Inside the Atlantic Cod Fishery

Final Report

2008-07-28T00:29:00.007-04:00

After spending nearly an entire year explaining why I wanted a chance to travel to study cod fisheries, it came as a surprise that the first time I was asked, “so why are you doing this?” I had a hard time finding an answer. As a girl who grew up hundreds of miles from the coast, a lifelong inland dweller, with little knowledge of fishing or marine biology and a pesky tendency to seasickness, it didn’t seem so likely a choice, and I threw myself into the world of fisheries and fisheries management with little preparation. In many ways, though, it was my place as an outsider – a foreigner without experience or background in fisheries – that allowed me to learn from the ground up, not to take anything for granted, to learn without the biases of already knowing what to think. Fishermen learn their trade from fathers and uncles and neighbors and as apprentices, marine biologists go to a university and earn a degree; I talked my way onto boats and asked lots of questions between bouts of feeling queasy.

In addition to not beginning this year as an expert in fisheries, I often found it hard to explain that my goal was also not to become a fisheries expert. Having spent so much time getting to know fishermen, fisheries management sociologists, and fisheries biologists, I have tremendous respect for them as people and for the work they do, but I am convinced that none of these jobs is for me – I want to do something interdisciplinary between science and policy, something where I can apply my love of the unseen undersea world of water chemistry, something that doesn’t require spending quite so much time being seasick. I looked at fisheries management as a model of what works and what doesn’t in creating policy: I got to know a fisheries science structure that fosters extensive international cooperation but is forced to focus on producing specific management-geared reports for government “clients;” I talked with fishermen frustrated by trying to make a living off a resource managed under a clunky bureaucratic structure that is just learning how to give fishermen a say in their own futures; I witnessed attempts to bring together fishermen and scientists to incorporate traditional knowledge and social and economic concerns along with classic science in fisheries research and management recommendations.

I knew from the beginning that I was unlikely to find any new solutions for fisheries management – smart, experienced people have been working on this for years – but observing firsthand how so many places have tried to solve the same problem and how those efforts have played out for people and the resources on which they depend, I have developed my own philosophy of environmental management. I’m convinced that there’s more at stake than possible extinctions or even ecosystem health: there are coastal cultures, family traditions, food sources, and myriad uses both aesthetic and practical for the environmental resources on which we depend. After a year of close consideration, I have lots of specific ideas for fisheries management – getting fishermen involved in basic research, putting all the stakeholders around the table for transparent decision-making, long-term resource allocation plans that won’t consolidate quotas in big companies when the current generation retires. But even more important, I feel like I learned which questions to ask, how to listen to new voices and respect their opinions and weigh their arguments, how my values play out in real-world situations. So even if I don’t apply these lessons to fisheries, I still can take these lessons and apply them: as a better scientist, more in tune with how my research could and should be used; a better educator, helping society understand the relationship between people and the environment; a more conscientious environmental citizen living off limited natural resources.

In many ways, though, the intricacies of fisheries and the lessons of how to design environmental management are just the outer limits of what I learned from this past year. A week after returning to the States, I rediscovered a note I had written to myself a few weeks before leaving for this year-long adventure. Under the heading “Goals for Watson year,” I had written, “1) Give people the benefit of the doubt. Be patient, compassionate, and understanding with everyone and take the time to appreciate the best in people. 2) Be passionate about everything I do, and enjoy the beauty and excitement of each day. 3) Remain positive through setbacks, fear, loneliness, and difficulties both expected and unexpected.” It was a firm reminder of what I had truly set out to – and did – gain from this past year. As much as my focus for the past year has been cod fishing – even when I wasn’t researching fisheries, I chose books to read about fishing communities, learned new ways to cook fish, even knit myself a winter hat with a pattern of fish – the most important lessons I have to take away from this crazy trip have little to do with fishing. The defining feature of this year has been much more my struggle with being on my own far removed from the places and people that make up my sense of home. In the end, I think this is what a Watson is all about – not the Latin names I can recite and my ability to hold a conversation about trawl net designs or even just my sharpened personal environmental philosophy, but the experience of questioning who I am and how to be myself away from my familiar world.

I had not expected at the beginning of this year of travel that I would be homesick, but I hadn’t banked on how much of my own identity was wrapped up in the people and places that define home. Exploring a field where I have little background, without the people I love and who love me, stripped of the context in which I’ve built my outward identity and sense of myself – overcommitted enthusiastic student, contradancer, Jew, friend, even my outward appearance (I left my skirt collection at home) – I was forced to see myself without the support of a past that tells me who I am and reminds me that I am a worthwhile, successful person. I had to get by not on my own merit or anything I’ve earned, but mostly on the good graces of others who offered me experience and information of their own good will. As someone used to being self-sufficient, I was taken aback at home much my sense of self was situational, built on living in a world I know intimately and where I feel comfortable and useful. Instead of proving my independence, leaving my familiar context showed me my dependence on others – both those at home who I missed dearly and those I met abroad whose kindness and hospitality helped me find my way in the places where I felt most lost.

Many travelers leave home armed with devices and advices for how to ward off foreign thieves and rogues and many people I met along the way worried at the idea of a young woman traveling alone, but I found that rather than meeting danger at every turn in new and unfamiliar places, traveling as a lone (and very unthreatening) outsider opened up for me a world of kind, friendly people willing to go out of their way to help a stranger. The shopping mall attendant who talked me through each step of the Icelandic passport photo machine so I could get my visa to go to Denmark – and then gave me the photos for free; the minister’s wife I met at the old saltfish store in Grand Bank, Newfoundland, who invited me home to stay with her family at the rectory only fifteen minutes after meeting me; the woman in the Lofoten Islands who not only gave me a ride to church on Easter Sunday but also translated the entire Norwegian service for me. The people I met and their extraordinary kindness form my most striking memories of many of the places I visited. It is a humbling experience to continually feel indebted to the generosity of others, to constantly remain on the receiving end of help and hospitality with little ability to express my gratitude or return the favor. Traveling in a group of people to look out for each other, or with a surplus of funds to amply provide for expensive solutions to complicated situations, I never would have found myself dependent on the kindness of strangers or fully opened myself to finding the best not only in friends but in people I have never met.

After spending the first nine months of my travels feeling very distinctly an outsider, both as an American abroad and as a newcomer to fisheries, spending my last few months in Newfoundland was in many ways a return to the familiar in the midst of my year of adventure. I felt more comfortable in the world of fishing after nine months of gradually, inexorably gathering knowledge, and after so long traveling, Canada seemed a palpable step closer to home. With the Stanley Cup in progress, Newfoundlanders had something other to say other than “hmm, where’s that?” when I told them I was from Pittsburgh. My accent no longer immediately identified me as a foreigner. I even found a welcoming Jewish community in St. John’s (the first Jews I lived near all year). I also rediscovered the ubiquitous box store strip malls and car dealerships that seem to define North America and experienced my surprise upon return from moderate-sized grocery stores of Europe to the everything-you-could-ever-want supermarkets of North America three months before returning home. Arriving in Canada, I felt less an outsider than I had at any other point during my travels.

My first real adventure in Newfoundland – a trip to Fogo Island, a four hour drive and ferry ride from St. John’s to an island of small fishing communities, in the midst of the sealing season, still iced in at the end of April – proved to me how home and adventure can collide. I was enamored with the landscape, the ubiquitous presence of fishing in the culture and heart of the island, the friendliness of everyone I met. And yet, for the first time since I had left home, I found people who knew, quite specifically, where I came from – I stayed with the family of a woman who lives in my small town outside Pittsburgh. The connection was, frankly, disconcerting: I had spent so long away from anyplace even distantly associated with home that it was hard to talk about my old school district, the local grocery store, things I thought I had left behind. But most of all, it made me realize that the places I had tended to overlook near home could have the same beauty and hidden surprises as the places I had been visiting throughout this year. Although less exotic that many of the possible places I could have traveled, in many ways the familiarity of the landscape during my time in Canada confirmed for me one of the most important lessons from my year of travel – that excitement and adventure are not found only in exotic, distant places but also are waiting close to home.

In the weeks since I have returned to the States, I have not lost the sense of wonder and exploration that became my constant companion as a Watson fellow. My actual return home was anticlimactic – I drove from Newfoundland through Nova Scotia and New Brunswick before crossing the border into Maine – but the gradual easing back into a world I know well seems to have avoided any sharp change that might have felt like an end to adventuring. Instead, rather than feeling like the end of my Watson year, it felt more like a beginning – with a year of adventuring as the prelude to a life full of adventures, whether they be journeys across the globe or in my own backyard. For me, the Watson was not about a year-long adventure but about learning to see the possibilities available in the world and realizing that I am capable of pursuing any of them I want. I’m still passionate about many of the same things I loved before I began – I want to sail, to teach, to study the oceans, to find sustainable ways to use nature – and this long journey has proven to me that these are things I can do, and no doubt provided me with many of the tools and lessons I will use on the way. Beginning in August, I will be sailing Long Island Sound, teaching about the environment and sharing my passion as I consider which dream to pursue next. And so, the end of my journey is not an end but an interlude, as the next adventure begins.

Home again

2008-07-03T17:46:00.006-04:00

And so, I'm home. I crossed the border on June 27, a full year from the day my flight landed in Reykjavik and this crazy adventure began. For having been out of the country for a year, my return was entirely anticlimactic. My return journey, rather than a long plane flight like that of most Watson fellows, was by car: I crossed the border between New Brunswick and Maine in a minor road between the small towns of St. Stephen and Calais at the end of a two week road trip from St. John’s.

The border crossing consisted of a ten-minute traffic jam on our way to crossing the bridge into the US. The man at border security didn’t even notice from my passport that I had been away from home for the year, and didn’t bother with a stamp. It felt as if returning to the country after a year away was as normal and routine as the many Maine license plates returning home from a day trip. A bit anticlimactic, I suppose, but mostly it feels lovely and comfortable to be home.

The trip back was wonderful too – a perfect way of easing back into the life I left behind for this year of adventuring. Before I even crossed the border, I had a chance to remember what it’s like to spend time with friends, to relax without having to worry about the details of what comes next, and to get my first taste of summer (and sunburn) since last June.

After a year of wanderings, it seems I should have something profound and conclusive to say at this crossroads in my life, but I regret to inform you that a year of wandering has not taught me the secret of life. I’ve become more careful and nuanced in my views, more aware of the hidden wisdom and beauty to be found in strangers and out-of-the-way places, more thankful for time with people I love and the comforts of familiarity and belonging. But more than anything, the secret is that there is no secret – life doesn’t change because you cross a border.

And even though the official adventure is over, I’ve learned that excitement and adventure and the opportunity to make things happen don’t depend on finding a fancy fellowship. My adventures don’t end just because I’m home again. I have a month to relax and recollect myself and reconnect with my friends and family, and then I’m beginning my next adventure – working as an educator and deckhand aboard the Schooner SoundWaters in Long Island Sound. I’m pretty excited. I’m hoping to spend some of the next few weeks going through the flotsam and jetsam of this past year, the notes and pamphlets and pictures that record where I’ve been and what I’ve seen, and hopefully I’ll slowly work this blog towards a more complete account of my journey before the next big adventure begins. Meanwhile, if you want to catch up, give me a call.

Homeward Bound

2008-06-27T23:02:00.012-04:00

I could have taken a plane straight home to Pittsburgh from St. John’s. But then I would have missed everything in between: the winding roads through the hills and forests of central Newfoundland, the beautiful coastal vistas out over the ocean, the geologically fascinating and visibly stunning table mountains of Gros Morne, the picturesque fishing towns of Newfoundland and Nova Scotia, the most famous fisheries museum of maritime Canada in Lunenburg, the mud flats of low tide in the Bay of Fundy. It was my last chance for adventure in this year of adventure, and so I skipped the plane and road tripped home instead.

This called for a car and traveling companions. Lucky for me, Adam and Michelle were crazy enough to drive Adam’s Honda Civic, Jib, all the way to Newfoundland to road trip back with me.

Jib has served us loyally, not only for thousands of miles of driving.
He dried our tents,

and even served as a replacement tent the night we took the ferry from Newfoundland across to Nova Scotia (long story short, the ferry schedule was shifted unexpectedly and we missed our night’s sleep while en route only to discover we couldn’t make it to a campground because none of the gas stations on Cape Breton Island are open in the middle of the night).

And, of course, Adam and Michelle are pretty awesome too for coming all the way out to road trip with me.

Given that Amherst, Massachusetts was our final destination all together (and also all being former or current Amherst College students) it seemed fitting to begin the journey at Fort Amherst in St. John’s.

Fort Amherst is indeed named for the same Lord Jeffrey Amherst who led the British Army in North America during the French and Indian War and is infamous for distributing smallpox-infected blankets to the Native Americans. Towns are named for him throughout New England and Atlantic Canada, and his influence apparently stretched all the way to the most distant peninsula of Newfoundland.

We also began with a trip to the very tip of Newfoundland – Cape Spear, just south of St. John’s, is officially the easternmost point in North America. It was so foggy that we could barely see the lighthouse and cliff face, let alone the view out into the Atlantic (typical for the Avalon Peninsula, this easternmost piece of the island), but Adam came equipped with a GPS to ensure that we made it to the very easternmost point.

And then, we set off on the final adventure. We explored and hiked and camped our way back to the States over a period of two weeks. We hiked to the top of Twillingate, an island in northern Newfoundland (near Fogo Island, my first outport destination), where we saw great sights and great signs.

And we hiked to the base of the Tablelands in Gros Morne, a rare piece of the mantle and deep ocean crust preserved above ground (a geologic sight not to be missed!), and a strangely barren landscape due to the inability of the rocks (mostly peridotite) to provide the nutrients for plant life.

We blackened our pots over nightly campfires,
and slept in beautiful spots – in a forested area right by the water in Dildo Run Provincial Park near Twillingate,

on a hill overlooking the fjords of Gros Morne,

at the Ovens Natural Park in Nova Scotia, known for sea caves you can actually climb down into and a beach where you can pan for gold,

and on a cliff looking out over the wide mudflats washed by the enormous tides in the Bay of Fundy.

The most exciting camping experience, though, was discovering that despite setting up our Gros Morne campsite in an isolated spot, we had a neighbor. A big neighbor.

Sometimes Adam and Michelle seemed dubious about my excitement (or just reluctant to be in pictures…look behind you! It’s so pretty!)

though they usually seemed pretty excited about the adventure too (they can tell the waterfall is pretty).

Maybe it was the slow onset of summer as we headed south in June, maybe the joy of having friends back in my life on a regular basis, maybe the determination to truly enjoy these last few weeks of my incredible year, but I have been constantly thrilled by everywhere we went. The ideal ending – a gradual blend from the life and self I created throughout this year of travel back into the world I left a year ago. Which brings me to the next step of my adventure: coming home.

A town called Dildo

2008-06-11T14:40:00.005-04:00

Yup, you heard me right.

Newfoundland has a lot of towns with odd names. The week I spent on Fogo Island, I stayed in a town called Seldom-Come-By (a fitting name for a small town on an island only reached by ferry). Other names include Come-By-Chance and Happy Adventure. But I think Dildo takes the prize. Some sources I’ve found claim that the name has nothing to do with its current meaning – Wikipedia says that the word dildo initially referred to the pegs in a dory used to hold the oars in place (also called rowlocks), though I can’t say whether this is actually true. A few times, people from town have suggested changing the name to something more…child-friendly. But the name has stuck, and seems likely to stay – it may raise a few eyebrows, but the curiosity also seems to draw attention and tourists.

But I didn’t actually come for the name…I came to learn about the fish hatchery that operated on Dildo Island, just across from the town of Dildo in Trinity Bay, from 1889-1897.

I was interested in learning about the hatchery largely because its presence and the historical records from its time raise questions about the possibilities of overfishing and worries about how to maintain a sustainable fish stock that most people today tend to consider only a modern concern. In talking about the depletion of the northern cod stock, many people tend to only look as far back as the beginning of industrial fishing in the mid-twentieth century. But nobody really knows what had changed before then – this group of scientists and historians, for instance, found that there had been significant depletions in the cod biomass on the Scotian Shelf in the 1850s, long before the advent of modern trawlers. And certainly, the fish were not so plentiful in the nineteenth century as when John Cabot first arrived in Newfoundland in 1497 and reported that even though he had not found spices, he had discovered a source of fish so plentiful they could be scooped up in buckets.

As it turns out, Newfoundland has experienced fish depletions in the nineteenth century that, while by no means as widespread as today, were enough to cause alarm for the fishermen living in isolated coastal areas who depended on the inshore migrations of cod for their livelihoods. It was enough of a concern that in 1887 that when the Newfoundland government heard a presentation by a Norwegian named Adolph Neilsen on “artificial propagation” of fish stocks, they invited him to move to the island to begin hatchery operations and provided $4000 (a large sum in those days) to build the facility.

Nielsen took a steamer trip through some of the east coast bays to look for a suitable spot for the hatchery and finally settled on Dildo Island. Although a fish hatching operation in the nineteenth century seems far ahead of its times, the methods Nielsen used for his hatchery were the product of methods that had been developed in Norway beginning in 1864. An experimental hatchery had been opened in the US at Ten Pound Island, near Gloucester, around 1878 and had later led to the development of a hatchery at Woods Hole that opened in 1885 and ran until the 1950s. Another experimental hatchery had been opened at Arendal, Norway in 1882, which was run until it was taken over by the government in 1918 and has since been used as a research facility (today it is the Institute of Marine Research’s Flodevigen Biological Station).

As it turned out, the Dildo Island hatchery did not run for so long as the others – mostly because public debate over whether the project was worth the cost to the government led the government to pull out funding when a new party came into power. Nielsen funded the operation of the hatchery for its last year in 1896, but then was forced to close the hatchery due to poor health and lack of money. Today, all that is left of the facility is a rusty pump, but luckily there are fairly extensive notes on the hatchery both from a few early pictures taken of the facility and illustrations from the report of a visit from a French delegation considering the potential for a hatchery in their colony of Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon.

Here you can see an aerial view of the hatchery on the island. You can see the holes cut into the wharf to use as holding tanks to keep both the large fish used to produce and fertilize the eggs and the small hatchery-raised fish just before releasing them into the bay.

This illustration shows the interior of the hatchery facility, with rows of water tight wooden boxes each containing cylindrical glass incubators where the fertilized cod eggs were hatched. By the last year the facility was running, 76% of the fertilized eggs survived to grow into the juvenile fish that would be released back into the bay – to my mind, quite an impressive success rate for nineteenth century technology.

The very presence of this hatchery and the debates over whether the hatchery was a worthwhile investment illustrate one of the major debates in fisheries science and management – namely, whether human influence was capable of affecting fish populations, whether through fishing out the stock or building it up with this sort of supplementary effort. Most people talking about attitudes towards fishing and the possibility of overfishing at the turn of the twentieth century cite Thomas Henry Huxley’s address at the London Fisheries Exhibition in 1883, in which he said, “I believe, then, that the cod fishery, the herring fishery, the pilchard fishery, the mackerel fishery, and probably all the great sea fisheries, are inexhaustible; that is to say, that nothing we do seriously affects the number of the fish. And any attempt to regulate these fisheries seems consequently, from the nature of the case, to be useless.” In looking more closely at the rest of his speech, though, it seems that his argument is not such a unilateral statement as it seems, but rather a sort of back-of-the-envelope calculation showing that the contemporary fishing methods were not catching enough to significantly add to what scientists today call “natural mortality.” Huxley also admits that local populations of sea fish, such as individual salmon rivers, can be fished out – and so it does not seem so unlikely that people at the time would also have seen that local bay stocks, such as those relied upon by Newfoundland’s inshore fishermen, could also be overfished.

Certainly this was Neilsen’s belief, as reported by the French delegation that visited the Dildo Island hatchery in 1894. They reflected on their own opinions of the usefulness of the operation: “‘Is artificial procreation useful?’ ‘Does the cod stock, plentiful off the coast of Newfoundland, tend to diminish by the very fact of overfishing which has been done?’ It is certain that if, as Huxley thinks, the stock is inexhaustible, the idea of harvesting a few million cod a year along a certain stretch of coast is something like a child every day carrying a little bit of water from the sea. For Mr. Nielsen it is undeniable that the cod supply is being exhausted, and if a future fishery is to be guaranteed, it is necessary, as soon as possible, to make up for the lost of each day.”

It is hard to say whether a hatchery operation such as Neilsen’s could significantly increase the overall population of a large stock such as northern cod, but for the local inshore fishermen in Trinity Bay it seemed to have improved their catches. A Norwegian article on the subject found that, “In various reports, one can see that the growth of young fish increased substantially in Trinity Bay. The oldest residents in the area confirmed that they had never seen so much fish as the years that the hatchery was in operation.” It is hard to say whether hatcheries such as this one could have averted the crisis in the fishing industry that today has devastated in the coastal communities of Newfoundland – as the French pointed out after their visit to Nielsen’s hatchery, even if such an operation would have helped keep good fishing in Trinity Bay, it would not have solved the problems of a declining fishery all around the coastal areas of the island. “Dildo is but a spot on the Newfoundland coast and, since other spots do not profit from this work of “restocking”, how can it be worked to their advantage? Will we be able to restock other places with the artificially-born cod from Dildo? It is possible. Must one establish in all bays a scientific industry like the one we have been viewing these days? That would be a huge enterprise and extremely costly, for uncertain results for which we would have to wait…. He [Nielsen] may have been able to set up a base for the prosperity of Dildo, but he has not yet resolved the more general problem: raising the confidence of the fishermen higher than it has ever been, to definitely guarantee the resources throughout all of the coast of Newfoundland if, as he has himself positively affirmed, the cod tend to become exhausted on this coast of Newfoundland, just as they continue to do in Norway.”

Today, though the hatchery is long gone (it was purchased by a local merchant, who took down the building and used it for construction elsewhere), but the (hi)story is still an important part of the community of Dildo – particularly since the cod fishing moratorium in 1992, which has lead the community to focus on opportunities to market its culture and history for tourists, not to mention prompting considerable reflection on the wisdom of Nielsen’s conservation mentality. I first heard about the hatchery from one of the men working at Hampidjan Canada, whose uncle Gerald has collected an incredible amount of historical information about the hatchery, including translating a number of old documents, putting together an interpretation center in Dildo about the history of the town and island and running boat tours out to the island to learn about the local history and environment.

He also still maintains his own fishing stage and boat, although now he says he really only uses it to take out his grandkids for a trip out in the bay.

There seems to be a sort of wistful attitude towards the hatchery, wondering about the “what-ifs” of the fishery – whether overfishing and the cod moratorium would have happened if they had followed Neilsen’s philosophy that Gerald described to me as “for every fish you take you should put one back.” It is interesting, however, that while many inshore fishing communities blame the inadequacies of science and the use of new fishing technologies (both the use of gill nets inshore and trawlers offshore) for the collapse of the fishery, Nielsen’s hatchery – using highly advanced technology for its time and the most modern science – as a potential savior of the fishery. In all likelihood, hatcheries like Nielsen’s wouldn’t have been enough to counterbalance the massive catches of offshore trawlers, but emphasis on local conservation – particularly if the government had remained involved in funding efforts at preserving local stocks – might have influenced people’s attitudes towards the potential problems of overfishing. History, it turns out, still has lessons worth paying attention to today.

From Bonavista to Burin

2008-06-10T23:13:00.000-04:00

After the end of the symposium, I set myself to more serious meanderings. I had rented the car for another week and had no plans for the next five days until I intended to take the ferry to Saint-Pierre from Fortune, on the southern tip of the Burin Peninsula. Which left me with plenty of time to explore the Bonavista peninsula, where Port Union is located, and make my way the two hundred miles south. For reference, here’s a map of the most direct route (obviously, not the one I took, though, which was slightly more circuitous) from Bonavista in the north to Fortune in the south.

