My View of Life on the Dock
The Sunrise Amazing. The crew works to clean fish as they have every day out fishing while mother nature puts on a spectacular show all around them. There’s no audio but plenty to see.
We have two more videos from Frank which I’ll be posting over the next two days.
Entering tags on each photo I upload to flickr is sometimes a painstaking process but when you think about the sheer number of photos taken (say 100,000 or more) there would be absolutely no way to ever locate a particular photo without going through all 100,000 photos unless you have each one tagged with an identifying name.
It is through this tagging system that I can locate and isolate certain photos. It may be painstaking but the archive of photos from Gloucester and of my family that I can access with a few clicks of the keyboard are pretty remarkable.
Click the Picture for the Mondello Boys Gloucester Waterfront Slideshow
When the last load of gear is loaded on the dock happy times ensue. Video at 8AM
Nate Sits Atop The Last Load Of Lobster Gear Of The Season, originally uploaded by captjoe06.
Here the boys are getting ready to offload a pile of lobster traps. The cold water temperature haas made the lobstering activity slow down to a crawl and the time will be better spent fixing broken gear and making repairs than going out to catch very few lobsters this time of year. When the last load of traps comes in it is a big relief for lobstermen. It’s the end of another season and hopefully they’ve made enough to carry them through the winter.
Tuffy and Nate Prepare To Offload a Pile Of Lobster Gear, originally uploaded by captjoe06.
To say that the dock where the St Lucian Fishermen tie up was laid back would be an understatement.
St Lucian Fisherman, originally uploaded by captjoe06.
St Lucia Ballyhoo, originally uploaded by captjoe06.
Ballyhoo are a favorite game fish bait. Sport fishermen will bury the hook in it’s belly and then wrap the line up around it’s long snout. They look very similar to herring in the way they look except they are skinnier and have that long spear coming out it’s nose.
Ballyhoo Caught By Port of Castries Fishermen, originally uploaded by captjoe06.
I’m pretty sure they would put you away if you tried to land a yellowfin this size in the US.
Yellowfin Tuna At The Fishermen’s Dock In The Port Of Castries, originally uploaded by captjoe06.
They looked intimidating as hell but like most fishermen once you get talking to them they are a friendly bunch.
Port of Castries Fishermen Fillet Yellowfin, originally uploaded by captjoe06.
There was a rather large woman cooking something in a pot off to the right in the picture. A fire had been set using whatever scraps of wood that were around and the pot set right atop that fire. Under the fishing boats which were hailed up out omn the dock there were many small dogs playing with each other and some roosters roaming around. Obviously getting the dogs neutered was not high on the priority list.
Just across the bay were two cruise ships. Such a striking contrast between the big hulking and modern cruise ships and the very basic fishing boats.
Castries Fishermen’s Pier, originally uploaded by captjoe06.
Whenever we go on vacation I try to go to the fishing villiages to see the way different ports operate and how different fishermen fish. In the Port of Catsries they operate their fishing port in the shadow of a huge cruise ship industry. There were 2-3 cruise ships in port and they can accomodate up to five in the harbor of Castries.
Walking down the fishermen’s pier they do things the same way they’ve done them for generations. The men were filleting baby yellowfin and ballyhoo. Alongside the pier there was the Fisheries administration building and a small fish market.
At The Dock, originally uploaded by captjoe06.
click pic for full sized version
Beautiful Industry Working On Herring Net, originally uploaded by captjoe06.
Click the pic for the slide show of all the pictures I’ve taken and tagged with the term lobster-
You suppose we could get Three Sheets To The Wind to perform this one?
thanks to Paulie for the heads up on this one
The boat had a little over a foot of snow aboard after the snow storm. There’s a whole set of precautions that commercial fishermen have to take to keep their boats going through the extreme cold temperatures. Frozen coolant lines, frozen lobster hoses, snow engines freezing up.
It’s always best to have a block heater which keeps the engine warm and the fuel from gelling up. We plug our truck in and it starts up (usually) pretty easily but without that block heater forgettabout it!
Video at 6pm
Good Morning Gloucester 