Thanks to Hollywood, the story of the Andrea Gail and her Gloucester-based crew lost at sea during "The Perfect Storm" is well-known.
Less familiar to those outside of Provincetown, though equally tragic, is the story of the fishing vessel Patricia Marie.
Rewind to the summer of 1976. Unexpectedly, and suddenly, codfish couldn't be found. Thankfully, the sea offered up another prized delicacy. About 10 miles offshore, near Pollock Rip, a scallop bonanza beckoned.
Capt. Billy King and his crew of six left Provincetown Harbor on Oct. 24, 1976, to load up, as they had done many times before. And load up they did.
On the voyage home, according to the Times archives, the Patricia Marie was filled to the scuppers with scallops. They were piled so high on deck the crew could barely see over the tops of them.
Granted, there were reports of 10-foot swells and 25-knot winds — not exactly smooth sailing — but nothing that an experienced Capt. King couldn't handle.
What happened next is still shrouded in mystery. The crew of Patricia Marie's companion boat, the GKB, noticed that at about 9:30 p.m. its sister vessel suddenly vanished from the radar screen.
GKB skipper Michael McArdle turned around to see whether they were in trouble.
"We heard men screaming in the water for help. But by the time we got there, the boat and the men were gone," McArdle told the Times the following day. "I saw it sink but we didn't have time to help. It went down in a matter of seconds."
The theory latched onto by investigators and local fishermen in the immediate aftermath was that the Patricia Marie was overtaken by a rogue wave, and, with its heavy load of scallops, sank fast and furiously. Volunteer divers with the National Marine Fisheries Service, when they finally located the sunken scalloper three miles off Nauset Light in Eastham weeks later, found no signs of structural damage and noted that it came to rest on the sea floor in an upright position, 135-feet underwater.
The day after the Patricia Marie went down, King's body was found floating three miles east of South Wellfleet. A week later, the body of Walter Marshall turned up in a fishing net.
It was a disaster for a small town where just about everyone knew or was related to someone onboard. It was made worse by the fact that over the course of the next few months, the remains of missing crew members would surface. All were eventually recovered except one, Dicky Oldenquist.
Henry David Thoreau, no stranger to these shores, once wrote "time is but the stream I go a-fishing in." But, like all things temporal, the stream of time eventually swallows up the men and women who live off the sea, as it was with the crew of the Patricia Marie. Yet, along the way, bountiful blessings were bestowed. The yin and yang of fishing. Great risk, delicious reward.
Did you know that in September 1941, more than 900 tuna were caught in a single day off Provincetown? Or that the schooner Willie A. McKay brought in the largest catch of codfish ever landed in P'town from the Grand Banks?
Have you heard about the Portland Gale of 1898 that destroyed 24 ships in the harbor?
Once upon a stream in time, Provincetown boasted the largest cod fishery in the country (next to Gloucester), and was second only to New Bedford as one of the largest whaling ports in the land.
Imagine: the tip of the Cape in 1875, with 54 long wharves and hundreds of fishing vessels and whaling schooners, making Provincetown the wealthiest town per capita in the entire commonwealth.
Commonwealth is also an apt term for the ethos of that time, as it was common for the local fishermen to share their wealth of seafood with the celebrated artists who began setting up shop in the tiny seaside village and who made the bustling life around Provincetown Harbor known in ports the world over.
But the stream of time moves on. The shifting tides of demand and methods, the emergence of industrial-sized fishing vessels, and stringent federal regulations have all but squeezed the life out of a once vibrant fishing community with its fleet of colorful boats and characters. Not that they're all gone. It's just that the boats are smaller and fewer, with less crew members aboard them now.
It's a history as rich and varied as Gloucester's, where there's a fisherman's memorial. It deserves a memorial in its own right. But when? Where?
Say hello to the Provincetown Fishermen's Memorial Committee, whose members have decided it's time to build a bronze fishermen statue to be erected in Lopes Square, or perhaps some other spot in town, to commemorate the town's fishing legacy and the remnants that remain.
Already, more than 200 residents have signed a petition in support of the project.
"We've had a lot of tragedy here with fishing. We've lost boats. We've lost men," memorial committee chairwoman Carol Peters told me Wednesday.
"I wish it could happen tomorrow, but it's going to take a lot of work," the lifelong Provincetown resident said, emphasizing it's early in the process and the memorial committee has only just begun to talk with the town's arts commission about where it goes from here.
"This will be dedicated to all Provincetown fishermen, living and dead. They've got to have something."
Build the statue and let it stand in the stream of time for those who go a-fishing.
Sean Gonsalves' column runs on Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Read past columns atwww.capecodonline.com/gonsalves. E-mail him at sgonsalves@capecodonline.com.
