‘Display’ Auction Proves to Be Quite a Catch for Massachusetts Fishermen

At daybreak they gather, more than a dozen bleary-eyed men with their cups of coffee, orange rubber gloves and cell phones, for a ritual that might just save the fishing industry here.

The Seafood Display Auction--on this as on any day--begins at 6 a.m. sharp. And before anyone has had time to visit the coffeepot for a refill, Louis Linquata, veteran buyer for Northcoast Seafoods of Boston, has outbid everybody to win dibs on 5,452 pounds of fresh, wet haddock.

“Ours! Good fish!” Linquata says proudly. “Beautiful haddock.”

The auction opened in 1997, when “America’s Oldest Seaport” wasn’t living up to its fame. Fishermen were struggling miserably, in the face of government restrictions limiting how much they can catch, where they can catch it and how long they can spend doing the catching.

There has been a renewed spirit among fishermen in this town that fishing made famous, and many point to the auction. It has, they say, revolutionized their business and helped them adapt.

In the past, making more money meant catching more fish. Captains scoured the oceans and brought to shore as much as their boat could lug home. They often accepted a low price for one catch to get quickly back on the water in search of the next.

The auction puts the focus more on quality than quantity. Fishermen, unable to catch as much under the regulations, spend labor and resources trying to catch the best fish and buy the best equipment to keep it fresh at sea and make it look attractive back on shore. They are rewarded with higher prices, which seafood companies are often happy to pay for the better quality.

Gloucester captains are receiving on average 10% to 20% more than several years ago, when buyers rarely inspected the fish before buying according to prices set in Boston.

“Where you used to need 50,000 pounds of fish to make the amount needed to pay captain and crew, you need 25,000 pounds today,” says Vito Calomo, executive director of the Gloucester Fisheries Commission. “A couple years ago, they were down on their knees, and now some guys are buying second boats. Say the fishing industry is the heart. Then this auction is an artery. It is pumping new blood into this heart.”

When the auction opened, there was already a disturbing metamorphosis in Gloucester. Some fishermen were quitting, and many feared that the town was becoming a museum of fishing history rather than an active seaport. In the town’s heyday, the 1940s, millions of pounds of fish arrived each day at the bustling wharf.

“We did this out of necessity,” says Larry Ciulla, whose family of third-generation fishermen invested $3 million to launch the auction. “We felt we were losing an industry in this city, and we wanted to keep the industry here. We took a gamble.”

“Display” auctions--where the fish are laid out for inspection by buyers before bidding, and purchases are final--are common in other parts of the world, such as Australia and Japan. They are relatively new to the United States but may be catching on, as fishermen from New England to California to Alaska are lobbying for them.

Like most buyers, Linquata arrives at the Gloucester auction about 4:30 a.m. each day. He is immediately given a list of the last day’s catch, the weights of the fish and which of the 350 or so boats served by the auction it came from. “This is the morning news,” he says, sipping coffee.

Linquata spends an hour in the warehouse--a gymnasium-sized refrigerator, really--where the fish are stored, and he inspects whatever entices him, poking raw cod, haddock, mackerel and shrimp with his big rubber glove.

The buyers, representing companies from all over New England as well as Chicago and New York, then gather in the bidding room, and the bellowing voice of auctioneer Butch Maniscalo takes over: “$1.90 you are . . . $1.92 Paul . . . $1.93 Louie . . . ‘ And so it goes for about two hours. Immediately after the auction, the wares are loaded onto trucks and reach supermarkets or restaurants within 24 hours.

If anything seems a bit anachronistic on this 17th-century wharf, it’s the auction’s fancy technology. A big-screen monitor displays prices (and CNN during breaks). The buyers, more bankers than watermen, wear headsets linking them directly to their bosses, who demand play-by-play on the bidding.

The buyers watch one another suspiciously, wary lest a rival buy up a crateful of fish they may want for themselves. A buyer’s nightmare, says Ciulla, is for a competitor to land a batch of haddock at a low price, then undersell you to a precious customer. Such fears often result in bidding wars, eliciting few complaints from the fishermen.

More than 5,000 fishermen worked out of Gloucester in the 1970s; about 3,000 remain.

The auction has been almost universally embraced by the remaining fisherman here as a way to help them adjust to new times. But they insist that they would have found a way to survive anyway.

“They might be down a little, but they’re not out,” Gaetano Brancaleone, president of the Gloucester Fishermen Assn., says of his comrades. “As long as you see an ocean here, there will be fishermen.”