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Year after year the sports pour a fortune into those top-heavy jungle gyms they call boats and consume thousands of gallons of gas and beer cleaving the waters of the Bay after the wily tuna, only to return to Gloucester empty of hand and parched of throat.
While right now in the harbor we're catching 'em bared handed. You don't even need a clothesline and a bent nail.
Like last week. The Lakeman boys were in the dory underunning their fish trap off Black Bess Rocks. Not much mackerel. Suddenly the cry;"Tuna!"
A big one. He'd followed the school in. As the guys hauled, he loafed into the pocket. Their father, Ned Lakeman, was fifty feet off in the Four Brothers III on the mooring, and at their shout jumped into the punt and pulled furiously to join them, grabbing the only weapon handy, the great hook they use to hoist the dip net.
The intruder was strangely docile, apparently unable to get up headway enough in the reduced confines of the pocket to make a dash for freedom, or maybe logey from lack of oxygen. He stuck his snout up inquiringly and Lakeman gaffed him under the chin with the hook. So he dove, but the boys were ready and lassoed him around the tail with a line.
After some considerable scuffling, for he was far too big to get aboard the Brothers, they towed him into John (Sonny) Deltorchio's Cape Ann Seafoods at Fort Wharf. Having given the dory and the big boat a few thumps to remember him by, hanging there on the scales Mr. Tuna with a final flip decked Sonny for a nine-count.
This oversized guppy weighed out at 575 pounds resting on his tail, and while Lakeman was relating all this to me from the deck of the Brothers broad off the trap a couple of days ago, we were startled by a quick swish no more than thirty feet inshore from us. A gurgle, a glistening back, a foamy flash of dorsals.
Another tuna, plenty big, waiting for his dinner right here in the harbor. I could have nailed him with a beer bottle from my sunporch.
And just then Milt Wonson slid alongside for bait and a bandaid, with the news that he had just seen two others broaching across the harbor at the Bubbler (sewer outlet to you). The bait was for lobster, the bandage for Milt's thumb, dripping blood. Caught a fishhook in it and had to cut it out with his knife.
Yes, hold out two slices of bread and the tuna these days will jump right
in between and beg for mayonnaise.
Not like a few years back. Captain Bill Sibley was dragging to the west'ard in Peggybell when sport came roaring up and yelled over: "Seen any Tuna around here?"
"Nope," Will allowed, "but there's plenty o' Finns up Lanesville."
And with a wave of thanks, off roared the sport for the Bay.
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A day or two after the Lakemans and Sonny had theirs, Joe Santapaola of East Gloucester and his boys got one, fortunately exhausted, in their Kettle Island fish trap and lugged the 700 pounds of him into town without much trouble.
Coincidentally, Jack, Fred, Larry and Ned Lakeman Jr., thirteen to eighteen, handled that bull in their twine closet like old hands partly because they're a cool bunch and partly because the family was just back from a run over to Provincetown where they'd seen how deftly the P-towners tame tuna entangled in their weirs - with a shotgun. But the Lakemans had no artillery, so more the credit.
With a second trap put out this week off the near shore of Magnolia point, the family is fishing in stereo. For three summers they've worked Black Bess, after a one season try inside Salt Island following their move here from Marblehead.
Each season the swelling cyclical migration of mackerel has dictated a bigger boat. When you're hauling upwards of 30,000 pounds in one day, as Lakeman claims, and still not emptying the pocket, you need something substantial to put them in, so this year they bought and gave artificial respiration to what is no doubt the oldest commercial vessel in Gloucester, from Jim Madruga, the tottering Jackson and Arthur, an antique dragger built here in 1914 ... renamed, naturally, Four Brothers III.
Trapping is an ancient art, and still alive, thanks to the mackerel's recurrent habit of coming back and to men like the Lakemans and Santapaola and the Heath brothers from Manchester, who fish their Egg Rock location out of Gloucester.
And the ones before them, such as Carl Fiers who used to work the Black Bess site and the Douglass brothers, Orrin and Len, way before Carl there, and inside the Breakwater, and in old old times running a trap near their Hawthorne Inn. And of course the late Kirk Walen's at the south end of Niles Beach.
These were the harbor traps. The Back Shore has been assayed too, inside Salt, Milk and Straitmouth Islands and off Brace Cove, and even around the Cape on the Bay side, they tell me, but you're taking your chances with the easterlies, I'd think.
One of the old timers was Uncle Mort Mayo of East Gloucester, now departed, who had the Kettle Island location for years before Joe Santapaola, and Unc had a tuna run-in too.
Seems that Mort and the boys steamed out of the harbor from Smith Cove one fine day to haul, as was his wont in season, but when he found a big tuna cavorting in the trap he was not pleased, for Unc kept his temper on a short string.
Somehow they rassled the fish into the dory, where it thrashed around in a most alarming fashion. Unc was a powerful man, and powerful vexed, and he grabbed his axe.
Raising it high over his head for a mighty whack, while muttering a final imprecation, the wrathful executioner brought his weapon whistling down, missed the quivering culprit by some three-eighths of an inch and drove it clean through the bottom of the dory.
July 31, 1971
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