I was standing on Turtle Hill on Sunday about noon in front of the Montauk Lighthouse and beside the Lost at Sea Memorial looking down on eight seals close to shore, some floating on their backs, others with just their heads out of water looking shoreward at the few human visitors.
Johnson Nordlinger, the assistant site manager for the Lighthouse Museum, said she watched the seals surfing the day before, hitching rides on the swells rounding the point. Fishing, surfing, equally expert at both activities, and with no friction between “user groups.” Eating when hungry, wasting nothing. No need for industry, conservation a natural thing.
Back in about 1974, I think it was, I worked as a deckhand on the Joey, an offshore lobster boat. Its captain, Dave Krusa was, and is, a master mariner and ingenious fisherman. The body of federal fishing laws now known as the Magnuson-Stevens Act was in the process of being written. Foreign fishing boats were about to be kicked outside a new 200-mile territorial limit. . . .
To read the remainder of Mr. Drumm’s article, please click here.
