Harvesting the Bay: Fathers, Sons And The Last Of The Wild Shellfishermen

by Ray Huling

Overview

A generational story of fathers and sons and the lives of New England shellfishermen.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780762770427
Publisher:	Globe Pequot Publishing
Publication date:	07/03/2012
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Ray Huling, a twelfth-generation Rhode Islander, comes from a long line of quahaugers. Drawing on his own history with shellfishing, he has written extensively about marine affairs for the town of East Greenwich, Rhode Island. Huling earned a graduate degree from New York University’s School of Journalism and was a Fellow in the Reynolds Program in Social Entrepreneurship. .

Read an Excerpt

Harvesting the Bay

Fathers, Sons and the Last of the Wild Shellfishermen

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By Ray Huling

Lyons Press

Copyright © 2012 Ray Huling
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780762770427

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Introduction

Dad hung a picture on the parlor wall, and everyone mistook it for a photograph of a planet. “What’s that, Neptune?” asked a good friend. This pleased me because of Neptune’s association with the sea. What people mistook for a planet was actually my father’s eye. During surgery to repair his detached and torn retinas, his surgeons photographed his eyes from within their sockets. This operation ended his career as a full-time fisherman. His doctors said that the stress of his labor-intensive profession—the pounding of the waves, the strain of hauling in the catch—had damaged his congenitally weak retinas. To continue as a full-timer would likely blind him. My mother said he wept at these words. In all my life, I’d never heard of such a thing as my father crying. He was a man who didn’t cry. But this news collapsed one of the great arcs of his life: He had started as a fisherman at the age of ten.

Continues...

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Excerpted from Harvesting the Bay by Ray Huling Copyright © 2012 by Ray Huling. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Introduction: A Bullraker's Portrait vi

1 Cove, Bay, and Bay 1

2 The Feast of '85 18

3 Their Hardship, in Their Own Words 37

4 Water in a Dry Boat 51

5 Bullrake Men, Bullrake Women 75

6 Eulogies and Secret Codes 104

7 Young Guys 122

8 Food or Money 148

9 The Point of Quahogging 181

10 The Man Who Doesn't Eat Quahogs 194

11 Of Unions and Associations 211

12 Old-Timers Gone 237

13 The Coin of the Fish 253