Cod_ A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World - Mark Kurlansky [72]
Each vessel was restricted to 139 days of groundfishing annually. The goal was to take only 15 percent of the stock in a year of fishing. But in 1996, when it was calculated that in those 139 days fishermen had taken 55 percent of the stock, restrictions were further tightened to 88 days. This system of conservation greatly favors small boats over the large trawlers. The owner of a large bottom-dragging trawler has enormous maintenance costs, such as $30,000 or more per year for insurance, and cannot afford to have his vessel sit idle 277 days each year. Most fishermen said that even in the winter, when the groundfishing was good, they would still rather crew on a small gillnetter than on a big trawler, because the catch wasn’t enough to split among a six- or seven-man trawler crew. If fishery management could actually force out larger boats, it would greatly reduce the capacity of the fleet, and this could be part of a solution.
Georges Bank was the one bank that still had cod fishing. Canada had won rights to a part of what is called the Northeast Peak, which Canadians fished from June to December. After 1994, the United States closed its part of the Northeast Peak, but the western part of Georges Bank was still fished with some success. Since they were severely limited in the number of days they could go groundfishing, Gloucester fishermen began asking the government for financial help—the same kind they had gotten to build their bottom-dragging fleet after the 200-mile limit was established—to convert their vessels to midwater trawlers.
The seas seemed suddenly full of pelagic fish—midwater species such as herring, mackerel, and menhaden. Since these fish were normally eaten by the now-vanishing cod, the two phenomena might have been related. Ralph Mayo rejected this theory, pointing out that the herring boom began in the late 1980s, before the cod decline. Or at least before the cod decline was perceived.
Just as a codfish would do, the fishermen simply turned toward the available food source. In the 1960s, skate was sold to lobstermen as bait for one dollar a bushel, herring was cheap bait for longlines, and dogfish were the curse of gillnetters. The rough skin of dogfish was hard on fishermen’s hands and so difficult to get disentangled from the nets, fishermen would hack them out with knives and hose the gory mess overboard. By the 1990s, herring, skate, and dogfish were all target species.
In the 1990s, dogfish, marketed under its new name, cape shark, though still low-priced, was selling well, especially for export to Europe and Asia. In fact, by the mid- 1990s, it no longer seemed likely that the dogfish would take over the cod’s niche in the food chain, because these little sharks themselves were being somewhat overfished. A shark is not a fish, and instead of laying millions of eggs every year, a dogfish gives birth to five or six “pups” every other year. It is not biologically capable of withstanding the siege cod has faced.
Truck drivers, repairmen, dockworkers, and captains of tour boats—all over town there are ex-fishermen. All the men who work on the dock for Old Port Seafoods are former fishermen. Dave Molloy, a small fit Gloucester native in his forties, had grown up fishing with his father. In 1988, he gave up. “I knew it was over. I fished for seventeen years, but the last three years I starved.”
The concrete pier of Old Port Seafoods has two unloading cranes, small rope-and-pulley affairs with a motorized drum