Growing up on Fogo Island, surrounded by puffins and passing icebergs, cod was a way of life for Aubrey Payne — along with his parents and 14 siblings. “Here, if you’d have fish for dinner the only thing we ever knew was cod,” Payne recalled. While salmon or herring sometimes put in a showing, cod was king. “We didn’t know there was such thing as turbot, halibut, redfish, catfish or any other kind of species. We never fished that.”
Cod was the economic and cultural bedrock of Newfoundland’s isolated ‘outport’ villages for more than 500 years. That bedrock began to crumble in the mid-1980s after years of industrial overfishing and poor management decisions. By 1992 the Northern cod fishery had collapsed, and the Canadian government instituted a near-total moratorium that’s still in place today. Even though the moratorium is 25 years old, Northern cod, like many depleted fish species in Canada, do not yet have a rebuilding plan.
But there’s good news too: Early signs show cod are slowly returning. Thirty-five years ago, Payne said, he could net only about 10 fish every 24 hours. Now, he estimates that the same net could catch 1,000 cod in just two hours. “Our codfish is back to the point now that it interrupts us from doing other fisheries because of the bycatch,” he said.
With many Canadians anticipating the reopening of commercial cod fishing, Payne and others are hoping that a novel kind of fish trap can help Newfoundland avoid the mistakes of the past.
Source & Full Article: Oceana.ca