Joe Roderick, a fisherman’s story • Part 4

Story as told by Joe Roderick, part 4 of 5

I stop and think back to '50 when I bought the boat. In '54 I got caught in a hurricane in New Bedford putting a new engine in the boat.  That's another deal where I went backward again.  That happened almost right after I purchased the boat. I had to pay off the people down in Gloucester that owned the 16ths. In 1968 I put in the next engine. In '68 the boat sunk alongside the wharf.  She got punctured with a pole. An old pole, with a big spike, come out of Skarloffs Wharf and drifted against her on Christmas Eve. I went to Christmas Eve Mass. I went down the wharf after Mass. It was Midnight Mass. I went down to the wharf. I saw the boat there. It was right on the end of the wharf, right on the end of the T. I went home and went to sleep.  

Next morning I get a knock on the door. My brother Sonny came over and told me, "Joe you better come now." The boat was sunk alongside the wharf. There she is laying away from the wharf.  It was on a cold, cold day when we brought the boat up.

We brought it up with the mast against the wharf. When she fell, when she got full of water, she laid over away from the wharf, but was still fastened to the wharf. So we took a tackle from the top of the mast and pulled the boat to the wharf so that she would be level. When the tide went out, we could see the deck, but the boat was all-full of water inside. We got pumps to go down there and started to pump it out. We were able to pump out the water because she had watertight bulkheads.  And when we got a little water out of her, we were able to bring part of it up. That’s the way we moved her. The next day, after we moved her into the short water, two or three boats came near to my boat. They helped too. It was all community spirit. Everybody helped.

First we put it alongside the pier. At that time you didn't have to worry about putting oil and water from the bilge in the Harbor.  I don't know what would have happened with the boat if I wouldn’t have been able to recover it. We had the engine running in a couple days. We had to flush it all out.  But it was brand new. It had gone in the spring before. It was a Caterpillar, cost $15,000.  We took it to flyers afterwards. It was about three months before I went out fishing with the boat again.

I was up to Flyers. We had a little damage but it wasn't much. The biggest damage was to the engine.  All the electronics had to be replaced. That was like another $I0,000. But at that time I had insurance.  Now that's the part that always got me. It cost the insurance company $24,000 to pay off what I had done to that boat. The next year they wanted to double the premium that I was paying before.  I think at that time I was paying almost 10 percent interest on that boat. I had the boat  insured for $50,000 or $60,000 at the time. So can you imagine what I would have to pay? I could not. That's when I stopped. I stopped having insurance and I formed a corporation.  That’s the only way.  The next seven or eight years was very, very good. Then things started getting bad. 

There’s a long period when the foreign vessels started to come over. Before you know it, they were catching more fish than were all the boats in the United States put together. There was no comparison.  They’d have one big mother ship and all these big bean trawlers would be going out and supplying these mother ships with all the fish they wanted. They were right along our coast. We wrote our congressmen. They didn't respond. Kennedy didn't respond. The only one who did was Congressman Hastings.  We wrote three letters and some friends of ours wrote letters. They never heard anything.

I remember being in the Provincetown Inn talking with Ted Kennedy. He was down here one time.  I told him about the insurance and the problem we were having with insurance. It must have been in the 70's. It was after I had the trouble in '68 or '69 when I started fishing again.  It had to be in the early 70's when he came down here and I had run into the problem with insurance. What was I gonna do with the vessel? Here I am stuck with the vessel. I just put the engine in.  I invested at the time $44,000 or $45,000 to put in the new engine and new tanks and everything else I had to do to the boat. I was almost to the point where I would have been better off if I went and bought another boat given the money I was gonna have to put into the Jimmy Boy.  It was a real expensive deal. Teddy Kennedy didn't say a word. So I said, "I hope you do something about this insurance. We shouldn't be any different than the Canadian government.”  The Canadian government covered all Canadian boats. They would supply with the insurance and the boat would be under the government's supervision. But you couldn't do it in this country. I don't know why. 

You know the part that I've always been against. What ever happened to the marine fisheries when we had to have insurance? Look how many years we used to have fishing boats. We didn't have to have insurance on the boat or on the crew. Why? You had a marine doctor. You had a marine hospital. Everywhere you could go for nothing. Then they turned around and stopped that. Can you imagine what has happened through the years as a result of having insurance for crewmembers? It was to a point where it was impossible to supply the insurance for five or six men. There was no limit under marine law to what you are entitled for any injury you might get. If you were on a fishing boat or a marine boat, it's unlimited what you can sue for.  If you’re working ashore and you're a carpenter or you're some worker and you chop off a finger, there’s a limit to what you can receive. But when you do it on a fishing boat, it's unlimited.  It goes way back in marine law to the l770's or l 780's, and that's never been changed.

Part 5 coming soon …