About a hundred years ago, Finley Peter Dunne, safe behind his nom de
plume of Misther Dooley, no doubt instructed his mythical friend Mr. Hennessey
as follows: “Always remimber, no matter whether the constitution follows th’ flag
or not, the Supreme Court follows the iliction returns.” And at only a slightly lower
level, the Hon. Gladys Kessler has done the same, yielding to a lot of protests
and the blandishments of Maine’s matched pair of Republican Senators,
Olympia and Susan.
Another Sue, DMR’s Inches, has logged in as director of industry
development and as firmly against Individual Fishing Quotas applied to
groundfish management. One compelling example is Iceland, which introduced
quotas (in our view, against its better judgment) and watched the small-boat fleet
swiftly decline from a thousand to a mere 340. What happens in a quotaed
fishery is that the big boys initially spend more time chasing quotas than they do
chasing fish. So fishing gets to be corporate, and the little guys disappear. And
if the quotas are in single species, bycatch becomes a horror, the ultimate being
two vessels a mile apart with one of them shoveling dead haddock overboard
while the other does the same with cod.
So it’s a good idea to hark back to Distant Water, William W.
Warner’s remarkable book about the invasion of the Soviet Bloc’s fishing and
factory fleet and its enforced disappearance by the passage of the 200-mile limit.
(Distant Water is now sadly out of print, but you’ll find it worthwhile to
keep a sharp eye at yard sales, secondhand book sales and the Internet.)
In 1975, Soviet fisheries minister Alexander Ishkov fixed a blind eye on the
economic fishery zones obviously just over the horizon, came up with another
Soviet Five-Year Plan for 1975-80, and cheered his country’s citizens with a
prediction of 46 pounds per capita (three times the USA consumption that hovers
between 15 and 17 pounds) by 1980. Minister Ishkov’s breezy optimism was OK
with the United States as long as the Soviet fleet and its colleagues did their
fishing somewhere else, and they did.
One place was Canada. In 1978, Canada licensed the Soviets within the
200-mile zone for 22,000 tons of redfish, 25,000 tons of grenadiers (which
nobody wanted except the East Germans), and an astonishing quota of 266,000
tons of capelin. The tail of the banks is beyond 200 miles, so the Soviets could
fish without regulation there while waiting for their inshore quotas to show up.
Comrade Ishkov got the first two pounds per capita; only 44 to go.
It is well to remember that 40 percent of the world catch is the cod with its
cousins and the herring. And that 85 percent of the world catch swims on the
continental shelves to the slope down to the abyssal plain.
In the remarkable epilogue to Warner’s Distant Water, you will learn
why experienced fishing captains really earn their keep. Warner accompanied
Captain Carl Spinney on the trawler TREMONT out of Boston in the month of
August, 1977, a few months after the 200-mile USA zone went into effect.
Spinney felt that the Soviets’ continuous dragging never let the fish bunch up and
rest. And he recalled a 200-foot spot out on the Northeast Peak where he had
done well a time or two before. The TREMONT steamed there straight from
Boston. The next day they hauled back twice, each time with 10 tons or better,
with goodly numbers of cod running 10 toward 20 pounds.
The lessons of the preceding two paragraphs are clear: 1) When the fish
come back they’ll be mostly in the Gulf of Maine (with a slight footnote about the
Hague Line); 2) Using your head to find the fish is maybe better than half a
dozen sonars; 3) Don’t believe the headlines in a newspaper until you’ve parsed
the story — what durable old Vaughn Anthony said was “This is how high is up,”
young haddock are at 70 million, up from between 2 and 5 million
catchable fish — what’s that supposed to mean? We just counted 70
million smolt; whyncha go catch some salmon?
Go down a couple of paras in the newspaper clip, and discover that 1983
and 1984 were each down 55 percent and that 1985 was down 53 percent from
those. And only 9 percent of that was landed in Portland. “Haddock numbers
rise” says the headline.
Indeed.