Why this Blog?

Why this Blog?

Let’s face it.

No matter how proud you are of your commercial fishing family—no matter how much you look forward to your loved one’s arrival home from sea and the good times that (you hope) are sure to follow—there is still the Daily Grind to get through in the interim.

And that isn’t easy.

Take me, for instance. I get stressed out and overwhelmed fairly quickly. I am terrible at multi-tasking. I’m the new mother of not just one, but two tiny children.

(So why, you may be asking, with a three-month-old baby and a toddler who is not even two-years-old, Jazzercise routines to learn, and a husband who has begun the long Dungeness crab season, did I start this Blog? Believe me, my husband asked the same question!)

I started this Blog so that those of us who live, or have lived, this way of life can share stories, advice, and support. So that on these long, rainy winter nights and dark, lonely, windy mornings, we might have a place to go for a glimmer of sun.  So that we can all keep reminding each other of the unique qualities and fun of this way of life, and find a little extra strength to just keep charging ahead.

I hope this Blog becomes a place where we, as captains of our shore-based crews, can go to share frustrations and also have a laugh or two.

I’m ending this page with a quote from the article “Nor’easter Research Profile: Surviving the Changes—Families Respond to Fisheries Management,” by Helen Mederer (Associate Professor of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Rhode Island):

“It has been well established in numerous social science studies that fishing is more than a job; it is an identity and a lifestyle as well. It is this identity and lifestyle that fishermen value above all.”