Last
November, I was up in Connecticut, fishing with an old friend.
We had fished together since
the early 1970s, mostly in Long Island Sound and in the ocean south of Long
Island, but sometimes as far away as Alaska, the Caribbean and Belize. Over
that time, we’ve caught a lot of fish, of many different sorts, but on that day
off Connecticut, things were a little slow.
We set out in the dark, well
before sunrise, with the hope of finding some decent striped bass somewhere
along the rocky shore. Although the fall migration was past its peak, November
sees some of the largest bass of the season moving out of New England, headed
south toward their wintering grounds off the Virginia/North Carolina line.
We found all the bass we could ask for, but nothing of size.
While we caught a lot of fish over the course of the morning, I’m not sure that
any weighed more than five pounds; most seemed to be three-year-olds, from the strong year class spawned in the Chesapeake three
years before.
Notably, larger fish from the
even bigger 2011-year class were nowhere to be found.
It was a little discouraging.
So we switched off to tautog—what we
always called “blackfish” in Long Island Sound—dropping green crabs down to
assorted rock piles that were historically productive at that time of year.
The first drop yielded a big toadfish, and
then nothing more. The second drop produced even less; not even the bergalls (a/k/a
“cunners”) that used to swarm in those places turned out to nip
at our baits. So we moved a couple of miles, to a piece of hard bottom where we
found a few fish.
Most were far too small to
keep. Along the way, as we picked at mostly undersized fish, my friend repeated
something that he had said more than once in recent years. “If I was a kid,
just starting out, I don’t think I’d bother buying a boat. It’s not worth it.
There aren’t any fish anymore.”
It’s not the first time that
he’s said something like that, but every time, it still jars me. My friend and
I were both introduced to fishing by our fathers when we were very young; for
both of us, it was probably the defining family activity of our childhoods.
When our fathers weren’t working, we fished with them from our families’ boats.
Other times, until we were old enough to take the boats out by ourselves, we
fished from docks and from shore.
I still recall one summer
morning when he was out with his father, and I was out with mine, fishing a
stretch of rocky shoreline. It was a calm day, with the sun climbing over the
horizon, when without warning, black clouds roiled out of the west, it started
to rain, and lightning flashed on the too-near horizon. My friend’s boat shot
past where we were fishing, heading for home. We were planning to head in then,
too, but a decent-sized striped bass rolled on my lure and made it clear that
we weren’t going anywhere for a while, regardless of the approaching storm.
Some time later, our boat
caught up with his, deep in the harbor. I held up the bass, lure still stuck in
its face, as mute explanation of why it took us so long to arrive.
I’ve got a lot of stories
like that, and so does my friend, because when we were young, fishing was a
heritage that was handed down to us, and that we always expected to hand down
to following generations.
But now, I have to wonder
whether there will be much left for us to pass down, and whether those who
follow us will have anything at all to pass on to their successors.
When we were young, fishing
was easy to do. There were a lot of fish, and a lot of places to catch them.
Over the course of the year, there were probably less than three months when we
didn’t fish, mostly because the harbors were covered with ice.
Once the ice went out in March, we caught winter flounder and tomcod from
docks in the harbor. By April Fool’s Day, that fishing was going strong, and
the first schools of river herring—first alewives, and bluebacks later
on—swarmed in silver hordes so determined to spawn that, when the tide was out,
they swam on their sides through trickles of water, trying desperately to get
to fresh water.
We watched the herring,
wondering at their seemingly endless multitude.
By the second week in May, we
caught blackfish from shore at the town beach and eels from the local docks.
Two weeks later, we caught striped bass from our fathers’ boats and sometimes
from shore; by the time I was in junior high, bluefish chased menhaden into the
harbors, and we could catch them from shore, too. When the big bluefish weren’t
around, summer vacation was mostly about catching eels and the occasional
flounder until the young-of-the-year “snapper” bluefish showed up. At that
point, just about every child older than five years old—and more than a few who
were younger—lined up along just about every piece of land that bordered the
water, some with their parents, the older ones alone, in pursuit of the small,
but avidly feeding fish.
After we went back to school
in September, the year sort of unraveled itself.
