THE MOON IS STILL DIM IN THE WESTERN SKY, but a band of sunlight has risen over the horizon as Saturday tips into morning. An egret hunts for breakfast on the far bank, but the Weekapaug Breachway is otherwise empty. Jason Jarvis grabs a floating keeper car from the bed of his ancient Dodge pickup and drags it to the shore. A king tide is heading into Winnapaug Pond, so the green crabs will lie low and the catch will be light. Jarvis treads through thigh-high water, pulling up his traps, dumping the crabs in the keeper car, and popping the butterfish into a net bag for bait.

“Slow day,” he says.

The heavy tide and rollers beyond the breachway cancel his plans to go tautog fishing later. But the week ahead will be busy. In between cobbling a living from his lines, pots, and traps, he’ll be kitting out the kitchen for the summer opening of the Quonnie Fish Company, a fishers’ cooperative he co-founded. He’ll be making his weekly delivery to Providence as a supplier to a seafood program for low-income recipients.

In a few days, he’ll head to Brazil, as president of the North American Marine Alliance (NAMA), to discuss wind farms and the federal fishing permitting system at the 8th Annual World Forum for Fisher Peoples, an international organization that protects the rights of small-scale fisheries. 

For more than three decades, Jarvis has pulled a living from the water. Those years have honed his angling skills, as they have transformed him into a fierce advocate for the rights of independent fishers. Championing the marginalized is the slow work of repeatedly making your case—at public meetings, in the media, and in Congressional conference rooms. Jarvis began to speak up after watching the captains he admired labor to articulate the impacts of commercial fishing policies on their livelihoods.

“I realized, I’m a pretty smart guy with a good sense of humor and fairly decent education. How do I help these guys that have taught me everything I know?” he says. “I was so tired of seeing them struggling to pay their bills, while beating their heads against the wall of antiquated regulatory BS that was just benefiting corporations.”

NAMA Coordinating Director Niaz Dorry says that Jarvis brings one of the most important weapons to the fight against the status quo: persistence.

“The issues that we fight for don’t happen overnight. We look at the measure of what we can accomplish as: Are we staying in this marathon? And do we have strong runners? And Jason is going to stay in the marathon as a strong runner,” she says.

Jarvis also advocates as an educator and marketer for green crabs, a species long considered a scourge. First spotted in Massachusetts waters in 1817, these highly adaptable crustaceans aggressively outcompete local species for food and destroy eel grass—a critical ecosystem component.

Capable of consuming up to 40 clams a day, green crabs are also a threat to shellfish harvesters. As an invasive species, they are unregulated, making them an attractive catch for Rhode Island fishers, who can take as many as they want. Jarvis had been trapping green crabs for bait as a lucrative sideline. But several years ago, he joined the effort to promote them as food and encouraged others to become harvesters.

“A lot of commercial fishermen are secretive about the way they use certain traps or bait,” says Mary Parks, founder and executive director of GreenCrab.org, an organization creating a culinary market for green crabs. Jarvis, as one of their harvester advisers, “is willing to share his knowledge, and he doesn’t see it as competition. He sees it as building participation and getting more people excited about eating green crabs, which has been invaluable to growing the fishery.” 

Jarvis drifted through a variety of jobs before fishing became his profession: sous chef at 17, a stint at Sandy’s Fruit Market in Westerly, followed by a cook’s job at Corkery House, once a drug treatment center for adolescent boys in Wyoming. One day, the center’s director watched him bring two kids brawling in the dining room around to a truce and a handshake and offered him a job as a counselor. Corkery House paid for his training as a licensed chemical dependency professional, and two years later, he was the house manager.

At the time, Jarvis had been trapping green crabs for bait and fishing for food on the side. The captain of Seven B’s, who took some Corkery kids out for a charter fishing trip, noted Jarvis’s facility with people and boats and offered him a spot on his blue-fishing crew. He began working overnight shifts on the charter boat before reporting to his day job at 7 a.m.