View Larger Map
Bonavista, at the northern tip of the Bonavista peninsula, is thought to be the first place in Newfoundland visited by Europeans. According to the plaque on the statue of John Cabot looking out at the tip of the peninsula, “In early May, 1497, John Cabot (Giovanni Caboto), a Venetian citizen bearing letters patent from Henry VII sailed from Bristol in the Matthew to seek a western passage to Asia. On June 24, he made land somewhere on the east coast of Canada. Although the sources do not allow unequivocal identification of the site, local tradition records Cape Bonavista as the landfall. From this, the first official English voyage of exploration in the Western Ocean, derived Britain’s subsequent claims in the New World and the beginnings of her overseas empire.”
Though there is debate within the historical community about whether this was the actual site of Cabot’s landing, the story is considered as fact in Bonavista. The story goes that when Cabot first saw land, he cried “Buon Vista!” – “Happy Sight!” – hence the name for both the town and the peninsula. In 1997, to celebrate the 500th anniversary of Cabot’s original voyage, a recreation of the Matthew was built in Bristol and sailed across the Atlantic to Bonavista for a ceremony on June 24 presided over by Queen Elizabeth II. (Everyone was proud to tell me about the Queen’s visit, though the most vivid story I heard about the day was from a woman who had decided to avoid the crowds and the rain and just watch from her house.) That replica then returned to Bristol, where it remains today. Seeing a promising tourism opportunity, however, Bonavista decided to build its own replica of the Matthew, which is seasonally on display in the Bonavista harbor right alongside the fishing boats. Built, maintained, and interpreted all by locals, the aura surrounding the boat is nothing like one generally finds around historic or recreated wooden boats. The new Matthew is too authentic to be seaworthy (no engine or safety features), but locals are very proud of such an historic monument in their harbor and the work of locals in doing all the carpentry and maintenance on the boat. Since the harbor regularly ices over for the winter, they even have a clever set-up for keeping the Matthew indoors during the icy months. Beyond the history, though, the real beauty of these days of wandering was the ability to see the unfolding of spring in the scenic outports, drive through some of the most interesting parts of the province, and meet some of the most welcoming people I have met this year. In my four nights of meandering, I was twice taken in by strangers I met along the way – the two people who discovered that my other option was to sleep in my rental car. (Yes, Mom, I went home with strangers and slept in my car. I promise they were very upstanding strangers, and I locked the car doors even though I was at campgrounds all by myself.) I spent one night at the base of Cabot’s statue, looking out over the water, and the other on the shore at a campground on the Burin peninsula, where I remembered to record the view when I woke up:
In Bonavista, I was taken in by a retired schoolteacher who I met at the local coffeeshop/bar while watching game five of the Stanley Cup finals (Pittsburgh won in triple overtime). I met his dog and talked with him about travel and education and his childhood in Newfoundland before he sent me off with an open invitation to visit anytime. In Grand Bank, the first person I met was the Anglican minister’s wife, who gave me a tour of the old fish plant-turned-theatre where she works and insisted that I come and stay the night with her and her family at the Anglican rectory. And, as most Newfoundlanders were quick to tell me, such unquestioning hospitality is the rule rather than the exception.

And if such welcoming people weren’t enough to sell me on Newfoundland’s outports, I was content just to wander the towns and watch the scenery. I saw old fishing stages, signs of a by-gone era of fishing,

and small boats and fishing stages still being used as they were decades ago, looking quaint but also continuing to provide a livelihood.

There were sheep – rounding out the tally of Watson year sheep sightings to include all four of my original project countries,
and peaceful domestic scenes.
When I got to Newfoundland, everyone kept telling me that this is a place that people just end up staying. It gets in your blood and you just don’t want to leave. And really, I can see why.

Port Union: “To Each His Own”

2008-06-10T19:40:00.000-04:00

I set off on this grand road trip rather spur of the moment. I had begun feeling a sense of restlessness spending my days in St. John’s while knowing that the heart of fisheries in Newfoundland was in the outports and had been mentally planning to set off and search out a story of fishing that couldn’t be found in town. So when I saw a flyer for a symposium on the founding of the Fishermen’s Protective Union, that did it: I was off.

While in St. John’s, I had met with representatives from the modern-day fishermen’s union, now called the Food, Fish, and Allied Workers Union (FFAW). Fishers (men and women, here, unlike everywhere else I traveled) in Newfoundland are very well organized and represented, in no small part because of the FFAW. Having organized nearly all the fishers and fish plant workers in the province into a single infrastructure, the union was able to provide representation for the fishing communities, despite their being spread out throughout the province. The FFAW was instrumental in lobbying for the unemployment benefits that sustained whole fishing communities when the cod fishery collapsed, in helping communities keep their local fish processing plants from closing, and procuring representation for fishers in the policy-making process. It had seemed from my initial meetings with people at the FFAW office and from talking with union representatives in some of the outports that the unionization of fisheries workers has been instrumental in sustaining rural fishing communities and preventing the consolidation found in so many other places.

So naturally, I was eager to learn more about the beginnings of fishermen’s unionization in Newfoundland and the history that has shaped the modern fishery in the province. And key to that story is William Coaker and the Fishermen’s Protective Union (FPU) he founded 100 years ago in 1908. The FPU was initially established as a political and social movement to provide independence to fishers as the working class of Newfoundland, their motto of “to each his own” focusing on the need for economic independence. At the time, fishing communities were beholden to the merchants who provided on credit the essential goods they needed to live on and in return for their cured fish at the end of the season. The merchants inflated the prices of the goods they sold and set low prices for the fish such that fishing families were constantly in debt to the local merchant. The FPU’s initial innovation was to create the Fishermen’s Union Trading Company, which bought goods and wholesale prices and shipped them to the outports, where fishermen could buy them at cost. They would also purchase the fishermen’s cured fish at the end of the season, paying them a fair price. This took away the merchants’ monopoly and ability to inflate prices, returning economic control to the fishermen. For a short time, the FPU also expanded into politics, attempting to provide not just economic but also political independence for the province’s fishermen (though at this time, Newfoundland was not yet part of Canada and not technically a province). William Coaker, who remained the driving force of the FPU throughout its early influential years, was elected to the House of Assembly and eventually became Fisheries Minister under the Union Party. This is a bust of Coaker, at the top of a hill overlooking the Port Union harbor.Port Union, where the symposium was held, was the center of the FPU’s efforts, a town actually founded by the union. The union built premises for retail and export in connection with the Trading Company, serving as the hub store for outlets in 40 communities, established a shipbuilding company and built a fleet of supply and trading ships which to transport goods and cured fish, and set up a publishing company for The Fishermen’s Advocate, the Union’s newspaper. The town had its own spur railway line, saltfish and seal plants, a cooperage and carpenter’s shop, a soft drink factory, a warehouse, a woodworking factory, a school, a debating club, a church, a hotel, a large meeting hall, workers’ housing, and even a movie theatre. Port Union also has its own hydropower plant, making it one of the first outport towns in Newfoundland to have electricity. As part of the symposium, a number of older people who had grown up in Port Union and surrounding towns described what it had been like in its early years. They saw the dances held in the meeting hall, the moving pictures shown at the theatre, and the town’s electric lights as the height of sophistication – nearly as exciting as the big city of St. John’s. Here they are speaking, flanked by a picture of William Coaker.Of course, things are very different today than they were in Coaker’s day. The FPU no longer exists, though its legacy of advocating for rural fishing communities’ social and economic independence doubtless helped keep the outport fishing lifestyle from collapsing under economic and social pressure and planted the seeds for the modern-day FFAW. Today, with cod populations still low, it may take new efforts to maintain these communities. During the symposium, a new project for Port Union was announced by Newfoundland Fisheries Minister Loyola Hearn. The government is providing a grant for the Sir William Ford Coaker Heritage Foundation to restore the former retail store and fish plant, to “add to the area’s tourism infrastructure and help attract new business to the community.” Here's what the old fish plant looks like today, on the edge of the harbor at sunset.And new business is already on its way: part of the funding for the restoration will come from Iceberg Water and Vodka, which plant to use part of the building’s interior as a bottling plant for their water and vodka products (which indeed are made by towing real icebergs into the harbor and melting them for their water). The plan is innovative – it will promote tourism by restoring the building and providing tours of Iceberg’s bottling facility, and it will provide short-term jobs in construction and long-term jobs working for Iceberg, in addition to the new jobs from tourism. It’s a far cry from William Coaker’s initial vision for Port Union, but it just might work.

Refuge of the Roads

2008-06-10T11:38:00.004-04:00

I think I may have developed some wanderlust. After four weeks sleeping every night in St. John’s, I started to get antsy. And so I rented a car and headed off in search of adventure and beauty and whatever it is that people search for.

I drove up the Bonavista peninsula and down the Burin peninsula, and found lighthouses and fabulous stories of lighthouse keeping at the tips of both,*

And even made it all the way to France (the French colony of Saint-Pierre et Miquelon, only an hour’s ferry ride away from the tip of the Burin peninsula).

There were icebergs, rocky cliffs, sunsets, and fishing boats – sometimes all at the same time.

I saw living coastal cultures that blend the old and the new - old fishing stages in the same harbours as modern fish processing plants, a traditional Catholic ceremony blessing a modern seagoing fleet, the Bonavista harbour with a replica of John Cabot's 15th-century caravel that sailed to Newfoundland alongside today's fishing boats.

And after ten days of wandering, I’m back in St. John’s. I have one last week here to tie up loose ends and begin to put together some of the pieces of this year (and hopefully also write more here about what I’ve seen and done…) before setting off on the final homeward journey in this year of journeying.

*Newfoundland still has fifty-two manned lightstations, and I met two real-life lighthouse keepers! They were painting the lightstation and showed me their office, complete with computer and desk, not so romantic as my image of a lighthouse keeper. But – both of them used to work at another lighthouse nearby, where they stayed alone on the island for twenty-eight days at a time. The dream still lives…

How to make a shrimp trawl: nets and networks in a global world of fishing

2008-05-27T22:45:00.011-04:00

My first introduction to the Newfoundland fishing industry in this year’s journey was actually at the Hampiðjan workshop in Hirtshals, Denmark in December. David Kelly, a Newfoundland netmaker (as was his father, who still works making nets and is apparently so well-known for his nets that there’s a style still known as a “Bob Kelly” net), runs a netloft that is part of the worldwide group of Hampiðjan companies, and thus was one of the many netmakers and fishermen from around the world who came to the flume tank to see some of Hampiðjan’s trawl nets in action. After we met in Denmark, Dave offered that when I got to Newfoundland I could come see how the nets are made and try my hand at netmaking. And so, a couple weeks ago (I know, I’m constantly behind on this blog) I took a few days and went along on his daily trip from St. John’s to the netloft in Spaniard’s Bay.

As one of relatively few netmakers in the region, the netloft provides all sorts of products – from providing the netting for local soccer goals a few years back to making mesh covers to protect trash bags from gulls to selling rope to local women for a clothesline – but most of the netloft’s business is in making shrimp trawl nets. Since the closure of the cod fishery in 1992, crab (caught with traps, which the netloft also makes but, Dave says, not so much for profit as to help keep customers) and shrimp (caught with trawls) have become the most important species for the fishing industry. I’d been in a netloft before while I was in Scotland, but it was only after seeing firsthand how the trawl nets are made that I feel like I can actually appreciate how much work goes into each one. A trawl net of the type I’ve seen on the stern of many boats this year more than fills the entire floor of this room.

Although the mesh material for each piece of the net comes from a factory in Lithuania, all of the pieces that go together to make the net have to be measured, cut and then hand-sewn together. Each step in the process has its own particular methods for how to tie the knots, splice the ropes, and piece together all the mesh, twine, and rope to make a functional net.

Even just the most basic of tasks, lacing together two pieces of mesh, was slow going for me even after I got the hang of the method – although it was kind of exciting to see palpable progress as I worked my way down the room.

It takes this group of experienced netmakers about three days to put together a full trawl net – which seems fast to me given how slowly I work without any experience – but still uses about 120 hours worth of work. The labor-intensity of the process, combined with the huge amount of physical material that goes into making a full trawl net explains why one of these nets ends up costing about $20,000. That’s expensive for a net, but in the scheme of things for a large fishing enterprise, this is just one of many pieces of the extensive capital investment (buying and maintaining a boat, fuel, nets, etc.) that have to be put in before there’s any chance to catch something and hope to make a profit. The fisheries union, the Fish, Food, and Allied Workers (FFAW), writes that, “As the shellfish-driven fishery of the late 1990s and early 2000s drove existing fishing fleets farther from shore, there was a massive overall capital investment - to the tune of $100s of millions - in vessels more suited to the greater distances from shore and the changing nature of the fishery.” And in most of the world’s fishing industries these days, this has become commonplace.

Yet even as the nature of the fishery is changing to require this sort of capital investment, many Newfoundlanders seem hesitant to trade the small-scale inshore fishery for fewer, larger, more capital-intensive enterprises. One of the most interesting things about seeing how trawl nets are made here in Newfoundland is that, unlike other places I’ve been like Iceland and Scotland where nearly everyone is fishing with trawl nets, trawling is a relatively small part of the province’s fishing industry. Even though there are about 13,000 people in Newfoundland employed as fish harvesters, there are fewer than four hundred shrimp licenses in the province, meaning that it’s actually only a fairly small proportion of the industry – the largest, most capital-intensive enterprises – that fishes with this sort of trawl net.

Among the old-time, inshore fishermen, many are dubious of trawling, particularly after many felt that offshore trawling caused the decline of the cod stocks, and even among the families of fishermen who had invested in the larger boats and gone shrimp trawling who I met on Fogo Island, many wondered whether they actually made any more money at the end of the day because of the bigger boat. At the same time, though, this sort of modernization, using new technology to be able to target new species in new ways and increasing size to improve economic efficiency, seems to be the dominant trend in the world’s most profitable fishing industries, and a trend the province can’t afford to ignore since marine resources remain a central pillar of the economy. So for me, a trip to the Hampiðjan Canada netloft in Spaniard’s Bay was a prime illustration of Newfoundland’s balancing act in today’s fishing industry: we drove through small outports with fishermen who still know how to make their own wooden punts and maintain old put-put engines to get to a netloft that has evolved in the hands of a local family to partner with a worldwide company and uses materials from as far away as Lithuania and Iceland to build trawls for the largest, most capital-intensive fleet fishing out of Newfoundland’s outports. It’s an odd juxtaposition between the old traditional ways and modern innovation born of globalization. One that Newfoundlanders (and I) are still trying to work out.

Saving a few thousand words on St. John's

2008-05-25T19:43:00.007-04:00

St. John's has been my home base since I got back to this side of the Atlantic, and so I thought I should share a bit of the area. I'll admit that my first impression of the town was not so favorable - after more than nine months away from the realm of big box stores and strip malls I was a bit in shock at how, well, American it seemed here. But St. John's is also a city with plenty of charm - the oldest and easternmost city in north America, capital city of Newfoundland and Labrador, a city that manages to have both the most bars per capita of any city in North America but also a friendly atmosphere, low crime rate, and lots of walking trails and parks within the city limits. (Much of this, I should add, is helped by the fact that St. John's has a population only slightly over 100,000 and seems more like a small town at the center of a sprawling suburb than a bona fide city. But I digress.)

Downtown itself is rather quaint and cheerful. To me, the bright colors on the wooden houses says New England meets Iceland, which might not actually be so far off.
The town is situated at the site of an excellent natural harbor, which made it a great location for the early English fishermen who used the town as a base when they began crossing the Atlantic in search of cod in the 1500s. This view shows most of the downtown area and the entrance to the harbor, known as the "narrows" for rather obvious reasons.
When the town was initially founded, this geography was also a major benefit for defense - on the hill to the left of the picture above you'll find Signal Hill, and to the right, Fort Amherst (yes, the very same Lord Jeffrey Amherst of my fair alma mater). While Adam was here, we took a walk up to the top of Signal Hill to see the reception point of the first transatlantic wireless signal by Guglielmo Marconi in 1901, as well as the site of harbor defenses for St. John's from the 18th century to the Second World War.The town is obviously well-defended.Partly because it is such an excellent harbor and partly because Newfoundland's lifeblood is the sea, it is still very much an active harbor. There are many fishing boats tied up along the harbor downtown (also a number of other boats, including supply and service vessels for the growing oil industry and even an EU fisheries patrol vessel). As you can see from the crab pots, these boats are actually here to work, not just to look pretty.Also among the defining characteristics of St. John's is its weather - lots of wind and rain and fog that is only just starting to clear up enough to hint of summer. Here Adam demonstrates mid-April wind at the top of Signal Hill, so strong we actually had to be careful not to get blown over. Most people tell me that this year is worst than most, but I think I'd be missing something of the Newfoundland experience if I only saw clear, sunny days. To make up for it, though (and partially causing it), the spring brings visitors from the far north...icebergs!This one was right in the entrance to the harbor at Quidi Vidi, a small fishing harbor just at the edge of downtown St. John's. One of the other things I like about this city is that there can be a small village like this just a few kilometers from the central downtown.With this just next to the city, even for "townies," it would be hard to forget the central role of fishing in the economy and identity of Newfoundland.

It's a good place to be.

Of seals and sealers

2008-05-21T22:38:00.005-04:00

Most people around the world who have heard of Newfoundland immediately associate this rock in the north Atlantic (as the locals fondly call it) with cod fishing on the Grand Banks, particularly since the collapse of the cod stocks in the early 1990s and the cod moratorium made international news and turned Newfoundland into the fishing world’s cautionary tale. But there are other species long-hunted by the local fishermen who make their living from the sea that makes international headlines every year – seals. Each year, Canada’s hunt for harp, hooded and gray seals draws the attention of animal rights protesters around the world, constantly raising questions about the future of the seal hunt as other nations around the world threaten to ban Canadian seal products and even boycott all Canadian fish.

Each year when the harbors of Newfoundland become iced-in, seals appear on the ice floes, sometimes practically walking distance from shore over the ice in addition to farther out on the “front.”

Inuit and other native peoples in Newfoundland have hunted seals for at least 4,000 years, and when Europeans first began traveling to Newfoundland for the seasonal cod fishery in the sixteenth century, the potential meat and saleable furs from seal hunting were both an incentive for permanent settlement and a means of making it through the long winters when the iced-in harbors made fishing impossible.

Increased demand for seal oil and furs in Europe led to the beginning of a “commercial” seal hunt beginning in the 1750s, and the seal hunt shifted from the former tradition of seal hunting in small open wooden boats called punts or even just walking out from land over the ice to an operation on large boats. The first wooden sailing boat headed for the seals of the distant ice floes left St. John’s in 1794 and by the mid-nineteenth-century, sealing on large boats with crews assembled from all around the island was a central part of life in Newfoundland. Even today, I met people who could tell stories of their fathers and grandfathers who were so desperate for a berth on one of these sealing ships that they would even walk to St. John’s from the outports; young boys attempted to stow away in the ships, and it was considered usual for a few to manage to avoid being caught despite the boats being scoured for stowaways before leaving port. With no fishing income in the winter, sealing became a central piece of the island’s economy – second only to cod fishing. It was hard, dirty, dangerous work – crewmen had little to eat, often not enough clothing to keep them warm on the ice, and men often got stranded out on the ice or drowned when their boat was crushed in ice or sank – but it was a necessity of life for many Newfoundlanders to get their families through the winters.

In the twentieth century, seal hunting modernized into a large-scale high-technology fishery along with the rest of the fishing industry. But in the 1960s, opposition to the Canadian seal hunt exploded among the public as a result of graphic footage of the hunt showing both the charismatic baby whitecoat seals that had long been the chief targets because of their highly-prized white fur and the startling image of red blood on white ice. Animal rights activists led protests around the world, particularly in the US and Europe, and in 1983, the European Commission banned imports of any products made from the whitecoats, cutting off 75% of the market and effectively stopping the seal hunt in its tracks. Since then, the Canadian seal hunt has changed considerably: killing whitecoats was made illegal; there are no longer any industrial-sized sealing boats, with all seal hunting now done from small inshore punts and midsize nearshore vessels; and the Department of Fisheries and Oceans has put in place a host of regulations on how the seals may be killed, designed to ensure that the seals are treated humanely.

I’m no expert on seals or sealing, but it seems that the main reason people oppose the seal hunt is, well…seals are cute. The youngest baby harp seals, known as whitecoats before they shed their initial white fur, are the iconic cute baby animal with big black eyes, and somehow even though hunting for these youngest of baby seals stopped twenty years ago, the whitecoats still feature front and center in most anti-sealing media (examples of this include a popular post from this year on a vegan blog and this video from the Humane Society). I’ll admit – it’s not pleasant to see the seals being killed (in the video – I couldn’t go out and see it for myself because strict rules for the seal hunt require that anyone coming near the seals during the hunt, whether hunter, protester, or observer, have a license). But these reports are sensationalized: repeated studies by veterinarians and independent scientists have determined that the seal hunt is humane – not only has the commonly-criticized club, called a hakapik, been shown to cause seals no more suffering than certified methods for slaughterhouses, most sealers today use high-powered rifles that kill the seals cleanly and instantly.

Similarly, the rhetoric of questioning the future of the seal populations suggests the seals are endangered, despite the fact that the stocks are closely monitored by the Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans and strict quotas are set to determine that the hunt is sustainable – in fact stocks have been slowly increasing. As the Director of Conservation and Fisheries Advisor for the Atlantic region of WWF-Canada pointed out to me last week, the seal hunt is not a conservation issue (and thus they focus their efforts elsewhere on species that may be less charismatic but more at risk). Most Newfoundlanders point out that if seal populations were allowed to grow unchecked, they would also put even more pressure on the population of cod, one of the seals’ favorite foods, also seen as an issue in the case of seal populations in Scotland and the whale population in Iceland.(I love the painting on the boats here.)

This is not to say that Newfoundlanders have had no faults in the history of the sealing industry. Overhunting has been a serious problem in the past when the hunt was unregulated: as early as 1800, the walrus population in the Gulf of St. Lawrence had been hunted to extinction and the harp and gray seal populations were diminished in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Most Newfoundlanders I’ve talked to have little sympathy for the anti-sealing protesters in any capacity, responses to any mention of Greenpeace and Paul Watson ranging from shaking heads to wishes of unpleasant fates, but the most nuanced view I’ve heard was in a short story written by a man I met along the harbor in Tilting in Fogo Island.

I met Roy Dwyer, a sealer himself, as he was cleaning out his own small boat (in the picture above) after going out sealing, and I went over to his house with him to buy a copy of the book he just recently published. In his story “The Cardigan,” two young people (the narrator and Barb), ask an old-time sealer, Uncle Pete, about the protesters.

“You must really hate Greenpeace,” Barb interjected.
“No, not at all, my dear. They just sounded an alarm. The seals were getting scarce but nobody would face up to it.”
“But that doesn’t excuse them,” I said, “for portraying Newfoundlanders as barbarians.”

Uncle Pete later says,
“In a way it wouldn’t hurt to have a little bit of Greenpeace in all of us.”

But he also confronts a protester on the ice, saying,
“What do you know about our way of life? Here at the edge of the world, outside of your world, these hands, our hands, battle sea, ice and storm to make a living. You say our hands are soaked in blood but it’s the sea’s blood and at times our own blood and it’s been that way for generations.”

For me, this illustrates my major problem with the anti-sealing protesters, a sentiment I’ve also heard from many people I’ve met here: it’s not so much the opposition to the hunt that is so offensive, but the fact that they give the local people and their culture no credit either for the importance of their sealing traditions or for the genuine efforts they have made both towards conservation and making the hunt itself more humane. Most, in fact, know little about the hunt at all: this girl I met demonstrating against the Canadian seal hunt on the streets of Edinburgh admitted to me that she knew very little about the hunt beyond the information on the flyer she was distributing.

This girl, at least, was a steadfast vegan consistent in her opposition to all use of animal products as food or fur; many people here have pointed out the hypocrisy of decrying the death of seals to provide food and fur for humans when they wear leather, eat chicken and steak (or even lamb and veal – babies!). As a vegetarian myself, I’m not going to be eating any seal flipper pie (as intrigued as I am by the concept) and I don’t plan on buying a seal-fur coat…but I see far more reason to protest the average meat-producing factory farm than the seal hunt.

