Adventures with Egg Mud and Scaling The Harbor Breakwater: Fiona Skeggs on the 2022 Ghost Gear Recovery Program

Photo caption: Fiona aboard the F/V Miss Lilly on the first day of the CCS 2022 Ghost Gear Recovery Project out of Provincetown, MA. (Annie Lewandowski)

 

May 11, 2022.
Fiona Skeggs is a graduate student in the health, science and environmental journalism program at Northwestern University. As part of her studies, she embedded with the Center’s Marine Debris & Plastic Program for a month this spring. This is her report.

By Fiona Skeggs

When I first arrived in Provincetown back in April it was a beautiful spring day – clear blue skies, sunshine and only a slight chill in the air. I’d just flown in from a very cold, wet and miserable Chicago, and the change in scenery was, quite literally, a breath of fresh air.

I was to spend a month with the Marine Debris and Plastics Program as part of my master’s project. But I wasn’t there in a science capacity as is typical of a visiting student at the Center for Coastal Studies; I was on a month-long reporting assignment for my graduate program in health, science and environmental journalism.

It was a pretty jam-packed month. Between online classes, daily journaling and homework assignments I spent eight days on the F/V Miss Lilly grappling for ghost gear, scrambled over both breakwaters collecting trash, and walked the beaches at Race Point, Herring Cove and Nauset Light. I recorded four hours and 22 minutes of video, took over 900 photos and asked endless questions.

The bulk of my time was spent aboard the F/V Miss Lilly with captain Mike Rego and Owen Nichols, director of marine fisheries research at the Center. Mike was one of four fishermen involved in the 2022 Ghost Gear Recovery Project, and Owen was collecting data and marveling at all the weird and wonderful critters we found.

A typical boat day involved heading out early to a location around Provincetown Harbor -Long Point, Wood End or Billingsgate Shoals. Mike would let out a line with a weighted grapple and tow in wide circles until the line snagged. He’d then haul the line in while Owen and I eagerly anticipated what would be on the end. More often than not it was a lobster trap, but gill nets and rope were also a frequent find. Owen would photograph and document the items we found, and I would photograph Mike and Owen hard at work.

It was a dirty job, and it took a while to acclimate to the smell of benthic mud (rotten eggs if you were wondering). In addition to noting the location where the trap was found, its size and condition, we would also hunt for trap tags. These would identify whom the trap belonged to and give an estimate on how long it had been on the seafloor. Some traps would emerge completely covered in the aforementioned “egg mud,” would wash off to look good as new but be 20 years old – others would have tags from 2021 and have a menagerie of sponges, tunicates and other unidentifiable slime growing on them. And while we couldn’t save all the slime, we did our best to return all the little critters to the ocean: Crabs, lobsters, fish, mussels, sea slugs, urchins, sea squirts and odd-looking worms.

Being out on the water with Mike and Owen was the highlight of my trip and an experience I’ll never forget. I’m now back in Chicago sifting through hours of video footage, hundreds of photos, and pages of hand-written notes to find what is referred to in the journalism world as “the blade of grass” that will be the focal point of my story (I guess on the Cape it would be the grain of sand!). Having the opportunity to immerse so fully into the project was an incredible experience, and I will forever be grateful to Laura Ludwig and the Debris Brigade for welcoming me into the fold. No doubt I’ll be back in Provincetown one day.