'Ask Any Mermaid You Happen to See...'

The intrepid, if little known, Harvard fishing team set sail off the coast of Nova Scotia in the early morning mist of August 28, searching for the denizens of the North Atlantic waters.

The five man Crimson contingent--coach Dave Zewinski '76, seniors George Hughes, Gene Purdy and Jon Stein and sophomore Tommy Murray--had entered the International University Sports Fishing Seminar and Competition which has been sponsored by the town of Yarmouth, Nova Scotia since 1956.

Zewinski, who works in the real estate management part of the Buildings and Grounds Department when he's not coaching, is the old salt of the group. He has participated in the tourney for the past five years, unlike the rest of the team who are all relative tyros to the world of deep sea fishing. As Gene Purdy remarks, "I felt bad having to pull those fish out of the water." But Purdy's heart soon warmed to the task at hand and by the end of the tourney he landed an 11-lb. Gadus Callarias, known as cod to the laymen, the third largest catch in the tournament.

Hughes, Purdy, and Murray are all standouts on the Harvard varsity hockey team. Fishing is a pleasant diversion for them in the off-season. Murray happened to work with Zewinski last summer at Buildings and Grounds. Zewinski forms the team just once every year for the tournament, and asked Murray to join this year. Murray then contacted Hughes and Purdy and the Crimson fishing team had its starting roster for 1978. Although he has netted a lot more goals than bass in his lifetime, Purdy declared his three days in Nova Scotia, "the best athletic experience I've had at Harvard."

Five American universities compete against five of their Canadian counterparts in the tournament. The U.S. was represented by Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, UMass, and Lock Haven State College. Lock Haven surprised the field by winning the University Cup for the greatest amount of fish caught. Over the three day period, the three men and two women on the Lock Haven team poled 1,696 lbs. of fish.

Originally, the tournament was envisioned as a tuna catching shindig, but since its inception only four tuna have been boated. (The fishermen have hooded nine others, all of whom got away.) In 1964, George Deagle of the University of Western Ontario brought in a 703-lb. tuna. However, the tuna population has been on the wane in the past few years, and the peak tuna season comes two weeks after the tournament.

"The fishing wasn't that great," Zewinski says, but the Harvard squad that arrived for the fishfest by dint of a ten-hour ferry ride from Portsmouth, Maine was never disappointed in the least. "It's basically a good time," says Hughes. The team lost little time in starting to enjoy themselves, beginning with the gambling casino on board the Portsmouth ferry.

One of the most enjoyable aspects of the tournament is a chance to fish with French Canadian fishermen who sail the boats in the tournament. Most of the professional fishermen are tightlipped men who grew up in the nearby fishing villages and are now in their sixties. One exception to this rule is a fellow named Norman who Zewinski befriended a few years ago. "Norman's a little borneo," Zewinski says. "He has the hot rod of the boat fleet, a boat called Red Sun. One night we went into a bar with him and he ordered fifty beers."

The end of August is the off-season for the Canadian lobster fishermen. When they're not lobstering, they spend their time long mining. Long mining is a laborious process in which the fishermen drop a 10,000-yd. long rope with fish lines spliced into it at 6-ft. intervals into the water. The fishermen haul up the rope and remove the catch, rebaiting every line as they go along.

The tournament commenced from idyllic Mateghan wharf with the Crimson venturing out in a lobster-fishing rig named the Mary Jane, skippered by a one-armed graybeard named Melbourne. Melbourne and his crew of two prepared an al fresco fish chowder for the Crimson fishermen's lunch. "They would pull a fish out of the water, filet it, and throw it in the pot," Purdy says.

The Crimson dropped anchor in a teeming school of off-shore mackerel in the afternoon. "It was incredible," says Zewinski. "We were pulling in six mackerel at a time just as fast as we could drop the lines in." Zewinski and company used deep sea rods, equipped with phosphorescent lures attached to the six hooks on each line.

By the end of the day, the Harvard boat was crammed with 359 lbs. of mackerel. This was good, but not good enough, for the Lock Haven boat had espied the school before anyone else and had thus been able to catch a whopping 1,502 lbs. of fish in the first day.

The Crimson then returned to dry land for a clambake, cornbroil, and "Fun-in-the-Woods" session. The team was also treated to a seminar on the more abstruse aspects of salt-water fishing by icythyologist Aubrey Gladwin, who lives nearby in Herring Cove, Nova Scotia.

The second day of fishing found the Crimson's 25-ft. dory pitching on tempestuous seas and most of the team members leaning over the rails. Purdy queasily recalls, "I spit my tooth out, that was how sick I got. It was the highlight of the tournament."

Coach Zewinski praises Hughes's performance under adversity, saying, "George got seasick but he made a big comeback. He was asking where the beer was by the end of the day." Zewinski adds, "I never get seasick so I was stuck with doing the fishing all day."

The final day of the tournament, the Crimson fishermen had the ignominious distinction of failing to hook a single fish. "It's just unheard of not to catch a fish all day," Zewinski says. Actually, the team was not completely shut out, since Zewinski caught a 6-in. sea robin and hauled in a large clam shell from the ocean bottom. The squad also spotted a female whale but decided not to give chase.

Thanks in part to Harvard's disappointing finish the U.S. was edged out for the Nova Scotia International Trophy, as the Canadian colleges caught 3,599 lbs. of fish altogether, 27 lbs. more than the Americans.

This is one sports competition, however, in which winning is of wholly secondary importance. The real appeal of competing on the Harvard fishing team is evoked by that closing stanza of John Masefield's poem:

I must go down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life,

To the gull's way and the whale's way where the wind's like a whetted knife;

And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover,

And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick's over.