SALTWATER FISHING: "WE GROW ACCUSTOMED TO THE FALL"

A week or so ago, I finished reading Monte Burke’s book Lords of the Fly, a well-written volume that describes the glory days of flyfishing for world record tarpon off Homosassa, Florida, and manages to weave some broader insights into the narrative as well.

Toward the end of the book, there was a brief reference to a New York Times article penned by Brooke Jarvis.  The piece was about the loss of insects, not fish, but for anglers, it contained this relevant comment:

“Anyone who has returned to a childhood haunt to find that everything somehow got smaller knows that humans are not great at remembering the past accurately.  This is especially true when it comes to changes to the natural world.  It is impossible to maintain a fixed perspective, as Heraclitus observed 2,500 years ago:  It is not the same river, but we are also not the same people.

“A 1995 study by Peter H. Kahn and Batya Friedman, of the way some children in Houston experienced pollution summed up our blindness this way:  ‘With each generation, the amount of environmental degradation increases, but each generation takes that amount as the norm.’  In decades of photos of fishermen holding up their catch in the Florida Keys, the marine biologist Loren McClenachan found a perfect illustration of this phenomenon, which is often called ‘shifting baseline syndrome.’  The fish got smaller and smaller, to the point where the prize catches were dwarfed by fish that in years past were piled up and ignored.  But the smiles on the fishermen’s faces stayed the same size.  The world never feels fallen, because we grow accustomed to the fall.”

Author Burke also quotes Marshall Cutchin, a one-time Keys guide who now runs the flyfishing website Midcurrent, who observed,

“The average person goes to the Keys and says, ‘This is beautiful,’ and it is.  But it’s only ten percent as beautiful as it used to be.  If you knew what it once looked like and how much better it was, it’s pretty sad.”

I caught my first fish in the mid-1950s, about the time the first photos used in the Keys “shrinking fish” study were taken.  Of course, I was young enough then that the memories of that event are a little hazy, but I’ve fished enough over the intervening years to have amassed a pretty extensive collection of memories about how things used to be, a collection that provides a pretty good gauge of how far the world, and in particular its fisheries, has fallen in the past 65 years.  They are good memories, for the most part, but their tale of the fall is fairly bleak.

One Angler’s Voyage began with a story of loss, the loss of the smelt fishery that once thrived during late fall and winter along the stretch of coastal Connecticut where I was raised.  It was a fishery that I knew for just a few ephemeral years before it collapsed, foreverr, over a half-century ago.

Just about every year since this blog began, I’ve chronicled the collapse of the southern New England stock of winter flounder, a fish that once seemed to pave the bottom of our estuaries and bays, and now has all but disappeared.  This year, I didn’t bother to discuss it again.  There’s no more of the story to tell; the fish are gone, and given the increased water temperatures and decreased oxygen levels in waters where they used to thrive, I’ve accepted the bitter truth that no one is likely to see flounder filling those bays again.

River herring—blueback herring and alewives—have also been a recurrent theme.  Those stocks have crashed, too, but at least there, one can see a thin thread of hope, as the removal of some dams, the creation of fishways around others, and some very modest management measures offshore are offering hope that the herring runs might, to at least some degree, be restored.

As I stand on the brink of yet another season on and around the sea, I now ask myself, have I grown accustomed to the fall? 

I’m not sure how to answer that question.

Certainly, many of the fish that I pursued in the past are far less abundant than they used to be.  Inshore, we lost the smelt, the tomcod, and winter flounder. Striped bass and bluefish remain overfished.  Weakfish, though overfished, might be staging a comeback, while local tautog stocks are not overfished anymore, although tautog are nowhere near as abundant as they were when I was a boy.  We no longer get big runs of Atlantic mackerel in the spring or Atlantic herring in the fall, and it’s been about 40 years since ling and whiting (red and silver hake) supported a thriving winter fishery in the New York Bight.

Offshore, longfin albacore are few and far between.  Marlin, both blue and white, are less often encountered than they were in the ‘80s and ‘90s, and it’s been a very long time since I’ve seen a swordfish finning out on the surface—although North Atlantic swordfish is deemed to be a fairly healthy stock.  Most species of shark are less abundant than they used to be, with the number of duskies notably lower than they once were, and both the size and numbers of shortfin makos down substantially from where they were just a decade ago.  Even the smaller tuna relatives, fish like skipjack and Atlantic bonito, seem to be harder to find although, lacking a reliable stock assessment, I can’t know for sure whether that is reality or just perception.

