Friday, January 8, 2010

at home and abroad

Well, here at HAWSEPIPER's floating HQ, it's been an active and tense week, and the Office Folk (I almost said office drones, but the truth is the office folk here are all former mariners themselves, and good people) have really gone overboard providing us with warm bodies and materials for repairs and upgrades. We're out of service for a major repair (one which I won't go into, as someone got fired over it (but not us!)), so the opportunity was there to do repairs and some preventative stuff that should make life easier. All is well, though we've lost some bunkering jobs as a result of being out of service without a replacement available with similar capabilities. So it goes.

Anyhow, last night I got a blast from the past... the educational corporation who funded my overseas research when I was a student sent me an email. There is a Dutch graduate student who will be traveling to the US this summer to work on his master's thesis. He will be looking at effect of market infrastructure and regulation on the economics of the american lobster industry. This pretty much is a homerun study, for me. It touches on some research areas in which I have a deep personal investment: economic modeling, lobsters, commercial fishing, and politics.

After almost 10 years dormancy, my research skills are no doubt soggy and hard to light, and my vocabulary is in the toilet for sure, but I'm feeling the deep stirrings of intellectual curiosity, not to mention the need to catch and kill some of God's most ancient marine creatures. Plus, even though I'm no longer vice-president of my region's lobsterman's association, and I haven't pulled a lobster pot in 2 years, some of the skills needed are still in my muscle memory, and where they're not, it would be smart to touch base with the political, scientific and fishing community around New England again to keep my chops up.
Fuck it, I'll say it... I'm excited.


Perhaps this will be a nice way to fuse some interests- I can help out and open doors for this prospective researcher.

4 comments:

will said...

change is good, even if it's a deja-vu kind of change. have fun pulling pots and doing maine biology.

Paul, Dammit! said...

I hope to... it'll be a nice way to blow off steam between cruises at my regular job...

Anonymous said...

let us know when you are in maine. I have a place on the Penobscot and am there at the moment for some winter. Sometimes work on a boat there.

bigsoxfan said...

I would imagine you have read "the lobster gangs of Maine" but if you haven't. I found it interesting, as the ground work for the study was done around my childhood home in Waldoboro. No judge of the conclusions, but interesting study of the social underpinnings of the modern industry and some insightful viewpoints on the lobsters migratory patterns. I would have to say, a must read, unless the author has some fatal professional flaw, of which I know nothing. BTW, glad you didn't get the axe, although, I'm thinking your shore engineer is regretting some choices. if your student needs some introductions to a couple of mid coast lobster families, I can oblige.