Fresh Catch
A new business venture and changing climate mean a new crop of local shellfish may soon be making its way to Rhode Islanders ’ plates .
Rich Fuka peered through curtains of rain , whipping on thirty-five-mile-per-hour winds , from the dockside doorway of the Narragansett Crab Company . It was 7:30 a . m . and the Aces High was due in with a hold full of Jonah crab . “ Biblical — if it had been snow ,” he declared cheerfully . It was bad enough as it was . A pre-Christmas storm of arctic temperatures , heavy precipitation and gale-force winds was wreaking havoc across the United States . Rhode Island was warm , but the wind and the high tide conspired to push a section of Great Island Road under a foot and a half of water and invade the building ’ s plywood floor . Point Judith was an angry soup of pallets , planks and other assorted gear that previously occupied the docks .
Despite paralyzed holiday travel , Capt . Ted McCaffrey and his crew had chugged home seventy miles through eight- to twelve-foot seas and wind gusts of fifty miles an hour to land their catch in Galilee .
Fuka spotted the boat ’ s fire-engine-red hull nosing through the gray and dragged the scale into place . “ OK , here we go .” Two years ago , Jon Williams , a veteran fisherman and the owner of the Atlantic Red Crab Company in New Bedford , Massachusetts , saw an opportunity in a defunct warehouse built over an aged dock in Galilee . Williams , who began harvesting this deep cold-water species in 1996 from a single boat , operates a fourteen-vessel fleet continually traveling from the Canadian border to Cape Hatteras , catching and freezing hagfish for export and crab bait for his main business : harvesting Jonah and deep sea red crabs . In 2007 , he opened a crab processing plant to bring his product to market readiness . Atlantic red crabs were a niche fishery , but Williams had worked hard to develop a customer base in the restaurant industry , and later the nation ’ s largest grocery chain . Today , he sells more than 4.5 million pounds of red crab annually — harvested by his own crews or purchased from other fishermen .
“ We had expanded in New Bedford as big as we could get ,” he says . “ I ’ ve seen a lot of waterfronts and as soon as I saw this , I said , ‘ This is where we need to be .’ The state is receptive , and it seemed like a really nice mix of high-end condos , tourist spots and a commercial fleet — everybody sharing the same footprint . I don ’ t know where you are going to find that at that scale .”
He hired Fuka as his business manager with the task of renovating the facility to off-load , store and process crab and other species brought ashore . The 1948 building once had been the largest fishing co-op on the Eastern Seaboard . More recently , it had been leased by the Ocean State Lobster Company . But the building had sat idle for more than three years by the time Williams purchased it .
“ That kind of neglect on a waterfront takes its toll ,” says Fuka . “ We had a heavy lift just to get everything working .”
In December , Williams purchased the adjacent fuel dock . The
30 RHODE ISLAND MONTHLY l MARCH 2023 PHOTO ILLUSTRATION : GETTY IMAGES AND EMILY RIETZEL .