Broad-sided - Long Island Business News
John German is not one to mince words: He doesn’t work well with others.
“I’m out there minding my own business, fishing,” he says. “I don’t get along that well with people, and all of a sudden, I’m in the middle of this thing!” ....
.... “Our biggest problem is going to be the shift in the shipping lanes,” said Mattituck fisherman Mark King. “If these barges get pushed a little bit south, they’re going to run through everything.”
Besides a loss of business, that could also mean a loss of gear. King strings out 1,000-foot lines with buoys at each end, with traps attached to the main line by a snood roughly every 150 feet. Other boats forced out of the main shipping lanes by LNG tankers could destroy King’s lines; the traps cost $70 each, so losing a line with six traps is costly. (The traps have panels held in place by clips that rapidly biodegrade, allowing marine life to escape lost pots.) ....
King – whose boat, the Timtarah, is docked just across Mattituck Creek from Rispoli’s – grew up fishing on his family’s vessel (his brother Jim, a Southold Town trustee, is also a fisherman). He worries about adding to the cumulative effects on the water. ”This poor Sound’s been hammered enough lately,” he said.
Challenges aside, most lobstermen can’t imagine any other way of life. “I’m 51 years old,” King said, as a cold Sound wind whipped through a stock of lobster pots. “I don’t really want a career change if I can help it. I don’t know how you compensate for someone’s life.”
“There’s nothing else I’d ever want to do,” said German, who is 60 and has fished for all but two of 43 years, when he was in Vietnam. “It’s not a job, it’s a way you live your life.”