One day, his brother Mike begged him to take his place on a commercial fishing boat while he vacationed for two weeks. Jarvis recalled his dismay when he opened his first pay packet and saw only $1,200. “I’m just sitting in my car in tears because I’ve got kids at home. And the captain saw me and he says, ‘You okay?’ I said, ‘That’s not a lot of money for a week’s worth of work.’ He starts laughing because that was for one day.”

Jarvis quit Corkery House to fish full-time. “It was a great program, and if I was independently wealthy, I’d go back to doing it. It just couldn’t pay the bills,” he says.

Charlestown’s Wilcox Tavern has had many lives in its 285 years: family home, general store, travelers’ inn, and the host of thousands of celebratory dinners. The working restaurant had been defunct since 2019, but its kitchen is about to rise again as a place where small commercial fishers can earn a living by directly packing and selling their product.

Freshly painted, but stripped of its stoves and ovens, the narrow space is crowded on a December evening with well-wishers for the Quonnie Fish Company’s open house. Jarvis is stationed at the far end of the room, shucking local oysters and chatting up the crowd. The co-op plans to create a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) for retail customers to buy shares of their catch and make value-added products like a mince of green crab meat.

This evening represented the culmination of seven years of work with partners, accelerated by the pandemic and a $20,000 state Local Agriculture and Seafood Act grant.

But Jarvis has long been mulling a different model of commercial fishing. He spent 15 years in the big boat fishery, switching off weeks at sea with crewing charter boats. The money was good, but he watched his future prospects disappear in the wake of the Magnuson–Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act.

Passed in 1976, the law extended U.S. jurisdiction 200 nautical miles, established regional fishery management councils, and offered low-interest loans to build up the domestic fleet. Eventually, it set catch limits on specific species in specific seasons. It has been re-authorized twice and now covers 1,000 species.

In addition to limiting the total allowable catch (TAC), the law allocated shares, called individual transferable quotas (ITQs), of a particular fishery’s TAC to individuals or groups. ITQs were established to promote more efficient and sustainable harvests. Essentially, a permit to fish an ITQ can be bought, sold, or leased. Small fishers like Jarvis and fishery organizations like NAMA have criticized the system for concentrating its quotas in fewer hands and allowing them to become more valuable than the catch itself. ITQ holders can include entities that don’t fish at all—such as a retired fleet owner or an investment company that makes money leasing their ITQs to the actual fishers. Lessees complain that the fees can be onerous, slicing the profit to razor-thin margins for those going to sea.

“If you wanted to get into the federal fishery, you needed to have a lot of money. It was no longer, you work the deck, then you work your way up to a captain, and then an owner. I saw a lot of people get broken,” Jarvis says.

In 2015, he joined NAMA, and in 2019, became its president, advocating for the passage of the Domestic Seafood Production Act. The act would prohibit permitting or constructing offshore fish farms in federal waters without Congressional authorization and promote research on their environmental impact. He continues to tackle the unintended consequences of the ITQ system.

“We’ve been at this for 13 years, trying to stop the corporate privatization of the fishery, and progress has been slow, but we’re doing all right—making people aware of it, number one,” he says. “It is such a complex issue.”

In Rhode Island, Jarvis was among those who successfully pushed regulators to change state licensing regulations to allow fishers to make direct retail sales, and served as a member of the Rhode Island Marine Fisheries Council for 5 ½ years.

Jarvis works just as hard on consumer access to seafood, participating in a U.S. Department of Agriculture program to distribute fresh fish to 1,500 food-insecure families served by a variety of community organizations. Jarvis remembers the program director’s reaction to his first delivery.

“She looked at me and said, ‘Does it smell?’ ‘No,’ I said. ‘This is fresh caught by my friends who package it and freeze it.’ ‘This is for us? And it’s fresh?’ She was dumbfounded. That was an eye-opener for me,” Jarvis recalls.

