After a lifelong career as a commercial fisherman, Capt. Bob Smith has swallowed the anchor and is on the beach, firmly aground. As self-imposed as his retirement may be, it doesn’t make the shift any easier for the plain-spoken Smith, who has been wresting a living from southern New England waters for 76 of his 88 years.
“Look at my hands,” says Smith, holding them out as if there is something wrong with them. “There are no blisters. No cuts.”
Smooth and unblemished, the hands strike him as those of a stranger. Smith misses the tough, calloused mitts that belonged to the working fisherman.
Even the most stalwart and stubborn of watermen eventually succumb to the effects of age. Commercial fishing is a punishing way to make a living, even for those who are at the peak of their physical powers. The small, low-sided boat that the old salt used for fish potting was not the safest platform for a savvy parttime octogenarian like Smith, who fished with a younger helper, but whose balance is not what it once was.
“My making-bucks’ days are just about over,” says Smith when I visited him recently at his home in Charlestown, Rhode Island. “I’m 88 years old and I’m all done. Pretty much time to say thank you.” Smith fills his days reading, puttering around, talking with old friends and new ones. He quietly longs for the sea and the hard work that has defined him since that time long ago when he first began digging and peddling soft-shelled clams called steamers. “You get to that point in life,” he says, “where there’s no one left.”
Smith loved salt ponds, the sea and the life of a fisherman. He could mend twine, splice wire, work a pair of tongs, bullrake quahogs, harpoon swordfish and run a dragger day after day, season after season. In addition to groundfish, lobster and clams, the waterman at one time harvested and sold mummies, fiddler crabs, eels, bay scallops and wrack weed, for which he received $1 a bushel. His mind remains sharp with names, dates, figures. It’s his body that is giving out.
“I’ve been lucky with fishing,” he says. “I got into it at the right time.”
Smith is a member of a dwindling clan known as Swamp Yankees—tough, smart, stubborn, laconic fishermen, farmers and merchants who go back at least to the Revolution. Found primarily in Rhode Island and eastern Connecticut, they are an independent, hard-working lot who don’t suffer fools and speak their minds. I asked Smith if he knew the term, Swamp Yankee. “You’re talking to one,” he said.
When Smith and his ilk are gone, their ways will move a step closer to history’s dust bin, which indeed will be a loss.
Smith could easily have toiled in the obscurity that some commercial fishermen, especially Swamp Yankees, seem to relish. But Smith spent more than 20 years sitting on various fishery management councils, serving as a calm, experienced voice for reason and fairness. And for what he gave back both to the industry and the fisheries, he was named a recipient of the National Fisherman’s Highliner Award in 1996, one of the highest honors in the commercial fishing field. Not too shabby for a person who was so shy initially about public speaking that he was nicknamed “whispering” Smith. I wasn’t aware he’d received the award until looking at the plaques on a wall in his home. “That’s the one that counts,” said Smith, tapping it with a finger. “You don’t go any higher.”
Smith spent the bulk of his career running a dragger and then a lobster boat, both of which were successful ventures. I assumed Smith was blessed with physical strength and stamina to wrest a living from the water for as long as he did. “There were people more powerful than me, but I had to have more up here,” the captain says pointing to his temple. “I ran the boats.” In his prime, Smith, who is 5-feet, 9-inches tall, weighed a solid 225 pounds.
When I first interviewed Smith two years ago, he was selling black sea bass that he caught in wire pots out of Point Judith, Rhode Island. “I can’t wait to go tomorrow morning,” said Smith then. “If it’s windy I sit around and chew my fingernails. I have to go as much as I need a hole in my head, but I love it.”
I checked in again with the captain last fall as his black sea bass season wound down. He was hopeful about fishing another year. “What are you going to do?” the captain asked. “Hang around the house and die?”
Smith doesn’t need the money, but fishing has been such an integral part of his life and identity for so long that he rues the idea of stopping. “I’d rather work than sit around,” he says.
