Ocean Solitaire: The Story of Declining Fish Populations

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But again, it's not the money—it's the not fishing. Donovan worked on freighters for a few years when he was in his 20s, but fishing is all he's ever wanted to do. "Hey, crabbing's the easiest fishing you'll ever do," he grants. "It's the cleanest. But we count crabs. With cod, we'd go to fish six or eight rocks [fishing grounds] in a day, try to find the best-aged fish before the other guy." Donovan's father, Phillip, who's still alive and clear-eyed and has a new small skiff on order, was born in Melrose in 1911 and fished his whole life. "His planet was these five miles out from shore," says Donovan. "Cod's what we were made for. That's why we're here."

If you understand what happened to the codfish, you'll more or less know what happened to the redfish and the swordfish and the bluefin tuna and the orange roughy, a list that grows longer and longer after each fishing season. But the cod will do. For that story, I visit Richard Haedrich, a fish biologist at Memorial University in St. John's, Newfoundland's capital, where he sits me down in his office with a small mountain of charts and begins to talk.

"For about 300 years after Cabot, fishermen took between 100,000 and 200,000 tons of cod a year, caught by hook and line from small dories," Haedrich begins. "Then, in the 1870s, the cod trap was invented—a piece of fixed net that was very effective. There were big debates in Newfoundland: Would this wipe out the cod? For two years it was banned."

But the net slowly became the backbone of the industry—it was the tool Donovan and his dad used to make their living. And the catch stayed about the same, slowly increasing toward 200,000 tons a year. "Even with the nets, it was very seasonal," Haedrich says. "You'd wait for the capelin to come, and then the cod to chase them. The cod were landed in these tiny ports and split and dried there, and the company boat would eventually come along to pick them up." When the cod weren't in season, something else was; many fishermen hunted seals in the winter for cash, cut firewood, grew small gardens. It was a rugged, poor, rich life, but it was kept alive by the prodigious cod.

Then, in the 1960s, the distant-water fleet appeared—the draggers that could hunt the cod down out at sea and fish year round. The catch suddenly quadrupled, to 800,000 tons, most of it going to European boats that didn't even have to dock in Newfoundland before the voyage home. Canada, along with many other nations, quickly declared a 200-mile limit, effectively pushing the foreigners off the richest shelves and banks. "The idea was that the streets were paved with fish and that now that the Europeans were gone it would come to the Canadians," says Haedrich.

Ottawa started subsidizing boatbuilders, erecting fish-processing plants, establishing a huge fishery. Quasi-public companies built fleets of trawlers, and for a few years jobs were easy to find and life was cushy. "But as a result of all the capital investment, the fishing couldn't be seasonal anymore," Haedrich tells me. "And there were new advances in fish-finding technology, every couple of months." Once the dragger captains were able to locate the nurseries where the cod mated, they discovered that the fish were in prime condition just before they spawned—so that's when they started taking them, tearing up the ocean floor in the process. Government biologists had been assigned to regulate the catch, but bad news never gained credence. "The setting of quotas always seemed to err on the high side," Haedrich recalls. Enforcement was lax. As one of Bill Donovan's friends, a former crew member on one of the draggers, put it, "The last two years before the ban, all we did was steal fish, just to make a living. You'd get a piece of paper telling you where to fish, but there weren't no fish there. So you fished where there were fish."

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