Fishermen’s Big Catch, Almost a Thing of the Past

MOST fishermen chase big fish, but Larry Seaman, a bait fisherman, hunts finger-size ones to sell to bait shops to sell to fishermen chasing big fish.

Mr. Seaman, 65, docks his boat here behind one such bait shop, on a canal next to some large commercial draggers that sit rusting away because of government fish-catch quotas. That, and fuel is up to more than $4 a gallon.

“Now, if they would only raise the price of fish too,” remarked Mr. Seaman, as he and his brother, Bob Seaman, 60, headed in their homemade wooden, flat-bottomed work boat out to the bay to catch bait, as they have done for decades. They were after spearing, the sleek, silver-sided school fish that glint in the sun as they swim at the surface. As children, we used to call them shiners and swept the shallow water for them with a bed sheet-size seine.

The Seaman brothers do the same thing, except their net is 150 feet long and they can pull up hundreds of pounds of spearing in a single drag. At $1.50 a pound wholesale for spearing, that’s one profitable drag. But many drags yield only a net full of seaweed and sea robins, so it’s not that easy. The trick is to know where to cast the net.

For this, the Seamans watch the birds that are also hunting spearing. When the floppy-flying terns gather in frenzied groups to dive-bomb the little fish, when the snowy egrets, tall and storky, use their long graceful necks to stab at the fish, then the Seamans head over to investigate.

Larry Seaman will take out a bottle of bunker oil and throw out a couple of capfuls, creating a smelly slick to attract the fish, which make little swirls on the slick-smooth surface. The men, wearing rubber overall-style waders, hop into the shallows at the edge of a small island and begin feeding the long net, kept in a folded pile on the bow, into the water in a long arc. With Bob Seaman at one end and Larry Seaman holding the other, they begin pulling it in, trapping the fish against the shore.

The Seamans explained all this as they headed south and east under the Meadowbrook State Parkway, then the Wantagh Parkway bridges. Larry Seaman’s legs straddled the handle of the roaring outboard engine, and he steered with his knees as he headed east along the State Channel squinting at the birds on the marshy islands. There wasn’t much activity, and after a few hours of hunting, a couple sets of the net yielded only a few quarts of spearing and a bit of cussing.

“That’s why they call it fishin’, not catchin’,” Larry Seaman said, trying to keep patient.

They were plying the creeks and flats around the salt marshes south of Amityville and Copiague, and the tide was unusually high, up over the islands, leaving visible only the top of the marsh grass. Watching and waiting in the bobbing boat, the Seamans said they had heard that an alignment of planets was creating unusual tides, and Larry Seaman joked that the planets were aligned against them.

Which is actually more than a joke. Like many other local commercial fishermen, from Jamaica Bay to Accabonac Harbor in East Hampton, factors like development, pollution and government regulations on fish quotas have all but wiped out this once-thriving way of life.

Larry Seaman is no whiner, but he says he has been increasingly stymied in recent years by government regulations and authorities that hamper his ability to make a living, the only profession he has ever known.

Both Seamans live in Rosedale, Queens, just west of the Nassau border, on a creek of Jamaica Bay along the south edge of Kennedy International Airport. Larry Seaman has trapped eels there since he was a child, and his family has fished there for generations.

With million-dollar homes making up the horizon and expensive luxury boats speeding by, the Seamans look more and more anomalous every year in the waters off these well-to-do suburbs. Larry Seaman’s wife died several years ago, and he has resisted the urge to sell his house and boats and move to the Carolinas, partly because his children are still up here.

Bob Seaman runs a small bait shop in front of his house but is still affected by the Vietnam War. As a sergeant, he saw some disturbing things that still haunt him, he said, pulling a cigarette out of a plastic bag, and an old metal lighter with his Army nickname on it: Bebop. He said he cannot qualify for benefits for post-traumatic stress disorder because he does not have a strict account of the traumatic events.

“They want to know dates and places, like, ‘Where and when did you see the woman blow up,’ ” he said. Then without a pause, he perked up and said, “Hey, Larry, did you see that?” He was pointing to the northeast, where a group of tall white birds gathered in the shallow water were pecking away. The Seamans were soon over there and in the water dragging their net. Both men stumbled on the uneven bottom and fell into chest-high water at times, but kept pulling the net in, side by side, hand over hand. Finally, in the purse was a small load of flipping silver fish.

This took some of the sting out of a light-catch day — a silver lining, of sorts — but they would have saved more money by staying at home. Back at the dock, they gave the spearing to the bait shop owner, free.

By COREY KILGANNON

New York Times