A Doryman's Day

We'd be hard put to decide whether Barry Fisher is better at fishing or storytelling. The three stories in this book are rollicking gems, salty as a flake of cod set out to dry. "A Wharf Rat's Tale" takes us to Gloucester, Massachusetts, a town where, "if you didn't go fishing, you got out of town." It was a fascinating, adventurous place for a boy in the late '30s, as young Barry and his pals pick up odd jobs on the wharves, repair a beat-up dory, hang out with the schooner crews, and take up fishing themselves, catching the fattest flounders at the sewer outfall in the harbor.

Barry Fisher went offshore dory-fishing for real when he was eighteen, and "A Doryman's Day," he says now, is "as accurate as my old mind can make it." He describes fishing longline trawl gear from Grand Banks dories launched off the deck of a schooner in wonderful detail and paints a vivid picture of a working day in a fishery straight out of history. A few years later, he went on a late-season swordfishing trip, dory-fishing from a schooner with a crew betting against the weather and the odds that they'd come home with a catch. "Mysterious Ways of the Lord, or How Captain Jack Brant of the Sowrdfishing Schooner lorna b Found God in a Split Second and then Achieved Salvataion on the Northern Edge of George's Bank" gives you just a hint of the story to come.

Born and brought up in Gloucester, Massachusetts, Barry Fisher went fishing as a "catchee" at fourteen, went into the Merchant Marine in 1943 at fifteen, fished up and down the East Coast of the United States, Canada, and Newfoundland after World War II, did two combat tours in Korea. After Captain Fisher received bachelor's and master's degrees at Harvard, he went back to fishing, first out of New Bedford and then on the West Coast, where he also taught at Oregon State University for four years, and in the late '70s he led an effort to start joint fishing ventures with the Russians, trawling for whiting off the Pacific Northwest coast, and for flounder and codfish in the Bering Sea. Since the late '80s, Captain Fisher has worked promoting marine science and fishery research at Oregon State University and with the National Marine Fisheries Services.