He also partners with the African Alliance of Rhode Island. Director Julius Kolawole praises Jarvis’s dedication to “the neighborhood and the opportunity that’s been denied over many years,” and adds, “Our philosophy is not to be a charity. We want to be a part of the economy of seafood, because this is the Ocean State.”

To that end, Jarvis works with the alliance to teach people how to fish commercially and to navigate the licensing and food certification processes required to run a food business.

A fragrant pot of bouillabaisse simmers in the kitchen of the Elks Lodge in Wakefield. On the other side of the kitchen door, a full house awaits a five-course feast of local seafood hosted by Eating with the Ecosystem. The New England nonprofit works with scientists, fishers, wholesalers, retailers, chefs, and consumers to strengthen the local wild-caught seafood industry by promoting species that are underutilized by custom or ignorance, or that are newcomers driven here by climate change.

Executive director Kate Masury calls Jarvis “a great partner for the organization because he’s so passionate about preserving fish populations for future generations, while harvesting food for people, and that aligns with our mission. Fishing is a really hard job; it’s labor and time-intensive, but Jason prioritizes speaking engagements and showing up at events, and he’s really good at connecting with people and educating them.”

Enthusiasts in the buffet line hold out their plates for helpings of slipper limpets and grilled whole butterfish. Jarvis supplied the limpets and 60 pounds of green crabs that David Standridge had rendered into stock.

Standridge, executive chef and part-owner of The Shipwright’s Daughter in Mystic, learned about green crabs’ culinary value when he was a chef at L’Atelier de Joël Robuchon in New York. The acclaimed French chef and restaurateur would come to town several times a year to revise the menu.

Standridge’s job was to assemble potential ingredients. On one visit, Robuchon asked for crabs. Standridge got every type available—except the one his boss wanted.

“When he got here, he asked, ‘Where are the green crabs? They are the best ones for stock. We use them for everything.’ I started searching for them, and none of the purveyors could get green crabs,” Standridge recalls. “Maybe a year later, I was fishing with a friend, and, lo and behold, the bait was green crabs. I was amazed. ‘How did you get these?’ He’s like, ‘We catch them right off the dock. They’re all over the place.’ And that, to me, was a huge disconnect. How is it possible that they’re that easy to get and I can’t buy them?”

Three seasons ago, Masury connected Standridge with Jarvis, and he has been supplying The Shipwright’s Daughter ever since.

In October, Standridge prepared a sustainable seafood supper at the James Beard Foundation
that used green crabs in every dish—including the cocktail. Jarvis’s catch shows up on the restaurant’s winter menu as Green Crab Crispy Rice. In 2024, Standridge’s seafood and his sustainable approach won the foundation’s Best Chef: Northeast award, and that honor has helped create a following among diners and fellow chefs.

“Five years ago, I reached out to wholesalers who told me they had no interest in working with green crabs—they’re not edible, they’re a trash species,” Parks, of GreenCrab.org, says. “It wasn’t until people started focusing on chef outreach and seeing them as a resource instead of just a problem that their tune changed. Now people are asking me: ‘Can you connect us to a green crab supplier? Our restaurants are asking for this.’”

Back at the Weekapaug Breachway, Jarvis counts the morning’s harvest: some juvenile sea bass, a snowy grouper, and four gallons of crabs. He slips the fish back into the water, puts the crabs in a cooler, and closes the lid. Everything he trapped at dawn will be sold by the afternoon.

“They’re plentiful. So we’re going to wipe them out—definitely doing the ecosystem a favor. But it’s tough to get somebody to eat something that they see as bait,” Jarvis says. “A handful of restaurants are using them, and we’re trying hard to change the narrative about green crabs.”

So, Jarvis perseveres in pursuit of the environmentally sustainable and socially just food system he wants to create. “It comes back to the stuff I’ve always believed in—the public trust,” he says. “The fish belong to everybody, and I’m just catching them for the people who can’t.”