Longlining on the Bad Dog (Complete Documentary)

everything told about the sea even when we did not see its desert or hear its roar of birds there were seagulls and four cars in the fields boats turned upside down against the houses sometimes the rib of a whale was woven into the fence at the edge of the road The coasts They are more fertile than dry land. The inhabitants measured their harvests not only in bushels of corn but also in clam guts. Henry David Thoreau. For hundreds of years, New Englanders have fished like their fathers and grandfathers did before them, using in-line hooks. Captain Mike Anderson is a good example of a longliner who profited despite the last 30 years. years of ups and downs in the fishing industry after graduating college in 1968, Mike moved to Cape Cod to make a living in what was then a very different business four or five years ago, a long line is like Anderson decided to take a chance and fish for non-traditional species the dogfish until recently fishermen saw the dogfish as a trash fish, a nuisance that could ruin a day's work by hitting the cod and haddock against the baited hooks, when you catch it, you really catch it, and that It used to happen. by accident where we can go down to the sandbanks and you think you were sitting on a caught fish and the dog would catch every hook, of course you would lose the whole trip and your equipment would be a message and you would be crazy, but One day I realized and I said, well, you know, if you could catch him like that, maybe you could really make some money even when I die, you know, it seemed doable, we were and we didn't really have many alternatives.

We had a lot of bottom left and there wasn't much cod fishing. It seemed like we could try. We thought if we could get it together, we were short on money and we would see what we could make a profit on and we could make it to the Northwest. The Atlantic dogfish is one of the oldest shock species that first swam onto the scene more than 200 million years ago. It is a highly migratory species found in Cape Cod waters between spring and fall, they gather in huge schools and eat almost anything. It feeds on crustaceans, mollusks and any number of species of fish because the dogfish constantly and indiscriminately eats a dog.

The fishermen can catch large quantities so at any time of the day the dogfish lives up to 40 fish and reaches lengths of 3 to 4 feet. The females Dogfish begin to reproduce when they are about ten years old and, like humans, live young after a full two-year pregnancy. True to their name, they are armed with a backbone that local fishermen are constantly aware of throughout the decade. Since the 1990s, demand for British fish and chips has increased. transformed them from an unwanted past into a catch almost as viable as scammed fish, a habit that usually has the mic up and cruising down the channels to the open sea before anyone on land even sits down to breakfast, but today more will come out later than usual, just like a Remnants of the morning fog from the fire.

He heads to a place the locals call the old tuna farms. Mike maintains close radio contact with other longliners to monitor the location of Doug's dish within the area about eight miles offshore. He approaches Mike Kiernan and Kenny. Eldridge on the long line in Margaret, they are already removing the hooks and lines because you can fish anywhere and since you don't need to fish in certain places, if you are fishing on land you have to be practically in the slaughterhouse there is no fishing at all , so it's very competitive. People try to get to places before or after work, but in this particular business, if you find them and they're not worth much, you try to help. the other guys, everyone, and you also try to stay out of each other's way because if the team gets loose, it flies into someone else's sea, so you have to be in some kind of communication, you have to continually be in communication as teammates. , I suppose. shapeshifter what are you doing, hey anyone, will you come out from being with the second flag and so close to being close to the beach like this minutes later, Mike encounters another longliner, this time it's the William Gregory captained by Raja Horn, traditionally the Chatham fishermen go out? pairs, but in recent years economics dictate that men like Horn and the ensign now choose to go it alone, there just isn't enough money for heaven to put in a cruel, I mean, I fished with a fritter, but it doesn't come out.

It's really not enough money. I had crews for a long time. You know, when the fishing was good and you really needed a clip, but what happened was eventually the fishing got so poor for a while that you couldn't really do it. enough money to support it was a pressure to have a person with a family that depended on you to make money it was kind of hard to have to call someone on the morning of December January to say we are going to go fishing and then not make money and that is difficult and I began to feel the pressure at night.

I'm sure a lot of captains did it with people who really needed the money, so I would go in conditions where I thought I knew for sure not to go that way and it led me to go ahead alone and I just went and found out that I could do it, it wasn't that difficult. Hours pass and the morning moves into the afternoon. but the Atlantic remains as flat and calm as a tide pool, making it easy to forget that this is not a pleasure. The cruise microphone is here to search for dogfish. It's late spring, so the dogs are farther from shore and tend to cluster higher in the water column.

