Comment by shoover | Hacker News Reader

Comment by shoover | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I went to Stonington last fall with my family. It's a beautiful and interesting place. We were fortunate to rent from a lifelong local and tour with a retired oil industry scientist and learned about a lot of this while there.

The locals are very proud of the lobster industry and efforts to regulate it pragmatically but also humble and understanding that it could disappear quickly if the overall ecology changes and especially if the water temperature sweet spot continues moving north.

There is concern for the economic prospects of those who leave school early or skip college to take fishing jobs young and may not be prepared for much else if the fishing goes away.

I thought they said many lobster boat captains made more like double the article's stated $45k; of course, that's only for the owner/operator. It's no desk job, for sure: those guys are out on the water before sunrise every day (except during thunderstorms) and it is cold out there. They do wrap up pretty early in the afternoon.

A lot of the Northeast coastline acts like this from New York to Maine. You have to remember too that this area has a long and firm understanding of what overfishing does (Nantucket, whaling industry) and chose to try and find the most stable route. Most of that area's income is export of fishing and tourism from people from elsewhere coming to visit the beach. I grew up in this area and you are definitely brought up being very mindful of it.

> take fishing jobs young and may not be prepared for much else if the fishing goes away

Why not just go back to school and retrain for another career? Offshore and deepsea fishing is backbreaking, labour intensive work. I'd hope most of them were smart enough to figure out they aren't going to do this for the rest of their lives. Hell, I was a bartender once and even I figured out that standing on my feet 8-12 hours per day won't be possible after so many years.

>Why not just go back to school and retrain for another career?

You make it sound like such a trivial thing. There is usually considerable debt and lost wages taken on for attending school, even for someone fresh out of high school. Throw a family into the mix, and it becomes very, very difficult.

There are some jobs that are high paying, short-term only. If you're being realistic you realize that and try to extract as much money from it as humanly possible before the jig is up. Some examples include oil derrick roughnecking, professional sports, modeling (obviously), deep sea fishing.

Which is why you do it as early in your life as possible, where you might still be able to count on your parents support.

The word "just" is doing so much work in that sentence.

Yup - in addition, many take the winter off. It's hard work during the peak times of year, but I'd compare it to the schedule of a school teacher (~3 month break).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com