For the first time in 30 years, Corey Wheeler Forrest has a job on land.
A third generation fisherman from Rhode Island, Ms. Forrest started this spring as the new director of the Seafood Collaborative, the main program of the Martha’s Vineyard Fishermen’s Preservation Trust. The Seafood Collaborative buys Island fishermen’s catch, donates the processed fish and also ships it to the mainland, allowing fishermen to access more markets than the Vineyard itself can provide. It also runs a community supported fishery program, where participants pay upfront for a monthly seafood share, distributed through the West Tisbury Farmer’s Market.
“It’s an outlet for fishermen to sell to, just to expand their horizons — because on an Island, you only have so many choices, and we’re not the only fishing harbor,” said Ms. Forrest in an interview this summer. “That’s what’s so beautiful about [the Island], having the umbrella of the Trust to be able to help fishermen.”
Ms. Forrest grew up near Sakonnet Point in Rhode Island, where her family’s trap fishing business operated for 80 years. It closed in 2024, strained by the cost of equipment and labor.
“The price of fish never goes up, but everything else does,” she said. “I feel like if we had something like [the Trust] back at home, it would have been a different story. Like maybe we could have kept going.”
Ms. Forrest brings a rich history of fishing to the collaborative, said Shelley Edmundson, the executive director of the Fishermen’s Preservation Trust. She also understands the support required to keep the fishing industry alive.
“Their program of buying and selling seafood out of our shack has so many facets,” said Ms. Edmundson. “[Corey has] already just unlocked so much potential for us.”
Ms. Forrest now lives in Menemsha, and can be found most days at the Seafood Collaborative, a 600-square-foot shack next to Larsen’s. Little kids plug their noses as they walk past, but Ms. Forrest barely notices it anymore.
On a recent summer day, inside the shack, one staff member weighed and vacuum sealed black seabass as another packed lobster into a box. Behind them came the hum of coolers and the clockwork-like crash of the ice machine. Outside, fisherman Matt Mayhew dropped off fluke, and fellow fisherman Aidan Gates prepared to lift three drums of lobster to the docks. They’ve both sold their fish to the Seafood Collaborative, and it’s Ms. Forrest’s job to distribute it.
Ms. Forrest knows fishermen. She knows how to “deal with them,” she joked.
“They’re incredibly passionate about what they do,” she explained. “My father was one of those people, and my brothers are, and it’s just what I grew up around.”
But growing up, Ms. Forrest never went out on the boat.
“I had no desire to fish, like, ever,” she said. “I was more interested in doing gymnastics and playing piano and reading.”
When Ms. Forrest was home one summer from college, her dad suggested she mend nets. She went out at 6 a.m. to the field where the nets were laid out and worked with old-timers who fished with her grandfather. They told her stories of fishing in the old days — smuggling casks of liquor with the fish during prohibition — and sang sea shanties all day, forgetting the lyrics and remembering them a week later.
“It was like a sewing circle,” Ms. Forrest said.
The next summer, she went out to the dock at Sakonnet Point one morning before mending, and her dad told her the crew was shorthanded. That was the first day Ms. Forrest went fishing.
“Once I was out there, ‘I was like, oh my god!’” she said. “I can’t believe I’ve been missing all this. And that was the end. Like, that was it.”
Over the next 30 years, Ms. Forrest fished side by side with her dad, trap fishing as her grandfather did beginning in the 1940s.
Trap fishing is Rhode Island’s oldest fishery, and started in the 1800s, according to Ms. Forrest. It uses football-field sized nets weighed down with two dozen 900-pound anchors in deep water. Nozzles lead the fish into a quarter-mile long leader net, which traps them in the larger net; each one can hold hundreds of thousands of pounds of fish.
To retrieve the fish, Ms. Forrest and her team would take out a 63-foot, 1963 steel boat towing three 30-foot skiffs. They’d set up the boats and, with a crew of ideally 15, haul the nets up. Then a bull net would scoop 400 pounds of fish at a time onto the boat.
In 2024, Ms. Forrest did her last season of trap fishing with a small crew. Plagued with engine failures and too few hands, she decided to cut loose.
“There was a grieving process,” said Ms. Forrest. “It was like my whole identity.”
After a harsh winter gill fishing monkfish and skate offshore, Ms. Forrest moved to Menemsha to lead the Seafood Collaborative as it seeks to move into a larger space, increasing its buying and processing capacity.
The Fishermen’s Preservation Trust plans to expand into the old Poole fish processing plant at 10 Basin Road, which a Vineyard couple purchased last year and leased to the organization. There, they’ll have more space to process, freeze and store fish. The trust also operates a refrigerated truck for fishermen to ship their catch to off-island markets, and a chandlery program that provides immediate replacement supplies for boats.
Ms. Forrest was one of the few next generation fishermen in Rhode Island. Here, the Vineyard fleet is seeing a surge of youth, and Ms. Forrest hopes to help them stay in business and educate the public to buy local.
“Everybody…really wants to see the collaborative succeed, and me succeed,” she said.
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