In Love With Fishing at 8, She’s Now a Charter Captain at 22

AMANDA CASH stood on tiptoe in the wheelhouse of the Osprey IV, checked the screen of her global positioning system and watched the depth monitors as she steered the 72-foot boat out of the harbor here and into Long Island Sound.

Picking up a microphone, Ms. Cash welcomed aboard her passengers for a seven-hour fluke-fishing expedition.

At 22, Ms. Cash is the youngest captain among the dozen or so in the marina. She is the only female skipper there, one of a handful on the Island.

“When people refer to me as a fisherlady, I say no, I’m a fisherman,” she said, though at 5-foot-3 she needs to stand on a step to see out the wheelhouse window. “It is a job, not a gender.”

But she does more than steer the vessel, which was built in 1962, holds up to 70 passengers and, after $25,000 in upgrades, made its inaugural run as the Osprey IV when the fluke-fishing season got under way on May 15.

“I do everything the guys do,” she said. And then some.

Ambling down on deck while the boat drifts for fishing, with her 5-year-old pit bull mix, Sierra, at her heels, Ms. Cash is also the hostess with the Christie Brinkley smile. Dressed in a lime hoodie, jeans and flip-flops, she chats with passengers, scoops hooked sea robins and fluke out of the water with a net, untangles reels, offers coffee and bagels in the galley and makes sure everyone, herself included, is enjoying the fishing party.

Ed Spiess, 42, an ironworker from Lindenhurst, said that “lots of time if the fish aren’t catching the captain doesn’t want to talk to the passengers and you don’t have a good time.” Ms. Cash helped make the expedition “very pleasant,” he said.

A third-generation fisherman, Ms. Cash discovered her passion for the sport at age 8, when her parents, who worked two jobs, had no baby sitter and sent her out with an older sister, Meghan, then 15, on the family’s party boat instead.

“I ended up fishing the whole day and handing out bait and picking up people’s fish and netting them, and I had a blast,” Ms. Cash recalled. The next morning she was raring to return.

Ms. Cash earned her master captain’s license at 18, before she got her driver’s license. To do so, she spent 720 days over five years on the water in boats weighing more than 50 tons, mostly on her grandfather’s vessel, the Port Jefferson Ace, and the family’s previous boats, the Osprey, Osprey II and Osprey III.

“Since I was the captain’s daughter, no one taught me anything,” she said. Instead, her father told her to figure out how to drop an anchor or throttle back in six-foot swells.

“It’s the best way to learn,” she said.

After high school she applied to Suffolk County Community College, but never went; that fall, when her father had no mate for blackfish season, she volunteered.

“This is what I want to do for the rest of my life,” Ms. Cash said. “There was no point in getting a degree in something that I am never going to do.” During the off season, Ms. Cash works as a waitress at the El Dorado Southern Grille nearby.

James Peterson, 33, a commercial fisherman during the winter who also works as a captain on some Osprey IV expeditions, said there was an old superstition in the maritime industry that “women on boats are bad luck.”

To some older anglers, Ms. Cash’s role “is a detriment until they see that she’s an excellent boat handler” with “a nose for the fish,” Mr. Peterson said.

Richard Wright, a boat mechanic in Port Jefferson harbor, said that while “some captains just operate the boat,” Ms. Cash changes the oil, and has changed engines and transmissions on other boats. She also sands and paints the Osprey IV.

Ms. Cash captains daily 7 a.m. expeditions and goes back out on the 4:30 p.m. runs, working as first mate or a deckhand, setting up rigs, hooking bait and teaching landlubbers how to fish.

Just before the Osprey IV headed back to shore, Ms. Cash hooked a fluke. It measured “just a bit short,” she said, falling shy of the State Department of Environmental Conservation’s minimum length of 20 ½ inches, so she tossed it back to sea.

The other anglers fared better: There were 16 “keepers” in all. (State regulations limit the catch to four fluke per fisherman.) As Mr. Peterson took the helm, Ms. Cash handed the flukes to the anglers for trophy photographs. Then she picked up a knife, sliced into a fish, plucked out the guts and filleted it.

“It looks like I am working, but I am having fun,” Ms. Cash said.

By MARCELLE S. FISCHLER

New York Times