Charity Robey

The Baymen’s Nightmare: All the Scallops Are Dead - The New York Times

There have been lean years in Peconic Bay, on Long Island. But fishermen have never seen a failed harvest like this one.

via www.nytimes.com

My first reported piece for the New York Times.

Veteran Island

SHELTER ISLAND HISTORICAL SOCIETY PHOTO A May 1944 letter from Ignatius Avona, US Navy, to his brother Charles Avona, US Army.

There is an affinity between veterans and haircuts, and Louis Cicero understands both.

He’s been cutting hair at his barbershop in the Heights since 1959. “I had an old-timer in here who fought at Iwo Jima,” Louis said. “Saw a lot of action at a young age. They open up in the barber chair and tell me their secrets and problems. They know I won’t tell anyone.”

Bill Dickerson, 95,  served in WWII, and weighed 113 pounds when he entered the Army in his prime at 19. He operated the 155-millimeter gun, a weapon with 96-pound shells, and a range of about twelve miles. “You could get off about five rounds in a minute if you worked really hard at it,” he said. “We could wipe out Riverhead from Shelter Island.”

Bill operated the gun at the Battle of the Bulge. When it malfunctioned,  he was struck in the head. Six months of recovery left him with no hearing in one ear, dents on one side of his head, and memories of his service that he’s shared with family and friends ever since.

In the last census, 2,392 people called Shelter Island home, and 381 of them were veterans. Add to that number the Islanders who are not themselves vets, but have a father, mother, brother or sister who served this country and you see the powerful influence of military service on Shelter Island, an influence that becomes obvious when veterans and their families tell the stories of their lives.

Although Betsy Durkin Mathes never knew her grandfather, who died at the battle of the Somme in World War I, or her father, a paratrooper in World War II who died at the Battle of the Bulge when she was three, their lives inspired her. “They were both officers who died while defending their men,” she said.

After a career as an actor and lyricist, Betsy, still haunted by the life of a father she never knew, wrote a book, “Forever is Not for Everyone,” to try and find meaning in her father’s story.

Town Councilman-elect Mike Bebon’s Air Force service gave him life and work experience that helped him become Director of Operations at Brookhaven National Lab years later, but it also kept him from his father’s side in his dad’s final days.

In 1975, Mike had been assigned to inspect a base in Texas built in World War II  to modernize it for the era of terrorism. “My dad had a heart attack and he was doing OK, and then he had another one and passed,” said Mike. “At least he knew we were coming back [to Long Island].”

Military service runs strong in Sara Mundy’s family, and its influence on her is evident, even though she chose a different kind of service — she works at the Senior Center. Her father and her brother Michael served in the Marines, brother Nathan is still in the Marines, and her sister Melissa is on the board of the Theinert Foundation, a charity established to support veterans and their families in memory of Joseph Theinert, who grew up on Shelter Island, became an officer in the Army, and died in Afghanistan protecting his men.

“Joe Theinert was very close to my father and my sister, and my brother Michael left for boot camp a month after Joe was killed,” said Sara. “I don’t think any of us slept the whole time Michael was there.”

Town Supervisor Gary Gerth’s father was in the army medical corps during WWII, and Gary enlisted in the Navy in the late 60s, when he was about to be drafted into the Vietnam War.

The first time Gary saw Shelter Island, he was in an Army helicopter, flying over the East End in late 1970s on his way from the Naval War College, to a base on Long Island. He said he’ll never forget the view from above of the emerald-green Island between the North and South forks of Long Island.

Gary later became Director of Veterans Services Agency of Nassau County, and worked to resolve cases for veterans who had been denied benefits, sometimes because of missing records. His agency was able to reconstitute many of those records, and get benefits to veterans and their families.

Dave Clark, the son and father of veterans, served with the Marines in Beirut and narrowly missed getting blown up in 1983, when a truck bomb destroyed the Marine barracks and killed 220 men. It wasn’t until his own son was deployed to Afghanistan that he understood how the family of a soldier feels.

“You don’t even think about it when you are over there. But the parents think about it every day,” he said.

He remembered when the barracks blew up it took about five days for his family to find out he was still alive.  “It took a few years off their lives.”

Sea change-Inside Montauk's commercial fishing industry

Published in the Summer 2019 issue of Newsday's Feed Me magazine.

