For the last bunch of years, I’ve scratched out a ridiculous number of published words on the
subject of fisheries management. The last two or three seasons, much of that output has related to what many fishermen and I have seen as the increasingly bleak state of our striped bass resource—a position that has remained up for active debate until quite recently. Lisa Helme DanforthAug 27th, 2014
In the fall of 2009, I published an essay on what I saw as the major threats to a then-flourishing winter cod fishery off Block Island. Because that rebounding cod population represented sorely needed revenue for a party boat fleet that had been brought to its knees by a host of regulatory misfires, I elected to publish the piece—one of the more strident condemnations of fishermen and regulators I’d ever written—in the Coastal Conservation Association’s Tide Magazine, where I was reasonably sure I could memorialize the words in print without causing massive damage to the industry. Despite some concerns that the piece would make the rounds anyway, I sent it off and filed it in my records as a kind of future “I told you so.”Lisa Helme DanforthAug 1st, 2014
Somewhere beyond the thrill of the hunt, the chase, the cast, the loading of the rod, the fight, the heft of a good fish, there are bigger, more compelling reasons to clear an inlet and steam 150 miles offshore chasing a hunch. Earlier in my career, I lived on the suspense of distant waters chunking and the constant variety of jumbo mystery meat. I lived for the screaming of a reel dumping line so fast against its drag clicker that I heard the sound as two layered tones. Lisa Helme DanforthJul 1st, 2014
