From a childhood obsession to his potential career plan, Willy Goldsmith ‘06’s passion for fishing has certainly been lifelong. He says, “I’ve always been known as ‘the fish guy’, and that obsession—for better or for worse—has permeated every aspect of who I am.”
Growing up fishing in his Boston neighborhood and off the shores of Gloucester, where he spent the summers, Willy had a bit of a rough time adjusting to landlocked Concord as a freshman at Middlesex. “I had been used to going on offshore fishing trips for cod and haddock nearly every weekend,” he recalls, “and Saturday classes put a damper on that routine rather quickly.” In fact, Willy remembers his mother calling his advisor, Alan Proctor (then the Assistant Academic Head) during his first month at Middlesex to see if he could miss Saturday classes one week to go fishing. “Understandably so,” Willy says, “her supplication was met with an emphatic ‘No!’” and Willy learned to “make do” by fitting fishing into his new life at Middlesex in other ways. He spent many Sundays off-campus on ocean-fishing trips, and the wonderful discovery of “the gold-mine honey hole that was (and is) Bateman’s Pond—chock-full of largemouth bass and chain pickerel.” “I would leave a fishing rod leaning on a tree behind the Warburg Library,” Willy recalls, “and would sneak off and make a few casts whenever my schedule allowed.”
Fishing on Bateman’s became a pastime, but also began to creep into his academic life. Willy credits his evolving writing skills with another major development in his fishing life—freelance writing for local fishing magazines. Willy submitted his first articles to The Fisherman and On The Water magazines during his sophomore year at Middlesex, and at just 16 years old, began to connect with people in the fishing industry and scientific community on a different level. While Willy says the writing was originally just a way to cure his “cabin fever” during winter months in Concord, he continued to write regularly throughout high school and college, and ending up creating an initial network of fishermen and fisheries scientists, many of whom he is still friends with today. In the classroom, Willy tried to incorporate fishing whenever possible. He remembers writing a term paper for Paul Harrison’s freshman history class on the “Icelandic Cod Wars,” and many of the skills he acquired in class – like research and communication—served him well through his college career at Harvard and his work in fisheries management beyond. His college History major had a distinctly fishy flavor—“Nearly every assignment I received that didn’t have explicit subject guidelines was contorted into some aspect of fisheries history– from the role of the Pacific cod industry in the U.S.’s 1867 purchase of Alaska from Russia to the evolution of the Soviet Union’s high-seas fishing fleet.” He also pursued a minor in Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, and worked as the animal care technician in Dr. George Lauder’s fish biomechanics lab.
A summer student fellowship at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution during college affirmed Willy’s thirst for independent research, which he now continues as a second-year PhD student at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, part of the College of William and Mary. His research focuses primarily on the recreational fishery for Atlantic bluefin tuna along the east coast, and incorporates both field work tagging tuna to study their post-release survival rates, and socioeconomic analyses examining the motivations and values of recreational fishermen. “What we’re trying to figure out,” Willy explains, “ is how economically valuable the recreational bluefin tuna fishery is, and how angling efforts will respond to changes in regulations and the availability of tuna along the coast.”
After he finishes school, Willy says he doesn’t think he’ll pursue the traditional path into academia that most other PhDs follow. Instead, he plans to leverage his knowledge of all the different players in the recreational angling community to maximize the economic value derived from fisheries while maintaining catches within biological limits. “The angling industry doesn’t need to be at odds with the fishery managers or the scientific community, and I hope to help engage all three communities in a way that is beneficial for everybody—including the fish,” Willy says. With an impressive education record and a lifelong passion for fishing behind him, we’d say he’s just the man for the job.
If you’d like to learn more about Willy’s research—or just “talk fish”—feel free to email him: [email protected].