By Charity Robey Special to Newsday Updated July 21, 2019 5:00 AM

 

When Gosman’s Dock, 14 acres of restaurants and shops at Montauk Harbor, went on the market for $52.5 million in 2015, it signaled the latest evolution in a "discovered" coastal town that used to be all about surfing, fishing and dive bars. But walk past the dumpster and ice machine onto the dock that stretches into the harbor, and you’re in another world. You will typically see a forklift operator removing boxes of fish from a boat’s hold, or two guys hefting lobsters into the back of a pickup truck. Welcome to Montauk—past its heyday, perhaps, but alive and still bringing fresh local seafood to people who know enough to buy it up while they still can.

Montauk is not only the biggest commercial fishing hub in New York, it’s one of the largest in the Northeast. But that’s not saying much. In the United States, about 80 percent of the seafood we eat is imported, and most of it has been frozen, thawed and refrozen multiple times while being shipped and processed. Prices for local wild seafood, the stuff landed at the town dock or a dock on the east side of the harbor, hit a high of $21.2 million in 2012. By 2017, this figure had slid to $14.8 million.  

Unlike Gurneys’ or the iconic Shagwong Tavern, Montauk’s commercial fishing boats don’t attract investors eager to keep their businesses afloat, and their property (boats, gear and permits) is not easily transferable from one person to another. Fishers are foragers of wild food in an industry that is heavily regulated, with quotas, licenses and practices dictated by state and federal governments. And unlike farmers, they have no federally subsidized crop insurance to tide them over when their harvest is threatened by wild weather.

John Nolan, his wife, Laurie, and their son John Nolan III are owner-operators of the F/V Seacapture (“F/V” stands for “ fishing vessel”), a boat that hauls in 25 percent of the tilefish caught in the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council’s region, which stretches from New York to North Carolina. John Nolan III, 32, has been captaining the boat since he was 21, fishing 100 miles off Montauk year-round with a crew of five. They are at sea for 6 to 10 days at a stretch.

Robert Aaronson, John Nolan, Tom Eshenfelder, Armaan Gretarsson, Marty Senkus and Steven Doyles on the Seacapture in Montauk with a load of Golden Tilefish. Credit: David Handschuh

 

On a brilliant October day last fall, the 82-foot Seacapture arrived in Montauk Harbor with 20,000 pounds of tilefish in the hold. It had been a longer trip than usual: While a nor’easter pounded the coast, Seacapture had stayed far offshore, out of harm’s way. The entire crew was on deck in a celebratory state, including one young salt wearing a bunny outfit (Halloween was a few days away), who helped secure the boat as Nolan III stepped onto the dock to an emotional welcome from his mom, his sister Molly and his sister Jean’s baby, a cherub named Bodie. His father was picking up a large order of bacon-and-cheese sandwiches to feed everyone. Cousin and former crewmate Robert Aaronson, who had gone out to the jetty to take in Seacapture’s safe return, was on hand to help unload. Nolan III pointed proudly to the hold, packed full of cleaned, iced fish, and said, “Oh yeah.”

The crew—Tom Eshenfelder, Stephen Doyle, Al Ellis, Mark Semkus and Armann Grettarsson—were ebullient. “We had a little bit of weather,” Nolan III said. “But we fished every day. We have a good boat for it. We were getting beaten up pretty good, good-sized waves one day. Stuck it out and caught some fish.”

Extreme weather, the sprawling thicket of regulations and quotas, and reproduction and migration changes in fish species are existential threats to today’s commercial fishing business. The key to survival is to grow and maintain a sustainable fishery, and the story of how the Nolan family developed the market for Atlantic golden tilefish out of Montauk is worthy of a Harvard Business School case study.

The Nolans catch tilefish on a longline, a 40-mile length of wire rope with 4,000 baited hooks that snap on, an innovation John Nolan introduced to the Montauk fishery in the 1980s, after he and Laurie saw it used to catch tilefish during a fishing sojourn in Florida. Prior to that, most Montauk fishers used nets for tilefish, but the Nolans’ new gear began to outperform the traditional method.

Left: Unloading Golden Tilefish from the Seacapture on the dock in Montauk. Top: Captain John Nolan III on the Seacapture. Bottom: Steven Doyles sorts Golden Tilefish by size in the hold of the Seacapture. Photo credit: David Handschuh

Although it takes a skilled crew to bait and then remove fish from the line without being gouged by the business end of a hook, line-caught fish are never damaged by a net, and the method, when properly managed, results in less bycatch.