I went through some of the archived Canadian Broadcasting Company coverage of the seal hunt , and some of the comments from the 1970s and 1980s point out some of the same major flaws in the anti-sealing movement that I see today. In 1977, Richard Cashin of the Newfoundland Fishermen, Food and Allied Workers' Union told CBC that "this is a social, economic and political question about the sealing," saying that the protests were also pushing for Newfoundlanders to give up their rural lifestyle for an urban, modernized, high-technology world – the kind of society that doesn’t like to associate images of bloody animals with the food they buy from the supermarket (a trend I’m not a big a fan of, as I’ve written about before). He says, "I think...that the soul of this province would suffer, if you came down to me in your gross hypocricy, eating meat and wearing other furs, and said you were imposing your morality on me” and forcing me to give up sealing. "If today you take the seal away from me, tomorrow you'll take the cod, the next day the lobster, the next day my right to live in a small village, and you'll put me up in your crime-infested central Canadian cities in areas where you yourself have been unable to come to grips with the problems of your society and it is much easier to get concerned about the problems of distant provinces." Indeed, many of the online comments I’ve read opposing the seal hunt suggest (in often none-too-pleasant terms) that the sealers should go move to the cities “like everyone else” and should catch up with the rest of “civilized” society. Although I wouldn’t quite equate the situation of Newfoundlanders with Canada’s indigenous people, but comments like these illustrate where Cashin was coming from when he said, "if you want to do with us as you did with the Indians, then do it."

In addition to these defenses of Newfoundland traditional culture, generally belittled or completely overlooked in criticisms of the seal hunt, another important question is why the seals have drawn so much attention at all. In 1982 debates in Britain, Ken Collins, a Scottish MP and Chairman of Parliament’s Environment Committee, pointed out, "over 5 million people have submitted signatures on [seals]...when we've debated hunger, when we've debated the torture and the misery of many people across the world, the letters have not appeared, and I think that that is a reflection of the values sometimes that our society has I'm afraid...I think we have to express just a little degree of doubt about the values of those that will weep tears for seals in Canada...and yet will quite heartlessly condone the policies of those who will continue the policies of those that will continue the catalog of torture and misery and poverty and indeed death of people in just as distant and just as deprived parts of the world." Many people here are intensely cynical about the motives of the animal rights protesters, saying that they focus on the seal hunt because the tear-jerking images bring in the money to fund their organizations. I’m not one for cynicism, but I must admit that even within a legitimate animal rights agenda, I see little reason to focus on the hunt of a non-endangered wild species as part of a rural society’s long-held lifestyle when there are plenty of endangered species and farm animals who live and die in far worse conditions.

There's a lot of information out there, a lot more than I've included here, but if you want more information, I suggest as places to start:
The Department of Fisheries and Oceans, Canada
Canadian Geographic, Sealing Timeline
CBC Archives on Sealing

A Tale of Saltfish

2008-05-06T23:04:00.007-04:00

It has been another long hiatus since my last update, mostly spent in enjoyable wanderings getting the feel of Newfoundland – from the rugged geology and rocky coastlines to the incredibly friendly people to the excellent traditional music on the radio (a blend of seafaring ballads and chanties, Irish tunes, and something uniquely Newfoundland). After two leisurely weeks with Adam exploring St. John’s, the capital city of Newfoundland and Labrador and both the oldest and easternmost city in North America, and a week visiting beautiful, friendly and very fishery-oriented Fogo Island, I’m now back in St. John’s, settling in a bit for the last weeks of my long adventure. The places I’ve been deserve telling of their own, but for now what I really want to write is an experiment in…food blogging.

This, of course, is not a food blog, but I remember that quite a while back, my favorite food blogger mentioned that she would write something about bacalao and never got around to it. So, inspired by having the past and present world of bacalao all around me, I thought I’d try to pinch hit.

Bacalao, of course, is cod. Dried, salted cod to be specific. Although even today, there is no word in Spanish for fresh cod – it has to be specified as fresh bacalao. This may seem strange in an age where fish is flown around the world to arrive fresh to markets tens of thousands of miles away, but in the days when cod was a major staple food and item of trade, the only way to ship it was once it had been preserved for travel.

I picked up my saltcod in Bergen, Norway, where it goes by the name klippfisk. Bergen came to prominence in the Hanseatic age as an important trading center, and in those days most of the warehouses on the famous Hanseatic wharf at Bryggen were full of stockfish and klippfisk.

(Today, Bryggen is a UNESCO World Cultural Heritage site and most of the buildings contain gift shops, restaurants, and museums.)

Having already tasted traditional Norwegian preparations of cod, I took the opportunity while in Bergen to try the dish simply known as “bacalao,” the traditional Spanish and Portuguese preparation of saltfish, no doubt introduced to Norwegians by the many foreign traders who come to buy their fish. (Even recipes on Mexican websites say that Norwegian saltfish is the best quality, and worth paying extra for.)

So I went to one of the restaurants along the historic wharf in Bryggen, decorated in proper Bryggen cultural-heritage style with old wooden ships, paintings of ships, and ropes, blocks, and other odds and ends taken from ships. Norwegian businessmen were enjoying lunch and plenty of Norwegian beer (only Norwegians enjoy Norwegian beer because everyone else is still too hung up on the price).

And I ordered myself a lunch portion of bacalao.

It tasted rather like a stew, with the fish cooked along with tomatoes, peppers, potatoes and a faint hint of spiciness, although not too much, since the Norwegian palate is generally not accustomed to very spicy foods. It was good, particularly with good French bread.

So good that I decided to embark on my own culinary adventures with bacalao. So I went across the street to the seafood store in town and bought myself my own kilogram of klippfisk to bring with me on my journey from Bergen to St. John’s.

Even though I didn’t cook my Norwegian klippfisk in Norway, Newfoundland is also an ideal place to experiment in cooking saltfish, since the original European explorers chose to settle on this rock in the harsh Atlantic climate not for its beauty but for its cod, which was both traded and eaten at home salted and dried for most of the island’s history as both the Newfies’ staple food and as the “Newfoundland currency” as proclaimed on an early stamp.

In downtown St. John’s, murals and statues speak to the importance of catching, preparing, and selling saltfish in the town’s history.

And on my trip out to Fogo Island, I had the chance to see some of Newfoundland’s best-preserved fishing stages, used for “making” the fish – the process of salting and drying the cod after it was brought back ashore.

So it was in the most appropriate of circumstances that I made my first-ever homecooked saltfish into bacalao. The process started the night before, since saltfish needs to soak for about 24 hours to rehydrate the fish and get rid of some of the saltiness. Although not all directions call for it, I also changed the water in the morning to make sure to get rid of enough of the salt.
Here’s the recipe I used, loosely adapted from a number of versions found online:

half a kilogram of klippfisk
1 large or 2 small cans of peeled, cut tomatoes (whatever’s handy will do, just note that the more runny your canned tomatoes, the more watery your finished product will end up, determining whether it seems more like soup or stew)
half of a large white onion, chopped
a lot of garlic, (in my mind, the more the better), around 4 to 6 cloves, half as whole cloves and half pressed or cut fairly finely
half a cup of olive oil
a small jar of green olives (around a cup)
a sliced red pepper
a jar of chiles in vinegar (or if, like me, you can’t find chiles, whatever hot peppers are in the store)
6 small potatoes, about 2 cups

You'll want to start with two pots on the stove - one with water to boil the potatoes, and a second one (the one everything will end up in at the end) with olive oil in the bottom. While the potatoes boil, heat the olive oil with half of the garlic, still as whole cloves, until the garlic is brown. Once the garlic seems entirely browned, discard it - now the olive oil has extra garlicy taste.

Add the tomatoes, cut garlic, and onion to the oil and mix will. Heat until everything reaches a boil and cook for a minute on a low simmer before adding the fish. Break the saltfish into pieces as you add it to the pot. After you’ve finished adding the fish, dump in the red pepper and olives. You can also add some of the vinegar from the chiles or hot peppers if you like spiciness – I used a couple of tablespoons, but you should taste it to check. Mix everything together and boil until everything is hot and the fish seems cooked, but not overcooked, which takes around 15 to 20 minutes. While it cooks, take your boiled potatoes, which should be done by now, and cut them into slices.

When the bacalao mixture is fully cooked, remove it from the stove and add the potatoes. It should look something like this:Serve it with the peppers or chiles on top. Very good with French bread. Also good with philosophical musings about the significance of saltfish throughout history and throughout the north Atlantic. Mmm, tasty.

Nine Months Out

2008-04-12T09:32:00.007-04:00

From where I left off in the Lofoten Islands, one of the most gorgeous places I have been this year,

I took a long and scenic trip south on "Hurtigruten," the coastal steamer ("the world's most beautiful voyage),

a train-bus-boat trip from Bergen to Oslo through Norway's longest and most famous fjord and on two of the most famous and impressive railway lines,

and a long and not-so-scenic airplane journey from Oslo via London (Heathrow's new terminal 5) and Newark,

I have finally arrived in St. John's, Newfoundland for the final segment of this year of travel. I must say, it's a little weird to be back on this side of the Atlantic. In any case, here I give you my third official quarterly report for the Watson Foundation as a bit of a wrap-up of what I've been up to these past few months before I plunge ahead into the last leg of my trip.

I left off at the end of my last report saying that having spent most of my first six months learning about policy and science but seeing the fishing itself mostly from the outside, I planned to focus this stage of my project on getting to know the views of fishermen and their communities. I can say now, having had the chance to visit small, fishery-dependent communities and spend time with fishermen and their families in Scotland and Norway, getting to know these people and places has been the highlight of my past three months. I saw inshore crab fishing with creels – one of the few fisheries still left largely unregulated – in the Orkney Islands; I met a northern Irish skipper waiting for a replacement part for his engine in Lerwick harbor in the Shetland Islands, not only a major fishing area but also an important port for fishing boats in the North Sea that run into bad weather or technical problems; I went to a meeting of prawn (Norway lobster, or Nephrops) fishermen in Fraserburgh in northeast Scotland discussing how to modify their nets to reduce cod bycatch with scientists from Fisheries Research Services in Aberdeen; I spent a week in Peterhead, the largest whitefish port in Britain, staying with a skipper and his wife and getting to know their family and town; I talked with fishermen from small west coast prawn trawlers as they mended their nets on the docks when the bad weather kept them in port; I shared a traditional Lofoten Islands Easter dinner of boknafisk (made from cod that has been hung to dry for two weeks, the beginning of the process of preparing stockfish) with the family of a coastal gill net fishermen in Ballstad in northern Norway.

Although I was still an outsider looking in on the fishery, I did get to see the places and meet the people who live in and on the fishery and they were tremendously welcoming and generous in sharing their time and knowledge. Their stories about how their towns and fishing fleets have been forced to adapt to changes in both fish stocks and management policies, their passion for where they live and what they do, and their broader view of fisheries not as a separate entity to be studied but as something woven into the pattern of their lives, was the reminder I needed of why I wanted to study cod in the first place and why I care in the first place about the bureaucratic tangle of rules trying to keep fishing sustainable.

During my week in Peterhead, the closest I have felt to any of the communities I have visited, I was struck by their sense of history and tradition in their towns and in the larger fishing industry. I spent the morning after I arrived in town at the Deep Sea Fishermen’s Mission talking with retired fishermen over tea about their days in herring boats following the fish from Lerwick up in Shetland down to Great Yarmouth in England, and then returned to the Mission in the evening for the Ladies Meeting to sing hymns with nautical themes and hear the older women’s stories about their younger days as herring girls following the boats along the coast to gut and pack the fish. The skipper and his wife I stayed with showed me the video of the launch of their boat, the Budding Rose – an event they described as equally important to a wedding in the life of a fisherman – with footage of the whole family and their friends in their best clothes and the boat being blessed and let down the ramp into the water to the playing of a lone piper. This skipper’s twin brother took me along to a local elementary school where he taught a lesson about the fishing industry complete with muster drills and practice net-mending, one of the many ways he has stayed active in maintaining the fishing traditions of his family and community even after retiring from fishing. And so even though the business of fishing was certainly an important aspect of life in Peterhead, when I talked with the fishermen about the effects of the policies that have drastically reduced the fleet, they didn’t talk about money but about the people are leaving and the loss of families with over a century of fishing history. And this experience is representative of the passion I have found for fisheries in so many of the communities I have visited: the stories I heard, whether in Peterhead or in the Gaelic-speaking Hebrides on the west coast of Scotland or in the villages of the Lofoten Islands in northern Norway, told of fishing as a way of life, not just as a way of making a living.

Right now in Scotland, the future is looking hopeful for most of the fishermen who have kept their boats and quotas and stayed in the industry. The Scottish fishing fleet has been particularly hard-hit over the past decade, with about 60% of the boats being “decommissioned” – sold for scrap and removed from the fleet as part of a government program to reduce the size of the fishing fleet and readjust the overall fishing capacity of the industry to match the reduced quotas available as the EU attempts to rebuild the North Sea’s cod stocks. For the boats that are left, though, this has meant less competition for the fish available, and with the decline in illegal or “black” fishing that had been paying the bills for fishermen who didn’t have enough quota to pay their expenses, fish prices have risen considerably and enabled the boats to get more profit from their catches. Now that the situation seems to have stabilized, the industry has been working to improve its image among the public, from voluntary programs such as a Responsible Skipper’s Scheme where the boats pledge to comply with health, safety, and environmental regulations, applying for Marine Stewardship Council certification for North Sea haddock and Scottish prawn (Nephrops) fisheries, and even showing British television-viewers just what it takes to get fish on the table as a few fishing crews have become minor celebrities as part of the popular BBC series Trawlermen (rather like a British version of Deadliest Catch). Scotland has also been proactive among European states responding to the tightened regulations around cod, putting in place real-time closures where any area found to have a high proportion of juvenile cod is immediately closed for fishing and a conservation credits scheme that encourages skippers to try new net plans and fishing strategies that reduce their cod catches and discard rates by rewarding them with extra days at sea for fishing. Unlike a few years ago, when most fishermen say their outlook was mostly gloom and doom, they see that the decommissioning is over and the fish stocks are recovering and are optimistic that they can continue to make a living from fishing.

The worry, however, is that with the ability to buy and sell quotas, the next few years could see a continued decrease in the number of boats fishing as large companies buy up more and more of the quota, reducing the size of the fleet and putting many small ports out of business. The boatyard owner in Mallaig, on the west coast of Scotland, told me he had been discouraging his son from getting a job in boatbuilding because he doesn’t see it as an industry that will last throughout his son’s lifetime. In larger ports like Peterhead, plans for future expansion rely on the large pelagic boats and oil tenders rather than on the smaller skipper-owned whitefish vessels. Many middle-aged fishermen today are the last in a line of fishing heritage that stretches back more than a century. Already, skippers have found fewer and fewer young people in Scottish fishing towns deciding to get jobs in fishing, and nearly all the boats I saw all around the coast of Scotland had hired at least one Filipino crew member to fill the gap.

For some of the kids growing up in fishing towns today, it is simply the lure of more reliable pay in the oil industry or a land-based job that keeps them from fishing. A more intractable deterrent for young people, however, is that high quota prices – literally the price of the right to fish – have made it nearly impossible for a young man could start out as a crewman and eventually save up enough to buy and skipper his own boat. When most of the current skippers began fishing, all they needed was a boat and a fishing license, and when the quota system was introduced, they were given a quota for free based on their “historical” fishing patterns. With the additional startup cost today with the quota system in place, only young people coming from a fishing family with a chance to inherit a boat and quota have the chance to make it to the position of skipper within their lifetimes. With so few opportunities for the next generation of fishermen, a west coast Scottish skipper predicted that as the current generation of skippers retires, they will sell off their quotas to those few families who have stayed in the industry until all the fish is being caught by “five millionaires.”

In Norway, rural fishing communities are also losing their young people to jobs on land and in larger towns. It is not so obvious as in Scotland, since the Norwegian coastal fleet has been able to maintain better wages for the crew than in Scotland, helped both because the Barents Sea cod stock that comes to spawn around the Lofoten Islands is doing well and because small boats going out for daytrips have lower expenses for fuel and maintenance than the Scottish trawlers. So far the coastal boats in northern Norway don’t seem to have had trouble finding Norwegian crew members (although on the large boats in the southwest, this may not be the case – I met a Polish fisherman in Bergen looking for work on a long-liner who had found many large companies looking for crew). With only four months of experience, the young man fishing as the only crewmember with the skipper on the Iversen Jr told me that he was making plenty of money and saw fishing as a good job. And even while still in school, young people are encouraged to see the fishing industry as a lucrative line of work, as the job of cutting the tongues off the fish heads before they are hung up to dry is traditionally kept for children, who can make up to two hundred kroner (about $38) an hour.

Despite this, however, the overall demographics of Norway’s fishing population show a dramatic dropoff in the number of young people going into fishing as a career. Like in Scotland, this is the first new generation that will face the additional cost of purchasing quotas if they want to skipper their own boats, making fishing less attractive as a career than as a short-term job. (While technically the quotas are attached to vessels and have to be re-approved by the government if the vessel is sold, leading the Norwegian government to claim that they have not privatized the fishery, vessels are advertised on the market with and without fishing quota and people pay a lot of money for the quotas. The fisherman in Ballstad in the Lofoten Islands who took me out on his coastal gill netting boat, the Iversen Jr, told me that about 90% of what he paid for the boat was for the fishing quota, not the value of the boat itself.) Of course, decreased interest in fishing careers is not necessarily the fault of fishing policies – many people I talked to point instead to a globalized world where children grow up with television and internet that introduces them to allure of big cities that are not available in rural fishing communities, others point to a more education-focused culture that sends young people away from home to finish school and prepares them for white-collar jobs rather than for fishing. Whatever the reason, however, fishing communities – whether in Norway or Scotland or indeed any of the places I have visited – are in for drastic changes if retiring fishermen end up selling their fishing quotas not to younger fishermen in the local area following traditional fishing methods but to larger fishing companies in other parts of the country, literally selling away the community’s rights to fish.

And this brings me to what has remained the nagging problem in the back of my mind in thinking about the quota-based management systems that I have seen so far this year (and though each country runs the system a little differently and only Iceland has openly named the system one of individual transferable quotas, Denmark, Scotland, and Norway in addition to Iceland all have systems that allow fishermen to buy and sell the right to fish). Should these countries really be giving the right to catch fish – to use a public natural resource – to private individuals, to be bought and sold on the market like any other commodity? (Of course, most countries – and particularly those like Norway and Iceland with a strong legal and cultural tradition of considering fish a free resource for the entire public – argue that rights have not in fact been given away, just temporarily granted. But when selling a quota is providing the money to buy a new house or car, when people cannot afford to purchase the quota necessary to fish, it seems clear to me that whether the rights are temporary or permanent on paper, they have closed public access to fishing for all of those who were left out of the initial allocation of fishing rights determined based on “historical” fishing during a short reference period – which of course left out all future generations who were not yet around to be fishing – unless those who were left out of the initial allocation have the money to purchase for themselves the right to fish.)

In Iceland, the representatives of large fishing companies holding large proportions of the quotas argued that private individuals or companies with a large share in the quotas have a stronger stake in maintaining the resource, contributing to conservation goals as a means of maximizing profit from the national fish resources. But this model assumes that money – the net profit to be made from a nation’s fish stocks, the maximum price received by fishing at the level of the “maximum sustainable yield” – is the end goal of a nation’s fishing policy. But is that necessarily the only desirable goal? Fish is not just money (despite the Norwegian saying as the fish dry in Lofoten that you can smell the money in the air) – it is also food, nature, culture, tradition. Having had the privilege to meet many of the people in fishing communities in the eastern North Atlantic, when I think of the value of fish I think of the families who have shown incredible kindness by inviting me into their homes, the skippers who have taken the time to show me their boats and fishing methods, the scientists working alongside the fishermen to develop better fishing gear technology, the fish buyers who arrive at the markets every morning to purchase the day’s catch at auction, the “Mission Men” providing moral and financial support for those who deal with the day-to-day risks of bringing fish to the table. With whole communities centered around fish resources, decisions should not be left up to a select group of people as a small “special interest” issue but considered by the whole of the public, all of whom have a stake in determining how we value and use natural resources.

And so, I have come to realize over the past months that that the “big picture” is much bigger than just fisheries. Protecting cod isn’t just about a funny-looking species of groundfish – because if that was the only reason to care about cod, it would long ago have gone the way of all the non-cute-and-fuzzy species under pressure from human activities. Although having spent four years learning to think like a geologist did not teach me much about fisheries, my tendency to think about broad questions of “the environment” in a geologic time scale informs how I see humanity’s relationship with natural resources: in the scheme of things, the world will go on if we depopulate the fish stocks that humans eat for food – new species will take their place, the ecosystem will evolve…and anyway, most of these species wouldn’t outlast the creation of the next supercontinent just a few tens of millions of years down the road. On a human timescale, however, depopulation of fish stocks means the loss of a piece of nature upon which many people and cultures depend. Sustainable fishing is about sustaining things people value that have grown up around cod: it’s about maintaining an ecosystem that can support fisheries-dependent economies, allow coastal communities to maintain their culture and traditions, and provide healthy food for the world’s growing population. Thinking about the wider contexts in which people value fisheries has made me consider much larger issues: what sort of food sources should we use to feed the world’s growing population? What is the place of traditional rural cultures in a globalized, technically-advanced world? How should a nation allocate finite natural resources among its population?

My experience so far this year has been richest when I find myself thinking about these larger questions and looking at what I am seeing and doing as broadly as possible. With all the technical complexity of trying to decipher fisheries regulations, not to mention the frequent day-to-day slog of trying to figure out the logistics of what I’m doing and where I’m going next, I sometimes find myself getting bogged down in the minutiae of my project. But for me, the real beauty of the Watson Fellowship is that I don’t have to sort out all the details or limit my scope to questions I can neatly answer, and that there is no separation between things that are and are not relevant to this year’s experience – everything can relate back to what I am learning, both about fisheries and the larger questions they inform. I find lessons about the reasons people value fishing and connections to larger questions about the place of fishing in today’s society in all manner of surprising places: an example of people’s strong ties to rural communities and the importance of a sustainable food supply in meeting a couple who moved back to the wife’s childhood home in the Lofoten Islands to start an organic farm, or insight into the importance of fishing heritage in Scottish culture listening to a ballad about the end of the steam drifter era in an Edinburgh folk music pub, or an illustration of the personal significance of cod in Norway in the embroidered cod on the dress of the woman sitting behind me at the church service on Easter Sunday. Learning about fisheries not just as something I am studying but as part of an overall experience, I also see the big picture questions of how and why people value fish – their overall experience of fisheries – as the place to start any discussion of how to ensure that fisheries management continues to sustain not only the fish resources at their base but the reasons that people care about fish in the first place. It’s not an answer to solve the problems of the cod fisheries in the north Atlantic (which, surprise surprise, is not something I could do in a year), but taking the time to think about these questions in a larger context does frame my perspective in thinking about how to manage natural resources – and I still have the rest of my life to spend looking for answers.

From Sea to Stockfish: Lofoten’s Coastal Cod Fishery

2008-04-07T08:31:00.016-04:00

Every year, for as long as people have lived in northern Norway, the winter has been a time for fishing. In January, the Barents Sea cod stock swims south from the coast of Finnmark to spawn along the coast of the Lofoten Islands, just north of the Arctic Circle on the Norwegian coast. From January through April, coastal fishermen from Lofoten – and many visiting fishermen from all along the Norwegian coast (and increasingly also foreign sports fishermen, attracted by the lure of catching a record-breaking cod, perhaps as part of the World Cod Fishing Championships, described very nicely here) – set out in small day boats to catch the spawning cod as they come close to shore. Many people I met over the past six months had recommended that I go see the Lofoten fishery and I was curious to see the traditional inshore fishing fleet for myself, so even though I hadn’t initially included it is my plans for the year, I headed to Ballstad, a fishing village of just under a thousand people in the southern end of the Lofoten Islands, for a week in the middle of the peak cod fishing season in the end of March.

