Ocean Solitaire: The Story of Declining Fish Populations

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The tip of Cape Bonavista is a good place to start unraveling this mystery—to start figuring out how the world can be so damaged and our lives so little changed. But the view from that rocky headland, I warn you now, is sobering. At the very least, it looks out on a world far more daunting than the one in which the cod swam by the tens of millions.

Just as the sun comes up, a little wind ruffles the swells. "The old guys call that wind 'the pride of the morning,' " says Bill Donovan, who grew up fishing the North Atlantic with his dad. "It's just to let you know not to get too cocky."

We're aboard Donovan's boat, the Danni J., a few miles down the Newfoundland coast from Bonavista, plying the water off the tiny town of Melrose. Donovan is using his handheld Global Positioning System unit to steer toward the spot where he has a line of crab pots. "I like this gadget because those satellites cost somebody $26 billion," he tells me, "but I can use it for free." Soon the winch is hauling up 150 fathoms of line, starting to strain as the first of the pots nears the surface. Donovan grins at the squeal it makes—"sounds like a few bucks to me"—and indeed, when the crew of three pulls the first pot aboard and opens the bottom, 30 or 40 long-legged snow crabs spill out across the deck. Perhaps half are both big enough and hard enough to keep; the small ones and those that are molting get tossed back overboard. When we return to Donovan's hand-built wharf to unload, he's got 2,600 pounds of crab, which will fetch about 80 cents a pound, or more than $2,000.

Which is not to say that Donovan is happy. He's a big, genial, 44-year-old native of Melrose, and he clearly enjoyed the sunrise this morning ("Same as drugs, it is"), and the puffins that flew by in a little squadron, and the minke whale that sounded off the starboard rail. But whenever he sits down for a smoke and a talk, he shakes his head. For one thing, he's not making any money: His crab license lets him take only 13,300 pounds in a season, and so he's slipping further behind in the payments on his small boat.

And he's watching his community crumble—when we return to the dock, almost everyone in Melrose is there to help haul the crab boxes up to the scales, which seems a pathetic reminder of how little there is to do now that cod fishing is banned. "Two years ago we had 118 guys in our bar baseball league," he says. "Forty-eight of them don't play anymore. They've moved away."

Most of all, though, he seems blue because he's not fishing for cod. He takes me into his workshop at the end of the wharf and picks up a wad of black netting. "Smell that," he says, thrusting it toward my nose. It smells like new plastic. "That's a cod trap," he tells me. "It's never been in the water. I spent $4,000 on them the winter before the moratorium. It's like to turn your stomach upside down."

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