INTERVIEW & EXCLUSIVE CLIP: North Atlantic fisherman takes to the ‘Deadly Seas’

When Discovery Channel premieres the North Atlantic episode in its new Deadly Seas series on Friday, June 22, fisherman Eddie Welch will probably be watching.

His mother may not be.

“I’m actually reluctant to even tell my mother that the thing is going to be on Friday night,” Welch said recently during a phone interview.

Welch is the real deal, a scallop fisherman who uses salty language and has mastered the dangers off the coast of New Bedford, Mass., where his boat is docked He’s been fishing the North Atlantic for decades, and although he has pulled back from his own days at sea, he makes sure his skilled crew is ready to go with or without him.

After a friend put him in touch with the Discovery Channel, Welch and his crew found themselves the subject of Deadly Seas, a three-part series that looks at some of the most dangerous parts of the ocean in the world. For Welch, the North Atlantic waters run in his blood. “My mother’s side of the family came from Newfoundland,” he said. “My grandfather on her side was a fisherman, and a couple of my uncles were fishermen. … My father’s side of the family, he was an educator, principal in the New Bedford school system. He used to always tell me, ‘You’re not going to go down there with those bums. You’ll get hooked up, and you’ll end up just like your uncles.’ ”

Welch admitted that he tried college and a few other professions, but then he made a simple decision: “I went fishing.” For the past 40 years, he’s never looked back.

In 1980, he built his boat, a vessel that’s been with him ever since. At one point, he was averaging 280 days a year offshore with 13 crew members. The scallop season begins and ends in March, although he can sell his catch at any time. “Some of the guys like to wait until winter, because they figure they’ll get a better price. But then you’re fighting the weather. You’re fighting the fuel price. As I see it, the fuel always seems to go up.”

Competition isn’t as stiff as one might think. There are few scallop boats operating out of New Bedford because the waters are essentially a “limited access fishery” with a finite number of permits available — all efforts to regulate the local fishing industry.

“We’re actually making more money in this bit of time than I ever did,” Welch said. “What we’re making now is beyond our wildest dreams back in 1980. We never, ever did what we’re doing now. And that’s good because a lot of people fought this conservation thing. I kind of endorsed it, because I was always fishing. But you get these guys that own fleets of boats. … Those guys always want more days, more days, but now because there’s so little time, the prices come up. So, you know, it’s like a farmer saying, ‘We’re losing $10 a head a cow, but we can make it up in volume.’ So if I could fish two days and make the money I’m making, that would be fine by me.”

Welch said he owes much of his success to his dedicated crew, many of them having served on his boat for years. “They treat me well. I treat them well.”

He sells his catch at a display auction, a fairly new process for New Bedford. “So I come in, I take out my catch and I put it in this auction,” he explained. “People can come in and look at it, and they can bid on the product. It’s a lot cleaner for me. I don’t have to worry about the gang thinking, ‘Oh, yeah, he made a deal with this guy. He’s taking 20 cents under the table. Or, whatever’s going on.’ The auction, generally, we get a better price, and they pay you for quality. So there’s an incentive for my gang to do a good job keeping the product right.”

For this fisherman, with 40 years in the business under his belt, the excitement may have lessened, but the drive to make money and offer quality seafood still motivates him to head out from the safety of the Massachusetts coastline to the dangers of the North Atlantic.

When he leaves the dock on yet another trip to catch thousands of pounds of scallops, he can still see the energy in the younger fishermen. “They’ve got a lot of excitement,” he said. “I never like to go, and once I get gone, I never like to come home. Those are always the two hardest days for a skipper. You leave and you got to make sure you’ve got the right grub, everybody shows up, that you’ve got enough gear if the s— hits the fan, that you’ve got filters and all this. There’s quite a bit to getting the boat out, and then once I’m out, it’s pretty peaceful. It becomes what you do. I don’t have to drive. I don’t have to face any traffic. I get up. I’m right there at work. I work my time. We work hard and long hours. But I turn in, I go to sleep, I get my four hours or whatever. Then I’m back up again.

“Coming home … you’re worried about what kind of price you’re going to get. … There’s quite a bit of stress. There’s stress going out; there’s stress coming in.”

By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com

• Deadly Seas featuring Eddie Welch airs Friday night, June 22 at 9 p.m. Click here for more information. See below for an exclusive clip.