350 YEARS OF INSHORE FISHING

There is nothing like the sea to teach humility, nothing like fishing to learn brotherhood. 'Bub' in Bonac means brother.

ARNOLD LEO

The East Hampton Town Marine Museum, where we are gathered today, was founded in order to preserve the traditions of the baymen, the inshore fishermen. Inshore commercial fisheries are found in all the coastal regions of the United States; in the Chesapeake area, the fishermen are called watermen.

When the settlers arrived in America, they discovered the Indians were using vines and reeds to make fish traps of the same design the Europeans had brought from home. Some of the words for nets and traps are very old: weirs, fykes, seines, trammels, and trawls are all used today,.

The early East Hampton settlers were farmer-fishermen, not for trade but mostly for their own subsistence. Fish, especially cod, could be dried and salted; oysters were pickled in brine and kept in barrels; eels and other fish might be smoked. For the most part, however, the daily catch had to be consumed. What could not be eaten was used for fertilizer in the fields.

For the first 250 years after settlement, the farmer-fisherman engaged in the types of fishing still going on today, with the two great exceptions of near-shore whaling and bunker fishing.

East Hampton changed forever in 1895, when the Long Island Rail Road came to town. With the railroad came the appearance of what might be called modern baymen. For the first time, what a fisherman caught could be taken in timely fashion to the substantial markets of the city. Within about 25 years after the railroad's arrival, this ability was further increased by the use of early gasoline-powered trucks.

Milt Miller says these trucks gave a severely rigorous ride on hard-rubber tires, but they got the fish to market. Now a family could devote itself exclusively to fishing for an income. Many did so: Lester, Miller, King, Bennett, Havens, Eames - common names among members of the Baymen's Association.

Broadly, the baymen fish in two places: in the bays and harbors, and off the ocean beach. On the bays and in the harbors, finfishing and shellfishing are done.

Clams are taken from shoal waters by tongs or bullrakes. Mussels are harvested by hand or, when beds appear, by tongs. Before power boats, oysters and scallops were taken from bay bottoms by dredges pulled by sailboats. Today, of course, the dredges are pulled by outboard motors mounted on sharpies, garveys, or new-fangled fiberglass boats. Since scallops, unlike clams and oysters, cannot close their shells tight and retain liquid, the practice is to shuck the white meat from them for market. Shucking sheds may be found in most baymen's backyards.

Lobsters and conchs are taken by pots (cage-like traps) set in bays; blueclaw crabs are mostly caught in tidal ponds. Finfish are taken by pound traps, fykes, gillnets, draggers, hook-and-line, and bay seines: striped bass, bluefish, weakfish, flounder, fluke, porgies, blowfish, mackerel, blackfish, eels, kingfish, dogfish, skates, and several less-eaten species are among the catches.

Squid is taken mostly in pound traps.

These are the bay fisheries, and the baymen go from one to another according to season, seeking species that are abundant and leaving alone those that are scarce.

Among the baymen's fisheries done from the ocean beach is cod fishing. In earlier days, fishing shanties were nestled by the dunes. Once used by near-shore whalers, they also served as base camp for winter cod fishing. On mild winter days, small skiffs were rowed out as far as three miles. The trawls (long lines with baited hooks every six feet or so) were set out and retrieved the same day. Winter weather being tricky, this was a sometimes dangerous activity.

Another earlier beach fishery was gillnetting for sturgeon, which appeared regularly, as large as 10 or 12 feet in length. The roe was much valued in the city, and the white flesh was excellent smoked. Sturgeon fishing is no longer permitted due to reduced populations.

For most of this century, the real heart of the baymen's community was the ocean fishery known as haul-seining. At its height, from the 1950s through the early 1980s, there were more than 30 families depending on haul-seining for their livelihoods and hundreds of others who benefited from it. Like near-shore whaling, haul-seining was a communal and family enterprise. A haul-seine crew consisted of at least five men, with two trucks, a 26-foot dory, and more than a half-mile of net - the haulseine.

