Cod_ A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World - Mark Kurlansky [2]
Asked if he could really float with that jacket, Sam answers, “I don’t want to find out!” And that is all they say about the black water a few feet away on either side of them as the boat heads out in the first violet light of early-autumn morning. Cod like the water this time of year because they think it is warm. But forty-five degrees Fahrenheit is a cod’s idea of warm, and the gunwales around the edge of a trap skiff are only inches high. This same day, in another community, the bodies of two fishermen who fell overboard are found. This isn’t something fishermen talk about.
They head out to sea. Sam, a small, dark-haired man, with a touch of rose on his clean-shaven cheeks, is stuffed into his scarlet flotation jacket. Leonard is in the little pilothouse, while Bernard, in his flame orange overalls, stands with Sam on the open deck looking contemplatively at a flat sea of dark, polished facets. The light is beginning to warm a clear sky. Once the sun is up, the only clouds are cotton candy fog stuck between the rocky, still-green hills of the September coastline.
They find their fishing grounds by land markings. When a brown rock is aligned over the church steeple, when certain houses first come into view, or when they first sight the white spot on a rock that they call “the Madame” because in their imagination it looks like a skirt and a bonnet, they are ready to drop anchor and begin fishing.
Only today, having forgotten a pencil, they head over to the other boat where the three-man crew is already hauling cod with handlines. After a few jokes about the size of this sorry young catch, someone tosses over a pencil. They are ready to fish.
These men are part of the Sentinel Fishery, now the only legal cod fishery in Newfoundland. In July 1992, the Canadian government closed Newfoundland waters, the Grand Banks, and most of the Gulf of St. Lawrence to groundfishing. Groundfish, of which the most sought after is cod, are those that live in the bottom layer of the ocean’s water. By the time the moratorium was announced, the fishermen of Petty Harbour, seeing the rapid decline of their once prolific catch, had been demanding it for years. They had claimed, and it is now acknowledged, that the offshore trawlers were taking nearly every last cod. In the 1980s, government scientists had ignored the cry of inshore fishermen that the cod were disappearing. This deafness proved costly.
Now two Petty Harbour boats are participating in the Sentinel Fishery, a program meant to get scientists and fishermen working together. A few fishermen in each community are sentries, measuring the progress of the cod stock by catching fish and reporting their findings to government scientists. The men on Leonard’s boat are tagging and releasing as many fish as they can catch. At the same time, the fishermen on the other boat are supposed to catch exactly 100 fish, open them up to see if they are male or female, and remove a tiny bone from the head, the otolith, which helps the cod keep its balance. The rings of the otolith tell the cod’s age.
Tomorrow, or the next good day with a calm sea, the two boats will switch jobs. There is no point in braving bad weather. The fishermen earn only a modest rent on their boats for this work but are glad to have it, because it gives them something to do besides collecting their unemployment compensation, renowned in Maritime Canada as “the package.” They also like doing it because there is constant pressure to reopen fishing. This week the debate is on an idea to let everyone fish a few cod “just for food.” The Sentinel fishermen are proving with their scant, undersized, and underaged catch that there are still not enough cod to allow any fishing at all.
“This is it. We are out on the headlands,” Sam frequently reminds people. Petty Harbour fishermen are proud of the fact that they live in the most easterly fishing community in North America—the first of three things for which Petty Harbour is famous. Their little village, along with St. John’s in the next cove and the rocky