On the bottom, cod are, at best, a shadow of what they once were in the southern part of their range, and not doing too well farther north.  About a decade ago, there was a small spike in cod abundance around Block Island which has since abated substantially.  Yet some people are still willing to aver that

“the southern New England stock is doing well,”

and say things such as

“The fish off Rhode Island seem to be getting larger.  We’ve always gotten nice market cod, but not the 35-pound fish we have been catching lately,”

and

“Fishing has improved in the last few years.  Last year, the season was short, but it was one of the best as far as intensity.  There were cod in the 25-pound range and pollock to 20 pounds mixed in.”

The only problem with statements like that is when I was doing a lot of party boat codfishing off Rhode Island in the late 1960s and ‘70s, the smallest pool fish I ever saw weighed 35 pounds; most were in the high 40s, and fish over 50 weren’t all that rare.

And when I jigged pollock at Block Island in the early ‘80s, 20 pounds was about the smallest fish that we saw.

So 35-pound cod and 20 pound pollock are a big step backward from the fishing that I used to know.

“We grow accustomed to the fall,” indeed.

But I go fishing anyway, despite so many depleted fish stocks, and some could argue that my continued pursuit represents just another way to accustom oneself to declining abundance.

Still, I rarely leave the dock without harboring some level of dolor.  I might sit over a wreck where black sea bass pester my baits well before they hit bottom, and yield immediate hookups, a clear confirmation of biologists findings that the species’ abundance is more than twice the target level.

Yet, like the fish in the Florida Keys, my sea bass are shrinking.  Ten or fifteen years ago, at least at the start of the season, I could run out to a wreck and be sure of finding a few fish that weighed between three and four pounds; some might go a little larger.  On just about every trip, I caught a “doubleheader,” where the combined weight of the two fish exceed seven pounds.

Today, that doesn’t happen.  Even with the current three-fish bag limit, it typically take two or three hours, and sifting through dozens of undersized fish, before I can ice a meager limit of legal-sized sea bass, and those are much smaller than what I caught before.  I haven’t broken four pounds in a while.

High numbers but falling size is usually a sign of increased fishing pressure.  The stock, more dependent on fewer individual year classes, becomes more vulnerable to periods of low recruitment, which can easily spur a decline.  Whether the lack of larger fish that I'm seeing is a meaningless local phenomenon, or whether it signals potential future problems, is impossible for me to know, yet given the fate of so many other species, it’s something that I can’t help thinking about.

Yet I know that few others share such thoughts, and I know that time keeps moving on, leaving ever fewer people who remember the fishing in former days, before things had fallen so far.

Certainly, the recreational fishing industry is more than willing to accustom itself to the fall. 

As Ms. McClenachan noted in her study, today’s fishermen are willing to pay just as much to participate in the current, degraded fishery as they were willing to pay—adjusted for inflation, of course—in the halcyon days of the 1950s.  Thus, the industry has no immediate need to support conservation, particularly since the restrictions needed to restore real abundance might deter today's fishermen from buying new boats and gear, and so reduce the industry’s income.

Instead, we see advertisements hyping faster, longer-ranged boats capable of taking anglers out to the last concentrations of fish, loaded with sophisticated electronics to aid in the hunt.  

We are encouraged to purchase ever more advanced—and ever more expensive—graphite rods, braided lines, and high-tech reels.  We are encouraged to forget that, not so very long ago, an earlier generation of anglers fished from slow wooden boats that often didn’t venture beyond sight of shore.  Using rods crafted from hickory or Calcutta cane, and simple reels loaded with rot-prone linen lines, they caught more and bigger fish than we do today, just because the world hadn’t yet fallen so far.

In the short term, the fall probably benefits the industry; it's probably harder to sell $400 graphite rods when people can catch all the fish that they need with a $5 cane pole.  Today, the industry can easily market “new and improved" products to anglers, too many of whom are already more excited by the tackle that they buy than the fish that they catch with such gear.  

So long as such people keep buying, the industry will keep doing well, and our world will continue to fall. 

In the long term, of course, consequences will flow from our fallen world, but few take the long-term view.  Instead, they hope that by the time the long-term comes around, they will have retired, sold their businesses, spent their bonuses, cashed out their stock options, and have done whatever else needed doing to insulate them from the damage that they helped to create or, at the least, that they condoned.

Others note that the world has been falling since before we were born, and that it’s pointless to stand in the way.  Accepting that fact is, to them, less a matter of being accustomed than of being realistic.

And maybe they're right.

But, at least for me, the start of a new season is always a reminder of things lost.  I can't help but wonder how many such losses could have been averted, if people had acted in time.  Becoming accustomed to the world’s fall means becoming accustomed to loss, to failure, to just giving up and not even trying, just once, to defeat the particular gravity that's imposed by time.

Like everyone who has ever lived, I’ve experienced my share of loss, and my share of failure.  I will experience more.

But I will never become accustomed to it.  Not while I remember a less-fallen world, nor while I believe that this fallen world still has some small chance to rise.