Quote:
Originally Posted by numbskull
Do you know bigger ones have been caught within sight of PTown around the turn of the century? The gully between Ptown and Stellwagen was a hot spot before they were fished out according to Bigelow's "Fishes of the Gulf of Maine" . Dragger pressure has kept them from ever coming back. Sad. It would be nice to float around within sight of land on a nice March day and catch 200-300 lb fish. Then again, the best swordfish grounds in the Atlantic were within sight of Nomans, and that is all gone as well. People don't realize what we could have if things were managed better......much, much better.
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Interesting read and glad the book is available online:
http://ia700404.us.archive.org/15/it...ma1953bige.pdf
One of the last reports of a big one--a 410-pound halibut that was brought in to the Boston fish pier by the
Dawn, March 27,
1941, was spoken of as the largest that had been landed there in a "score of years,"
Gulf of Maine—The history of
the halibut in the Gulf of Maine, like that of the
salmon, must be written largely in the past tense,
for their numbers have been sadly depleted there
by over-fishing. In Colonial days the halibut was
a familiar fish and seemingly a very abundant one
on the coast of northern New England, but was
considered hardly fit for food. Wood
for instance, writes "the plenty of better fish makes
these of little esteem, except the head and finnes,
which stewed or baked is very good; these hallibuts
be little set by while
basse is in season."
They seem to have maintained their numbers there
down to the first quarter of the nineteenth century,
when contemporary writers described them as
extremely numerous in Massachusetts Bay and
along Cape Cod, in fact around the whole coast
line of the Gulf of Maine. And they were discovered
in abundance on Nantucket Shoals, on Georges Bank,
on Browns Bank, and on the Seal Island ground as soon
as fishing was regularly undertaken offshore.
The cod fishermen of those days looked upon
them as a nuisance, seldom worth bringing to
market. And "It was the practice of the fishermen when
halibut were troublesome to string them
on a line and hang them over the stem of the
vessel."
But a demand for halibut developed in
the Boston market sometime between 1820 and
1825, and they have been pursued relentlessly ever
since then, first inshore and then farther and
farther afield.
The Massachusetts Bay—Cape Cod region
yielded large numbers of these great fish during
the early years of the fishery. Four men, for
instance, are reported as having caught 400 in two
days off Marblehead in 1837, while a party of
equal size is said to have landed 13,000 pounds off
Cape Cod in three weeks. And it was discovered
some time prior to 1840 that halibut congregated
in winter in the 25-30 fathom gully between the
tip of Cape Cod and Stellwagen Bank. However,
a shrinkage in the supply had been noticed along
shore even before 1839, for we find halibut described
in that year (in the Gloucester Telegraph) as "formerly"
caught along Cape Cod and in Barnstable Bay. And they
had been so nearly fished out in the Massachusetts Bay
region by about 1850 that it no longer paid small boats
to go there especially for them.
The history, in short, of the halibut fishery leaves
no doubt that this species shows the effect of hard
fishing sooner than most sea fish, it being possible
to catch the majority of the stock on any limited
area in a few years. Long liners and otter trawlers
search all the good ground-fish bottoms of the Gulf
of Maine and its banks so thoroughly and constantly
that the halibut never have a chance to
reestablish themselves in any abundance on the
shoaler grounds. They maintain their numbers
better on the deeper slopes chiefly because they are
subject to less intensive fishing there.
Given the diversity of the human species, there is no “normal” human genome sequence. We are all mutants.
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