Vanessa Chaput
Vanessa (Costa) Chaput’s father worked at the family’s lobster house, her brother was a lumper and a scalloper out of New Bedford. The family loved to fish recreationally.
“My connection to the fishing community starts back as far as I can remember with my grandmother’s sister and her husband, owning M. Costa and Sons Seafood Company in Groton, Connecticut. Dad worked in the lobster house. The lobster house was interesting. I remember going there and the stacks and stacks and stacks of lobster cages. It was on the water, very close to the water. So, the boats, his boats would come in, and they would stop to stock them up.”
“My aunt, Gelsemira Costa, she had one (recipe) that got into the Betty Crocker cook book. I remember now that the name of it was Lobster A la Costa. It was a lobster that had like a Newburg sauce.”
“But my father always loved to recreational fish, and he was in the Navy, so boats were his thing, he was really into it, though. If Blues were over there, he was over there. It depends on what fish were running where he was. We always had fish on the table. Always. So, he provided for us also in that way, not only with income but with fish.”
“One of my best friends of all time, her husband was a fisherman on a scalloper. We were always down at the boats, picking them up, bringing them on the boats, and it’s always been a part of my life, and it will probably always be a part of my life, I still buy fresh scallops off the boat, and I won’t buy seafood any other way.”
“We always had family time, we always made time for family time. There was a dining room table, and we would always congregate at that table. Puzzles would always be going and that’s how we spent spend time with Dad, because he was so busy all the time. He’d be working, he’d be fishing. And then the time that he had, we would gather at that table and do all kinds of stuff. We would do macramé together. We did so many macramé and that came from his Navy days.”
