Found this while perusing the CLF's
http://www.talkingfish.org site.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
DR. WILLIAM BURGESS LEAVENWORTH SAYS:
DECEMBER 8, 2011 AT 12:31 PM
Our group has the catch amounts for every Barnstable County, Massachusetts coastal town, by species and amount, by static gear (weir, pound net, fixed gill net, etc.) for each year from 1875 to 1910, and six subsequent years through 1921. Using the NOAA current prices per pound for MA for 2009 or the nearest year and state reporting, that data tells us that the 1885 catch for Barnstable County alone, not counting lobsters, bivalves and seaweed harvested, would bring an additional $10,701,010.28 into that county’s economy from the simple sale of fish caught in shoal waters within sight of the coast, not counting by-products and offshore fisheries. This data is skewed somewhat to the low side by omitting all of Provincetown’s cod catch, much of which came from offshore, but the rest of the town data is solid inshore catch in weirs, pound nets, fixed gill-nets and shore-haul seines. In 1895 USFC observers on Menhaden seiners noticed that those seiners were taking an extraordinarily large number of alewives as bycatch, and by 1910 the fish commissioners and fishermen were discussing a shrinking inshore catch of more valuable market fish, proportionate to the drop in alewives in their historic spawning grounds. This data comes from contemporary published sources.
Threaded Mode