I arrived on the ferry the night before Easter, in the middle of Lofoten’s biggest snowstorm and coldest night of the year so far, to discover that – being the night before Easter – there were no buses running and no shops open for the next two days. Luckily, Mary Ann and Børge, the couple who own the rorbu (fishermen’s cabin – initially built around Lofoten to house fishermen visiting for the winter cod season, now mostly run as tourist accommodation for the summer months) I was staying in took pity on me and my poor planning (somehow I had just brought a jar of peanut butter as food) by inviting me for Easter dinner with their family. They made a Lofoten specialty called boknafisk, made from cod left out to dry on the fish drying racks for fourteen days, served along with potatoes and peas and a bacon and butter sauce. It was wonderful to have the chance to share a holiday meal with a local fishing family (in addition to running the rorbuer, Børge is a commercial fisherman on a coastal gill netter), and very tasty fish too.

Although I had not considered whether it would be a good idea to spend Easter in small Lofoten town (not normally celebrating Easter myself and all), it turned out to be a wonderful opportunity to get to see the normal life of the community – including the place of cod in local culture. Since everything in town was closed for Easter, I did what seemed the normal thing to do – go to Easter services. Since I had never actually been to an Easter service before, I couldn’t tell you the difference between Norwegian and American Easter traditions. But the church – a 102-year-old red and green painted wooden cathedral with lots of stained glass and sunlight – was lovely and the music, hymns accompanied by an organ, trumpet, and choir, was beautiful, and I really enjoyed watching the service unfold (and even could mostly tell what was going on, with the help of explanations and translations by the woman I sat with).

The best part, though, were the families baptizing their babies as part of the service – which there were quite a lot of, since Norwegian families tend to all get together for Easter and so the baptisms wait until the whole family can be back at home. This was exciting first of all because it was fun to see all the babies in their lacy baptism dresses and little hats (I had also never seen a baptism before), but also because I got to see the mothers’ traditional Norwegian dress costumes. I didn’t take any pictures (even though plenty of people brought cameras and took pictures of the baptisms, I’m used to thinking of religious events as technology-free, and anyway it seems disrespectful to me to take pictures during a service, so I left my camera at home). But you can get the idea of what they look like here. The Lofoten costume is a blue floor-length dress and vest-like jumper top embroidered with flowers, worn along with a matching embroidered purse attached on the side and a cape used instead of a regular coat when going outside. My favorite, though, was the design worn by the woman sitting behind me: under an embroidered picture of two Viking ships heading towards the sun was an anatomically-correct cod, and on closer consideration I also noticed that her purse, rather than being embroidered, was decorated by silver charms in the shape of a cod covered over by a piece of green mesh with a silver clasp at the top in the shape of a fishing boat such that the purse looks like the boat has caught a net full of fish. Just in case I was wondering, cod is pretty important to Lofoten.

The next morning, I went out fishing with Børge on his boat, the Iversen Jr, to see how the coastal fishermen in Lofoten catch their cod.

Børge fishes nine months out of the year and catches a quota of 44 tons of fish (mostly cod, and other species such as haddock and saithe, which are measured for small boats like his in terms of cod-equivalents). He fishes with gill nets, which are set on the ocean bottom and “soak” for a day, collecting the fish that and the day I went out with him he was picking up fish from three sets of thirty nets each that he had set the day before. It was a very good day for fishing: by the end of the day we came back with 1,400 kilos of fish, Børge’s best catch so far this season. Obviously, I am good luck.

Here is the boat in the harbor - time to go fishing!

And after just a half-hour steam, we are on the fishing grounds (pretty gorgeous, huh?). This is another small gill-netting boat much like the Iversen Jr fishing alongside us. Note the sail, used not to actually move the boat but to help stabilize it against the wind, and the flag and buoy, marking the beginning of the net they are about to haul.
Børge soon locates the buoy marking his first set of nets and soon is hauling the net back aboard with all the fish that have been caught over the past day. The fish and net are pulled up by an automatic hauler, leaving Børge and his single crewmember free to just work untangling the fish and the net.

As the net comes in, it has to be untangled and stowed in the compartment aft, ready to be set again once all the fish have been removed - as Børge told me, we also need something to do tomorrow.
Both fishermen work to extricate the big fish from the net, using a tool that is both capable of gently untangling and of ripping apart the net to free the fish.

Once freed from the net, they quickly kill the fish by cutting at the gills, using the sharp end of the same tool used for detangling.
Most of the catch are big cod, but there are also occasionally haddock and plaice, which they also keep unless they are juveniles (which they try to free carefully before throwing them back), and crabs like this one, which although edible they mostly do not keep, but bang against the side of the boat to crush and get them out of the nets.

After they have finished removing all the fish from the net, and while it is being set back out for the next day's fishing, they remove the fish heads and guts, leaving just the portion that will be hung up to dry to make stockfish.

After hauling up the fish from all the nets and setting them back in the water to catch the next day's fish, we head back to harbor to land the fish to the small fish factory that will dry the fish to make Lofoten's signature product - stockfish. Known as tørrfisk in Norwegian, and sold as "bacalao de Noruega," mostly to Italy, this transformation of the cod is what makes Lofoten's cod fishery world-renowned.

At the factory, they use a crane to haul the fish off the boat.
In the factory, any fish that the crews didn't get a chance to head and gut on the boat are prepared onshore. Note that rather than discarding all the offal, the roe - the female's pouches full of pink eggs - and the livers are saved to eat. Another choice piece used in Lofoten cooking, the cod's tongue is cut from the heads by a young boy - this is traditionally a job saved for young people as their first introduction to the fishing industry.From the factory, the fish are put into fish boxes and onto tractors and taken out the fish racks to be hung to dry.There were crews out hanging fish all the time while I was in Ballstad, and I stopped to watch on group hang up a batch of fish.
Along, as it so happened, with an English television film crew producing a short spot on the Lofoten fishery. Yet another testament to the world-wide reputation of the Lofoten cod fishery.The men were working in pairs: one man on the tractor picks up the fish (bound together as a pair), and then hands up to another up near the top of the racks who hangs it over a wooden pole.As this worker explained to us, each rack can hold tens of thousands of fish, and hanging the entire catch to dry is a full time job during the winter fishing season - they work all hours of the day, from early in the morning when the boats are heading out until ten and eleven at night. They also keep busy the rest of the year, since after the fish is done drying in June it needs to be taken back down, sorted based on its quality, and then prepared for export.
The drying racks are found in seemingly every bit of free space on the islands part of the incredibly picturesque scenery of Lofoten.
Most people even had a few fish hanging to dry on the side of their houses, providing their own supply of stockfish for the coming year.
Here's what the drying fish looks like up close.
And the heads, also dried, and mostly sold to Africa (some are also bought by the Norwegian government and given to the poor in developing countries as government aid).
I thought it was pretty cool to be able to walk around and watch the fish drying. So much fish!
And, to finish off the experience and see the process from start to finish, I also had the chance to taste some proper Norwegian cod. In addition to the boknafisk I had with Mary Ann and Børge's family on Easter, they also invited me the night I went out fishing on the boat to eat some of the fresh fish catch prepared in classic Norwegian style - boiled fish and roe served with potatoes, carrots, butter and liver sauce. An excellent end to a fantastic chance to see Lofoten's coastal cod fishery, a continuation of centuries of fishing tradition that will hopefully last for centuries to come.

A sea of prawns

2008-04-01T10:07:00.005-04:00

Even though my travels have left Scotland behind, I would be negligent not to write something about the Scottish west coast, both as a distinct part of the Scottish fishing industry and as one of the most beautiful places I have seen this year. Traveling from Aberdeen on the east coast across to Inverness in the heart of the Highlands and then on across to the Isle of Skye, the “jewel of the Hebridean crown,” the largest of the islands in the inner Hebrides, the rolling landscape rose up into the Cuillin Mountains and a rugged sheep-dotted coastline.

Even though the Scottish fishing industry is regulated as one entity, and has increasingly called for separate consideration from both EU and overall British fisheries as a single entity, anyone will tell you that the east and west coast fisheries are highly distinct. Most of the boats on the west coast are much smaller, many smaller boats only fishing close to shore and returning to port every night and even the larger boats rarely staying away longer than a week.

In Portree, a small port on the Isle of Skye, the fishing boats on the pier seem as much a part of the picturesque landscape as an industry.

As with fishing towns all across the northern Atlantic and in particular in the wake of the decommissioning in Scotland, decreases in the number of boats fishing have led the town to diversify, and Portree is fairly typical of much of the west coast in having come to rely largely on tourism – by far the main industry in town – and to a lesser extent on salmon aquaculture.

These are salmon pens in the water between the islands, complete with a little floating building that seems to serve as a sort of storage facility and office.

Mallaig, one of the main fishing towns on the west coast, just south of the Isle of Skye, which came to prominence as a fishing port in 1901 when the railway to Fort William (the same railway line used for filming the Hogwarts Express scenes in the Harry Potter movies) was completed and created a transportation link for fish landed in Mallaig to be taken to market, has maintained a much larger fisheries infrastructure, including a boatyard and processing plants both for the prawns being caught by local boats and for farmed salmon. But the loss of vessels has also hit Mallaig hard – perhaps even harder than on the Isle of Skye, which has been more successful in attracting tourists.

Although there are still many boats in the Mallaig harbor, it was certainly not full when I sailed in on the ferry from Skye,

a very different picture than the harbor even thirty years ago.

Most of these boats, whether the smaller day-boats in Skye or the larger boats out of Mallaig, are trawlers, some fishing with a single trawl net and most of the larger boats pulling two trawl nets (prawns are most likely to be caught at the edges of a net, so larger boats find that they catch more by pulling two smaller nets than one larger net). Unlike the east coast fisheries, where whitefish is dominant and even in the Fraserburgh-based prawn fishery whitefish is an essential part of the catch for an industry that relies on its mixed fishery, the fishing boats on the east coast are catching almost exclusively prawns – the common term for the Norway lobster, Nephrops.

Nearly all the west coast fishermen aim for a catch of clean prawns by using large square mesh panels in the top of their nets that allow the fish to escape, a decision driven largely by the expense of acquiring whitefish quota and the many regulatory difficulties of catching cod under the Cod Recovery Plan.

A net laid out on the Mallaig dock for maintenance on a stormy day. This is a pretty good way to see the net design: note the main part of the net with rockhoppers on the bottom (the black pieces on the left side of the picture) and floats at the top of the net opening, and the two wings out on the side that are attached to the trawl doors and hold the net open. You can also see the orange square mesh panel near the back of the net where the prawns collect (the cod end).

A more close-up view of the square mesh panel. This one has 110mm meshes.

Most fishermen I talked with think the square mesh panels are helpful in keeping from catching small fish, citing both scientific tests of the nets that demonstrated their effectiveness and reductions they have found in the amounts of small fish they have had to discard since putting the panels in their nets.

The other reason, though, that the west coast boats don’t catch fish along with their prawns is because the fish just aren’t there. As the large herring shoals that built up towns like Mallaig and provided the mainstay of the Scottish fisheries in the beginning of the twentieth century disappeared in the late 1960s and 1970s, seine- and trawl-caught whitefish became increasingly important on the west coast. But the fishermen I talked to said that even before the restrictive conservation measures of recent times were put in place, the whitefish was becoming more and more scarce and the smaller boats that did not venture as far offshore were no longer finding fish. So as the herring fishery ended (a combination of the loss of the stocks and a change in regulatory structure such that now all pelagic fish are caught by large boats and there is no quota or processing capacity available for the herring that has returned to the inshore areas of the west coast) and whitefish became hard to find, the boats switched over to catching shellfish – mostly prawns. Even as many people I talked with question the wisdom of the Cod Recovery Plan, which has forced reductions in the size of the fishing industry as on the east coast, they are quick to acknowledge that the whitefish are gone from the area as a result of overfishing. It was only after the fish – a top predator – disappeared, they say, that the prawns began doing so well. It has worked out well for them now, but worry that it probably isn’t so good for the long term.

For now, though, the fishermen are still out catching prawns. The catch has a very short shelf life and, other than the small tails which are breaded and sold as scampi in Britain, most of the prawns are exported to Spain and France for a high-end market that pays top prices for top quality seafood. Thus the west coast fishing industry, even on small boats fishing out of ports with only a few hundred residents, has developed a well-coordinated system of getting prawns from a Scottish boat to a consumer in southern Europe within a week. The smaller day-boats that I saw in Portree come back to port every night but usually land their catch once every two days, and even the larger boats usually don’t stay out longer than five days, meaning that the catch is still very fresh when the prawns are landed.

The boats come in and tie up at the pier just as it is getting dark.

Like the way whitefish boats sort their catches, the prawners sort their catch by size while still aboard the boats. They remove the heads from the small prawns destined to become British scampi; all the rest are landed whole.

Unlike most whitefish boats, however, prawns are usually not sold on auction but directly to buyers who truck the catch straight to the processors. (This is mostly because the market price of prawns is much more stable than for whitefish.)

Boxes full of prawns are taken up out of the hold by crane and then transferred onto the dock. Larger boats like this one have a largely-automated system for doing this, but some of the smaller boats I saw in Portree still use old-fashioned manual labor to haul up their catches.

Trucks come to meet the boats as they land their catch, and after the catch is weighed – in a larger port like Mallaig in an established indoor sorting area and scale, but in a smaller port like Portree the truck carries its own portable scale in the back.

Prawns landed in Portree can make it all the way across Scotland to Fraserburgh in one night – one truck makes the rounds of all the small ports of the Isle of Skye and drives to Inverness, where it meets another truck that makes the rest of the journey to the processing plants in Fraserburgh. (Because processing plants rely on a steady input of prawns to keep regular employment for their workers and hold their reputation as regular suppliers in overseas markets, the prawns go long distances from where they are landed even before they are packaged for export so as to balance out the supply across Scotland and keep the processing plants running.) Most Mallaig prawns are processed closer to home, just a 90 minute drive down the road in Fort William. In both cases, though, the prawns arrive as the processing plant the morning after they are landed and within a few days are shipped out of the country and off to the seafood markets in Spain where Norway lobsters are in high demand.

Despite the reliance on a sophisticated international market to provide an income from the prawns, the west coast fishery still sees itself as a traditional lifestyle-oriented fishery as opposed to the more business-oriented fishery on the east coast, generally moving slower to adopt new technologies or expand their fishing operations. Most fishermen have found that they are making a decent living just catching prawns, and don’t see the appeal in the additional investment and longer trips away from home necessary to catch whitefish or bring back larger catches and larger profits (when I asked one skipper of a small boat in Portree how long he stays out, he laughed and said he didn’t fancy “night fishing,” and even the younger skippers who stay out for a week nearly always return every Sunday, as religious traditions still hold sway here). West coast fishermen are proud of this: one man told me that the difference between the east and west coast fisheries in Scotland is that they are greedy in the east, that they all are living in mansions and getting rich by towing big nets that are catching too many fish, while in the east they just want to make a decent living. It’s a hard argument to buy – the fishermen in met in Peterhead lived comfortably but not lavishly, and the living as a fisherman on both the east and west coast has become so unattractive for young Scots that most skippers have started hiring Filipino crews. But the sentiment is instructive – while fishermen throughout Scotland are interested both in maintaining their communities and making a living, the east coast is generally more business-oriented and open to change while the west coast is more focused on tradition and maintaining their ability to make a living from fishing in areas with few other industries to turn to if the fishing fails.

Even among the larger of the west coast boats fishing out of Mallaig, many are wooden boats with the wheelhouse located aft (a holdover from the days of sail), showing their preference to keep to old tried-and-true fishing styles.

My favorite of these Mallaig boats was the Reul A Chuain, which means Star of the Ocean in Scottish Gaelic (not the same as Irish Gaelic). The skipper is one of the growing number of west coast Scots who speak fluent Gaelic (now taught in schools and found on street signs throughout the Highlands and Hebrides). During decommissioning, he sold his old boat and took the chance to go back to school at the Gaelic college Sabhal Mor Ostaig on the Isle of Skye, where he learned Gaelic culture and language – to catch up with what his daughters were learning in school, he told me – and also studied North Atlantic fishing, including taking a trip to the Faeroe Islands. When he bought a new boat and went back to fishing he wanted a proper Gaelic name for his boat (even though, like many who worry about the future of fishing, he would like to get a job doing something else, he said there wasn’t really anything else he could see himself doing). He also said he tried to pick a name that would be easy to pronounce, but I think he might have overestimated the abilities of the general public…I must admit, he laughed a little when I tried.

This skipper, I think, is what I will remember most of the west coast Scottish fishery: a man who is tied to his heritage and his home and has been fishing all his life, and indeed can’t think of anything else he would want to do, but still worries that with stricter regulations and reductions in the number of vessels fishing and an ecosystem that has been radically changed even in his lifetime, there may not be much of a future in fishing. He is proud that his children can speak Gaelic, but glad that none of them want to be fishermen.

The Leaving of Scotland

2008-03-15T12:03:00.008-04:00

I spent the past week - my last in Scotland - in Edinburgh, and it was fabulous. Maybe it's the Scottish sentiment rubbing off on me, but I wish I was staying in Scotland rather than heading south to England. But onward I must go: I'll be in London for the next week, and then heading back to Norway through the first week in April to see the inshore cod fishery in the Lofoten Islands and some of the coast heading down to Bergen before coming back across the Atlantic to spend the final three months of my Watson year in Newfoundland. This far into traveling, a few months doesn't seem very long, and leaving Scotland is making me feel a wee bit sad - another leg of my journey coming to an end.

I still have more to write here about Scottish fishing, particularly about the time I spent on the west coast - a very different style of fishing and cultural attitude than in the northeast - but for now I just want to gush a little bit about my week in Edinburgh...not much to see about fishing, but it just didn't seem right to spend two and a half months in Scotland without stopping for more than a day in Edinburgh. And I'm glad I decided to go, because I had a fabulous time.

I stayed right on the Royal Mile, the famous street that runs through the old town of Edinburgh from Castle Rock at the top to Holyrood Palace, the Queen's main palace in Scotland (and right across the street from the seat of the devolved Scottish parliament).
The Royal Mile consists of a number of streets that run into each other along its length (a few hundred yards over a mile), all of which are paved on cobblestones and lined by old buildings hawking ridiculously touristy souvenirs and playing tinny recorded bagpipe music.

Despite being touristy, though, it was a good place to find things like a woman demonstrating the traditional style of spinning wool into yarn,
and there was usually a man outside the Saint Giles Cathedral (technically a High Kirk, since Scotland doesn't have bishops) playing the bagpipes...although my favorite piper was inside the kirk: a little cherubic angel piping away on the woodwork in the Thistle Chapel.
I also was a proper fangirl and went to The Elephant House, the cafe where J. K. Rowling wrote much of the first few Harry Potter books.
It was a good cafe in its own right, and doesn't seem to have been overwhelmed by crazy fan tourists...it was really just a nice place to sit and have a cup of tea and look out the window over Greyfriars Kirkyard and the Castle.
And of course, I walked through the Edinburgh Castle. It's a fortress on top of a basalt plug from a 340 million year old volcano that has protected the city in various iterations for the past 900 years, and saw the Honours of Scotland and the Stone of Destiny, among the most evocative symbols of Scottish nationalism (largely because it was a hard fight to get them back from the English).

Look, pictures of me at the castle! These courtesy of my friend Anne, who I've known since I was eight years old, who just happened to be visiting Edinburgh for her spring break while I was there.

It also happened to be my 21st birthday while I was in Edinburgh and Anne was visiting, so even though a 21st birthday outside the States is slightly momentous, I got to spend it with an old friend. (Interestingly, we both realized that though I've known her longer than nearly any of my other friends, we had never before consumed alcohol together...which I guess made the 21st-birthdayness slightly more momentous.) We did not do anything wild and exciting, but we did have a nice dinner. Scottish people don't go out for Scottish food, so a nice dinner was Indian and Thai, but I did also get a chance to sample some of the ultimate in Scottish fusion foods: , a vegetarian haggis samosa and a fried Mars bar.

Anne was very excited about the chippy where I got the fried Mars bar - here she is on the street waxing eloquent about her chips.
To do the birthday thing properly, we also went out to a proper Scottish pub on the Grassmarket, today known for having good pubs but formerly known for being the site of the town gallows. This particular pub, The Last Drop, remembers both the grizzly last drop into the noose for over 300 people throughout the city's history and also the final request of many of those hanged...a last drop of proper Scottish whiskey.Among it's neat little quirks, the pub had chalkboards on the back of the doors in the bathroom. Can you find the message Anne left for me? (My response includes a sheep, to make it a bit more Scottish.)
And here is the obligatory "look, it's a picture of us in a pub!" though frankly we could be anywhere.
We had a good time, but I must admit that this was not my favorite pub in Edinburgh. We also went to the University of Edinburgh's Library Bar, a very academic-looking pub inside the oldest Student Union in the world with a balcony up a spiral staircase from the bar and walls lined with wooden cabinets filled with books, which was pretty cool. My favorite, though, was the Royal Oak, Edinburgh's main folk and traditional music pub.

Lots of Scottish music, both old and new, and a really nice crowd of people who just like to get together and play folk music. For my last night in Edinburgh, and my last night in Scotland, I saw in the lounge downstairs with a bunch of guys and guitars singing everything from Bob Dylan to Rabbie Burns. One friendly older man, upon hearing that I was studying fisheries, sang Farewell Tae the Haven for me, the best Scottish song I've heard about troubles with the fishing industry and a fairly accurate representation of what I heard out in the fishing ports about the decommissioning. For those of who who know my penchant to sing sea chanties in the shower, you'll also be amused to hear that they also convinced me to sing one myself (I did Paddy on the Railway as a proper American tune but also appropriate for the weekend of St. Patrick's Day). And I got to end my time in Scotland singing the Mingulay Boat Song and Barrett's Privateers and Leave Her Johnny with the guys who run this folk music show. It doesn't get any better.

Marketing Fish for the Future

2008-03-09T16:30:00.019-04:00

One of the ideal benefits of quota-based fisheries management is that focus will shift from trying to catch the most fish to trying to make the most off of the limited number of fish you’re allowed to catch. This has had some obviously detrimental consequences – namely that it encourages fishermen to throw back low-value fish and only bring to market the top-value fish, usually the largest and freshest from a trip. If this practice of discarding, known as high-grading, can be minimized, however, the quotas do then encourage fishermen to aim for top market value for each individual fish. Although it’s much more complicated in practice, this can theoretically serve as a conservation tool by allowing fishermen to focus on quality and market demand to get the best possible prices for the fish they land rather than having to catch increasing numbers of fish to make a profit.

While I was in Peterhead, I had the chance to both see the daily fish market and talk with some of the fishermen and the fish buyers about how the market has changed over recent years as decommissioning and tighter quota regulations. The Peterhead fish market is the largest in Scotland, and fishing boats from all over will chose to land there (or, in some cases, have their catches trucked in from other ports) to be sold at the morning auction in Peterhead. To me, it seems like a large market – able to hold over three thousand boxes of fish.

But the old market across the harbor that this new one replaced was far larger, and often would be filled with twelve thousand boxes – whereas today, one quarter of that number is considered a big day in the market. Most people told me this with an air of regret, associating the decline in the amount of fish landed with the decline in the number of boats fishing and the overall place of the industry in town. But though most fishermen would like to see more fish being landed – particularly when they know that they are discarding marketable fish at sea (one told me it was like “throwing ten pound notes over the side”) – the more limited market has increased prices. Crews packing fish at sea also focus on keeping the catch in top quality by not squashing the fish in the boxes and presenting them so they look nice on the market rather than the older strategy of trying to simply fit as many fish as possible into the boxes.

A box of large cod – today, only three cod this size are put in each box, but ten years ago, they would have filled the box with six of them.

