Douglas A. Campbell (2)
Autore di The Sea's Bitter Harvest: Thirteen Deadly Days on the North Atlantic
Per altri autori con il nome Douglas A. Campbell, vedi la pagina di disambiguazione.
Sull'Autore
Douglas A. Campbell is the author of The Sea's Bitter Harvest: Thirteen Deadly Days on the North Atlantic. Previously a longtime reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer, in 2014 he was coauthor with Michael J. Tougias of Rescue of the Bounty.
Opere di Douglas A. Campbell
Etichette
Informazioni generali
- Sesso
- male
Utenti
Recensioni
Potrebbero anche piacerti
Autori correlati
Statistiche
- Opere
- 3
- Utenti
- 62
- Popolarità
- #271,094
- Voto
- 4.4
- Recensioni
- 2
- ISBN
- 27
Still, companies who owned the tags that limited production always wanted to make sure they met their quotas — not to mention the public, whose bizarre taste for clams unfathomably knew no limits. The more clams that could be brought back in a load meant more profits all around, since each crewman was paid a share. A captain could earn as much as a high school superintendent, and an otherwise uneducated crewman as much as a teacher with a master’s degree. Overloading was common. " 'Someone asks you to carry a two-hundred-and-fifty-pound man across the parking lot on your back, you can do that. That's a clam boat with a full load of clams. If they ask you to carry a second two-hundred-and-fifty-pound man on top of the first, you can't do it. That's a clam boat with a full load, taking on water,' " recorded one captain.
During a thirteen-day period in January 1999, four clam boats sank. Ten fishermen drowned, and Campbell's book is an expansion of a series of articles that was published in the Philadelphia Inquirer.
The intrigue of books like this is not just the recurring "man against the sea" theme. I love the detail of how things work, how the jobs are accomplished. Two different types of clams are dredged off the Atlantic Coast: quahogs and surf clams. Neither is typically served in restaurants. They are used for chowders, clam strips and other inedible clam dishes (or is that redundant.) The boats, usually less than 200 feet long to avoid the requirement for a licensed master at the helm, carry enormous dredges that scrape along the bottom. Every 25-30 minutes they are brought up, and clams and detritus are dumped on a conveyor belt where the clams are sorted and dumped into large cages for transport back to canning plants in Virginia, New Jersey and Maryland. The cages weigh about 500 pounds empty. When full, they are very heavy and how they are loaded becomes critical important to the stability of the boat. The boats also have several fuel and hydraulic oil tanks that must be watched carefully so the boats, which usually have a very low freeboard, don't develop a list that would cause them to capsize. This is especially likely because, the captains’ tendency to overload their boats with cages raising the center of gravity and reducing stability. In addition, numerous valves that pump out bilges and holds must be well maintained and operated properly, or instead of pumping water out, they will let water in, again reducing a boat's stability and increasing the likelihood of capsizing. So there are lots of things to watch out for and to monitor.
Drug use among fishermen is a huge problem, and fishermen accounted for 30-40 percent of the arrests for heroin usage in the nineties. Since clamming could be very profitable when things were going well -- a hand could easily earn up to $60,000 a year, much more money than could be earned at most other jobs requiring no education -- they often had money to burn. Campbell became close to several of the bereaved families. This and his research into the clamming industry provide a moving and balanced picture. He discusses safety standards, describing negligence both by the companies and the fishermen themselves. Other related books that I have previously reviewed are: [b:The Perfect Storm|108229|The Perfect Storm A True Story of Men Against the Sea|Sebastian Junger|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1171580454s/108229.jpg|1887699] and; [b:The Hungry Ocean|173165|The Hungry Ocean A Swordboat Captain's Journey|Linda Greenlaw|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1172413473s/173165.jpg|1842743] a book on King crab in Alaska. One can never have too many good nautical books.… (altro)