The snapper disappeared first, then the big bluefish, but
blackfish again bunched up in the shallows, where a kid with a pint of fiddler
crabs, who knew how to cast, could easily catch a dozen or two near the top of
a rising tide. As days grew shorter and colder, flounder and tomcod grew more
abundant, and were joined by rainbow smelt returning
to the estuaries prior to their early-spring spawn.
Finally, the days grew so
cold that our hands froze numb, so numb that we could sometimes slip a hook
right through our bait and into a finger, and not realize it until we went to
swing the hook back in the water, and found that it wouldn’t go.
Shortly after
that, ice would cover the harbor, and our season would end.
It was a wonderful time, and
a wonderful way, to grow up.
But for today’s kids, things
aren’t like that anymore.
The smelt were the first to go. I caught my last one in the fall
of ’68, the same year that I entered ninth grade. The tomcod didn’t last too
much longer. Whether warming water did them in, or too many dams
blocked their way to crucial spawning grounds, is difficult to say. Either way,
they disappeared.
River herring went next, the big runs gradually thinning out
until, by 1980 or so, only a few fish still entered the harbors.
After that, blackfish grew ever scarcer, as an increasing demand for live fish sold, often illegally, in urban markets, coupled with an
ineffective interstate management plan, caused abundance to sharply decline.
Winter flounder made it into the 21st Century—barely—but since then, the southern New England
stock has completely collapsed.
Striped bass collapsed in the late
1970s, but the stock was rebuilt two decades later. Now, the stock
is overfished once again, but the Atlantic States Marine
Fisheries Commission seems to be in no hurry to rebuild it this time.
Bluefish, too, appear to be growing scarce, although we’ll figure that out
for certain when the stock assessment is updated in August.
There are some bright spots amid the gloom. Summer flounder
didn’t become a regular catch in the western Sound until 1970 or so, but the stock remains in
fairly good shape. And scup and black sea bass are
probably more abundant than they have ever been during my lifetime.
But a young angler really
needs to go out in a boat to catch those fish with any regularity; from shore,
they will catch a few, but few of what they catch will be large enough to take
home. That makes it tough for young anglers, many of whom are tied to the land,
and provides little tinder to catch and sustain whatever dim spark of interest
a child may have in the outdoors, before it’s quenched by electronic
distractions and the lure of youth soccer and baseball.
To feed the fire that forges
new anglers, and make the flame run hot in new generations, children must be
able to inherit the same sort of quality experiences we knew when we were
young, experiences built on abundant fish stocks that we could cheaply and
easily access from local docks, bulkheads and piers. For if young and
inexperienced anglers are to maintain their interest in the sport, they must be
able to catch fish regularly, despite their lack of skill and their simple
gear. And, perhaps most important, despite their lack of a boat.
At some point, the new angler
will grow old enough, and earn enough money, to buy a boat of his or her own.
Provided, of course, that there are enough fish around to merit the purchase.
As my friend has suggested,
that might not be the case anymore.
Thus, it is hard to understand why both the fishing tackle
industry and the boating industry are supporting bills such as last year’s H.R. 200, which would have weakened federal fisheries laws and led to
decreased abundance and reduced opportunities for novice anglers, instead of
aggressively supporting conservation measures that will assure that tomorrow’s
generation of anglers will still have a reason to go fishing.
In the sixty-plus years since
I first became a fisherman, we have allowed too many of our fish stocks to
decline, allowed too many of our waterways to become degraded, allowed far too
many of our marshes, estuaries and other critical inshore nursery habitats to
be filled in, developed and destroyed. By doing so, we have stolen a treasured
heritage from today’s young anglers, and from anglers who have yet to be born.
Why should they fish, or buy
fishing tackle, just to frustrate themselves on the shores of an emptier ocean
than we knew in our early years?
It is our moral
responsibility, and the moral responsibility of the fishing and boating
industries, to pass on to our successors a world as vital and as full of life
as the one we received from our elders.
Failure to do so bathes us in
the shame of a thief who would steal from a child.
-----
This
essay first appeared in “From the Waterfront,” the blog of the Marine Fish
Conservation Network, which can be found at http://conservefish.org/blog/
No comments:
Post a Comment