COD: IT HAS COME DOWN TO THIS

If you didn’t start fishing for cod fifty years ago, it’s probably hard to understand what codfishing was like back then.

It was far from perfect; the bloom had long before fallen from the rose, which probably isn’t surprising for a fishery that had already been exploited by commercial fleets for nearly five hundred years, and was pounded by fleets of foreign factory trawlers for the past twenty.

Even so, in the 1960s and even in the opening years of the 1970s, codfishing was still good enough to suport fleets of party and charter boats in ports extending from New Jersey to Maine, boats that regularly targeted cod either seasonally or throughout the year.  

While the New York Metro angling press might have referred to cod as the “winter king,” and boats filled with anglers might have sailed out of New York and New Jersey ports during the coldest months of the year, anglers who knew how to find and fish offshore wrecks, sailing out of the same ports, found plenty of quality cod during the height of the summer.

I hooked my first cod in August 1960, a few days after my sixth birthday, while fishing on a tourist-focused half-day boat out of Provincetown, Mass.  For the next few years, our August vacations followed the same pattern, always ending with a cod trip out of somewhere, eventually moving from Provincetown's half-day boats to full-day operations out of other New England ports.  

We caught fish, even though we fished largely nearshore waters on boats catering to largely inexperienced anglers.

I finally graduated to the big leagues at the age of 13, joining my father and two of his friends on late May trip out of Galilee, Rhode Island.  There, we boarded the, Sea Squirrel, a 65-foot party boat that began life, I was told, as a World War II sub chaser, to make the rolling, 2 ½-hour trip out to Cox’s Ledge.  

Cox’s, in those days, was the promised land for codfishermen in southern New England.  Its cold water, rock/gravel bottom and abundant baitfish held cod throughout the year, and my first visit to the place was no exception.  Although the fish ran small that day—my father and another fishermen split the pool with a pair of 35 pound cod—our baits rarely sat on the bottom for more than a couple of minutes before attracting attention.  By the end of the day, my left hand was blistered from the hard wood grip of my old-fashioned boat rod, while my right index finger was raw and bleeding from constantly cranking the reel, but I was a happy and dedicated codfisherman from that day forth.

Or at least I was, until the fish disappeared.

The big foreign factory ships continued to hammer all of the New England groundfish, working constantly without any regard for the size or number of fish being killed.  In 1976, Congress finally passed the Fishery Conservation and Management Act, which pushed the foreign boats 200 miles offshore, but also gave domestic fishermen strong economic incentives to upgrade and expand their fleet and take up where the foreign boats left off.

Fishing remained half-decent throughout the ‘70s.  It was good enough in the fall of ’75 for me to lead three friends from college down to Galilee on a windy October Friday night, without any thought to what fishing might be like, and putting three cod on ice, including a 26 and a 31, despite fairly awful conditions (we’ll leave the details about cleaning those fish inside a college dorm, and the panicked reaction of an already drunken janitor when he saw a bloody cod eye staring out through the clear garbage bag when he emptied the men’s room trash on Monday morning, for another time).

But by the end of the decade, you could feel the continuing decline.

Some good fish were still being caught.  You could still ride a party boat out to Cox’s Ledge during the middle of summer, and expect the pool fish to break 40 pounds, and maybe top 50 as well.  But the absolute number of fish, and to some extent their size, was headed downhill. 

It seems that pushing the foreign boats offshore didn’t solve the problem, for as Discover magazine explained,

“Fishermen had lobbied Congress hard to have the foreign trawlers kicked out, and they expected a bonanza.  Between 1977 and 1983, the number of boats fishing out of New England increased from 825 to 1,423.  The new boats were bigger and equipped with the latest electronic fish-finding equipment.  The fish never had a chance.  The cod catch on Georges Bank alone peaked in 1982 at more than 53,000 tons.  Then it started to decline.  As the stock declined, the mortality inflicted by fishing rose, just as it did in Newfoundland [before cod stocks collapsed there].  The difference is that in New England, fisheries biologists knew it was happening all along, and said so.”

But those biologists were all ignored.

By the early 1980s, my wife and I moved to the South Shore of Long Island, New York, and my days of driving up to the Rhode Island party boats was over.  There just weren’t enough fish to justify the trip.  I jumped on a couple of boats sailing out of Captree State Park during the winter, but Long Island’s winter fishery was already on the skids.  The boats still caught a few good fish, usually early in the season (the Friday after Thanksgiving often produced), but they talked a far better game than the fishing deserved. 

I still recall taking one trip that produced four small cod for the entire boat—two of them caught on hooks that the boat’s mates attached to the weights on the buoys they used to help them anchor over the wrecks—and learning that we had done better than any other boat in the fleet.  And how one of the other boats reported to a local paper, which duly printed the report, that it had caught close to twenty fish up to 35 pounds on that same day, just to keep their business going just a little bit longer.  

Some anglers doubtless believed that report, because such catches had often been made just a few years before, but the days of good local codfishing were over.

