After the closure of Menemsha’s only wholesale seafood market last year, the Martha’s Vineyard Fishermen’s Preservation Trust has taken steps on multiple fronts to fill the void.
The Martha’s Vineyard Fishermen’s Preservation Trust said Tuesday that it hopes to lease the former Menemsha Fish House property, with an eye toward reopening the facility as a community-based wholesale seafood company.
Menemsha Fish House — one of the Island’s largest wholesale seafood distributors — has been shut down by its parent company, the owners confirmed Monday.
A smiling Alec Gale hops onto his 52-foot steel fishing boat, The Retriever. “We’ll see what happens today. Something always goes wrong,” he says. It’s 7:30 a.m. and Al has already been up for two hours. He spent the early part of the day with his eight-month-old son Riley. “It’s my only quiet time,” he says. Now he is bounding around his boat, starting one of its three engines, unhooking dock lines and moving the neck of a truck crane around.
There is a resurgence of activity in Menemsha this summer, and it is all related to getting seafood from the boats to the consumer. Every morning, visitors to Menemsha find fishing boats going in and out of the harbor. In the late morning they return from the fishing grounds laden with product