Stories about someone’s successful career often begin with their start on the ground floor. For Marty Scanlon, that was the bottom of Great South Bay.

“I started clamming when I got out of high school. Back then in the early 1970s there was a big set of clams on Great South Bay,” said Scanlon.

Today Scanlon, 70, of Hauppauge, N.Y., is captain of the Provider II, a 43-foot longline vessel that he pilots on trips of seven to ten days from New England for tuna and swordfish. A longtime figure in the tightly knit East Coast fleet, Scanlon started pelagic longlining in 1985 and has been president of the Blue Water Fishermen’s Association since 2017.

Scanlon was young when he first began working on the water back around 1970. The economy was not ideal, with inflation rising and then a Mideast oil embargo and energy crisis.

“I was going to college. Guys were working entry-level jobs in New York City making $140 a week,” Scanlon recalled. “I was making that every day clamming.”

While clamming part-time, Scanlon studied and played football at Nassau Community College on Long Island. After graduating in 1972, he continued clamming, working from 7 a.m. to 2 p.m. daily and then going to his union custodian job in evenings. But after six years he was making more money clamming, and when the custodial union ended up with a disappointing contract, “it was like, what am I doing here?” he said.

He looked for more opportunities in fishing. Longlining for tuna and swordfish was a growing sector and Scanlon started working in the fishery on Northeast boats like the Happy Hooker.   He got to know and learn from pioneering captains like the late Nelson ‘Hammer’ Beideman of Barnegat Light, N.J., who was among the founders of the industry group Blue Water Fishermen.

Scanlon bought his boat Provider II in1990. Built by the renowned Key West, Fla., boatbuilder Claude Torres, the 43-foot fiberglass hull was based on a 45’ Navy utility boat design, said Scanlon. The mold was taken off one of the original wooden hulls, after Torres shortened and flared the bow to ease the pounding and porpoising that tended to damage stringers.

“The boat’s legendary,” moves fast and “looks like a destroyer” at speed, said Scanlon. During those first years with Provider II the offshore trips were austere. “For a long time we didn’t have a generator. We’d call it camping out on Provider II, just running what we could on the 12-volt.”

As he grew in the fishery, Scanlon began to participate in fisheries management, joining the Blue Water Fishermen’s Association. Serving on the National Marine Fisheries Service Pelagic Longline Take Reduction Team in 2003, Scanlon helped resolve some conflicts with the introduction of a “communication protocol,” he said.

“The environmentalists were after us with everything they could find,” recalled Scanlon, including accidental takes of sea turtles and other protected species. 

On the ocean, fishermen were already commonly sharing information about where turtles were being sighted and how to avoid them – a new data source for take reduction efforts. New gear and training helped fishermen make longline sets less likely to take non-target species and successfully release those they encountered.

Among his advisory roles Scanlon serves on the NMFS Atlantic Highly Migratory Species Advisory Panel, and the Hudson Canyon Sanctuary Advisory Council as an at-large citizen member. 

Scanlon was among hundreds of U.S. fishermen who signed a 2015 letter to then-President Barack Obama urging him not to declare the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument under the federal Antiquities Act. Fishermen stayed involved as the Obama administration moved toward the designation, and Scanlon recalled being at “the final meeting before Obama rolled it out.”

The industry’s input did succeed in limiting the extent of boundary line boxes around the monument area. Without it, “that thing could have been even more devastating,” said Scanlon.

Established under the Antiquities Act, the Seamounts monument encompasses an area of the Atlantic nearly the size of Connecticut, ranging south from the Oceanographer, Gilbert, and Lydonia canyons at the edge of the continental shelf 130 miles off Cape Cod, to the Bear, Mytilus, Physalia, and Retriever seamounts, remnants of ancient volcanoes.

Monument advocates said the proclamation was needed to protect threatened and endangered marine mammals in the waters, and complex habitat on bottom slopes including deep corals.

The Obama administration moved to phase out trap fishing for lobster and crab, over protests and court challenges from fishermen’s groups. In July 2020, then-president Donald Trump announced he was rescinding the planned final ban. 

Within days of taking office in January 2021, President Joe Biden’s administration moved to restore all the planned restrictions, at the urging of conservation and environmental groups. Commercial fishing advocates asked the new administration to reconsider, to no avail.

“Pelagic longline gear used to catch swordfish has no impact on habitat,” James Budi of the American Sword and Tuna Harvesters longliners’ group said at the time. “Fishing impact on the monument below us is like a bird flying over the Grand Canyon.”

The 2024 presidential election could flip the situation again, Scanlon observed.

“If Trump gets back in, we expect the monument to be opened right up again,” he said.  With the Biden-Harris administration now, “the fear we have is 30-by-30” – the administration’s policy of protecting 30 percent of U.S. waters by 2030 – and its goal of building 30 gigawatts of offshore wind installations in that same timespan.

The Blue Water Fishermen’s Association started in the 1990s “to repair the damage that was done to the fishery” with mismanagement and international pressures on Atlantic stocks, said Scanlon. With offshore wind development, Scanlon says he’s worried “we’re following the same path” toward unseen future consequences.

Effects on fish from electromagnetic fields around power cables within turbine arrays and export cables that convey energy to shore are a major worry for him, with the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management pursuing its plans for future developments farther east on the outer continental shelf.