A box of haddocks, nicely arranged to look as attractive as possible on the market.

Though fluctuations in supply and demand to create the greatest variations in market price, fishermen and buyers alike agree that quality is an important factor in determining price – when Peter first took me through the market, he pointed out which fish were in the best condition, easily evident to anyone with even a bit of experience with fish; while bidding, the buyers would explain to me which fish would get the most prices, and which boats were known for consistently landing the best quality fish and getting the highest prices.

Here are the buyers bidding on the fish at auction, often selecting box by box which ones they want based on the size and quality of the fish.

Fish prices are more complicated than simple quality and freshness, however – as public concern about the environment and sustainability has increased, the market has begun to demand fish from known, legal, sustainable sources. “Black” fish – landed illegally and sold without being officially declared or counted in the quota, and “grey” fish – usually scarce, highly-regulated fish such as cod landed as a different species with excess quota available, has been considered one of the main problems with enforcement of the quota system in Europe. Scottish fishermen are quick to acknowledge that the practice of landing black used to be widespread – they say that once it became commonplace it became impossible to get by just by landing legally, but with the required registration of buyers and sellers that has come into effect over the past few years they say that black landings here have become all but nonexistent. Skippers are required to keep records of the fish they are landing and where they were caught on official EU logsheets and submit them to the Fisheries Office (officially called the Scottish Fisheries Protection Agency) for verification that they have not exceeded their quota and that their records of landings match the records of the amount purchased by the fish buyers.

At the pier in the town of Portree on the Isle of Skye, fishermen can turn in their logsheets in a box mounted next to the lifeboat station.

There are also Fisheries Officers stationed in fishing ports all over the country, who often come out in person to check the fish being landed and ensure that the fish actually being landed match the paper records.

In addition to avoiding the problems of circumventing regulations designed to protect fish stocks, keeping fish landings legal has increased prices both by reducing the fish supply (black fish was often sold at low prices, since fishermen afraid of getting caught would sell the fish for low prices to get it off their hands, making it hard to get a reasonable price for legally-landed fish) and, more significantly, allowing Scottish fish to be marketed as legally-caught.

Eventually, most discussions I’ve had about sustainability in fishing come around to the supermarkets. Because, while government has the ability to enforce policies aimed at creating a sustainable fishery, the market has also begun to influence fishing practices by demanding environmentally-friendly fish. So as a result, the fishing industry has been taking its own steps, independent of government-imposed regulations, to prove to the public – both the end-line consumers and the retailers (particularly large supermarket chains who are increasingly trying to “green” their image) that the fish they are catching meet various criteria of sustainable fishing. Although many environmental organizations have attempted to provide consumers with information about which fish are best to purchase – the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch program, one of the most widely-cited such consumer guidelines in the US, advertises itself as promoting seafood that is “good for you and good for the oceans” – these are often criticized within the fishing industry for broad generalities, including rejecting most trawl-caught fish or all fisheries for a particular species that might only have problems in some areas, that don’t take into account the detailed realities of how fish get from the sea to the market.

The alternative that has gained the most ground within the fishing industry is a scheme by an independent non-profit organization called the Marine Stewardship Council of that independently assesses fisheries based on the condition of the fish stocks, the impact of the fishing method on the ecosystem, and the fishery management system. The industry itself decides to apply for certification, and if it passes, can then label its fish with the MSC blue eco-label, currently the only independent assessment of fisheries and thus an important factor for both retailers and consumers looking for environmentally-friendly seafood.

The Scottish haddock and nephrops (prawn) fisheries are both currently being assessed for MSC certification, but in the mean time, many Scottish skippers have taken it upon themselves to independently prove that they are fishing sustainably. Peter Bruce was the first to tell me about the Responsible Fishing Scheme, a program that currently has 167 participating vessels in Britain who have been audited by Seafish to show that they meet a set of criteria about fishing responsibly and safely – everything from making sure that the crew have the proper safety training to collecting all the litter caught while trawling rather than throwing it back into the sea.

Walking around the harbor in Peterhead, it was easy to spot participating vessels – here’s a fishing for litter bag aboard Favonious, one of the seventeen vessels in Peterhead who have signed onto this program (slightly less than half of the port’s fishing fleet).

It was equally evident in the market, where fish from participating vessels are labeled with a note indicating to the buyer that it came from a vessel fishing responsibly.

Some skippers have taken the task of marketing their catch and their local industry even further, making direct connections with restaurants and consumers to explain their fishing methods and the efforts they take to fish sustainably. Fishing has gotten a lot of bad press in recent years due to concerns about overfishing and black landings, and from the perspective of fishermen attempting to follow the rules and fish responsibly, the industry now faces a significant task of proving to the public that fishermen are not criminals out to ravage the environment. While I was in Peterhead, Peter went to London for the launch of the Scottish Skipper’s Scheme, which focuses on getting top-quality fish and having a direct connection between the restaurant-goer with a fish on their plate and the fishermen out in the North Sea catching the fish. To me, it seems like one of the best ways of ensuring that the fish you eat is caught in a responsible manner – actually take the time to meet the person who goes out to catch it. Peter said that most of the people he met down in London hadn’t heard about many of Scotland’s efforts to conserve fish, including a new system of real time closures where fishermen avoid aggregations of spawning cod and a conservation credits scheme, which provides incentives for fishermen to use more selective gear and abide by the real time closure restrictions, and were surprised at the efforts taken to truly fish responsibly.

Another member of the Scottish Skipper’s Scheme, Jimmy Buchan of the Amity II, has become one of the best-known faces of the Scottish fishing industry and a bit of a celebrity as one of the stars of the BBC series Trawlermen, which is currently filming its third series showing the day-to-day realities of fishing (the British response to Deadliest Catch, if you will).

I initially met him at a meeting in Fraserburgh as part of a Science-Industry Partnership between the Fisheries Research Services in Aberdeen and the Scottish Fishermen’s Federation to “review recent development work on gear designs and to identify options for selectivity related technical measures for Scottish mixed species fisheries,” but didn’t realize he was a celebrity until I met him again after watching some of the Trawlermen series. Jimmy has in many ways taken on the role of showing the public what is really going on in the fishing industry, including writing for a blog on the Seafish website.

Although consumer demand is notoriously fickle and has certainly made fishing a much more complicated business, I think that overall, this move towards demand of sustainably-caught fish will be a good thing for the consumer, industry, and environment. This is still a fairly early stage in a much larger movement towards consumers wanting to know where their food comes from and how it was produced, and as such there are many mixed messages about which types of fish and fishing methods are really the best choices. But by allowing consumers to get to know the fishermen and their stories both about what it takes to get fish on the table and about their own histories and communities, and convincing fishermen that it is in their own interest from a marketing perspective to stick to responsible methods, I think the market has a chance of both encouraging environmentally-friendly fishing and in turn rewarding responsible fishermen with better prices.

Peterhead: Inside a fishing community

2008-03-02T17:01:00.009-05:00

I’ve spent the past week in Peterhead, the largest whitefish port in Scotland and one of the major fishing ports in Europe, talking to people about the fishing industry here and trying to see for myself how the policies put in place to try to conserve fish stocks here have affected the industry and the larger community. Over the past eight months of my travels, I have become increasingly interested in how fisheries management policies designed to conserve fish stocks and create a “sustainable” fishery have affected actual fishing communities. Most quota systems in place today function on a principle based on “maximum sustainable yield” – usually aiming to catch the most fish possible without depleting the fish stocks, and to do so with the highest net economic gain. At face value, this is a laudable goal…except it pays no attention to how that net economic gain is distributed or how that distribution affects people who have traditionally made their living from the sea, whether through pure economics or by changing the community in ways not normally accounted for in economic analyses. Peterhead, a community steeped in fishing all the way back to its beginnings as a whaling port in the late eighteenth century, with many families’ fishing histories stretching all the way back to whaling days, is an ideal place to see how fishing policy has affected not just the fish but also a community that has long depended on fishing.

While in Peterhead, I had the privilege of staying with Peter Bruce, skipper of the Budding Rose PD 418, and his wife Catherine, who helped me to get a view into the life of a fishing family and the local fishing community.

The Budding Rose in Peterhead harbor last week:

Peter comes from a long line of fishermen, stretching all the way back to his great-great grandfather, who sailed on a whaling ship out of Peterhead in the mid-nineteenth century at a time when Peterhead was Britain’s busiest whaling port.

Although it may not be entirely accurate, I can’t resist including here a picture of the only surviving whaling ship of that era – the Charles W. Morgan, to be found today at Mystic Seaport in Connecticut.

The whaling industry declined by the end of the nineteenth century as the whale population was depleted and increasingly difficult and dangerous to hunt, but Peterhead turned to herring fishing. Each generation of Peter’s family, from the early whalers all the way through to today have stayed in fishing even as the industry has shifted – catching herring through the mid-twentieth century before switching mostly to whitefish, and following the shifts in technology from the sail-powered Fifies of the early twentieth century through steam power to the current engine-powered steel boat Peter fishes from today.

Although the Bruce family is one of seemingly only a few who have taken the time to research and write about their family fishing heritage – you can read all about their family’s involvement in fishing, written up by Peter’s twin brother Steven – this kind of extensive family fishing history is fairly common among Peterhead fishing families.

Yet today, Peter is likely the last fisherman in his family – he and his cousin are the only two still fishing, and none of the boys of the next generation seem inclined to make their living from fishing. This too is fairly representative of what has happened over the past years in Peterhead. The size of the fishing fleet has been drastically cut – most people around the harbor today remember times when there would be 400 to 500 boats in the harbor, so many that it was sometimes hard to find a berth, whereas today there are usually no more than a hundred boats docked and only forty fishing boats are registered in Peterhead.

A full harbor in the mid-twentieth century,

compared to the harbor today - still with boats, but not nearly so full as before.

Although there is no fixed date when the size of the fishing industry began to decline – some of the older ex-fishermen I met traced the decline all the way back to the beginning of the European Common Fisheries Policy (many saying the UK never should have joined the EU) and others look even farther back, saying the fishing hasn’t been the same since World War II – it seems that most people see the recent changes in Scotland’s fishing fleet beginning with the Cod Recovery Plan in 2001. With scientific assessments showing that cod populations were declining in the North Sea and TACs for all European countries fishing the North Sea decreasing, Britain determined that the size of the fishing fleet was too large for the amount of fish available and set up a decommissioning program to reduce the number of fishing vessels. In two rounds of decommissioning, in 2001 and 2003, the government offered payment to fishing vessel owners who agreed to scrap their boats and leave the fishing industry. Some skippers saw this as their chance to get out of an industry that was becoming less and less profitable with increasingly tight regulations; others were forced to decommission by banks they were indebted to, ending a career in fishing by simply paying off their debt and breaking even. By the end, about 60% of the fleet had been removed, most sailed across the North Sea to a shipbreaking yard in Grenaa in northern Denmark and broken down for parts. You can see pictures of many of the decommissioned boats here – and also note the comments on many lamenting that boats with many more years of working service (and many likely built with government subsidies) were scrapped rather than being traded with an older fishing vessel or at least kept for some other use.

At the time, almost nobody in the community was in favor of decommissioning. Although most of the skippers and crewmembers who had to leave fishing were able to get jobs in the oil industry, it was a blow to the fabric of the community to lose so many fishing jobs so fast. Land-based businesses supporting the fishing industry – everyone involved in processing and selling the fish, building and servicing the boats, running the harbors, etc. – were also hard-hit by the decommissioning (some estimates suggest that more than 25% of local employment in Peterhead before the decommissioning was in the fisheries sector, and more than 50% in Fraserburgh just to the north).

The fishing industry both employs and depends on business such as the netmakers,

the ship repair facility (both covered repair hall and open Syncrolift facility, which can accommodate the UK's largest whitefish boats),

fuel suppliers (here fueling a Faeroese crab-fishing boat),

the fish market to sell the fish landed through an auction,

and many more besides.

Many community members tried to fight back against the quota restrictions under the CFP that had led to the decommissioning, including two fishermen’s wives from Fraserburgh who dubbed themselves the Cod Crusaders and organized a petition to then-Prime Minister Tony Blair opposing a closure of the cod fishery in the North Sea and an organization called “Save Britain’s Fish” that argued that Britain pull out of the CFP altogether . Peter and his family, even those no longer fishing themselves, were also very strongly opposed to the decommissioning (this you can probably tell if you read the website – it was written a few years, while the decommissioning was ongoing), mostly because of worries about the future of the community.

Today, most fishermen and other people in the industry I talked to around the harbor look on the decommissioning as unfortunate, but perhaps something that had to happen – most say that before the decommissioning there was too much competition on the fishing grounds and probably too much fish being caught, and that between the low quotas, low prices, and amount of fish available to be caught many boats would have ended up going bankrupt without the decommissioning. It is a smaller, leaner industry than ten years ago, but most people I talked to were fairly optimistic about the future of the industry. From what I saw over the past week, I’m also optimistic about the future of the industry here – those who opted not to decommission seem committed to making things work, and the town has retained enough infrastructure to maintain the fishery. It was also lucky, however, that Peterhead was able to maintain much of the community through people going to the oil industry, both providing jobs for former fishermen and extra work for people in the harbor or repairing boats whose can also get work from oil, keeping people from leaving town whereas in places like the islands of western Scotland or northern Norway there would have been no other option.

I worry also that as the fishing community gets smaller and more centralized, there will be less community support for those who are still fishing. Fishing is easier with a family support structure built around having everyone in the same area, which I saw some of through staying with the Bruces, who have a large extended family living in Peterhead - Peter’s mom gives him a good luck present before every trip to sea, when the washing machine breaks, Catherine’s sister-in-law can come to try to help fix it, and Peter checks up on where his cousin is fishing and calls his uncle to find out how his fishing is going. Beyond the family, however, the fishing community also needs to have a certain size to maintain meeting places down at the harbor like the Dolphin Café next to the fish market, where the fish buyers, auctioneers, fishermen, and other people who just happen to be in the area mingle and catch up with each other.

Another major institution in the fishing community is the Fishermen’s Mission, which provides services (from spiritual to financial) to support fishermen and their families.

Although built around religion (and Peterhead is a very religious town, although less so than it used to be), the Mission provides its services to people of all faiths (and no faith) in the fishing community. George, the Mission Man in Peterhead for the past six years, described to me a dizzying array of everyday tasks supporting people in the community both here and in other places where he was stationed before coming here – everything from delivering Christmas parcels to 350 families throughout town to organizing fundraisers (the Mission has to raise all its funds itself – there is no endowment or government support) to planning an outing for retired fishermen in the summer to walking the harbor in the morning just to say hello to those in port to the more serious task of being there in case of an accident at sea to break the news to the family. The Mission itself is a central place in the community, as a gathering place for retired fishermen, who meet at the tea room to have a cup of tea and talk about their old sailing days, a place for meetings and prayer, and a place to find a friendly and understanding face in the Mission Man, a confidential resource for anyone in the fishing community.

These are not the sorts of things taken into account when deciding on how to make the fishing industry as efficient as possible, but I would say that these community structures are just as vital to the industry – and certainly the quality of life for fishermen – as the more tangible economic factors taken into account in making fisheries policy. From spending a week in Peterhead, I think the optimism that the fishing industry will remain stable in the future is well-placed and there had indeed been a need for a cut-back in the size of the industry to match the amount of fish available, but I also understand the sense of loss that the industry and its role in the overall community is much smaller than it once was. I have no great ideas for how to help communities such as Peterhead go through this kind of transition, but I think it is key to remember that sustainability is not just about the fish stocks – it’s also about creating and maintaining communities that support the people who make their living from the sea.

The News on ITQs

2008-02-29T19:33:00.007-05:00

It's not quite new news (more than a month old now), but the UN Human Rights Committee has essentially ruled against the concept of allocating fishing rights to certain private individuals while excluding others - i.e. quotas. The ruling was made in the case of two Icelandic fishermen who were not allocated any quota under Iceland's ITQ system and when they found that they could not afford to purchase the quota needed to fish, decided to go ahead and fish anyway without the quota. They brought their case - essentially a challenge to the entire framework of Iceland's ITQ system - all the way to Iceland's supreme court, and when they lost then decided to take it to the United Nations. I haven't been able to find a copy of the ruling itself to be able to guess whether the UN's objections to Iceland's quota allocations would also apply to other quota systems throughout the world, but from the reporting in Iceland Review it seems that it could apply to the quota-based systems that are becoming more and more common worldwide.

For me, these are the most telling pieces of the article:

The committee believes that Icelandic authorities violated the 26th article of the UN treaty in this case, which states that discrimination of all kind is prohibited similarly to the 65th article of the Icelandic constitution.

The committee stated that protecting fish species with a quota system is a lawful goal but the Icelandic quota system also favors those who were allocated permanent quota originally and is not based on justice.

I have no way of telling based on this how seriously the UN looked at the setup of the Icelandic quota system or what specifically about it they consider not to be discriminatory or "based on justice," but if they see allocating quota to certain individuals as inherently unjust, then it has essentially ruled against not just the Icelandic system but also every fisheries management system that requires individuals to own or rent quota in order to fish - this includes every country I have been to so far this year (less straightforward than in Iceland, but the essential reality is that to fish in Denmark, Norway or Britain you need to own or rent quota), and many others including New Zealand (often held up as one of the best-managed fisheries in the world, though I know relatively little about it) and parts of the United States.

I have certainly seen for myself that allocating quota rights to private individuals - in most cases based on and individual's fishing records during a fixed reference period - has hurt small communities and small-scale fishermen who cannot afford the costs of bringing more quota into their community or even at times of holding onto the quota they have. In many places, once quota is sold away to a larger company or town, there is little else to do (particularly in remote islands in northern Norway or isolated towns on the Icelandic coastline) and people have no choice but to leave their homes in order to find work. High prices of quota also essentially bar entry into fishing for young people whose families do not already own a quota share, since the price of purchasing a quota (which the previous generation was provided for free) is a prohibitive start-up cost, whereas before quotas were in place it was feasible to earn enough crewing someone else's boat to eventually be able to build your own boat and fish for yourself.

Today I went into a primary school in northeast Scotland, near Peterhead, to see a former fisherman talk with the students about how the fishing works and give them some first-hand experience - putting on oilskins, seeing how to splice ropes and mend nets, watching actual footage of fishing in the North Sea. As part of the activity, each kids got a fishing "job" as a trainee deckhand, engineer, or cook, and they seemed to have a pretty good time with it...but as kids who live inland, none coming directly from fishing families, they would have a hard time working their way past crew positions if they decided to make their living from fishing.

All that said, though, I'm not sure how I feel about the UN ruling against the concept of a quota-based system. On the one hand, I agree that it is unfair to allocate quotas in a way that essentially gives away private rights to a public resource. (Sure, in Iceland they make a point of saying that the fish still belong to the people and that the quotas could be taken back by the government, and nobody technically "owns" their quota share with the same permanency as regular property rights, quotas are traded and rented for hard money just like any other property.) To me, the issue is not so much that the distribution is inequitable but that the distribution itself has denied public access to natural resources. In Norway, I talked with a lawyer who wanted to challenge the Norwegian management system based on a document from the 1100s where local fishing access was given as a gift to the people of northern Norway by the king, a gift to the entire public that this lawyer says has been illegally taken away by allowing some citizens the right to fish (and particularly allowing them to then trade this right to people not from the area) while denying access to others.

But it is a dangerous line of reasoning to say that it is unjust to limit the public's access to natural resources - without some kind of limitation, there is no way to prevent individuals from taking more than their share. And particularly in a case like fisheries, nobody could make a living from fishing without being able to accumulate more fish than the average citizen. Certainly there are ways to distribute limited access to fish other than allocating permanent quotas that might well be more fair in the long-run, but undermining the current quota systems by trying to find a new way to allocate fishing rights risks not only significant economic harm (particularly in a fisheries-dependent economy like Iceland's) since many individuals, companies, and even banks "own" quota and depend on it as a reliable asset, but also environmental harm by destabilizing management systems that have begun to make progress in maintaining sustainable fish stocks.

For better or for worse, UN rulings have little actual effect on national policies (as the Icelandic Minister of Fisheries made sure to point out, it is "not binding"). But perhaps this will help push world opinion towards considering not just how to conserve fish stocks while maximizing the economic value of the "sustainable yield" but also how to make fisheries policies that are fair to those within the fishing industry and take into account the interests of fishing families and communities both of today and of the future.

Trawling for Science

2008-02-23T15:09:00.007-05:00

My trip to sea last week gave me a chance to see the methods used for the International Bottom Trawl Survey, a huge effort by all the countries that fish the North Sea to collect data about the fish populations that plays a significant part in ICES stock assessments and the resulting scientific recommendations about yearly quota allocations. Although a large amount of information about fish stocks also comes from sampling of commercial fish landings and the data reported by the fishing industry, this had generally been considered insufficient to assess the state of the fish population – first because scientists are also interested in the young fish that are not yet large enough to have become part of the commercial stock, and second because landings information provided by the fishing industry doesn’t always reflect the amount of fish actually taken out of the ocean, either because fish are caught but then discarded at sea (a legal practice in the EU) or are landed illegally. As a way of supplementing the data collected from the fish landed by the commercial fishing industry, most nations have developed fishery-independent surveys to monitor their fish stocks. Unlike in a country like Iceland (where I saw my first bottom trawl survey this summer) that independently controls its own fish stocks, in the North Sea, fish stocks are shared by a large number of countries and thus the responsibility for monitoring the fish stocks is also shared by a large number of countries.

There is a relatively long history of international cooperation to conduct surveys monitoring North Sea fish stocks, stretching back to 1967, when Scotland, England, Germany and the Netherlands began a joint spring survey of the population of juvenile herring to help predict future recruitment to the commercial herring fishery. They soon realized that they were collecting information on a number of other important species in addition to herring, including both cod and haddock, and by 1976 the survey was officially broadened from “The International Young Herring Surveys” to “The International Young Fish Surveys.” As the surveys gained prominence in official stock assessments and quota-based management, more nations began to participate in the surveys and also to develop their own national surveys generally conducted in the late summer or early fall to fill in the gap in annual data left by the international young fish survey. In 1990, ICES (the coordinating scientific body that helps integrate fisheries science throughout the North Atlantic, and in Europe in particular) combined these surveys into the North Sea International Bottom Trawl Survey (IBTS) conducted in February and August. Scotland participates in the North Sea IBTS, and in a similarly-coordinated bottom trawl survey on the west coast of Scotland in March and November, all conducted from the main Scottish research vessel, the FRV Scotia.

This is the Scotia in Lerwick the day I joined her for the final week of Scotland’s portion of the February IBTS in the North Sea.

Although standardization of trawling gear and methods was phased on only gradually beginning in 1977, today all of the nations participating in the IBTS use the same net and fishing methods, ideally producing standardized results. The North Sea is divided into “ICES Statistical Rectangles” 30 nautical miles on a side,* each of which is sampled twice by vessels from different countries, which is meant to eliminate the statistical effects of differences between the fishing power of different countries’ research vessels. Since the results of the survey play such a significant role in ICES’s assessment of the fish stocks and subsequent recommendations to the European Commission, the methods used in the survey have been heavily debated and often criticized. The standard IBTS method is to trawl for 30 minutes at 4 knots using a net called the GOV (Grande Overture Vertical) trawl designed by the Institut des Peches Maritimes and selected by ICES as the standard net for bottom trawl surveys in 1977. The net uses 120 millimeter meshes at the opening of the net but has very small (20 millimeter) meshes in the cod end where the catch collects so as to catch juvenile fish that have not yet entered the commercially-targeted fish stock.

The opening of the net showing the wide meshes and the ground gear:

The cod end of the net, with much smaller meshes:

To account for differences in the exact size of the net’s opening and thus the volume swept in each haul, acoustic sensors are attached to the net providing real-time data on the opening of the trawl doors and wings throughout the survey in addition to accurately recording the trawl speed and the exact time during which the net is actively trawling on the seabed. The crew and scientists on deck attach the bright orange Scanmar acoustic units just before setting the net at the beginning of each trawl and remove them at the end of the trawl as the net is hauled back in.