It was Laurie Nolan, who shed for five years alongside her husband, that spearheaded another important change in the Atlantic golden tilefish industry in 2004, when she decided the fish was getting a bad rap. Since the 1970s, the FDA had put tilefish in the same category as swordfish, tuna and king mackerel—fish that contain elevated mercury levels and should not be consumed by pregnant women or small children.

Knowing that the warning was based on samples taken in 1976 from the Gulf of Mexico in the vicinity of oil drilling (which can produce mercury pollution), she wanted to see if the local tilefish, which live in deep, clean water and do not migrate, had elevated mercury levels as well. She followed testing protocols and sent samples of fish caught by her family to a lab for analysis. The results showed no danger from elevated mercury levels, the FDA amended the warning and Atlantic golden tilefish became recognized as one of the most sustainable and healthy fish around.

It’s also one of the most delicious. Most of the Nolans’ catch goes to Hunts Point, the vast wholesale market in the Bronx, where restaurants and seafood shops from all over the Northeast go to buy fish. A few thousand pounds is distributed through Dock to Dish, a community-supported fishery program that supplies Montauk seafood to restaurants and consumers, and another 1,000 pounds of whole tilefish from every load goes to Gosman’s to be filleted and sold to East End restaurants. With a firm texture, white flesh and flavor similar to lobster (because of their habit of eating crustaceans), tilefish is a favorite of chef Dan Barber at Blue Hill at Stone Barns in Pocantico Hills and makes a regular appearance on the menu at Nick & Toni’s in East Hampton. The Nolans’ tilefish is a mainstay at the New York Google cafeteria, where 5,000 employees not only enjoy eating it, they know who caught it.

The same goes for the Jonah crab claws from Montauk’s John Aldridge and Anthony Sosinki. They are fishing partners who have been instrumental in establishing the viability of this meaty- clawed creature, usually considered a bycatch of lobstering. Sean Bennett of Dock to Dish said the Google employees are particularly enthusiastic when steamed Jonah crab claws are on the menu at the company cafeteria.

Googlers may not realize, however, that they’re eating the catch of bonafide media figures, ones who can tell you in harrowing detail about the dangers of the job. Aldridge and Sosinski, longtime partners on the F/V Anna Mary, fish for lobster, and in the middle of one July night in 2013, Aldridge, alone on deck, fell off the boat. He spent 12 hours in the ocean without a flotation device or GPS personal locator beacon before he was pulled out by the Coast Guard. The story of the resourcefulness and resilience he called on to survive long enough to be rescued became a book and movie, “A Speck in the Sea.”

“It’s a job for somebody who has something to prove.”

John Nolan III

Even if you don’t fall overboard, fishing is not for the faint of heart. “It’s a job for somebody who has something to prove,” said Nolan III. “For me, it was my dad, I guess. You got to dig deep some days. You wonder, ‘What am I doing?’ And you just do it anyway.”

Family plays a part even for someone like Dave Aripotch, who happens to be one of the few commercial fishers in Montauk who did not grow up in the business. At 63, Aripotch is “the oldest full-time offshore guy” in the area, and he’s been at it for enough years to prove he’s not just being rebellious. “I’ve been doing this since I was 18,” he said. “Some nights I wake up in a mad panic thinking, ‘I’m going to have to get a real job someday.’ ” Like so many baby boomers born on Long Island, Aripotch went clamming in the Great South Bay as a child, but unlike most, he graduated quickly to working on a commercial trawler, going for swordfish, tuna and tilefish on trips that would have him at sea for weeks. Today he works from the 73-foot FV Caitlin & Mairead.

Aripotch’s wife, Bonnie Brady, is his advocate and shore-side support, as well as a vital voice for commercial fishers at sea, who can’t attend the endless rounds of hearings around issues of licensing, fishing regulations and quotas. “It requires 15 plates spinning,” she said. “If you do it right, you have this great harvest of fish and you get to feed people.”

So far, none of Aripotch’s children has shown an interest in following him into commercial fishing. His first mate, Jackson Urgilez, has been working with Aripotch for more than a decade. Aripotch hopes to work out a deal to pass the boat and his fishing permits to Urgilez when he retires in a few years. “I would like to see him do it. I would like to see fishing stay in this town.”