They will do this in the fall Mike scans his fish finder this time of year they will appear on the monitor as tight chains while later in the fall they will appear as yellow and blue lines along the bottom Mike also keeps an eye on the in the water there is activity around you from the back the whales splash playfully to starboard the former tuna schools are a large flat expanse of mud where the thermal lines and bottom formations attract concentrated schools of bait fish in the spring the area comes to life with humpback fins Minnie Keys white-sided dolphins and all kinds of seabirds beneath the ocean's surface, schools of fish, including dogs, feed here and that, in turn, is what attracts the many fishermen, all men and beasts, who are here for the same reason that the dragons at Bedford Lodge feed. and Gloucester cruise around, never a welcome sight for a long runner like Anderson.

We fear the draggers, especially the officials in the spring because we were right and we dragged our country to the soft bottom, there was just their domain and if they are saying in that area then you have to stay away from them because they will tell you what , but they don't understand what we're doing anyway, if you talk to them they just seem to be baffled by the idea. that you are out there for a long time fishing with the dog and when you talk to them he seems to be confused by the whole thing so I can see that you have to watch him very closely, they think we are gillnetting is that they always call them and They say the gillnet is in front of me and I always say I would know I'm a long line, what don't they do to know they're not fishing with a thin little line? big rig efficient terminal equipment, you know it, so you can usually avoid this, although so far, after five hours of patrolling the grounds, Mike spots the telltale chains wandering around his probe, it's time to set up the rig, a process that has remained relatively unchanged for generations.

In the old days, fishermen ventured to the rich fishing grounds of the Georgia shores aboard Lodge schooners, once their two-man crews left the mother ship aboard small 16-foot wooden Dory's to lay long trawl lines equipped with numerous baited hooks because the trawl lines were stored in circular tubs, people used the terms longline or tub trawler to describe them, as they used them to place the equipment, Dory's men They cast a barrel line and an anchor that was attached to two or three longline tubs, the anchors weighing on the ropes and barrels were used to simulate the set.

The lines were pulled hand-in-hand to the boat, where the fish were removed with a quick flick of the wrist. After a few laborious hours, the fisherman returned to the mother ship, but it was not to be. It is always easy to handle fish late inland could be dangerous for the gunwales, they were usually just inches from the waterline and some keepers never returned after disappearing in a fog bank or being taken by surprise in a gale. sudden. Schooners are no longer fished, the basic process of setting and carrying baited hooks remains unchanged to this day before Mike went out dogfishing, his Bader's were working to prepare the gear depending on the price of dogfish.

Mike had his Bader's. Squid or herring are usually preferred because they stay on the hooks better, but herring is used on days like today when the price of dogfish is low. Each bag of fish contains packages of two hundred and fifty hooks and Mike ties on three or four of them. these bags to a rope once the line is set it will only be a matter of minutes before it is full of dogfish, the quicker Mike can get back to the baited line the less chance there will be of problems like sails and damage to his When his last anchor catches the stern, Mike lets go and returns to the first game.

He runs up the bad dog's starboard side to the SAP's moored flag. He grabs the flag, feeds the line into the hydraulic trailer and spins it. Letting it fall freely on two spools in the bag so the betas on shore can better deal with it later, allowing the boat to move with the tide and trying to maintain the speed of the rig is the key to dogfishing. and from here on. discover things about the bad dog a little more frantic Mike moves quickly through the lines ambushing the dogs from the rollers just as the mouse hook is removed, steering with one hand and throwing the dogs over his shoulder with the other where It's all very important as at the end of the day it will take every square inch of the boat to bring them all back to Chatham Harbor amidst flying hooks and dogfish bodies.

Mike keeps in the back of his mind the many dangers that accompany anyone working alone. in the sea stages no, it's not a question, they on you, it's dangerous, you could get hurt, you're going to finish yourself off, so keep that in mind, you're working with hydraulics. I'm very ruthless, hydraulics are really a scary thing because if you don't know your bait, they don't care so you have to stay away and keep your head at all times. You know that if you get hooked or tangled, they have all the skills in the world. they'll take out your appendix if they decide that's what they're supposed to do, that's a very real danger and the other, really dangerous one, not being on the boat anymore, if you have to keep it, pay close attention to staying involved, because If there is no one else to help you, you go back in or if the water is at the end, they probably call you before long.

I used to always say it's analogous to sulfuric acid efficient when it's January/February because you only have a couple of minutes in the water. the life expectancy isn't too long so you mean you have to make a real attempt to stay out of the water you know you have to make some concessions to the fact that you're just i don't do more than that other than that it's you fishing with sulfuric acid and everything is trying to kill you it's nothing on the next line mike has put himself in a very bad bottom for longlines the taut anchor cannot hold in the soft mud and the numerous dogfish hooks have bent the long line, usually straight, on itself generating a huge tangle.

