A Father-Daughter Team With A Lot Of ‘Fish’ Stories

by Jennifer Sexton

            CHATHAM--- Let’s get the obvious question right out of the way. Yes, it’s his real name.

            “My given name is Robert Story Fish,” says Robert Story Fish. “And I’m not the only one—my father was also Robert Story Fish. People get on the boat and they say. ‘Let me see your license. We don’t believe your name is really Story Fish.’ I had to do a lot of pushups in the service because of it. They’d say ‘Alright, who’s the wise guy?’ It wasn’t me! It was some comedian back in my family.”         

Story and Annie Fish (far right) with charter clients.

     Captain Story Fish is the owner, along with daughter Captain Annie Fish, of Chatham Family Charters. The two offer a range of services including fishing, seal watching and exploring the Chatham coastline with a focus on family entertainment and education.

            With a name so uniquely evocative of marine lore, you might assume that Captain Fish descends from a long line of fishermen. Fish actually comes from a long line of Vermont doctors.

            “My great-great grandfather, my great grandfather and my grandfather were all doctors,” he explains. “I grew up in Canton, and my grandfather had a place in Eastham. So we’d get to go down there for the summer when we were little in the late ‘40s and ‘50s. I’d fish with my father and my brother in Town Cove and out on the outer beach. Those memories always stuck with me, and I always worked summers near the water. I tried to stay near the water. I couldn’t get it out of my blood.” 

            Fish attended Bates College, a small liberal arts school in Lewiston, Maine. Once out of school, he entered the service. After four years in the Coast Guard, he took a job as a salesman for the 3-M Company.

            “I was selling printing plates and film and that stuff,” Fish says. “This was in the late 1970s, right when word processing was starting. Man, that was a crazy time. We were thinking, ‘Word processing? What’s that?’”

            Fish was dissatisfied with his sales job, and dreamed of a life on the water.

            “It was a pretty good job, but I hated sales. Driving around in a tie banging on doors is basically what it was.  Pretty much ‘Fuller Brush Man’ type stuff. Even if you’re in a fancy suit, its still cold calling and doing that stuff. I always wanted to be on the water. So my brother-in-law had a lobster business down here out of Aunt Lydia’s Cove. I used to call him up and say, ‘What’s going on down there?’ I wanted to quit and move down there and get a boat someday. He said, ‘Why don’t you come down and work for me for a summer?’”

            Fish was thrilled to be following his dream, but afraid that he wouldn’t earn enough money to survive. When he brought in more money that first summer than he had in an entire year at 3-M, he hung up his suit and tie forever. He was 35.           

            “I went, whoa! I quit then and there, came down here. The next year I bought a boat. Then of course you go through the cycles of not making enough to make payments, and then making more than you need. I had to figure that whole thing out. That was hard. One minute you think you’re going be a millionaire, and the next minute you say, ‘Oh, wait! Oh my God, this is a disaster!’ I think that’s what makes characters out of some of these fishermen. They go through that and they learn to just chill out. Today we got nothing and then the boat broke down, and the next day we get a pretty good load, so... interesting. I had a lot to learn. I thought I would be fine but there was a lot to learn. The guys I met were a lot of the old time guys like Jackie Our, Dave Ryder, Jimmy Harding, the Farnhams, Billy Amaru, the Eldredges, the old Cape names. They were all older than me and helped me out a lot. It was a real eye opener.”

            Fish tried his hand at a variety of fishing methods over the next six to eight years until he found his strengths. When earning a living exclusively by fishing became more difficult in the 1990s, he expanded his repertoire to include chartering to scientists out of Woods Hole and to small family groups.

            “That’s the most fun of all,” he says. “I got my license to take six people, so they are mostly families with kids, and it’s fun because any family that takes their kids out fishing--- they’re good families. My daughter Annie got involved once that got going, when she was 12, and she got her 100-ton captain’s license when she was 19. We love teaching people about the water. Our goal is to try to give them a positive experience and be safe and comfortable. We concentrate not so much on volume of fish, but on just catching something to get that experience, get a picture, and then let the fish go and teach them about nature.”

            The Fishes incorporate local lore into their trips, telling stories about the history of Chatham, the light, the break, and shipwrecks. They also enjoy teaching children about SONAR, fish finders, and the skills fishermen use to locate fish using nothing but their senses and the observable surroundings.

              In the off season, Fish does some painting and repairs and occasionally joins his brother John, an underwater search expert, hunting the ocean floor for his Cataumet-based company American Underwater Search and Survey. The two, along with other fishermen from Chatham and Cape-wide, travel wherever disaster strikes to help locate debris that might pose a threat to navigation or provide answers to the cause of airplane and shipping mishaps.

            “One time we went with some other fishermen from Chatham and Falmouth to Taiwan,” Fish explains. “Another time we had a job in Chile, looking for containers that fell off a ship that were filled with sodium cyanide and were in 1,500 feet of water. They want people who know the ocean, and fishermen are perfect for jobs like that.”

            Sometimes Story Fish gets a little bit of fishing in during his trips abroad, which can lead to some interesting fish stories.

            “I was down in Costa Rica looking for a crashed airplane, and when we had some free time we did some fishing. A local guy came up to us and said, ‘Rod and reel are just for the ladies.’ I said, ‘What do you mean? Why would you use a hand line when you have a much better advantage over the fish with a rod and reel?’ And he said, ‘Because it is my finger against his lip.’ Isn’t that great? I will never forget that.”

            Daughter Captain Annie Fish, now 23, has fished all her life. Her father says that females, even little girls, are often the best fishermen.

            “I asked my wife why she thought that was, and she said, Story, it’s because men don’t listen. Women do.’ It’s interesting. I still can’t admit it, but it might be true.”

            During the off-season, Annie exercises another talent by selling her original apparel designs, created from recycled materials, on the online handmade marketplace www.etsy.com. 

            For more information about Chatham Family Charters, call 508-237-2628 or visit www.chathamfamilycharters.com. To shop online at Annie Fish’s Etsy store, visit www.etsy.com and search for Annie Fish.

5/11/09