" Killing the Golden Goose..."

Blue Point, Long Island

I was nineteen when I did this picture and I recaptured it from memory alone.
It was of a lovely little town near where I lived called Blue Point. You might know it for its oysters. This was one of the main fishing ports for oyster harvesting where the fisherman would go out on the Great South Bay and harvest these delicacies for the world. Towards the later part of the sixties, blockages in the inlet via Fire Island led to a form of pollution that eventually killed the "blue points" off. Today, people still talk about the oysters as being Blue Points but they are not the real Blue Points that were once harvested off these shores. Over harvesting and mis-management killed off the oysters as pollution killed crabbing along with many of the fishing crops. At one time, fishing and farming were the two businesses that kept Long Island afloat. All you needed was a line and a rudimentary pole to catch flounder, fluke, blues, King fish and other popular fish; now they are mostly gone--victims of overfishing and neglect. And fewer and fewer fisherman earn their livelihood off the waters of the Great South Bay....

les Aaron