years ago.
If you've made it this far, God bless you. THe point is, if you want to save striped bass start with they water they live in. Water is important. After all, like WC Fields said, fish f**k in it. Let's try to see to it that they continue to do so.
Okay, time for my second pot of coffee