The catch from each haul is then emptied into a laboratory known as the “fish house” where the scientific crew sorts and measures the catch. Everything from the fish to the hermit crabs to the squid are sorted by species and counted and measured and the commercially important fish species – sprat, herring, mackerel, cod, haddock, whiting, Norway pout and saithe – are further sampled to determine weight, sexual maturity, and age, determined by removing an ear bone called the otolith which forms annual rings and can be read to determine age. It’s an incredible amount of data to collect, and all onto a series of multicolored forms (a yellow version for haddock and whiting, an orange one for cod, etc. allowing you to quickly find the one you’re looking for without rummaging through the stack) filled in for each trawl.

Here’s the fish house empty of people but prepared for a catch to come in.

Scientists stand on each side of each of the fish bins fed by the conveyor belt, first sorting the fish by species into the orange baskets on the floor and for less numerous species into the smaller bins stacked at the end of the table. As each crew finishes sorting their portion of the catch, the single-species baskets are then combined, weighed (information for a master white sheet), and given to smaller teams to count and sample further (filling in the multicolored sheets) in what was described to me as an organized chaos. It seemed particularly chaotic while I was there since I was the third visitor in the fish house in addition to the usual six scientific staff, once I got a sense of what was going on I could see that everyone had a sense of what needed to be done and took on whatever task was needed to keep the system going smoothly.

Although there were already plenty of hands working in the fish house and I was by far the least knowledgeable or experienced in fisheries biology, I was able to help sort the fish by species and got to know a few new species I hadn’t seen before including mackerel (which I hadn’t actually seen up close before but are a really gorgeous blue with black stripes), Norway pout (tricky to tell from a similar species called poor cod), a number of flatfishes including saithe (easy to tell from the other flatfishes by its bright orange spots, which I am embarrassed to admit I had thought were artificial when I first saw them in an aquarium), and my first live monkfish. There were also lots and lots of haddock and whiting, which I hadn’t seen much of during the shrimp survey in Iceland, and relatively few cod – though the cod we did catch were often very big, one nearly a meter long and over nine kilos.

Here’s Keith weighing one of the particularly large cod:

When I wasn’t sorting fish, I mostly helped by recording data for the measurements of the demersal species – cod, haddock and whiting. In addition to measuring all the fish, one fish from each length (by centimeter) from each trawl was further sampled by weighing the fish, opening its belly to determine sexual maturity, and removing the otolith, providing the information to assess the age distribution and contributions to the spawning stock within the overall fish stock.

Here’s Craig cutting open one of many many haddock he sampled (so fast he could gut a fish and determine its sexual stage faster than I could write it down):

Ken looks at a cod’s guts to determine its sexual maturity:

And Catherine records cod information on the otolith envelopes, the same job I did most of the time:

In some ways the process of writing everything on paper forms before entering it into the official database seemed old-fashioned, particularly after having seen the process in Iceland, where everything is entered directly into an electronic database in the scales that is then uploaded to their database. But the IBTS process is much more people-intensive (with six or more people working at once rather than three) and even more of the analysis is conducted aboard the ship, since one of the scientists also read the ages of all the demersal fish species during the trip, so it might be too complicated to put it all in one centralized database from the start rather than having a paper backup. Plus, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it – and this system seems to work pretty well. Any sampling process that gathers so much data in such a short time is liable to have some gaps, and I did hear from one of the other visitors on the ship who works with IBTS data to model haddock populations that she has indeed come across some inexplicable problems with the data either from information that was improperly entered in the system or recorded inaccurately, but it seems that it works as well as I imagine anything could in this type of high-intensity sampling environment.

At the end of the survey, the data from all of the ships collecting data for the IBTS is worked up and the results are compiled at an ICES working group meeting to produce a picture of fish distributions in the North Sea, something like this one for cod.

The difficulty, of course, is in figuring out what exactly a figure like this means about the actual fish in the sea - translating the statistics generated from the IBTS into an actual understanding of fish populations. This is a tricky process that requires making assumptions not only about the data generated by the IBTS but also about commercial fish catches and natural mortality of fish in the environment. Although a lot of criticisms are leveled at the science, including one accusation from a fisherman I met in Denmark who was convinced that the scientists at ICES were in collusion to only produce results that said what the politicians in Brussels want them to say, I think the real issue lies in the assumption of what can be concluded from the data, the other assumptions that scientists have to make even without accurate data, and how the scientific assessments are then used to make fisheries management policies.

One of the major criticisms leveled at bottom trawl surveys, both the surveys done in Iceland and the IBTS survey, is that the gear used is out of date and very different from the gear used by commercial fishermen. This is, of course, entirely true – no fisherman could stay competitive using the same net design for thirty years. This means that what the IBTS finds is often very different from what the fishermen are seeing in their own catches, and not just because the IBTS uses smaller meshes but also because of the design of the GOV trawl. Studies of the fish escaping from the GOV trawl indicate that up to 75% of the cod swept by the net escape through the ground gear. At a first glance, this seems an obvious problem – the scientific survey is not measuring everything that is actually out there to be caught. However, this does not necessarily lead to flawed results, because the IBTS does not claim to accurately measure everything in the ocean, but rather to assess trends over time in the fluctuations of fish stocks. So, if the IBTS finds more fish this year than last year, they can conclude that the fish stocks are improving – an assessment that requires a time series using the same methods over a large time span to allow for accurate comparisons between past and present fish stocks.

It is possible, however, (albeit with considerable expense) to trial a new trawl net along with the old GOV trawl to determine how two sets of methods fit together and allow a continuation of the time series even with an update in the methods. This has been considered as a possibility within the scientific community partly as a way of more closely aligning the IBTS methods with current commercial fishing methods but also, more importantly, because the GOV net is not easy to work with because it has a tendency to tear very easily. Our first day out of Lerwick, we went to a particularly rough ground where the lead scientist says the trawl had torn nearly every year and had to be particularly careful to avoid a tear in the net – both getting advice from skippers in Lerwick and running an acoustic scan over the ground before actually trawling. A few days after successfully avoiding the expected tear, though, the net tore on the second trawl of the morning right as the net was shot, meaning that we couldn’t use that haul and then it took a few hours for the crew to repair the tear, all the way from the wing to the cod end.

Repairing the net by hand, basically tying in new meshes to replace those that were ripped:

In addition to the inconvenience of having to spend a few hours repairing the net rather than working, the scientist overseeing all the operations on deck also pointed out that this increases the variability between different countries performing the survey because the repaired net will never be exactly to specifications. And since the GOV tears so frequently, it means most of the IBTS is conducted by trawls not quite to official standards.

Even more important than a net not being quite to specifications, I think an even more important question is whether it is actually valid to assume that trawling the same area each year with the same gear will catch the same proportion of the total fish population in the area. A number of fishermen have observed that the fish’s behavior has changed over time, probably the result of both environmental changes (especially changes in ocean temperature) and changes in behavior as the overall fish population fluctuates and thus the density of fish in the area changes. A cooperative study between the Danish fisheries research institute in Hirtshals and local fishermen looked at the populations of cod on rocky ground where the IBTS can’t survey and found much higher fish populations than on the smoother ground where trawling is possible, indicating that a trawl survey is inherently biased by the type of area it is able to include in the survey. If, as fishermen have observed and this study’s preliminary results suggest, cod prefer the rocky ground, a decrease in population might seem much more drastic in the survey results because the largest signs of a decline in population would probably be found on the least favorable grounds – the ones surveyed – even if the population is maintained on the rougher ground.

Of course, there isn’t enough data available to tell whether this is truly a problem or not, but it does indicate what I see as a larger issue with any attempts to determine fish populations: we just don’t know enough to say for sure what’s actually going on in the sea. And it’s not that scientists don’t realize this is an issue – most fisheries scientists I’ve met have openly told me that what they do is like taking a “stab in the dark,” because no matter how much information you collect and how precise your methods, it is impossible to completely describe a complex ecological system. From seeing the IBTS for myself, I am certainly impressed by the amount of data collected and the amount of work by nations all around the North Sea that goes into conducting the survey – and that just one piece of the scientific data that goes into stock estimates along with samplings of commercial landings, observer programs aboard commercial fishing vessels, and a slew of other studies designed to better confine the assumptions that go into making the final stock estimates. No matter how good the science, however, I’ve been thinking a lot about the limitations of predictive scientific models and thus the limitations of a management system relying on predictive scientific stock assessments. It’s too big an issue for me to tackle right now, but my thoughts coming out of spending a week observing the IBTS are both that there is an immense amount of data being collected on the North Sea fish stocks – it is likely the best-studied piece of ocean anywhere in the world – but I still don’t think it’s enough to tell us what exactly is going on for the fish in the North Sea.

*For those of you confused as to why these are rectangles rather than squares, I am assuming that this is taking into account the fact that a nautical mile is not a fixed length but changes at different latitudes.

To Sea Once More

2008-02-14T08:05:00.003-05:00

After two weeks in Aberdeen talking with the wonderful people at the Scottish Fisheries Research Services, I am heading off to see some Scottish fisheries research first-hand aboard the FRV Scotia. I went on a brief tour of the ship two weeks ago when I first arrived in Aberdeen, and to my mind at least, it is quite a fancy, sophisticated research vessel, and I am excited to see it in action.

The survey I'm going out on is part of the IBTS (international bottom trawl survey) of the North Sea, a cooperative venture between most of the countries who fish the area to conduct a standardized survey of the fish populations as one of the main ways of collecting data about the state of the fish stocks. This is then used by ICES to assess how the stocks are doing and provide scientific advice which is used by the EU to set annual quotas. So because there are fairly significant implications of this survey, I've heard a lot about it (both critiques and explanations of the methods in response to the critiques) and am looking forward to seeing for myself how it really works. Hopefully when I come back I'll have lots more to say about it.

A thousand Viking men with torches

2008-02-09T17:33:00.000-05:00

I am now back on the Scottish mainland, having spent the past week in Aberdeen and talking with the fine folks at Fisheries Research Services about their research and learning lots about Scotland’s fishing industry. But before heading south, I first took a detour north to the Shetland Islands for Lerwick’s annual fire festival, reputedly both the largest and most famous fire festival in Great Britain. Up Helly A’ is largely a celebration of Shetland’s Viking heritage – a group of the leading men in town spend all year designing unique Viking costumes and building a Viking longship all in preparation for the final Tuesday in January, when they don their costumes and after dark parade through town with torches and set fire to the galley they spent all year building. Crazy, perhaps, but also completely brilliant.

Even though this is ostensibly a celebration of the Viking era, the festival itself is a relatively recent development. The official Up Helly A’ program suggests that the tradition can be traced at earliest back to period following the Napoleonic wars, “when soldiers and sailors came home with rowdy habits and a taste for firearms” which they made use of in initiating festivities in town during the darkest days of the year around Christmas and New Year’s. These festivities seem to have gradually developed from a general raucous mayhem – “blowing of horns, beating of drums, tinkling of old tin kettles, firing of guns, shouting, bawling, fiddling, fifeing, drinking, fighting” on Christmas eve in 1824 – to include the more elaborate and dangerous custom of setting fire to tar barrels and conveying them through the streets by a “motley mob, wearing masks for the most part.” As the town became more crowded and the fiery Yuletide festivities more dangerous, citizens not actively participating in the festivities began to complain, and the town eventually banned tar barreling in the early 1870s.

The town was not about to do away with its revelry, however, and so around 1870 a group of young men began to shape the proceedings into a more structured festival, including coining the term Up Helly A’, introducing more elaborate costumes (disguises – which make those who dress up “guizers”), and establishing the torchlight procession. The Viking themes entered the festival gradually, with the first Viking longship introduced in the 1880s, the first chief guizer or “Guizer Jarl” in 1906, and his accompanying squad of Vikings – the “Guizer Jarl’s Squad” becoming a regular feature after World War I.

The 2008 Guizer Jarl in his Viking regalia:

And some of his Jarl squad members:

There are many similar fire festivals throughout the Shetlands, but none so large or so formal as the Up-Helly-A’ celebration that has become one of the central moments of the year in Lerwick. Today the traditions are well-established and involve an intense schedule of events throughout the day in which nearly everyone in town participates. On the morning of the last Tuesday in January, the Guizer Jarl’s Squad rises early and marches through the town with their galley, stopping at the Market Cross in the center of town to put up the Bill, a decorated, ten-foot high proclamation with local humor and gossip.

This year’s proclamation. Some of the references I could pick up – the red lettering at the beginning refers to this year’s Guizer Jarl, Roy Leask, who runs a construction company called DITT; and there has been local controversy over a new organic cod farm in the Shetlands called “No Catch” which advertises its product as superior to wild-caught cod but has had some recent financial difficulties, hence “No money, no fish, no future – No Catch?” But, as I had been told by most of the locals, most of the content is completely incomprehensible unless you know the local gossip.

The Guizer Jarl’s squad then continues on to the harbor, where the galley – which had been kept completely secret while being built and has not been seen before by any of the public not involved in the Jarl Squad or the process of building the ship – is placed on display throughout the day. This year’s galley was very attractive, I thought – too bad it only gets one day of glory before being set on fire.

The squad is then whisked off to make the “rounds,” appearing at local hospitals and schools and generally being the center of attention throughout the town. I caught up with them at Lerwick’s new museum, where they mingled with the crowd (one guizer even let me try on his helmet), posed for photographs, and sang the traditional Up Helly A’ song.

If you want to sing along, here are the lyrics to the chorus:

Grand old Vikings ruled upon the ocean vast,
Their brave battle-songs still thunder on the blast;
Their wild war-cry comes a-ringing from the past;
We answer it “A-oi”!

Roll their glory down the ages,
Sons of warriors and sages,
When the fight for Freedom rages,
Be bold and strong as they!

I wasn’t sure exactly where the idea to sing this next song came from, but it was certainly a wonderful day – great weather, and as I heard the Guizer Jarl telling a reporter, it was the best day of his life. Make sure you listen to this one, and then just take a minute to think about the ridiculousness of a bunch of men singing this while dressed in chain mail and helmets and carrying battle axes.

I missed the initial procession of the Jarl Squad in the morning, but a few hours later got to see a sort-of repeat performance: the procession of the Junior Jarl Squad. Since the 1950s, there has been a parallel version of Up Helly A’ for young school-age boys, who pick a Guizer Jarl to head a squad of boys dressed as Vikings, build their own junior galley, and hold their own procession on the day of Up Helly A.’

This is a clip of their procession through town, led by the Lerwick and Kirkwall pipe bands ahead of the galley and the mini-Vikings.

They had rather impressive costumes, given that they all had to be entirely made and financed by the boys’ families, and seemed duly happy to have been given this position of honor.

The Junior Guizer Jarl being led along behind his galley:

The mini-Vikings of the Junior Jarl squad:

As they marched through the town, marshaled by their teachers and the police and followed by a flock of admiring family and friends, they raised their axes and cheered – everything from “three cheers for my mom!” to “three cheers for not being in school!” It must be pretty exciting to be a kid in Lerwick on Up Helly A,’ way better than the kind of fun I had in school dressing up for Halloween, though I also would have been incredibly jealous of the boys, since even in the junior squads, they follow the tradition of only allowing male participation. (I could complain about the gender bias, for which the arguments supporting it as “tradition” seem rather out of date, but it’s not my town or festival, so that’s the business of the women of Lerwick. But I must admit, I’d like to see a group of women form a squad and stir up the “traditionalists” by trying to participate.)

The real highlight of the day, though, was the torchlight parade. I went with the two lovely women who graciously hosted me while I was in Lerwick, who found us a good spot up on a wall overlooking the path of the parade and the site where they burned the galley. People filled the streets all along the parade route, and just as everyone finished collecting, all the streetlights went out. Meanwhile, across town, the Jarl’s squad of Vikings and forty-five other squads of men with all assortment of themed costumes, comprising a total of 941 men – collected their torches and arranged themselves to begin the parade.

As the torches were lit and they set off down the parade route, the glow of the torchlight illuminating the town was indescribable – eerie and magnificent.

It’s hard to show in a picture quite how it looks to watch the streets filled with nearly a thousand men with torches, but it was impressive. I can see how an approaching hoard of torch-bearing Vikings would have struck fear in anyone’s heart. (Though, after sitting outside waiting for the parade to start, we were looking forward to having all those torches march past us.)

And as they passed us, I got to see the costumes that each of the squads had chosen. Other than the Guizer Jarl’s squad, they had nothing to do with Vikings – it looked more like Mardi Gras or Halloween. Apparently, so many men take advantage of this opportunity to dress up as women that Up Helly A’ has gained the informal nickname of Transvestite Tuesday.

There were certainly a lot of women, but my favorites were the sheep. Here’s the squad of sheep marching past, carrying torches and singing the Up Helly A’ song.

At the end of the parade, all the guizers assembled around the galley at the burning site in the center of town. The Guizer Jarl got in the boat, surrounded by men with torches (I think this must be why they pick someone well-liked in the town – otherwise, I think he’d be a little nervous getting in a wooden boat surrounded by men about to set it on fire), thanked everyone who had helped put the festival together, finishing by calling for three cheers for Up Helly A’.

And then, the moment they had been waiting for, everyone threw in their torches and set the galley on fire.

As the galley burned, the guizers all set off for a night of visiting halls around the town to perform skits in stages of progressive inebriation and degenerating understandability until the early hours of Wednesday morning (an official public holiday, since nobody is fit for work).

It’s certainly strange – that men dress as women and sheep carrying torches and singing about Viking heritage, that they spend a year building a boat for the express purpose of burning it, that the Jarl Squad members spend all year growing their beards so they can look like proper Vikings – but I think that’s what I liked about it. It may not be an “authentic” Viking celebration, but it’s certainly an authentic Lerwick tradition in all its oddities.

Rabbie Burns, the Scottish bard

2008-01-27T15:27:00.004-05:00

Who, you ask? Robert Burns is Scotland’s best-loved poet, known for classics like “Auld Lang Syne” and “Green Grow the Rushes Oh.” If you haven’t heard of him, it’s probably because his preference to write in Scots dialect rather than in standard English makes his writing less accessible to the rest of the English-speaking world, but in Scotland it has made him an icon of Scottish heritage. So much so that his birthday, January 25, is celebrated as Robert Burns Day: he is commemorated throughout Scotland in special suppers complete with bagpipe performances, a ritualized salute to haggis (a dramatic recitation of a Burns poem addressed to the classic Scottish dish), a toast to Burns' "immortal memory," a toast to the lasses, and a final response from the lasses. It’s a bit like a Scottish seder, except with boiled sheep organs instead of matzoh balls and recitations of Burns’ love poetry (both the classics immortalized in song and the naughty bits less commonly taught in school or sung by choirs) instead of reading from a haggadah.

I must admit I hadn’t realized how much pride Scots take in Burns (so much so that in his toast to the immortal memory, the president of Orkney College explained that Burns was a more famous writer than even that lesser-known English poet Shakespeare, who alas has no day dedicated to his memory), but after finding a flyer about the supper in the local grocery store decided that I would have to go see for myself. And so I attended my first ever Robert Burns Supper, hosted by the Stromness Pipe Band, an evening of many firsts for me – drank my first Scotch whiskey (free with entry, of course), heard my first bagpipe band, danced my first Scottish two-step – and with a man in a kilt, and even tasted my first haggis (my first time eating meat in over a year…for the record, it was surprisingly tasty). Although I didn’t ever get a full explanation of how the traditions of the Burns Supper came about, it seems that it started out as a Masonic tradition (explains both the formal structure and the custom in places that take the event more seriously of barring women) and probably became popular as Scottish nationalism grew in the nineteenth century after Burns’ death. After centuries of feeling oppressed by the English, Burns’ patriotic poetry written in Scots dialect must have seemed an excellent symbol of nationalistic feeling, and the inclusion of farming themes and love poetry written in common language certainly make him seem relevant to most Scots. The added color of bagpipe performances and dressing up in kilts or tartan-patterned clothes may not be traditional to locations outside the Highlands (the president of Orkney College explained to me that kilts and bagpipes aren’t particularly Orcadian, being somewhat remote from the center of Scotland, which probably explains why the supper was relatively informal and most people not participating just wore regular clothing), but it certainly felt like quite an impressive demonstration of Scottish pride.

Here are some samples of the evening’s entertainment:

The Stromness Pipe Band and a group of young dancers, all in proper Scottish regalia, process onto the stage.

The dancers’ performance – really quite difficult steps, especially for girls so young.

And a selection from the dancing at the end of the ceremony – old and young, kilted and unkilted, they all seem to know the steps (and those who don’t just fudge it, in proper folk style). Also, the astute listener might note that the band is playing one of my favorite seagoing ballads, Leaving of Liverpool.

Personally, though, I was less impressed by the ceremony of the occasion than by the genuine interest in Scottish traditions – the dancing, the music, the poetry – among the young people. In the US, of course, most folk traditions seem to be more popular among middle-aged and older people, and in Denmark certainly something like folk dancing was not a place to find anyone under age thirty (and scarce under fifty). Here though, Scottish teenagers seemed to think it was cool to learn to play the bagpipes or traditional step-dancing, or to do couples dances (two-step, three-step, quick-step, etc.) to fiddle music. Growing up in a place that doesn’t have any single folk culture, I’m used to thinking of traditional music and dancing as appealing to a particular subset of the population, not to everyone and certainly not to the typical teenagers. But even though there is certainly something constructed about this form of Scottish traditions (the spread of kilts and bagpipes out of the Highlands, for instance), this is really much more what folk culture is about – something that has a place for everyone, that continues to develop. (The bagpipe repertoire certainly has developed – one of the pipers in the band told me that a tune they played near the end had been written in a contest during the first Gulf War and been played by a military band in Iraq.) A few weeks is certainly not enough time to really know Scottish culture, but it’s enough to make me wish that the US had more regional traditions that everyone took pride in and took part in.

Notes from Small Islands*

2008-01-27T14:52:00.000-05:00

I have been in Scotland for three weeks now, and have spent the better part of that time up in the far north of Scotland in the Orkney Islands. I cannot explain exactly what it is about the islands that has me so completely charmed – perhaps friendly people willing to pull over and offer a ride to a bedraggled stranger or the millennia of history nestled among fields of grazing sheep or the gorgeous views from the sea cliffs

– but I am strongly tempted to get myself a few sheep and a creel boat and just stay.

The Orkneys are mainly an agricultural community, particularly once you leave the mainland – after Adam and I made it all the way to the north of Scotland from London, we kept on going to Westray, an island to the north of Orkney’s mainland which the walking guide brochure calls “just one big working farm.” And indeed, most of the island seemed to be farmland. We stayed at a gorgeous restored crofthouse (now turned hostel and rental cottage) at a place called Bisgeos two miles from the main town of Pierowall overlooking the cliffs, next door to a working farm and surrounded by fields of sheep.

Looking up the hill from the cliffs, Bisgeos is to the right and the farm next door is to the left.

The view from Bisgeos at sunset (you can see why I wanted to stay):

And a better view of the neighboring farm:

And here are our other neighbors – the sheep.

We saw sheep in the fields everywhere, whether out the window or on the way to town for groceries or walking to town for groceries, but to most of the rest of the farm animals were inside of the winter. On our way back from a walk along the cliffs, we met a very precocious fourth grader at the farm next to us who came out to yell at the dogs who seemed intent on protecting the farm from us and in between telling us all about what he had gotten from Santa for Christmas and how he wants to become an American cowboy gave us a tour of everything on the farm you can’t see from walking past the field of sheep – the long-haired horses, the dairy cows, the pig, turkeys and chickens and even peacocks. Although not unusual at all to him, I was surprised at how much this boy knew about animals and farming (he told us with authority that everyone on Westray thinks John Deere tractors are the best), but also about Playstation and DVDs and other things I’m used to kids being interested in. And, like any good Scot, he had strong football preferences (the Celtics, he told us, are “the best in the whole wide world”) and even though he seemed to like mostly American country music, he also told us he liked the Proclaimers too (probably Scotland’s most famous modern band, best known for the song Five Hundred Miles).

