It is difficult to understand why people watch and review these films without making any kind of effort to understand the context for them. Of course this is not a particularly exciting film. It is one of a whole series of films shot in 1901 by Arthur Marvin on commission for the U.S. Fisheries Commission. Both Edison and Mutoscope cameramen did a lot of such commissioned work at this time. To appreciate the series, it needs to be seen as such (if you are prepared to stop expecting every film made to be an action drama and have an interest in such absorbing subjects as the fertilisation of cod-eggs, the drawing of lobster pots, the workings of a mackerel schooner or the intricacies of shad sein fishing). But unless one is prepared to consider the purpose and context for films made at this period when cinema served many different functions, then it is quite pointless to write reviews.
Such commissioned documentary series served an important function in accustoming cameraman to location work and to the composition necessary for such films (Marvin's film is for instance a distinct improvement in this respect on Armitage's Brook Trout Fishing shot in Canada the year before). Fishing may not be everyone's favourite subject but it has continued to play an important role in documentary film-making because (like boxing matches or bullfight scenes) of the special challenges such scenes represent for the cinematographer. John Grierson's Drifters (1929), for instance, is a classic of documentary film-making. Grierson and the British documentary movement were, one might add, great believers in the virtues of "commissioned" films in establishing a solidly "real" or mundane context for their documentary work (in contrast to the "Flaherty" tendency to invent spurious drama).