It was set by launching the dory into the surf, running the net out in a semicircle, and coming back to shore (the dory planing like a surfboard onto the beach). The net was then drawn back to the beach: by hand in the older days, by winches mounted on the trucks in more recent times.

Although large catches were made (the largest Capt. William Lester recalled was over 300 boxes - more than 30,000 pounds), much more often than not the net came back with little in it. A large catch, however, meant calling on family and friends to help pack and ice the fish for shipment.

The surfmen from this tradition of ocean beach fishing formed the core of what came to be called the Life Saving Station. Shipwrecks on the offshore sandbar were common occurrences, and as early as 1790 a beach watch was begun. The Life Saving Service started in 1867 to maintain boathouses at intervals on the beach, and these were manned by experienced surfmen who knew how to launch dories into breaking seas. Today, the baymen continue to operate the dory rescue squad, which keeps a dory at Atlantic Avenue in Amagansett near the beach.

The baymen's way of life is based on community values that are very old, and which formed an important part of the fabric of American culture. To live simply, work hard, help thy neighbor, be at one with one's fellows and with God, to be a part of nature - these are strands of that fabric. There is nothing like the sea to teach humility, nothing like fishing to learn brotherhood. "Bub" in Bonac means brother.

The baymen are the watchmen of the marine environment. No one notices sooner when wetlands are compromised, when bulkheads cut off the flow of fresh groundwater that sweetens the saltwater nurseries in our creeks.

Today the baymen's very existence is threatened by two growing problems: pollution and politics.

Pollution is amply illustrated by the brown algae bloom that first occurred here in 1985. The baymen, ever alert to change in water quality, had already noted in the 1950s the appearance of a hitherto unseen type of seaweed (codium) of a spongy, unplantlike consistency. It arrived the year the Russians sent Sputnik into space, and so the baymen called it "sputnik grass."

For the next 30 years, the changes that had begun after World War II - expansion of marinas, construction of ever-larger waterfront houses, more and more big, gasoline-powered boats - altered the very nature of the bays and unbalanced the relation among sea life.

The result: a never-before-seen algae. It appeared first in Flanders Bay near Riverhead, where the Peconic River, with its radioactive contamination from the Brookhaven National Laboratory, empties.

Never before had we had an algae that could bloom in winter, crowd out every other life form, starve those shellfish that attempted to feed on it in the absence of their normal diet, turn the waters dark as coffee, block all sunlight from the bottom vegetation, and in the end leave a dead sea, with nothing but broken shells where once life flourished. Almost overnight, the baymen lost their scallop industry.

Even more deadly for the welfare of the baymen is the politics of fishing. After World War II, while commercial landings of most food fish remained constant, the sports catch leaped and bounded. By the 1980s, some popular species began to experience population declines. The solution, according to the fish managers, is to set quotas.

The question then becomes: Who gets to catch the quota? This is called the allocation question. The answer is, whoever has the most political power.

Clearly, several hundred thousand saltwater sportsfishermen in New York State have more political power than a handful of baymen on the East End of Long Island. In 1997, commercial fishermen in New York State landed less than 500,000 pounds of striped bass for market, while sportsfishermen took 5.5 million pounds.

Sportsfishing lobbies have actually eliminated the traditional inshore commercial fisheries in the states of Texas, Louisiana, and Florida, and they are attempting to do so now in New York. Without commercial fishermen, the consumer will have no access to local and regional seafood.

Twelve years ago, nearly 120 full-time baymen worked in the Town of East Hampton. There are today about 30, still huddled in small enclaves of Amagansett and Springs. A traditional way of life for the past 350 years may exist in the coming century only in museum exhibits.

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Excerpted from a Sept. 12 talk at the East Hampton Town Marine Museum. Mr. Leo has been secretary of the 41-year-old Baymen's Association for the past 21 years.