Even Orcadians (as the Orkney residents call themselves) who don’t work in farming can’t help but learn about it from living here – I met a woman on the mainland who moved from south England eleven years ago and works in a store in Kirwall, and even with no farming roots she knew how the weather over the past few years had affected the health of the fields and could say how the forecast of snow (as of yet unrealized) would soon have the farmers out spreading manure on the fields so the snow can help the nutrients be slowly absorbed into the soil. At the little bed and breakfast I stayed at in Kirkwall, the table in the downstairs hall is covered in ribbons from agricultural shows.

Fishing, though not so predominant as agriculture, is also a major resource for islands at the western edge of the North Sea. In the past, cod and other whitefish were easy to catch close to shore – an analysis of the middens at Skara Brae, a 5000-year-old Neolithic farming settlement found on the mainland of Orkney, revealed the bones of a 90-pound cod,

and even in more recent history, Orkney capitalized on its local fishing grounds by providing cod for the English during the Napoleonic wars, with 40 cod boats at the height of Orkney’s cod fishery in 1833. Into the twentieth century, both full- and part-time fishermen would catch cod, haddock and ling using handlines in small boats near shore. Today, though, the remaining whitefish fleet in the Orkneys goes farther afield – north to the Shetlands, east into the North Sea, or south to the Hebrides. There is no fish processing in the Orkneys, so local boats also have to land their fish elsewhere. When I bought fresh locally-caught haddock fillets in Westray, it had been shipped north from Aberdeen, even though it had been caught by a Westray boat – perhaps even the same one that the Bisgeos manager’s husband fishes on.

Most Scottish whitefish boats will tell you they are mostly interested in haddock, which is more popular in Scotland than cod (although with cod’s high prices, most boats want to catch some also, using a combination of fish to round out the catch as in most mixed fisheries). According to the head of the Orkney Fisheries Association in Kirkwall (an office lined with maps not just of fishing grounds but also of EU management zones and diagrams of quota allocations), the extremely low cod quotas in the North Sea have made cod largely a nuisance for fishing boats because they have to pick fishing locations to avoid the cod. Scottish fishermen have come up with a few strategies to try to avoid catching cod, including trying special nets designed to catch haddock while letting cod escape (they site the Eliminator Trawl designed in Rhode Island as the basis, also the basis for similar nets I saw in the flume tank in Hirtshals). Scotland has also instituted a real-time closure policy where fishing grounds will be closed if boats are catching too high a proportion of cod or too many juveniles – a regulation that the Fisheries Association in Orkney says grew out of the fishermen’s informal habit of telling others in the area to avoid those grounds to avoid overfishing the cod (possibly the only instance of giving accurate fishing advice, since fishermen are notorious for lying about their catches to try to protect good spots from competition).

Inshore fishing, though, is mostly for crab and lobster – partly because whitefish are mostly found farther offshore but also because there are no processing plants for whitefish in the Orkneys. Crab and lobster are caught in baited traps called creels (the same type of trap as the Maine lobster pots), and since it’s a largely unregulated fishery, many people here set creels part-time or to catch enough to eat at home in addition to four hundred or so full-time fishermen.

The crab and lobster fisheries have remained strong in the Orkneys largely thanks to the Orkney Fishermen’s Society, founded in 1953 as a co-operative marketing venture to help the fishermen of Stromness, half an hour south of Kirkwall on the Mainland, get the best possible prices for their lobster. In addition to successful marketing of live lobsters, the society also founded a crab-processing plant in Stromness in 1967, which was followed a year later by a crab processing plant at the fishing pier in Westray founded by a similar co-operative venture on the island. Both the plants in Stromnes and Westray are still in operation today. I didn’t get a chance to actually go through the plants, but I did find a video of the processing in the Westray plant, which is small and informal enough that both locals and tourists are encouraged to go to the plant to buy some of the day’s catch. Despite being small, though, they are highly successful, making Orkney crab has become a well-known product across Britain.

The Orkneys are indeed small islands: the phone book in Westray is only three and a half pages long and includes the mobile phone numbers and email addresses of everyone on the island, a newspaper write-up of a primary school play on one of the neighboring islands revealed that the students came from only four families, and to attend senior high school all the students from off the Mainland have to leave home and board in Kirkwall for the week. But the smallness and isolation creates something special about the place – perhaps that everyone feels a connection to the land through the farming and fishing, or that there are millennia of history preserved all around, or just that (as I was told by a man who had moved to Kirkwall from Yorkshire after 20 years of regular visits) everyone here is here because they want to be.

*This is indeed a take-off on Bill Bryson’s Notes from a Small Island, which I read while in Westray, providing a highly-entertaining introduction to British culture and what not to do while traveling. While mentioning books, I will also take the time here to answer the question that you have undoubtedly been asking since reading the books I’ve added to the list of books from places I’ve been…“did you actually stop over in Hogwarts?” Sadly, no – Harry Potter is now on the list because not only did I read it this year (in Iceland, since that’s where I was when it was released), but I have now been both to Edinburgh, the city where J.K. Rowling began writing the series (I thought the coolest part about the city was the castle right in the center of downtown, though Adam seems less impressed)
and taken the train from Fort William to Mallaig (also a pretty seaside location with lots of sheep),

purportedly the most scenic train line in Britain and the location where the Hogwarts Express scenes were filmed for the movie adaptations.

Six Months Out

2008-01-21T17:32:00.000-05:00

My apologies for the long hiatus between posts. I'm in the Orkney Islands in the northern reaches of Scotland and have been internet-free for the past few weeks. I'll have more tales coming soon of adventures in the Scottish highlands and isles, but in the meantime, this is my second quarterly report, submitted for my "official" Watson duties at the beginning of January.

Although I could easily fill a few pages with anecdotes and philosophical musings about cod fisheries, for a more honest report I have to begin by admitting that I have spent much of the past few months frustrated with myself and how little progress I have felt I have been making on my project. I spent most of my time in Denmark in Hirtshals helping social science researchers at IFM (Innovative Fisheries Management) with a project comparing implementation of total allowable quota management systems in the Faeroe Islands, Norway, Denmark and the overall European Union. Although I had hoped that working on a longer-term project with IFM would help me get “inside” the fishery by making contacts within the fishing community and the fisheries research community based at the North Sea Center in Hirtshals, I had a difficult time actually getting to talk with people in the fishing community and felt more inside social science than inside the fishery itself. The contact with experts on fisheries policy provided necessary background on the European Union’s Common Fisheries Policy, which is far too complicated to just pick up as I go along, and an introduction to how EU research and funding is conducted from people who are at the top of the field in fisheries social science. I gained a lot of respect for importance of economic analyses, social impact assessments and social scientific input in addition to scientific assessments in making policy decisions, but I was frustrated that the research I was helping with felt more like academia than seeing the fishery for myself and that I made slow headway in making contacts within the community and the local fishery.

One of my major obstacles thus far is that even when I do get the chance to get “inside” the fishery by going out on boats or to workshops or meetings, I remain very much an outsider. In some settings, such as the ICES annual science conference in Helsinki, I could blend in with young PhD students and my undergraduate science degree and future scientific aspirations gave me an air of credibility as someone who belonged in this context. In most other settings, though, it is not only my complete lack of expertise but even my inherent identity that sets me off as an outsider, recently demonstrated when I went to a seminar for fifty or so fishing skippers and netmakers where the speaker began by addressing “lady and gentlemen.” In a room full of middle-aged men who have been fishing longer than I have been alive, I am spotted as an outsider even before I open my mouth. Which, once I do, demonstrates my position as an outsider even more palpably due to my inability to effectively communicate in any language besides English (and though I am now moving on to English-speaking countries, I expect my American accent will continue to elicit questions in the UK and in Newfoundland).

Fishing has also become so politically and publicly contentious that the frequent confusion I have encountered in trying to explain what I am doing this year has occasionally led to suspicion, since most fishermen assume I am either a biologist or a “green.” Though many fishermen have cooperated closely with both fisheries scientists and environmental organizations, there is still considerable distrust, and I have found myself having to promise the people I talk with that no, I do not work for Greenpeace (practically a dirty word in the fishing industry due to such tactics as protesting fishing by jumping in the water in front of vessels fishing in the North Sea, written up in International Fishing News with the headline “Nutters!” and sinking inactive whaling ships in the Reykjavik harbor – actually done by Sea Shepard, a more radical offshoot of Greenpeace, but attributed to Greenpeace by the sailor who told me about it, a deckhand for Iceland’s Marine Research Institute who used to work processing whale catches at the on-shore whaling station).

There is also a lot of frustration among fishermen that there is much talk about giving them a say in designing fisheries policy, but they have seen few results that prove they are being heard. Some fishermen are then glad to talk to someone new who seems open to their ideas and ready to listen, but others see me as yet another in a long string of people who listen to what they have to say without them ever seeing any beneficial changes as a result of their cooperation and ideas. This general frustration was most pointedly illustrated for me by an Australian former skipper I met in Hirtshals who assumed I held some sort of important position in fisheries management and told me he knew how to fix the problems in fisheries but insisted that he wouldn’t tell me anything unless I could actually do something about it.

Through – and partially even due to – all of this, though, I have begun to get a sense of the major issues facing cod fisheries management in Europe, which are both similar to and much more complicated than the issues I found in Iceland. As in Iceland, the fishing industry in Europe has little faith in scientific assessments of the fish stocks used to set fishing quotas. Cod quotas in the North Sea have been drastically cut as the result of small year-classes of young fish found in the surveys over the past few years, and the International Council for Exploration of the Seas (ICES), the scientific body that provides the EU with official advice on fisheries management, has continued to recommend low cod quotas to allow these young fish to mature and rebuild the spawning stock. What fishermen have seen, however, is that they are catching much more cod than they have ever seen before in their lives – likely a result both of the cod’s recovery and of reductions in the number of vessels fishing. Thus the reduction of quota in the face of rising fish stocks seems, as a Danish fisherman put it at the North Sea Regional Advisory Council Meeting (NSRAC – a representative body for stakeholders in the fisheries to present their advice to the EU fisheries managers) in October, it’s “ridiculous” and “really frustrating to have an advice that says, yes fishermen you’re right there’s cod everywhere but don’t fish it…. How do ICES expect the fishing industry to take it seriously?”

Even as scientists respond to critiques and begin additional research and take fishermen’s ideas seriously, there remains and incredible amount of distrust. The president of a large fishing technology company told me that scientists aren’t interested in fixing problems with their methods because all they care about is earning enough to pay their salaries and don’t want to have to deal with politicians. I met a fisherman in Bornholm who was quite interested in cooperation with scientists; he had just picked up a voluntary logbook where he will record detailed information about his fishing locations and catches for researchers. Even he, however, seemed dubious that the scientist chosen to oversee Baltic fisheries was a young woman who had only been working in the Baltic for a year. He also insisted that the scientists’ math must be wrong to have produced what he sees as wrong estimates of the fish stocks. Even scientists who have done cooperative research with fishermen on new gear technology and measuring fish populations in areas not normally surveyed say that it is difficult to convince fishermen to trust their judgment and follow scientific methods in the research.

Though much of this seems the result of poor communication between people from very different worlds, scientists also seem to pick up much of the blame for management systems with problems that run much deeper than a reliance on imperfect scientific advice. At the NSRAC meeting, much of the outrage at the low quota recommended for the cod fishery was over the ramifications of a low quota under the EU’s fisheries policy, saying “your recommendations won’t solve a single solitary thing,” and “I understand the rationale, but it doesn’t work in the real world. All you will do is increase discards!” Since fishing regulations in the EU only concern the fish brought back to port, they essentially require fishermen to throw back (dead) fish they catch but have little quota to land compared to the amount they are catching even as bycatch while targeting other species – and thus even if the scientific assessment is correct, a low quota will not have the effect of protecting fish but instead of “slaughtering fish” if the fishermen are to be allowed to catch anything at all. At the end of the discussion of ICES advice at the NSRAC meeting, one of the most vocally upset fishermen noted that “we all vented our spleen at the science, but the Commission [of the European Communities – the major bureaucratic institution in charge of changes to the Common Fisheries Policy] should have been here to listen” because the anger expressed should not have been directed at the science.

It is this ongoing debate about not just how many fish are in the sea but how to manage them that I find the most important difference between European and Icelandic fisheries discourse. Though many Danish fishermen share the tendency of the Icelanders to complain that fisheries biologists don’t know anything about fish and are out of touch with the “real world,” they are equally likely to blame their problems on someone sitting in an office in Brussels, a politician who they derisively joke has never seen a fish except on a plate or in a supermarket. Here, people are still questioning not just how many fish should be caught but who should be given the right to catch those fish and who gets to make that decision.

Some of the Danish fishermen display their dissatisfaction with EU jurisdiction by sailing with the EU's flag with a rather telling hand gesture drawn in the middle.

This past year has been a time of change in Danish fisheries, as the fishing industry is still adjusting to a new transferable quota system (called the FKA system - ’FKA’ refers to “fartøjs kvote andele,” which means vessel quota shares) decided upon in the fall of 2005 and first put in place for 2007. Although the system technically does not allow direct purchase of catch quota shares as in Iceland, instead requiring that a fisherman purchase an extra fishing vessel and then inherit that vessel’s quota allocation, it is universally understood that what is being bought and sold is the right to catch fish. As in Iceland in the 1980s and in Norway in the 1990s, Denmark has become part of the trend of managing its fisheries commons through privatization. From a strictly economic viewpoint, this sort of privatization of common resources is highly successful, allowing the market to maximize efficiency and gain the most profit from available fish stock by eliminating the least effective fishing vessels and fishermen – a major goal of most European fisheries policy today, since post-World War II subsidies for new vessels with increasingly effective fishing technology that continued through the 1980s have created a fishing capacity that far outstrips that actual amount of fish available to be caught. The major problem with market-based resource allocation, however, is that it only values fisheries based on economic efficiency rather than less tangible assets such as maintenance of traditional settlement patterns, maintenance of social structures and employment opportunities in coastal communities.

Although the changes have come slowly over the past decades as regulations have become increasingly strict, it seems that the FKA system in Denmark has drastically accelerated the trend towards fewer fishing communities with fewer fishermen. Visiting the island of Bornholm, traditionally highly dependent on the Baltic cod and herring fisheries (although high levels of dioxin have made it illegal for Danish fishermen to catch herring, increasing the industry’s dependence on cod), the only sign that the fishing harbors had ever been full of boats were the pictures from the 1980s in a fishermen’s club in the island’s main fishing town and the stories of locals who could describe how a small harbor now with a single fishing boat in port had been full fifteen years ago.

These are pictures of two of the twenty-seven harbors on Bornholm - still plenty of fish boxes and fishing gear, but the harbors themselves are starkly empty.

In Hirtshals, one of the major North Sea harbors in Denmark, many of the boats in the harbor are simply sitting idle and unmaintained, having been sold for a quota now being fished on another vessel. The two small-boat cod fishermen I got to know in Hirtshals seem representative of the trend: one had recently sold his boat and quota and taken a job dredging gravel off the coast of Spain that comes with more predictable work hours and wages; the other says he has only resisted the frequent offers from other fishermen to buy out his quota because he enjoys fishing and isn’t quite ready to retire, but if he had a young family or mortgages to pay he wouldn’t be able to make a living from fishing anymore.

This decrease in the number of fishermen is not just a problem of nostalgia: fishermen depend on discussing the weather and the fishing grounds with each other, sharing information that increases the overall fleet’s knowledge and efficiency, in addition to shore-based infrastructures such as fish processing plants and auctions that help to keep jobs in the local community and help fishermen gain the best prices for their catches. In Hirtshals, where the daily auction is the main tool that allows small fishermen to reliably sell their catches at good prices, the chairman of the local fisheries association worries that if too many boats are sold and fishermen take more reliable jobs in other industries, the auction will not be able to remain in the town. In Bornholm, the many former fish processing plants along the harbors are now empty and most local fishermen now land their catches abroad. Each of the local fisheries association chairmen I talked with see their most important priority as keeping as much quota as possible in their town, because they know that otherwise they will be in danger of losing the critical mass of fishermen necessary to maintain the local fishing industry.

Many of the successful fishing towns in Denmark have used the switch to the FKA system as an opportunity to strengthen their fishing industry. Most fishermen recognize that something needed to happen to reduce the number of fishermen and fishing boats to fit the amount of fish available, and those who have stayed in fishing seem cautiously optimistic that it will be more profitable under the new system. Pretty much every local fisheries association in Denmark has developed a quota pool where fishermen can rent their quotas easily between members of the community – the fisheries chairman in Hirtshals showed me their online trading system, which he says makes it so quick and easy that if you’re out fishing and pull up a net full of haddock you don’t have enough quota for (which, according to EU regulations, you have to throw back even though it’s already dead), you can get out the laptop and pay for the necessary quota while the fish is still in the net. These community pools also help keep quota in the area, since all members of the pool have to see whether anyone in the community is willing to buy their quota and keep it in the pool before they are allowed to sell it to someone in another part of the country.

In other towns, however, the amount of fishing has dropped drastically and the towns have been forced to change rapidly to maintain their own existence. With fewer fishing and fish processing jobs to keep people in small fishing towns, the local communities have had to find other sources of employment, largely in growing tourist industries, to stem the tide of people moving to the cities from rural coastal areas. I had already seen this in Iceland, where on the island of Vestmannaeyjar, the number of cruise ships that had come to the island over the season and the town’s advertising efforts in the rest of the country was an important topic of discussion among local women, many of whom worked in local hotels or sold souvenirs for tourists as an important supplement to their families’ incomes, and the cut in this year’s cod quota had increased the town’s resolve to apply for funding to build a new research center on the island, which would provide jobs for people who could no longer find jobs fishing. In Bornholm, I was told that the now-empty fishing harbors fill up in the summer when recreational boats bring tourists for a short, intense season that provides the majority of the year’s income for many families and leaves many of the towns nearly deserted in winter. In these places, fishing has at least remained a major part of the islands’ identities even as it becomes a less central part of the economy, but other fishing towns have not fared so well: a former fisherman from Hals, a town on the Limfjord in Jutland that has largely changed from a fishing town to a gentrified suburb for commuters working in the city of Aalborg, tells me that in the 1970s, anyone in town could tell you who were the top fishermen in town based on their recent catches, but today many would be hard-pressed to name a fisherman at all.

With such a difficult situation in many fishing communities, understanding what people within these communities see as most important to protect the fishery along with the fish seems increasingly central to my project, and so I am going to begin my time in the UK by traveling in small coastal communities in Scotland. I know that by traveling as a definite outsider and only being able to spend a relatively short time in each place, I may only have short windows into the fishery, but I can at least appreciate the knowledge of those truly inside the fishery and just how much I don’t know – a lesson in humility and perspective that extends far beyond fisheries.

Over the past few months, loss of confidence in myself and my project as a result both of my difficulties in meeting my expectations of finding my way inside the fishery and of the difficulties of being far away from any community where I have a place inside became something of a self-fulfilling prophecy, since bouts of anxiety and dissatisfaction with myself are not conducive to success in seeking out new opportunities. Changing this has been slow, but the process of reevaluating how to change my approach and expectations so that I can make more of the connections I seek in my project and maintain my self-confidence even when I am alone and feel intractably stuck has been a valuable, if difficult, experience. Although I have still been learning about cod and fisheries, the most important lessons have been about how much I don’t know, not just about cod but about myself.

Godt Nytår!

2007-12-31T20:08:00.000-05:00

In case you couldn't guess, folks, that's Danish for happy new year.

Tonight is my last night in Copenhagen, and quite a last night it was. I spent the past week with my family, partaking in exciting Danish traditions such as dancing around the Christmas tree and singing Chanukah O Chanukah (ok, well, most Danes sing Christmas songs) and continuing the classic American Christmas tradition of watching movies and eating Chinese food.

Here's the family about to partake in an actual Danish tradition of eating a marzipan pig (the traditional gift for the one who finds the whole almond in their rice pudding, also something we sampled, though we all shared the "prize").
And Mom and Jason warming themselves in the evening at Tivoli Gardens.
But after they left this morning, I had New Year's Eve on my own to celebrate with the Danes.

In general, I've found Denmark to be a much better organized, tamer country than the US - trains run on time, streets are clean, people are generally polite. But Danish new year's celebrations are, well, crazy. A nice Indian man I stood next to in the main square in town to watch the festivities said it was much more "grand" than anything he was used to, but I stand by crazy.

In the US, I'm also used to new year's being a time for fireworks...but in the parts of the US where I've lived most of my life, fireworks are set off by trained professionals in pre-arranged displays. Not here - in Denmark (as in Iceland) it seems that anyone can get a batch of fireworks and set them off in downtown Copenhagen.
To my American sensibilities, this seems like a horribly bad idea. There were fireworks shooting off in all directions, across the ground and towards buildings and young children throwing sparklers along the sidewalks. The favorite, however, seemed to be explosives without the firework that would boom so loudly that they left my ears ringing and literally shook the sidewalk. These were thrown right in the road, where buses, taxis, and later police and ambulance vans drove right past, seemingly unphased by the explosions.

Here's a video of the smoke from one of them (I missed the bang, but it was loud), immediately followed by many of the police vans that came to monitor the action.

Once I got past the shock of regular ground-shaking explosions and having to check for lit fuses before crossing a street, it was really exciting to watch - much more so than the sort of fireworks displays I'm used to, though I still have a nagging sense that somehow this must be a bad idea if the evening requires so many ambulances. But, hey, who am I to question a cherished Danish tradition?

Plus, it was really fun to watch, no tickets or whole-day waits required, and definitely not something I'd see at home. Here's what the fireworks looked like over the crowd at midnight - all, mind you, set off by individuals, not as part of any organized show.

It was certainly an exciting conclusion to my three months in Denmark and to 2007. Early tomorrow (today) I'm flying to London and then heading north to Scotland for further adventures beginning the next phase of my project in the new year.

But for now, here's wishing you all the best for 2008!

Goodbye, Hirtshals!

2007-12-22T10:43:00.000-05:00

I left Hirtshals last Monday to head south (first to Bornholm, a little Danish island in the Baltic, and now to Copenhagen to spend a week with my family as a more standard tourist), and I must say – it was about time. It’s not that it was an unpleasant place, but I really stayed longer than I should have, since I didn’t really manage to find enough to do either for my project or just as plain entertainment. Though I did get the chance to get to know some lovely people and Hirtshals is probably the most long-term home I will have until I come back to the US (and potentially for even a while after that), I was ready to move on. That said, though, here are some of the things I will miss about living in northern Jutland.

Bike rides through the countryside

Bicycles are a popular mode of transportation in Denmark, much more so than in the US, and there are many nice paths and roads through the forest and countryside, so I borrowed a bicycle and spent many lovely days biking around northern Jutland. Though not all excursions were as eventful as this one, it was a good way to get to know the area. Lots of rape seed fields, producing both rape seed oil and, recently, bioethanol. It’s very flat, and I joked that without the windmills I would have thought I was in the Midwest.

Windmills in farm country:

My frequent biking companions, Andrea and Doug, as we were passed by a tractor. Farm country indeed.

Along these bike rides through the countryside, we also found some neat little places in the small towns scattered around the area, like this cute church with lovely tree-lined churchyard:

View out over the dunes to the sea…and a car driving right along the beach (seemingly a popular thing to do here):

Sunset over the fields. Rural Denmark really is picturesque.

Danish folkedans

I had such a good time at my first Danish folk dance in Hjørring that I kept going back – every other week in Hjørring and another dance (more like a lesson, though the instructions were in Danish and thus less helpful for me) weekly in Tornby, about half way between Hirtshals and Hjørring. Although I wouldn’t say I’m quite good at Danish folk dancing, by this point I’m at least decent – hopefully I’ll remember well enough to schottis and hambo (Swedish dances, but also done in Denmark, along with some Danish variations) once I get back home and go dancing in Greenfield again.

