The Present: My first cod!
I scrunched down the gravel path to the fishing stage just after 6:00 am on the opening day of the summer fishery, only to find out that I was late. This came as a surprise, as mornings in Petty Harbor tend to start slowly with a round of the day’s gossip over large Tim Hortons coffees steaming in their red paper cups. But here was Leo, tapping his watch and griping at the five minutes elapsed since our scheduled meetup time. “The big ones will be gone!” he chided as we donned our waterproof bibs and clambered down the ladder from the wooden platform into the boat below. As we cruised along the glassy waters of the harbor, I counted three boats already returning from the morning's fishing. We were indeed late to the party.
“Where can you go to get one by the gut?” Leo hollered to one of the returning boats. “Anywhere you fuckin’ want!”, one of the men yelled back. Encouraging!
Petty Harbor is a small fishing town in southeast Newfoundland, nestled inside a small fjord. Rounded mountains dotted with low trees rise up on three sides and protect the harbor from strong winds, while a concrete breakwater separates the harbor from the swells and storm surges of the open ocean. It's a town built to fish.
Today, our quarry is the Atlantic cod (Gadus morhua), a bottom-dwelling fish with glossy olive and tan skin marked with leopard-like spots. Famed for its firm white flesh, cod has been chased across continents, dried, salted, frozen, and shipped all over the world for centuries. Huge trawlers hunted the species nearly to extinction by the 1990s, resulting in fishery closures that put tens of thousands out of work in Newfoundland alone. But today, I am learning to catch cod the traditional way: by hand.
After a ten minute ride across the steel-gray waters of the bay, we arrived at our fishing site and cut the motor. Leo and Kimberly showed me how to bait the hook with fresh capelin: in through the eye and along the backbone so the fish completely encases the curved metal like a slippery sock. Once baited, we tossed the hooks weighted with heavy lead sinkers over the side and let them spool out until they came to rest gently on the bottom about 13 fathoms (24 feet) below. Grabbing the line, I pulled in the slack line until I felt the weighted hook lift off the ocean bottom. I had just enough time to wonder how I would tell when I had a fish on before I felt a sharp tug on the line.
“Jerk it up to set the hook then haul in! Haul in!” Leo instructed, spotting the tension in my line with a practiced eye. I yanked upwards, and then started hauling hand over hand as fast as I could manage in my cumbersome rubber fishing gloves. Give too much slack, and a poorly snagged cod could slip off the hook and swim straight back down to the bottom. After another frenzied minute of hauling, my very first cod came splashing up over the gunnels, wriggling and gulping at the air. Leo showed me how to remove the hook and break the gills so that the fish will bleed out (this makes for whiter meat), before Kimberly demonstrated the humane art of smacking the dying fish firmly on the head so that its spine cracks. Leo thinks that this last step is just a bit of softie nonsense, but I do it anyway.
With three hand lines shared by myself, Leo, Kimberly, and my co-workers Liam and Georgia, we hit our daily quota quickly. Between the excitement of hauling in the lines, curses at stolen bait, and exclamations as the cod appeared over the side of the boat I barely noticed the time pass. Large fish were deemed “fuckin’ dandy”, while small fish were resented as they counted towards the quota but had less meat and were also just less exciting. With our 15 bloody fish stacked neatly in a battered plastic fish pan, we headed back to the harbor.
Click through these images to see Kimberly jig a fish!
And then me! With my first fish!
The Past: A brief history of Newfoundland and cod
The history of Newfound is intimately bound up with the Atlantic cod. The Vikings were the first Europeans to voyage across the ocean to take advantage of this island’s rich fishing grounds around 1,000 AD. The Basques allegedly fished these waters long before Columbus stumbled ashore in the Caribbean, returning home with mysterious loads of cod from a secret fishing ground to the West. The Portuguese too, followed by the English, Irish, and French who began to form permanent settlements along the eastern shores of Newfoundland and drove the indigenous Beothuk people inland. Cut off from the fish and seal they traditionally relied upon, attacked by settlers, and infected by European diseases, the Beothic population declined. Shawnadithit, acknowledged in many histories as the last of the last Beothuk, died in 1829. However, other eastern First Nations like the Mi'kmaq say that many Beothuk fled Newfoundland, and their descendants live on in other indigenous communities.
Newfoundland cod fishing grounds were the richest in the world. Accounts from the 18th century describe seas absolutely rolling with fish, so plentiful that they could be caught by lowering a weighted bucket into the water. English and Irish settlers followed this bounty, and built wooden saltbox houses, “stages” for splitting and salting the fish, and wooden “flakes” - elevated wooden platforms for drying the split carcasses. Fishermen traditionally used “jiggers” (weighted hooks shaped like capelin) to catch cod. Though “jigging” (handlining) for cod remained popular with small-scale fishers, new technologies emerged over time to help fishermen catch cod with less manual labor. These included gill nets, cod traps, and eventually, the steam trawler.
The trawler changed everything. Cod are bottom-dwelling fish that live in large shoals, or groups. They are not built to chase down and hunt their prey like tuna or swordfish, preferring to hover just above the ground and lunge for anything small enough that gets too close (even other cod). Their unathletic nature is what makes their meat so white and tender. Unfortunately, it also means they are sitting ducks for large trawler nets which can wipe out entire genetic sub-populations of Atlantic cod in one go.