But my appetite for cod continued, so I booked with Montauk’s Viking Fleet, which specialized in making long-range trips to distant grounds where cod were still reportedly big and abundant.  Again, there were good days, but the hype overran reality.  I remember thinking, at the close of a three-day “Whale Cod” trip out to Georges Bank, that I had to run 13 hours, on a fast, modern boat, and spent parts of three days fishing, to catch fewer, and no larger, fish than I had caught on that first day trip to Cox’s Ledge, aboard a slow, converted sub chaser, twenty years before.

And things ran downhill from there.

As Discover magazine reported,

“the National Marine Fisheries Service is charged with assessing the status of fish stocks and with overseeing their management.  But recommendations as to what restrictions, if any, to place on fishing are left to regional councils composed of mostly fishing industry representatives—fish processors, fishermen’s association leaders, and fishermen themselves.

“During the 1980s the New England Council proved itself unwilling to control fishing.  Indeed, one of its early actions, in 1982, was to eliminate catch quotas.  Its goal, it said, was a simpler system that would allow the fishery to operate in response to its own internal forces.  As the decade progressed, the fishery did just that—and as NMFS scientists warned of declining stocks of cod, haddock, and yellowtail flounder, the council dithered…”

Cod and other New England groundfish continued to decline as a result.  

I reluctantly stopped fishing for them, as numbers fell lower, although I still took the occasional winter trip out of Captree for old times’ sake.  Things finally got bad enough that Congress passed the Sustainable Fisheries Act of 1996, which amended the 1976 Act, now called the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act after its primary sponsors, to require that local councils end overfishing and rebuild overfished stocks in no more than ten years, if it was biologically possible to do so. 

Although many fishermen up in New England originally supported the 1996 law, as they knew that fish stocks were collapsing, they didn't like the idea of the new law capping their landings.  Thus, the New England Fishery Management Council became very adept at drafting management measures that would, on paper, satisfy the letter of the law, while evading its purpose.  The New England Council still avoided hard quotas at any cost, and tried to satisfy their legal obligations by limiting a boat’s days at sea, imposing trip limits, etc.

It didn’t work, and overfishing continued.  Cod continued to decline.

So the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and ManagementReauthorization Act of 2006 imposed new requirements, mandating that hardquotas, deemed “annual catch limits,” be imposed for just about every managedstock.  It also required that fishermenwho exceed such limits be held accountable.  But that hasn’t helped the cod, either.

Maybe it came too late, or maybe fishermen are just finding ways to evade the law.  There is someevidence suggesting that the latter is true, and that fishermen are dumping manyof the cod that they catch back into the ocean, dead, in order to avoid exceedingtheir quota and triggering accountability measures, which would include not only paybacks, but shutting down fisheries for more abundant groundfish in order to avoid killing more cod as unintended bycatch.

Still, many fishermen continue to focus on cod concentrations when they can find them.  About a decade ago, an unexpected increase in cod abundance in the Block Island, Rhode Island/Cox’s Ledge area caught their attention.  The fish were small by the standards of forty or fifty years ago—far more pool fish were under 20 than over 30—but the commercial and for-hire fleets swarmed the fish while they could find them, enjoying the chance to make a little money in what had come to be their barren winter season.

Faced with such fishing pressure, the abundance soon declined to more typical modern levels. 

Concentrating such high levels of fishing pressure on those cod may have doomed the last best chance of seeing cod return, in numbers, to the waters east of Long Island.  A 2014 paper, “Stock identification of Atlantic cod (Gadus morhua) in US waters; an interdisciplinary approach,” published in the ICES Journal of Marine Science, notes that cod off southern New England, on Cox’s Ledge and in the Mid-Atlantic spawn between December and April, meaning that the fishery was probably targeting spawning aggregations.

The paper also noted that

“Several studies indicate that cod exhibit spawning site fidelity and return to the same places to spawn each season…

“Once a spawning site has lost its resident population, it may remain barren even when cod are present on neighboring grounds…”

So fishermen may very well have shot themselves in the foot—again—on that one.

The bottom line is that cod stocks remain deeply distressed, with no sign of improvement on the horizon.

Cod are in such serious trouble that one marine conservation group with a long history of work on New England issues, the Conservation Law Foundation, has now petitioned the National Marine Fisheries Service, requesting that the directed cod fishery be closed.  In a statement that is sadly all too accurate, it declared,

“After decades of reckless decision-making, Atlantic cod populations are now in crisis.  To give this iconic species a chance of survival and recovery, the federal government must take the strongest possible action today and temporarily prohibit further cod fishing.”

The petition also requests that NMFS require observers on all groundfish trips, to assure that there is a record of any cod that are incidentally caught and subsequently dumped, that important spawning and nursery areas are closed to fishing, and that action is taken to reduce cod bycatch in other fisheries.

New England fishermen will undoubtedly be hostile to the petition; many believe that there is still blood to be squeezed from this particularly dry and crumbling stone.  But it has come down to this:  NMFS must adopt whatever measures may be necessary and appropriate to conserve and rebuild northeastern cod stocks, or it must be willing to take full responsibility if, because of inadequate management action, fish stocks that once fed much of western Europe and eastern North America for centuries collapse, and never recover again.