Benches set up during the break in the middle of the dance for coffee and snacks and for group singing of traditional Danish songs (one of my favorite parts, even though I usually needed explanations of what they were about).

Some blurry pictures of the dances themselves:

(Look, it’s Michelle! We went to a dance while she was visiting, where she picked up the polka much faster than I did at first.)

Some dances, though, are just plain awkward until you really master them. This one, for instance, which made me feel like a gorilla trying to dance and hug someone at the same time.

My Danish dancing shoes, which I borrowed from a woman who had been a dance instructor in Sweden for many years and was very helpful in explaining some of the steps to me in English. These were the first real dancing shoes I’ve ever had, and made me feel much more authentic.

It was sad to leave behind the dancing…but hopefully I’ll get more chances to try local dances in Scotland and Newfoundland and build a repertoire of North Atlantic folk dancing to go along with my new knowledge of North Atlantic fisheries.

Hirtshals nightlife (ok, not quite, but some good times with fun people)

While I was in Hirtshals, I stayed at the guesthouse for North Sea Center researchers and got to know a number of interesting people who came in and out while I was there – ranging from zookeepers-in-training to Scottish fishermen visiting the flume tank for a training course to fisheries biologists. It was quite a diverse crowd. The three people who were there for most of the same time as me were Andrea, a Brazilian sociologist analyzing her research on fisheries communities in Spain, Maria, a Mexican fisheries biologist studying stress responses in fish, and Benedikt, an Austrian masters student in aquaculture doing a one-semester internship in a place that actually has some ocean (for those of you rough on your geography, Austria is quite decidedly land-locked).

There aren’t too many exciting places to go in Hirtshals – we visited the local pubs a few times, but it turned out that the bowling alley right down the road was the liveliest place on the weekends. It felt eerie to be in a place that felt so, well, American, but we had a good time.

We also held some small dinner parties together, which was fun both to not have to cook just for one and to sample other people’s home cooking. For one memorable dinner, Benedikt “caught” us a cod (actually, he bought it off a fisherman at the harbor) and Andrea cooked Brazilian-style fish.

It was good – and very attractive.

And, of course, we practiced our Danish. Skål! (Cheers!)

And now onwards I must go, to see and learn and, you know, do stuff.

Goodbye, Hirtshals!

Wined and dined, or eating fish with fish and fishermen

2007-12-22T10:34:00.001-05:00

One of the fun things about tagging along for events like the Hampiðjan workshop is that when people travel for conferences, etc. they usually have some sort of fancy dinner that I end up being invited along to – and if I learned anything as a college student, it was to never turn down free food. Plus, I’m sure experiencing fancy fisheries dinners (and the chance to talk with people over the meal) is an important part of my project. After the first night of the workshop, everyone was invited to dinner in the aquarium, right in front of the largest fish tank in northern Europe.

(This picture is from one of the regular daily presentations for visitors at the tank. Note the ridiculous-looking sunfish – in Danish called a klumpfisk, a name that more appropriately describes the fish’s ungainly awkwardness – which is considered the aquarium’s main star.)Nothing like sampling the best fish the North Sea has to offer right in front of the real live fish of the North Sea. This did seem a little odd, but fairly in keeping with the themes of the rest of the museum, which focuses on the fish species’ value to the fishing industry and how they are caught, processed, and sold rather than focusing on fish biology or North Sea ecology.*

So in case visitors were wondering, the sign over the aquarium cod makes sure to let them know that cod is good for eating…shown by labeling the fish with a picture of a fish on a plate with a knife and fork. Mmm, tasty aquarium fish.

I had seen the aquarium on my own before this dinner, but nothing quite this fancy for regular visitors. Rather than the normal visitor activity of watching the seals be fed,

there was champagne in the “sealarium” with the seals looking on,

And then during the dinner in front of the tank (which, though the chef joked that he was a little nervous preparing fish for so many fishermen, was very very good), there was a show in the tank with a scuba diver feeding the fish.

I had seen the fish fed by the diver before as part of the normal presentation for regular visitors, but normally they do the presentation in Danish and for the international visiting crowd they did it in English instead, which I greatly appreciated.

I’m not usually one for fancy events, but I could get used to this kind of thing.

How to see inside a fishing net

2007-12-22T10:11:00.001-05:00

The North Sea Center is known for fisheries for a number of reasons – not primarily for the social science research at IFM, but among the public for a large aquarium focusing on North Sea species, among scientists for the large branch of the Danish Institute for Fisheries Research, and among the fishing industry for the flume tank – one of few such facilities worldwide where you can test a scale model of fishing gear and see how it actually functions underwater. Most fishermen, mind you, spend a lifetime intimately getting to know their gear and its performance in different conditions…but they can’t actually see what is going on underwater once they release the net, how it interacts with the fish or whether it works they way they imagine in their heads. So the chance to test a net in a tank of moving water that provides a giant window into the net’s performance in action is a useful tool for netmakers and fishermen alike.

I first got to see the flume tank in October, when the tank was open for the public in celebration of its 25-year anniversary. Although the tank has come to be well-known worldwide, it’s a pretty expensive facility and as such generally only used for research projects or development of large (and thus expensive) nets for large boats*, and thus many local fishermen in Hirtshals, including the former fisherman I’d met just the week before at the folkedans, had lived walking distance from the tank for years and never actually seen it. The net demonstrated for this open-house was an experimental bottom trawl with square bottom panels as an alternative to the rockhopper gear generally used along the bottom of the net. The idea of the change is that though the rockhopper does indeed “hop” over rocks, it hops fairly considerably, which lets out a lot of the fish – plus, this traditional trawl gear has generally been considered as to cause potential damage to the seabed. The alternative square panels, however, flip up individually, so that they let out fewer fish and are thought to be less damaging to the seabed.

Standard rockhopper gear (this photo from the Bjarni Saemundsson, a flashback to my time in Iceland):

The experimental net with alternative bottom gear:

Along with the demonstration of the net in the tank, they also played video footage taken from a test of the net on a pair trawler (convenient for comparing experimental and control nets since the two are towed side by side by the same ship) in the Barents Sea. They mounted a video camera on the headrope (top) of the net looking back and it was really very cool to see how the fish behaved once they got caught (herded, really) in the net, and you could see that more escaped from the standard rockhopper net.

I’ve long thought that gear technology provides some of the best solutions to fisheries problems – rather than requiring limiting regulations to avoid bycatch of unwanted species or catch of juveniles or damage to the environment, many of the problems can be minimized by modifying the actual gear used for fishing. In any case, I was excited enough by this demonstration and by the potential of this flume tank to combine fishermen’s needs and policy/science-driven experimentation that I was determined to see some more of how this tank was used in practice. Which I had the chance to do on two different occasions – one an experimental use of the tank to modify an existing net and the other a workshop for fishermen to see their nets in action.

In mid-November, I came back to the tank to watch a test of an experimental net used for sampling salmon fry. Since one of the main complaints made by fishermen against scientific surveys is that the scientists do not test or update their fishing gear to successfully catch fish (scientists, on the other hand, will tell you that the purpose of surveys is not to catch fish but to sample the same locations using the same methods from year to year to have a frame of reference for comparison of stock sizes from year to year; I think both points have merit and have been largely discounted from by the other party – maybe more on this another time), it was interesting if just for the fact that it was a test of a scientific survey net.

Here’s the net in the tank:

The view of the net from the top of the tank – it basically looks like a large swimming pool…except you’d better watch out before you dive in and get caught like an unlucky fish.

Even more interesting than the net itself, though, was getting to see how nets are measured while in the flume tank – how this state-of-the-art gear research actually works. Although the system is highly sophisticated, the methods used to measure the important parameters of how the net works (mostly focused on the dimensions of the net at different points while towing – here mimicked by water circulation – at different speeds) are fairly simple, based on moving cameras with sensitive position coordinates until they point to the exact points to be measured and then determining the distance between the cameras. Elegantly simple.

Here are two of the guys who work at the flume tank, experts at taking all these measurements:

Based on the initial results, the team working at the flume tank can also make slight alterations to the design of the net – how it is rigged, the choice of doors used to keep the net open, etc. and then re-try the net to see the effect of these changes.

Here they are making some adjustments to one side of the net (look at the tiny door! This is what you get with 1:10 scale model…it’s almost cute.)

Most netmakers, unlike those working for scientific research vessels, have another purpose in mind beyond designing the best nets: convincing fishermen to buy them. And so another important function of the flume tank is that it allows fishermen who use these nets come and see how they look underwater. This is useful because it provides fishermen with up-to-date information on the available gear technology and helps them understand how they can get the best performance out of their own gear, but also because it helps gear companies sell their products. And so I had the opportunity to spend three days attending a flume tank workshop held by Hampiðjan, an Icelandic netmaking company and one of the leading gear technology companies in the world, with net lofts all over – Lithuania, Russia, New Zealand, Namibia, Denmark, Ireland, Norway, the Faeroe Islands, Newfoundland, and the USA.

The workshop participants were similarly from all over the world – from South Africa to Alaska, Iceland to Argentina, and mostly captains aboard large fishing vessels, which meant that they were the people who saw these nets in action more often than anyone else and also the people most interested in staying at the cutting edge of fishing technology. For three days, they watched net after net demonstrated in the flume tank and attended seminars on new fishing technology, both nets and other products shown and sold by other companies at the workshop, including strong but lightweight ropes and remote sensing technology used to determine how the trawl is working while in the water.

The skippers all seemed interested in learning as much as they could about this new technology, particularly things they might be able to try on their own boats – everyone wants to have the best gear out there.

Even fishermen from Iceland, where the ability to catch is strictly based on quotas and the decision of how much to catch is theoretically decided based on market prices, quality of the fish available, processing capacity, etc. (at least according to the office-based employees I talked to from the large companies), were set on talking about which fishermen were best based on who was able to catch the most, and any gear that could help gain that edge to catch more fish was thus extremely desirable. The development director for Hampiðjan explained to me that different people within industry focus on different objectives: the skipper wants to catch the most, the engineer wants to use less fuel, and the fleet manager wants to make the most money. By providing new technology, of course, companies like Hampiðjan try to make it easier to accomplish all these goals.

Inherent in this is also an ingrained desire for progress, to remain at the forefront of the industry. Although many of the new nets shown throughout the workshop and many of nets and other types of gear advertised seemed to provide important improvements over previous fishing methods, there also seemed to be a trend towards trying new products just for the sake of progress itself. As a South African skipper explained to me, “as soon as you think you’re on top of the game, you’re starting to lose it…that’s fishing.” Experimenting with new gear had worked well for him: he described fuel savings and higher quality catch with a new net he had switched to, but he also openly admitted that he hadn’t focused on these specific factors when deciding on the new net but mostly just wanted to keep improving and not keep using the same gear. A Faeroese netmaker explained the desire for new technology by saying that fishermen are much like schoolchildren with a new toy – once you convince one to try a new net, they all want it. This is also a tendency he had learned how to capitalize on: he says he always makes sure to test a new net with the most successful fisherman with the best boat, and then when he catches the most fish (as always), other fishermen will say it was because of the net and want to try it themselves. Unlike the fishermen, who seemed very focused on the ability to catch fish, this netmaker said the main limiting factor was actually the ability to process fish onboard the boat – those with a greater processing capacity, he said, are thought to be better fishermen when really they just have better boats.

I kept wondering, though, whether all this new technology was really as necessary as it was made out to be by the companies trying to sell their gear. I understand the point made by the president of Scanmar, the company selling remote sensing devices to measure the trawl’s performance while in use, that “there’s so much money hanging back there” that these boat’s cannot afford to not be successful on their fishing trips – and thus, he says, cannot afford to not use his technology. What wasn’t entirely clear from the workshop, however, was why large, expensive boats with fancy, expensive gear are better than smaller lower-tech boats. If everyone agrees that there’s a finite amount of fish that can be caught by each boat – we can quibble later over how much and who gets to decide how much goes to each boat, but in most places today determined by how much quota share you have purchased, not your ability to catch the most fish – do you really need the newest, fanciest equipment? In a lot of cases, new technology seems to be helping to maximize the amount of profit from fishing: reducing fuel costs, increasing selectivity and reducing damage while in the net to improve quality, replacing the high number of fishermen on numerous small vessels with fewer, better-paid fishermen on fewer, larger vessels. I’m still not sure whether profit maximization in and of itself is a desirable goal – it’s the point where pure economics begins to mix with cultural and social values, always a messy process.

Even without answering this question, though, developments in gear technology still hold significant promise since they provide consumers with higher quality fish and use less fuel, both important goals in their own right in addition to allowing fishermen to catch less without losing money, and also can be more selective about the fish caught (reducing bycatch of both unwanted species and of juveniles) and can reduce unwanted negative environmental impacts. Although at this workshop, everything was presented as a way of improving profit (reduce fuel expenses, increase quality and thus selling price of catch, reduce unwanted bycatch in order to more carefully select which quotas to use and to avoid breaking regulations), it also provides an opportunity to “slip in” modifications to gear and fishing technique that help with sustainability.

Fuel savings was one of the main themes of this workshop due to the high fuel prices that today make up a considerable percentage of the cost for a fishing trip. (See my earlier musings on worries about fuel use in fisheries here).

Most of the fuel-saving techniques presented were variations on the theme of reducing the trawl’s resistance while being pulled through the water, a very energy-intensive operation. Ways to do this ranged from using stronger but lighter-weight ropes and netting to new designs of nets and trawl doors that produce less resistance in the water to adjustments in the rigging and alignment of different components of the net to get the maximum fishing capacity out of each haul.

Size- and species- selectivity has also become increasingly important to fishermen as they have to adjust to regulations that restrict both what and how much they are allowed to catch. This net was developed by an Irish netmaker for pelagic boats in the Shetland Islands. With reduced quotas, the fishermen wanted to make sure they were only catching the largest – and highest-priced – fish, and so they designed a net with separator panels to allow small fish to escape. (In this model, I’m a particular fan of the illustrations of the escaping fish.)

I should mention here that the president of Scanmar was particularly adamant that this type of size selection is a bad idea for pelagic species, since he says that 80% of fish that escape through meshes in nets do not survive. I know that some pelagic species (particularly herring) are easily damaged by being touched, unlike hardier groundfish, but can’t tell you for sure what the “truth” might be. (This is a common theme I’m finding in fisheries – it’s not just that people disagree about interpretations or priorities about what to do with fish, but also about basic facts. My natural inclination is to say we need more science, but here even science is seen as just one of many viewpoint.)

For me, though, the most interesting of the nets were the ones designed to avoid cod. Whatever you might think about the reductions in cod quotas or the actual amount of cod in the sea, the fishermen have been facing the tricky task of trying to catch other groundfish – mostly haddock, redfish, and flatfish – without catching cod. This has been tried before – while at Williams-Mystic, I heard about the development of the Eliminator Trawl at Rhode Island Sea Grant, a net that is designed with particularly large meshes in the bottom of the net so that cod, which swim downwards once in the net, can escape, while haddock, which swim upwards, remain in the net. With the New England haddock fishery consistently being closed before the quota has been reached due to excessive cod bycatch, the idea of the Eliminator was to allow fishermen to catch more of the haddock they were trying to target while avoiding the cod. I also heard that the same principle was tried in Scotland and Ireland 25 years ago, but for some reason never caught on.

With the reduction in the cod quota in Iceland, where discards are illegal (unlike in the EU, where discards are mandatory and thus fishermen have been required to throw back large quantities of cod), it is imperative that fishermen be able to target groundfish species for which they have quota without catching too much cod. Knowing that this will be an important need for the next few years, and not just in Iceland but throughout the North Atlantic, Hampiðjan has developed new bottom trawls that allow cod to escape.

This giant net, brand new (has never been used, and brought out for sale for the first time at the workshop), is designed to catch redfish and haddock but not cod, specifically in response to the cod quota reduction in Iceland.

This net uses a separator panel between the top and bottom of the net to sort between cod and haddock, which collect in two separate cod ends. This is convenient because it allows the fisherman to decide just how selective to be: if he doesn’t want any cod, he can leave the cod end open, but if he wants to just catch the very largest cod while being less selective about haddock, he can also use two different cod ends to keep all the haddock but let more of the cod escape.

Although unfortunately fisheries management has many problems that can’t be solved by designing new gear technology, I must say that this is one of my favorite ways to deal with problems in fishing. Rather than making rules and setting up restrictions, you provide a tool to help the fishermen catch only what they want and reduce the unwanted side effects. Though I may not be an unqualified advocate of progress for its own sake, this is a prime example of the power of progress.

*Most nets tested in this tank are built and tested at a 1:10 scale, and even a few of the nets demonstrated for Hampiðjan just barely fit or couldn’t be rigged quite as they would in real-life due to size constraints. Jesper, a former fisherman and now an economist studying fisheries at IFM, reckons that the small trawl net he used to fish with (fairly normal for small-boat fishing) is the only net that’s been tested in the flume tank at full size. Since most fishermen don’t happen to have become social scientists and become friends with other researchers at the North Sea Center, they generally don’t have the opportunity to try this.

What about that lutefisk?

2007-12-22T09:57:00.000-05:00

If you were reading carefully about my time in Oslo, you’ll remember that I promised to let you know if I tried lutefisk. (If you haven’t been hanging on my every word, the description as I wrote while in Norway is that lutefisk, or lye fish, is made by soaking dried cod (stockfish) and mixing it with ashes (lye) until the proteins break down and it gains a jelly-like consistency. The likely apocryphal story I heard about it was that legend has the dish being developed when a stockfish-drying rack caught fire and then was quenched by rain, providing the stockfish, the ashes, and the water, and the loss of a winter’s worth of food providing the hunger-driven necessity of trying the resulting fish which the people turned out to like just as much as the original stockfish.) While in Oslo, my only evidence that this Norwegian specialty was popular were the signs in the folk museum and a book I found on the importance of lutefisk and other unusual fish preparations (including a special way of fermenting – read: rotting – salmon called gravlaks) in the lean times of the past and in maintaining Norwegian culture in the present day. Once in Tromsø, however, I saw for myself that lutefisk remains a popular Christmas food.

On Saturday, I went to walk around downtown during the few hours of light and came across a Christmas market set up in the main pedestrian street, which was completely full of sales stalls and trailers, throngs of people, and even a fire and haybale benches right in the middle of the street where women were serving coffee and handing out samples of lefse spread with butter and cinnamon sugar.

It was quite a street party for a cold, dark December day. And certainly the place to be to buy pre-Christmas necessities. And of course among those pre-Christmas necessities was a lot of fish.

All the plastic bags on this table were full of fish of different kinds – gravlaks, lutefisk, sei (saithe), and of course many preparations of torsk (cod). Even as fish has become less important in many parts of the world including Norway, it holds its traditional role here in the north.

One of the most traditional of these torsk preparations is stockfish, which is dried to produce a hard board-like piece of fish that can easily be stored for many months (the original reason for its popularity in the era before refrigeration).

But I had my eye on getting a piece of lutefisk to try. The man who sold my piece from out of his trailer-store seemed dubious – probably because I asked for a very small piece and had to ask in English. Obviously, I had no idea what I was doing.

Here’s what I got:

Yup, still with skin and fins. I poked it, and it did feel kind of like jelly. I smelled it, and it smelled like fish.

And then, I have to admit, I had no idea what to do next. As far as I could tell, you just boil and eat it right like that. But, hoping for some instructions, I planned to take it back with me to Denmark and eat it there once I could use my internet sleuthing skills to look up some cooking advice. And alas, once back in Denmark, the fish had begun to smell much more insistently and I became increasingly dubious…and I never actually ate it. I had good intentions, I promise, but it didn’t quite work out as planned (story of my life, folks). So the moral of the story is that if you want to know about lutefisk, you’ll have to find out yourself. All the Norwegians I asked said they liked it, and I hear it can be found in Minnesota (even in gas station stores!), so maybe it’s worth a try.

Are there still eight nights of Chanukah if the sun doesn’t rise?*

2007-12-07T13:37:00.001-05:00

Though I really liked Oslo, it really isn’t the place to study Norwegian fishing, which mostly is based on the west coast of the country. Cod fishing is particularly based in northern Norway in the three northernmost provinces, Finnmark, Troms, and Nordland. Though like most places, large trawlers have become an important part of the Norwegian fishing fleet, but these provinces to a large extent depend on coastal fishing and locally-based fishing processing and Norway’s fishing policies have generally attempted to protect the rural settlement pattern by trying to keep fishing jobs in these small communities. So on Tuesday morning I headed to Tromsø, the main city in the north, to talk with people at the Norwegian College of Fishery Science at the University of Tromsø, the main center for fisheries research in northern Norway and get a bit of a firsthand idea of northern Norway

It has been a bit of a crash course in Norwegian fisheries – I’d read a lot before coming here, but just walking down the corridors here and talking with people has opened up a whole slew of new issues (negotiations with Russia over the Barents Sea fishery, the tension between the northern and southern parts of the country, the difficulties of maintaining the rural coastal settlements as fishing becomes a less attractive profession, the effects of quota-driven reductions in the number of fishermen on community structure in coastal areas, issues of special rights for the Sami aboriginal group mostly known for reindeer herding but also seasonally dependent on fishing in fjords in the northernmost province of Finnmark). Unlike Denmark, there are still whole regions of Norway that are largely dependent on fisheries, and unlike Iceland, those regions are still largely organized around the coastal fishing fleet rather than industrial-scale trawlers. With less than a week here, I don’t think I’ll have the chance to get any deeper into the actual life of the fishery here than discussions with the social scientists and biologists and the regional fisheries directorate (the government administrative arm), but I feel like I at least have a general overview of the main issues in Norway.

Even though I haven’t been able to directly experience the fisheries themselves, however, being in Tromsø has definitely introduced me to the experience of a northern Norwegian winter. Located at 69°40′N, Tromsø is experiencing a true Arctic winter – the sun does not come above the horizon again until sometime near the end of January.

The last time I saw the sun was Tuesday morning on the flight from Oslo.

This does not mean that there is no light at all here: there are a few hours of twilight in the middle of the day, which is enough light to see by for a few hours. The light quality is also fantastic – all the pinks and oranges and blues of a gorgeous sunrise (coming more from the south than from the east or west) over the tops of the mountains.

The climate here is not as cold as you probably imagine when you think of the Arctic – since Tromsø (and indeed pretty much all of northern Norway, which is a very thin strip of land) is on the coast and this side of the Atlantic is warmed by the Gulf Stream (the reason Europe isn’t as cold as northern Canada), the temperature remains just around freezing. It doesn’t actually feel any colder than the winters I’m used to from home – the main difference, though, is that there is an admirable snow cover everywhere since the temperatures don’t rise enough for the snow to melt. This is a definite improvement over northern Denmark’s wind and rain, and I am actually rather enjoying the weather.

I've spent a lot of time outside walking through the snowy paths and roads, but haven’t had the chance to enjoy the snow properly, like the school children here who get to go sledding every day during the period of light in the middle of the day, or for older students, go cross-country skiing through the woods.

Since there’s so little light, it’s important that everyone, but kids in particular, get to go outside while it’s light out in the middle of the day.

Even if I was here longer, though, I doubt I would work up the courage to experience winter sports to quite the extent that many people do here. This ski jump just looks plain crazy.

I’m only here until Monday morning, when I head back to Denmark for another few weeks, but I really wish I had planned to spend more time in Norway (I am considering how I might be able to come back here for longer later in the year…more on that later if it pans out). For now, though, I’m glad I decided to come here – not just for the fish or because I can now say I’ve been to the Arctic, but because it’s absolutely gorgeous. I couldn't have picked a better place to spend Chanukah (the buildings on the right are where I've been living, and lighting my Chanukah candles, this week).

*Technically, in fact, Tromsø is not considered to experience polar night because of the amount of twilight light in the middle of the day. But since I’ve never gone more than 24 hours before without actually being able to see the sun in the sky (and I may never get far enough north to actually experience official polar night), this feels momentous enough for me to consider polar night.