Yes even you Scott can watch in on your new TV ...lol
VB
Lobstermen vie for TV ratings
By DOUG FRASER
STAFF WRITER
Nate Quinn never thought that signing on to an offshore lobster boat was the way to TV stardom. But with viewers still grooving on reality television, what could be more real than fishing hundreds of miles offshore in a New England winter.
Documentary film crews from the Discovery Channel, attempting to follow up on its surprise hit ''Deadliest Catch,'' profiling life on Alaskan crab boats, came east last November to shoot three offshore lobster vessels. The program premieres tonight.
Quinn, 33, is the first mate on the William Bowe, owned and captained by Bro Cote. The 72-foot vessel fishes out of Hyannis and carries five crew and a captain.
In summer, they're out as far as 200 miles offshore, fishing for up to nine days at a time. In winter, the trips are shortened to six days. In one of the stormiest bits of ocean in the world, the chance of avoiding a bad storm is slim. They fish too far out, in water that can be over a thousand feet deep, to return to port in bad weather. Frequently, the crew has to point its bow into wind and wave and just try to maintain position - known as ''laying to'' - riding out the storm and then going back to work.
''There's always wind,'' said Quinn, who lives in Brewster. ''You can have the best foul-weather gear in the world, and you're still going to get wet and cold in the winter. And you're hot in the summer.''
Quinn said he's watched some of the ''Deadliest Catch,'' and he doesn't think fishing in New England in winter in a 72-foot lobster vessel is any easier, or less dangerous, than fishing the Bering Sea in a 200-foot-long crab boat.
''I have the utmost respect for those guys, but I can't watch it without saying 'Oh, it's not that hard,''' he said. ''We're on Georges Bank; we see all sorts of weather too.''
The lobstermen work 18- to 20-hour days in 80 mph winds and big seas, hauling strings of 40 lobster pots at a time. Quinn said he doesn't let himself think about how far he is from land and about what could happen.
Ironically, after a string of trips with horrendous weather, the film crew came out on an idyllic trip.
''They were saying, 'Oh, we wish you had bad weather,' and 'If someone went overboard that would be great,''' Quinn joked.
There are plenty of details beyond the weather to attend to, any of which could save his, or someone else's, life. Last winter, he was temporarily snarled in line that was headed off the boat, threatening to drag him down with the pots in the blink of an eye.
Much like the crab documentary, the new series, titled ''Lobstermen: Jeopardy at Sea,'' stages a kind of competition between three vessels. Cote and the William Bowe are theoretically pitted against Westport, R.I., fisherman Grant Moore and his boat Direction and newcomer Scott Christopher's 80-foot Dragon Lady, out of Port Judith, R.I.
But Quinn said he wasn't aware there was any competition going on. He said the William Bowe has already staked out its territory and that it is defended both by the reputation of the captain and the tight offshore fishing community that respects the other guy's space but doesn't tolerate interlopers.
Doug Fraser can be reached at
dfraser@capecodonline.com.
(Published: June 20, 2006)
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