Montauk’s fishing families have mixed feelings about government regulations and quotas, which can hurt their short-term bottom line but help keep species sustainable in the long run. A prime example is the sea scallop fishery. “Scallops made a big recovery,” Aripotch said. “You had to rotate the areas, which makes sense. They came back. So did fluke, sea bass, striped bass. They put all these regulations in place, and fishing got better.” That is not to say that Aripotch approves of government intervention in his business. A recent proposal, to allow a Danish company to build a wind farm in the middle of a prime fishing area 35 miles offshore, is one that Aripotch and most other commercial owner-operators out of Montauk consider a serious impediment to their business.

Hank Lackner, owner-operator of the trawler Jason and Danielle—at about 90 feet, the largest commercial fishing boat out of Montauk—thinks the threat the proposed wind farm poses can’t be fully appreciated by people who don’t understand how much space in the ocean fishers need to operate. When the nets of a trawler open up, they are like a huge sail moving through the water, herding schools of fish before them.

“Those windmills, you can’t tow a net around them,” Lackner said. “They become closed areas, even if they are a mile apart.”

Lackner’s main cash crop is squid, and for the past two years the cephalopods have been unusually plentiful. The handful of commercial fishers who have permits to take squid caught their quota so early, they had to stop fishing by midsummer. Lackner fishes with two of his children and is hopeful that they will continue the family business.

“We’re some of the last hunter-gatherers on Earth,” Aripotch said, as his crew unloaded 50,000 pounds of porgy—equal to the biomass of about five mastodons. The fish were iced, boxed and bound for Hunts Point. “It’s money, but I never lose sight of producing food. Like a farmer ... harvesting fish.” 

By Charity Robey Special to Newsday

Gerry Siller. Always have a rag in your hand.

CHARITY ROBEY PHOTO
Gerry and Roni Siller on the front porch of their Shelter Island home.

Published in the Shelter Island Reporter on August 29, 2019

Gerry Siller was in high school when he decided to apply for a job at a new restaurant near home in Massapequa. He’d worked at his father’s deli in Bellmore, so knew how to make a sandwich, and when the hiring manager came out to see if anyone in the around-the-block line of applicants was a short-order cook, Gerry raised his hand. He was hired, and just before his first day on the job, a friend told him the secret of success for any job: “Just have a rag in your hand and always be cleaning things.”

This multi-tasking, continuously-improving way of life has been good for Gerry, from running bars and a restaurant in his early years to a successful landscaping business on Shelter Island, to his time as Town Supervisor from 1998 to 2001.

Gerry has decided to run for another term as supervisor in the November election. “When I did it, I loved it,” he said of his time leading Island government. “It was the best job in the world.”

Eighteen years later, Gerry said some of the same issues he worked on then are still front and center on the town’s agenda, including water quantity and quality, deer overpopulation/tick-borne disease and affordable housing, and he’s ready to take them on.

At his side is Roni Siller, his wife of 43 years. Roni and Gerry both went to Massapequa High School, where they met at a Friday-night party 50 years ago, and have been together ever since. He was president of the Key Club, and a schmoozer. “He would talk to anybody,” Roni said. “He just knocked me off my feet.”

After graduation, Gerry went to the School of Visual Arts to study photography, and Roni studied at Marywood University and became a school teacher. They lived in Massapequa where she taught, and Gerry ran bars and opened a seafood restaurant in Copiague, which resulted in his worst work experience ever. The chef he hired to design and execute the menu suddenly quit a month after they opened, and Gerry had to learn to cook every dish on the menu.

“I was the chief cook and bottle washer,” Gerry said. “In a hot kitchen, with stress.”

Roni introduced Gerry to Shelter Island. Her grandmother was one of the original homeowners in Hilo Shores, on land that had previously been a poultry farm, across from another chicken-producer, Cackle Hill. Roni had been going out to her grandmother’s place for many years when she brought Gerry in the early 1970s. He was impressed. “At the time, there were cows on Menantic Road, and I remember going rowing right off of Hilo and seeing scallops coming up in the water all around us,” he said.

The birth of their daughters persuaded Gerry and Roni to move the family from Massapequa to Shelter Island, where all four girls went to the Shelter Island School K-12 and were active in horseback riding. Kristen studied business in college, She lives and works in Kentucky, and has two children, Grace, 8 and Riley, 13. Meghan, who was valedictorian of her class, went to Connecticut College. She works as an administrator at the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York city and has a child, J.D. (James Douglas).

