These days, the Cod is pretty much gone from the Cape. Bob Luce, 63, sits on a bench and explains why. Luce, who has an artificial knee from the wear and tear of fishing and knuckles tattooed “love” and “hate” in honor of the Robert Mitchum movie The Night of the Hunter, fondly remembers the days in the 1970s when he could drop hooks to the seafloor 15 miles out and reel in 30 to 50 pound cod. By the 1990s, the Cape Cod fishing grounds were barren. Fishing had gotten too efficient for its own good, says Luce.
In 1980, many fishers began switching from hooks that caught individual fish to nets that snared cod by the gills, whole schools at a time. At the same time, big trawlers began dragging rollers across the rocky seabed to force the bottom-dwelling fish upward into nets, capturing massive amounts of cod and, some critics claim, destroying its preferred habitat. “They caught all the big ones and wiped them out,” says Luce. Now New England is trying to rebuild its cod fishery, opening deep divisions among fishers in places like Chatham.
When cod stocks collapsed in the 1990s, the federal government closed thousands of square miles of fishing grounds and limited fishers’ “days at sea.” The cod population has rebounded, says Steve Murawski, a scientist at the National Marine Fisheries Service, but to reach historic levels, the total mass of cod still needs to grow eightfold on Georges Bank, east of the cape, and about threefold in the Gulf of Maine.
Regulators have now proposed slashing the allowed days at sea by an additional 55 percent and reducing the daily limit on Georges Bank codfish from 2,000 pounds per boat to 500 pounds. Some trawler owners think they could live with such cutbacks. Barbara Stevenson, who runs three 87 foot trawlers out of Portland, Maine, supports lowering the daily catch limit on Georges Bank. “That’s the most stressed stock,” she says. “Many people in the industry are frustrated more hasn’t been done to date.”
Fishy numbers? But other fishers argue that the proposals are based on little more than guesswork about what the ocean contained lifetimes ago. “How do you compare what we’re doing today to when friggin’ Adam and Eve were around?” fumes Craig Pendleton, a Saco, Maine, fishing captain.
While trawlers can go after some 16 other fish species, hookers and gill netters depend more heavily on cod, and many say the cuts will put them out of business. Sustainable fishing practices will be hurt the most, says Paul Parker, director of the Cape Cod Commercial Hook Fishermen’s Association. “For hundreds of years, cod were caught using a hook and line on Georges Bank, and it was sustained for generations,” says Parker as he sips a pint at the local watering hole, the Chatham Squire. “Fish don’t bite all the time if the current, tide, or wind is in the wrong direction. That built in inefficiency allowed some to escape.”
By contrast, he says, the trawlers inevitably scoop up baby cod, and the gill netters often snag much more than the 2,000 pound limit, throwing the excess overboard. The trawlers dispute Parker’s contentions, noting that they’ve switched to larger mesh nets that allow small cod to escape. They also say the hook fishers have done the most damage by snagging juvenile fish, before they have time to reproduce.
Regardless of who bears the most blame for the cod decline, Chatham’s hook fishers worry that their rustic municipal pier will give way to a tony yacht club and that Nickerson Fish & Lobsters market will be replaced by a seaside restaurant serving fish trucked in from somewhere else.
