That was in 1966; three years later he was working two hundred miles offshore in a forty-foot wooden boat. “Never so much as cracked a pane of glass,” he says. “Bigger doesn’t always mean better.” Eventually he was running four or five sword boats out of Gloucester and pulling in hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. One winter he and his son started accumulating ice on deck on their way back from Georges Bank. “If you’re making ice on Georges you know you’re going to be in real trouble closer to land,” he says. “We went back out and that night it blew a hundred from the northwest and
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