PROJO Editorial on the state of codfish

[DZ]

Interesting take on the recreational cod fish fishery in New England.

DZ


Tim Coleman: Our great fishery failure

01:00 AM EDT on Saturday, June 26, 2010

By TIM COLEMAN
Del Barber is a retiree in Westerly who loves to fish from our beaches from Watch Hill to Charlestown. Del can tell many stories about his many years sport fishing in the Ocean State, including one grand night a week before Christmas, in 1972.

On that night, Del and a friend landed 17 codfish from a beach 200 yards west of Quonochontaug Breachway (Quonny, to the locals). Three were over 40 pounds, and one weighed an astounding 64 pounds — caught not with a net, but with a rod and reel.

Today, that fishery is a memory, victim of mismanagement. In the mid-1970s Del and others saw the fish disappear. Like the canary in the coal mine, their loss signaled the decline of what once was a proud symbol of New England’s greatness.

Alarmed by the loss the billions of pounds of fish harvested from our waters by factory ships from foreign countries, Congress passed the Magnuson Act in the late 1970s. It set up a series of regional councils around the country, planning agencies that submitted recommendations to their parent organization, the National Marine Fisheries Service. One goal was to reverse the decline in our cod populations, so that middle-class Rhode Islanders like Del could once again enjoy a healthy fishery not far from their homes.

In the past, Rhode Islanders not only caught cod from shore, they landed large and numerous cod for the table on the rocky bottom very close to shore from Sakonnet Point to Watch Hill in the late fall through early spring. From early spring through early summer, they caught cod in small boats off Block Island. During the summer, it was possible to run a boat of moderate size out to Cox’s Ledge, a famed cod spot roughly 25 miles from Point Judith, to catch cod weighing more than 30 pounds, some approaching 60 pounds. Rhode Islanders who did not have a boat could board one of several party boats operating out of Point Judith, some of them fishing for cod year round.

Today, that fishery is a skeleton of what once was. True, we have some hope of a winter fishery developing the last two years. Good as it may be, it doesn’t come close to restoring what Rhode Islanders once had. Professional captain and longtime cod angler Frank Blount said that, minus the winter fishery, Rhode Islanders have been left with about one-tenth the cod there once were.

Our regional council is headquartered in Saugus, Mass., and the National Marine Fisheries Center for our area is located on Blackburn Drive in Gloucester, Mass. These entities have now had over 30 years to repair the problem evident in the 1970s. But, despite years of taxpayer spending, they have failed. In the mid-1990s, I was told, taxpayers spent $16 million per year to run the council. Multiply that by 30-plus years of operation, and one comes up with a not-insignificant amount of money — even in these days of trillion-dollar federal deficits.

The cost to us all grows even more if one includes the loss of tourism, since people do not come to Rhode Island to go cod fishing as they once did. The fishing is so poor that not a single party boat fishes for cod out of Point Judith in the summer.

Imagine if Route 95 had been full of potholes in the late 1970s, and people had demanded action. Imagine if the same road were worse 30-plus years later, after millions of tax dollars had been thrown at the problem.

Shouldn’t we demand an accounting — certainly a change in business as usual, or perhaps some new faces way up the feeding chain?

One simple fact is clear: Even though our cod stocks were declining in the 1970s, we had more codfish in Rhode Island waters then than we do in 2010. Something stinks. Something needs immediate remedial action.

Recently we’ve seen President Obama on TV promising that the marshes of our Gulf states will be restored to their condition prior to the great oil spill. Wouldn’t it also be fair to Rhode Islanders to have their cod brought back to their former abundance?

Our BP is the National Marine Fisheries Service.

The time for the benefit of the doubt has long passed. It’s time for a public spotlight on a system that merely eats up tax dollars in return for a paper assurance that the system is working on the problem.

The 1976 book “Tell It Good-bye Kiddo” covered the decline in New England’s cod stocks. I fear that will be the inscription on the tombstone of our fishery if something isn’t done to change the way the government handles our common property.

The chances of catching a 64-pound cod from our beaches in the next 30 years look bleak indeed.

Tim Coleman is a writer based in Westerly.