Molly was the best horseback rider of the family (according to Gerry), and went to the National Horseback competition. She lives in Cutchogue with her spouse and two children, Wyatt and Austin. Katie went to Catholic University of America and is a nurse at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York.

Four children with an intense interest in riding meant the Siller family kept horses in the back yard, and sometimes they got out. Gerry got a call one night informing him that his horses were over by Hampshire Farms, almost a mile away. By the time he arrived, the Police Department was there, too, and the officer suggested instead of walking the horses home in the middle of the night, they’d use the squad car. He drove slowly as Gerry sat in the open trunk and the horses walked home behind the car.

When the family first moved to the Island, Gerry remembers people told him that if he was willing to work, he might not get rich, but he’d never go hungry, and he considered that good advice. Gerry worked in landscaping and owns a garden center, and Roni taught home economics at the Shelter Island School.

He was active with the PTSA and then on the Board of Education for 10 years, starting in 1988, during an exciting time in school history. He served on the Board of Ed that removed the superintendent/principal and replaced them with Lydia Axelrod, who would go on to be one of the most popular and successful school superintendents the town has ever known.

“We knew we needed someone who could mend things,” Gerry said, referring to the trouble and controversy that surrounded the previous superintendent/principal. “Lydia was great — she’s still paying attention, and may be reading this — she was a healer.”

The school needed additional classrooms, and the Board of Ed got funding approved for building a new wing with classrooms and an auditorium in late 1980s. It was a bare-bones budget, with Board member Cliff Clark working with an estimator to keep track of costs, and using seats recycled from another auditorium.

Gerry’s work on the Board of Ed only ended when he decided to run for supervisor in the fall of 1987, beating Hal McGee, a popular and well-respected member of the town council.

He set to work implementing and extending the good work of his predecessor in the job, Hoot Sherman. “Hoot got the affordable housing on Bowditch Road and started the Ram Island Causeway from the Army Corps and we followed through on it. We petitioned LIPA and they buried the power lines. We wrote the zoning code and created the near shore overlay district to protect the fragile areas.”

He turned the Recycling Center around from a money drain to a money maker with the help of Brian Sherman’s skill for finding markets for the town’s recyclables. When a funeral home in the center came on the market, Gerry oversaw the purchase of the building as a new Town Hall, allowing the Police Department to emerge from the basement of their current headquarters.

When the time came to run for a third term in 2001, Gerry was the driving force behind a referendum on the ballot to expand the Highway Department property by buying some adjacent acreage. People who liked the idea thought it would provide a site for industrial infrastructure on the Island, but those who opposed it thought it was too high a price to pay.

“To this day, I believe it was the right thing to do,” Gerry said. “The referendum was defeated, and so was I.”

Gerry and Roni have remained involved in the community. They’ve had their share of health crises, including Gerry’s esophageal sarcoma in remission, and more recent serious health problems that Roni is dealing with.

“We lean on each other, and the family,” Gerry said, “and we’re more appreciative of Shelter Island than ever. When we’ve had problems, people have rallied to help us.”

As he enters another election cycle, he’s reminding Islanders that he has always been a strong advocate for affordable housing. What’s new are the models he’s proposing for town and private development of homes for Island workers.

“Darrin Binder bought the A-frames and he is fixing them up for year-round rentals,” he said. “It’s serving a purpose. It’s not a drain on the neighborhood, it’s not a drain on the aquifer.”

He’s also satisfied with the four-apartment house a few doors down from his home that was developed by Janalyn Travis Messer, and is now fully-rented.

“My plan would entail using town-owned land and the homeowners would own their houses. If they sold, they would have equity in the house,” he said. “Start with two houses, and then you can show this is what we are capable of, it’s a good start.”

Not for a minute has he taken the rag out of his hand.

Lightning Round

What do you always have with you? A pocket knife.

Favorite place on Shelter Island? The North Ferry, coming to Shelter Island.

Favorite place not on Shelter Island? Anywhere with my grandkids.

What exasperates you? When kids tell me they’re bored.

When was the last time you were afraid? When Roni had a health issue lately.

Favorite movie or book? ‘The Power Broker,’ by Robert Caro.

Favorite food? A good hot dog. It should be a little crunchy.

Favorite person, living or dead, who is not a member of the family? Our neighbor, Eleanor Oakley — upbeat, a real role model.

Most respected elected official? Daniel Patrick Moynihan, he worked across party lines.