His relationship with the ocean was as a student to a mentor. “My school is the ocean. That’s where you learn,” says Smith, who speaks with the sageness of an ocean oracle. “Ninety percent of the people learn what they do in the coffee shop. The most important thing I learned was to be on the ocean.”
Smith suffered one of life’s inevitable blows two years ago when he lost his wife, Trudy, of 64 years. They’d attended high school together but never dated until after they graduated. “My best partner and my best friend,” Smith says. “My sweetheart. We never argued.” He pauses. “I miss her so much.” He doesn’t care to dwell and so we change topics.
Smith made a comfortable living from the sea, but none of it was easy. It meant working hard and smart and keeping a sharp eye on anything that could give him an edge, from being an early adopter of sonar and radar to finding fish at times and places where others weren’t looking. The days were long. Smith typically got to the boat around 2:30 a.m. and didn’t get home until 7 p.m. or later. “You need a wife who understands,” he says. “I fished the weather.”
Driving him since adolescence is a work ethic so deeply ingrained that it’s difficult even now to shut off. “There is no such thing as luck in the fishing business,” says Smith. “The most important thing is to get your ass out of bed and get out there.”
The concept of a work-life balance is foreign to the old salt, who came of age at a time when there were few safety nets outside of family and your own skills and fortitude.
Smith’s father Doug was an inveterate Swamp Yankee forager, who lobstered in summers and trapped otter, muskrat, mink and raccoon in winter, selling the fur. In the dead of winter, when times were lean, his father sometimes worked as a weaver in the local mills, but he disliked it. Smith describes his father as a non-conformist. “He was a Swamper,” says Smith, referring to those wily Yankees in southern New England who scratched out a living from the sea or upcountry.
It’s not difficult to see where Smith got his independent streak. “I’ve never worked for anybody since I was 12 years old,” he says proudly. “I came from a poor family, but we survived. We never went hungry. Fish and deer meat, we lived on it for 40 years.” And muskrat, which are primarily vegetarians, he notes, are a whole lot better tasting than raccoon.
When Smith started shell fishing at age 12, he was too young to hold a commercial license or to open a savings account, so his aunt started a bank account for him and deposited his earnings. He rode his bike to Point Judith Pond and sold oysters and steamers to Babcock’s Boat Yard, which rented skiffs for $2 a day to fishermen handlining winter flounder. Proprietor Elmer Babcock took the denizen of the tidewaters under his wing. The boat yard bought Smith’s steamers for $7 a bushel. Smith received 75 cents for a pint of oysters that he scraped off rocks and $1.50 for a quart. “Shucked,” he emphasizes.
Babcock built Smith his first boat, a 16-foot skiff, perfect for working the pond. “We dropped it in the water, and I asked Mr. Babcock how much do I owe you?” recalls Smith, his memory sharp as a fish spine. “He said $136.75. The cost of materials. But I want you to sell me the clams.”
It was a good lesson for a young fisherman embarking in a business that is wholly transactional. “I fished for money,” Smith says, “not for fish.”
Smith attended South Kingstown High School, where he made friends with principal James Wright, who tried to talk Smith into attending college instead of fishing. “He said, ‘Why would you ever want to do that,’” recalls Smith. Wright encouraged him to go to college and become a school teacher. “I said, ‘Mr. Wright, I’m going fishing,’” Smith recalls.
The administrator and the student had a good relationship. As a senior, Smith took math and English in the morning, and the principal allowed his student of the tides to take the afternoons off to dig clams in Point Judith Pond. In return, Smith delivered 6 quarts of steamers to the principal every Thursday. “That was my payment,” Smith said. “It was another world.”
The young man had an offer to mate aboard a dragger out of Point Judith once he graduated and he grabbed it. “I was going to be a fisherman no matter what.”
Smith skippered two fishboats for the bulk of his career. Starting in 1956, he owned and operated the 50-foot wooden dragger David D for 25 years. He mortgaged his first house and took a loan from the dragger’s owner to purchase the vessel. At the time, the David D had the third most horsepower of any boat in Point Judith—its GM diesel produced almost 210 hp. And as Smith is quick to point out, “horsepower catches fish,” when it comes to dragging. Most fish can stay ahead of a net being towed at 4.5 knots, he says. Five knots is better and at 6 knots “you’ve got them.”