What a mess we were preparing in a very bad way, it's not ideal for very smooth line drawings, so I mean, that kind of thing is going to happen. I mean, it happens to everyone who goes to trial at one time or another. There are tremendous things, but I mean, the whole consequence of this is to put him in the boat and deal with him on the shore. I mean, it's just a mess. line, let's remove all the hooks and you can untangle it pretty quickly. Fish buyers make it clear what size dogfish they will accept and after catching literally hundreds of thousands of dogs, Mike has no problem telling them or sending some of them, of course, go.

Back in the water, you know, you try to get an acceptable size, you know there's a size that you can after a while, everything you've been looking at forever you can tell which ones aren't acceptable, so you just let them go, but that's it. beauty, they're alive and they only put on a little bit, but it doesn't seem to bother them because you catch them all the time with chapped lips, it doesn't bother them at all, so yeah, I mean, that's the one thing you can say is that if aretoo small, you just another milestone and I are enormously resistant, you need to find everything in pieces, the drag has cut off their noses to get them out of their nets and they catch them. them all the time without noses, you know, so it seems they have no recovery powers, soon the tangle is put away in one of the bags and Mike makes quick work of the remaining threads.

Commercial dog fishing has increased almost six-fold in the 1990s, and some scientists have warned that the long periods of time required for females to reach reproductive maturity, a long gestation period, the birth of few pups, and the Commercial hunting of larger adult females can be combined to create dogfishing species that require some conservation measures but are time-consuming. The liner itself is a low-impact form of sustainable fishing. It's a very passive fishery and it doesn't really bother the baby, I mean if people understood what

longlining

meant for catching bottom fish, if they understood it, only the bait really only fishes for five or six minutes, so environmentally it doesn't we're breaking up the bottom enough, destroying the habitat and you're only there for a while. short, very short time and if you are careful you have the ability to release the fish you don't want.

I think obviously I think I think it's okay, but I would agree that if everyone had just stood in line forever, there would be all the fish that If we were here we would still be here because they could never be caught as fast as they could reproduce and there would be been a viable fishery, but that's not how humans do things and I understand what I mean is that we needed efficient people to catch them so that they will be caught more efficiently when the last lines stop and the last flags are taken down and the last doctor gets captured and all the gears used by the uh, there's no point in saying why you're doing this looking for trouble when you're out there just long enough, it's just that you're looking for trouble, go home and I guess the quicker, Better you definitely want to be a movie star in general, the trip was a success and the deck is full of dogfish for many people on the boat.

It may not be a very pretty sight, but Mike has had a long time to come to terms with this aspect of what he does. The part about being a fisherman that isn't the most unpleasant is that you actually killed it. I mean, farmers kill things. I guess guys, people who pick orcas, that kind of thing, you make it your own, you make peace with whoever you are, I mean, ethnically speaking, you have to have come to terms with your own life long before you do this. I am not an insensitive person. I'm not a thing killer, it's what I do, you need to participate in the life you're living.

I mean, some people think that because they hire killers to kill their meat, their hands are clean, that's not true, that's not the case. right, I mean, it just so happens that I'm efficient now, it always happens. I guess I could have been a librarian, but I didn't. What happened, so participation is that I chose a long time ago to participate in life, that's what dogfish are like. They are unloaded into a thousand pounds of watts, then frozen and taken to the truck that will soon head to the processing plants in New Bedford, from there the fillets will be packaged and shipped to the United Kingdom, where they are called rock salmon and are eat. mainstay of fish and chips while catching up with the others on the dock, Mike washes the bad dog after the day's work every day to cover fuel and expenses and can leave us something for him as a good day.

Today he has achieved 6,000 pounds per day profit despite the entanglements and low prices. If you just wanted to fish, you'd get a dredge and go fish it, especially a phosphate type full of drag and it would throw in mullet and gall, you know? Longlining doesn't really make sense in the civilized world because it's a throwback to how they fished at the beginning of the century, it doesn't really make sense to do it, but it has an aesthetic quality, I mean, it's fishing is fishing individually, it's not carrying them in a bag. great, is to see them, they go up in a line and you finish and then there's something fascinating about that, if you think about it, there's a certain kind of old pulpit, there's something about you, you know there's something about it that says satisfied, I don't know if dogfish in particular, that's correct, but the Ron line in general is something of a satisfaction in itself and I'm fascinated by ours.