Kings of Their Own Ocean by Karen Pinchin

Author:Karen Pinchin [Pinchin, Karen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollinsPublishers
Published: 2023-06-05T12:00:00+00:00

THAT FIRST YEAR of the US moratorium on Atlantic bluefin, during the steamy summer of 1982, 13-year-old Steve Tombs grabbed the rubber-gripped handlebars of his secondhand yellow bike, yanked it upright, and jumped onto the seat. He pedaled furiously down a small hill, feet churning, trying to build enough speed to make it up the next rocky rise. His family’s Snug Harbor cottage sat on a lane leading up to a slightly bigger lane, which itself led only two ways: back to town or down to the harbor. He picked his course and headed for the ocean: he wanted to make sure he was at the marina in time to greet the salt-scaled tuna fishing boats returning from a day on the water.

In his early teens, Tombs spent summers in Narragansett, Rhode Island, in a gray wooden summer cottage his family had built themselves over two weeks during their son’s spring break. As he grew up, Tombs passed every afternoon he could watching the deep-keeled tuna boats arrive at the harbor. Using winches and machinery, fishermen hung enormous giant bluefin from a board painted with the marina’s name and phone number; they nailed dried-out tuna tail fins, useless to Japanese tuna buyers, to the weathered dock posts where they docked their boats. They were gory, weaponlike trophies, proof of triumph. This was the height of the 1980s tuna price spike, when it wasn’t unusual to have a half-dozen giant fish, often 400, 500, or 600 pounds, regularly hung up on the same day, one after the other. In previous decades, the giants might hang there for hours before being bought in bulk and sold as cat food, but those days—especially considering Japanese buyers’ demands for freshness—they rarely stayed there long. Any day it wasn’t pouring rain, Tombs ditched his bike, found a spot to sit, and simply watched, sometimes buying a soda or an ice cream. On Saturday afternoons, cars and people and trucks and trollies filled the marina. People gawked, embarked, disembarked; bought fuel and snacks; sold fish and bait. He spent his summer this way, and spent the winter dreaming of fishing.

The next summer, mustering up his courage, Tombs walked out on the flaking dock propped on the rocky shore and approached a familiar boat. Al Anderson, for all his fearsome reputation on the docks, seemed happy enough to answer an hour or so of questions while hosing off the Prowler. After a few weeks of hanging around when Al docked, the bashful 14-year-old boy wrote him a letter asking to volunteer as a mate: “Dear Al,” it went. “You don’t know me, but I’m the kid standing around on the dock watching you when you come in.” Al couldn’t bring himself to say no.

Starting every summer day in 1983, Tombs walked the sloping shoulder to Snug Harbor Marina well before the sun was up, taking care not to get hit by half-awake fishermen driving their trucks through the dark. Working at Anderson’s side, Tombs fell in love

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.