It was a steady, dependable work boat with classic lines and a dory perched atop the pilothouse. David D is small by today’s standards, but Smith took his share of cod, whiting, hake, winter and summer flounder. And he was determined to make it succeed no matter how hard he had to work.
One of Smith’s closest shaves occurred almost 50 years ago, while dragging at 2 a.m. in February, about 20 miles south of Block Island aboard the David D. The wind was blowing hard out of the northwest and the seas were 5 to 6 feet.
Fate chose that moment for an oil line on the engine to fail, spraying 250-degree oil and igniting a fire below. Smith and his mate entered the engine room with extinguishers and put out the fire. A short time later, the blaze reignited and this time the mate inadvertently sprayed Smith in the face with his extinguisher. The fire was put out, Smith washed his eyes and life went on.
“The most important thing is to respect the ocean,” he says. “Don’t be afraid of it. In a serious problem, slow the boat down and figure out what you have to do to get out of it. She’ll keep you afloat most of the time.”
Smith, who is not a big talker, has a knack for boiling ideas down to their essence. My favorite: “You don’t want to be in the water between 3 a.m. and sunup. Everyone is eating everything.”
When he was through with dragging, Smith bought a bare 36-foot Ralph Stanley hull around 1986 and fitted it out for lobstering, naming it the Trudy S after his wife. “Good boat,” says Smith, who fished it for more than 30 years. “I did a lot with it.”
Between running the dragger and working the lobster boat, Smith likes to say he “retired” for a couple of years. Retirement for Smith meant tonging quahogs with his wife 7 days a week for 22 weeks to pay for the house they were building in Charlestown. The couple captured the hard-shelled clams in Point Judith salt pond from a 20-foot skiff powered by a 75-hp outboard. Smith got his limit of 10 bushels a day and paid the contractor and his helper $800 a week.
He started lobstering in the late 1980s with 450 pots and eventually increased the number to 1,300 traps, which he set between Block Island, Montauk and Watch Hill. He found he could haul, bait and reset 350 pots a day with two mates. “I liked lobster because there was good money in it,” he says.
The Magnuson-Stevens Act of 1976 established federal management of fisheries and extended U.S. jurisdiction to 200 nautical miles. The seminal conservation and management act also created regional councils to manage the fisheries. Prior to that law, Smith says, “My job was to fill the boat with fish.” Post-Magnuson, he notes, “I got past the point of killing everything we caught.” Smith also played an important role as a member of the Rhode Island Marine Fisheries Council, where he spent 22 years, serving terms as both president and vice president.
“When I went on the council, I was just a dumb fisherman,” Smith recalls. “I was shy. I didn’t talk much.” Initially, he was intimidated by members with college degrees and white-collar jobs. “But they didn’t know as much about fish as I did,” he says. When Smith realized how important his knowledge was to council matters, he found his voice and became respected for his insights and honesty. “I told it the way it was,” he says.
He said part of his motivation for the council work was to improve the image of commercial fishing in Rhode Island and New England. Smith served for decades on various fishery management boards and committees, doing his best to represent fishermen and fish stocks in rooms with no shortage of fishery scientists with advanced degrees. Even when meetings were packed with divided, angry fishermen, Smith was not one to lose his cool, choosing to focus instead on what he considered the larger picture of the debates. “You have to lose a few skirmishes to win the war,” he says.
Smith lives on a hill in tidy house built on quahogs. From a rise, there is a distant view of his beloved Block Island Sound. On top of his home is a gold-leafed swordfish weathervane, a gift from his wife and a reminder of the years he chased swords south of Martha’s Vineyard. Smith says he’s sometimes asked what he would do if he could live his life over.
“The same thing,” the old Yankee replies. “I loved it. And I love it today.”
July 2025