As large-scale fish finding and harvesting technology improved over the course of the 20th century, catch numbers just kept going up and up. Trawlers came from around the world to harvest cod from the waters around Newfoundland and the Grand Banks. Mistaking this as proof of the Atlantic's inexhaustible bounty, Canadian fisheries management failed to recognize that commercial fishing was systematically wiping out the species. Inshore fishermen working in small boats with traditional gear were the first to sound the alarm about declining catches. In Petty Harbor, local fishermen came together in 1960 to formally protest the use of trawlers in their bay, defending their “Ancient Rights” to sustainably manage these nearshore fishing grounds. Although they succeeded in securing a marine protected area free from trawlers, their larger point about the unsustainable pace of trawlers everywhere fell on deaf ears in Ottawa.
On July 2nd, 1992, it was all over. Fisheries manager John Crosbie announced a moratorium banning commercial cod fishing in the Atlantic for at least two years, putting 30,000 Newfoundlanders out of work in a single day. Over thirty years later, it remains in place (though a small commercial “stewardship” fishery is now permitted). The economic devastation was profound, but the losses for Newfoundland’s fishing communities cut deeper than just income. Whole towns had been built on the fishery over the course of centuries, and cod was deeply ingrained in the traditions and culture of each community. What did life in Petty Harbor look like without the rhythms of the working harbor? How can a fishing village survive and build a new life without fish?
The future: Fishing for Success
The loss of the cod fishery was a catastrophe for Newfoundland. Decades of commercial overexploitation left local communities to pick up the pieces of the collapse, and chart a new course for life without the industry that defined them for generations. But despite this crisis (or perhaps in part because of it), many community leaders in Newfoundland are re-imagining a future that keeps tradition alive by welcoming a diverse new generation into the world of cod.
For the past few weeks in Newfoundland, I have been volunteering with the team at Fishing for Success, a nonprofit based in Petty Harbour. Kimberly and Leo are the founders and dynamic duo at the core of the organization: Kimberly is a marine biologist, educator, and master planner, while Leo is an experienced fisherman, storyteller, and encyclopedia of fish-related knowledge and local history/gossip (what is the boundary between the two, really?). At its core, Fishing for Success teaches people to fish with traditional gear, for food. Tourists pay for these lessons, which allows Kimberly and Leo to run community programs for people that may never otherwise get a chance to even be in a fishing boat such as new immigrants, at-risk youth, and members of their “Girls Who Fish” group. They work to bring historically excluded groups into the rich traditions of the Newfoundland fisheries and to foster connections between people and the sea.
The recreational fishery for cod in Newfoundland lasts from early July to the beginning of October. Anyone in the province can fish up to five cod per day or fifteen per boat - whichever comes first. This fish is strictly for personal consumption, which means that discarding or selling it is illegal (though this doesn’t stop people from selling to local restaurants on the sly). From my conversations around town, it seems like the primary driver for this fishery is an emotional one. Being able to go out and jig for cod every day, even just a few, allows people to participate in the activities that defined and sustained their families for generations. They can be out on the bay in the early morning, eat fresh cod tongues and cheeks hot off the skillet, and hang around the filleting tables to work and chat. An active cod fishery means that fishing villages are still alive and recognizable as they were before, with the daily rhythms of a working waterfront that everyone can participate in.*
*...at least in theory. Though the fishery is open to anyone, you need a boat, a line, and someone to teach you the key techniques, which many do not have access to. This is what Fishing for Success is trying to change.
All of this is important, but it doesn’t mean that the heavy pans of cod brought in by recreational fishers is somehow anachronistic. Newfoundland is an island with poor-quality soil and relatively few farms, relying instead on expensive imported goods trucked in from the mainland to fill its grocery stores. As Kimberly pointed out to me, “Storms can stop the car ferries from crossing over [from the mainland], and after a few days of that the shelves start to get really empty”. Wild foods are crucial to the province’s food security, but accessing them requires specialized knowledge that isn’t readily available to many immigrants, women, and urban residents. Knowing how to fish and forage locally with simple tools isn’t just crucial to Newfoundland’s cultural sustainability: it’s a key step to knowing how to feed yourself if globalized food systems fail you.
Scroll through these pictures below of fishing for capelin! Newfoundlanders use these as bait, but people also eat them (usually smoked). They "roll" on the beaches like this to spawn, which makes harvesting them on foot quite easy.
A few final notes
Maybe you’ve noticed something is missing here… Perhaps the role of women???? You are correct, and that is still my project’s main focus. I have many thoughts and notes on the experience of women, kids, and queer people in the fisheries here but let's be real: how many people are even going to get to this last sentence of this post. If you’re reading this, thank you for your time and dedication!!
If all goes to plan, I’ll write another blog post that is all about gender and labor in the cod fishery in the next two weeks before I return home. If all does not go to plan, ask me about gendered divisions of labor in Newfoundland cod fishing towns and we can chit chat about salted fish and domestic labor all day. I know… fun fun!!!
Until next time,
Grace
