By Angus Phillips
Sunday, September 24, 2006
MURPHY'S COVE, Nova Scotia
The view from the dock here is much as it has been for hundreds of years. Tides ebb and flow, the sea rolls in clear and cold, boulders warm in the sunlight and seagulls wheel and dive. Only one thing is lacking -- fishing boats.
"There's nothing left to fish for," says Brian Murphy, latest in the family line for which the place is named. Murphys came here six generations ago to fish for cod and pollock, halibut and haddock.
"My father was a fisherman and his father was a fisherman, but not me. Not that I'd want it, anyway, but the choice isn't there anymore. There's nothing left to fish for."
It's not just Murphy's Cove that's so grimly affected. In 10 days roaming this green, lightly populated province where moose, deer and bears roam, the only outdoors equipment I never needed to unpack was my fishing gear.
We crossed dozens of streams but never saw a trout or salmon fisherman working the riffles, and stopped at scores of harbors and coves from Cape Breton to Annapolis Royal to Halifax but never saw a sport-fishing boat out plying the tides.
"All but one of our seafood processing houses has shut down," said Keith Merrill, skipper of Eastern Star, a wooden sailboat that takes tourists on two-hour sightseeing cruises out of Lunenburg, a once-bustling fishing port where draggers and trawlers now lie mouldering away. "They still catch lobsters here, but the ground-fishing is pretty much finished."
Murphy, who runs a campground on the property where his ancestors landed their catch, says he can remember as a lad 40 years ago looking out at the wharf to see halibut up to 275 pounds lined up, plus "big cod, and lots of 'em." He still keeps a boat around to take guests out. "They ask, 'Can we fish?' I tell them sure, but don't expect to catch anything."
Why bring this misery up? Well, if you look at a map of the Atlantic Ocean you'll see that Nova Scotia sits in a staggeringly productive-looking place. The continental shelf runs 100 miles and more out to the south before falling into the deep Atlantic abyss, and to the east lie the storied Grand Banks, where the greatest cod fishery known to man once sustained fleets from around the world.
All that is gone, with no signs of coming back.
Now run your finger down to Chesapeake Bay, a tiny sliver of tidewater compared to the banks off Nova Scotia, and ask yourself this: If in a few generations commercial interests can fish the Grand Banks and the Continental Shelf off Nova Scotia to utter depletion, what chance does our poor little Chesapeake have?
That's the sort of question nobody really wants to ask, which is why it was a pleasant surprise the other day to get a notice from the Coastal Conservation Association of Maryland, which apparently is prepared to grab this intractable bull by the horns.
On Oct. 3, CCA is holding a free symposium in Annapolis at which the big, scary questions of local marine resource management will be addressed, hopefully before it's too late. "The bay's productivity is in an advanced downtrend," CCA maintains. "It has become obvious to anglers that the management of our marine resources remains rooted in the past."
CCA-Md. maintains that Maryland, with 350,000 sport anglers and perhaps 5,000-6,000 mostly part-time commercial fishermen, still dangerously tilts its marine resource policies in favor of the commercial interests at the expense of a much larger recreational base.
Robert Glenn, executive director of CCA-Md., says the state's Department of Natural Resources has a longstanding institutional bias in favor of commercial fishermen that damages the quality of sport fishing and threatens the viability of marine recreational resources.
"Decades ago, commercial hunting and fishing were outlawed throughout Maryland with the exception of saltwater fishing, which helped shape the state's development," CCA points out. Today, it maintains, "with continual growth in population and development, people increasingly look toward the Bay for recreational fishing and boating opportunities," yet in CCA's view marine resources continue to be managed primarily for commercial exploitation.
That's the issue CCA will address next week. It has invited an economist from the National Marine Fisheries Service to compare economic benefits of recreational vs. commercial fishing; a state Natural Resources official to explain the agency's position, and experts from North Carolina and the Gulf of Mexico to discuss what's happened there. CCA also invited Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. and Democratic gubernatorial candidate Martin O'Malley.
CCA is reluctant to paint itself as an environmental firebrand. "We're trying to begin a dialogue between recreational fishermen and the DNR in how to change the management philosophy," says the organization's fisheries chief, Sherman Baynard. "They've got an archaic system that doesn't deal with the modern problems and demographics of the Chesapeake Bay.
"It's our contention that the obligation of the state is to manage a healthy, sustainable fishery, and when you get an abundance that can be allocated, give it to the broad spectrum of citizens, not to a small group with commercial interests.
"We don't want to close down commercial fishing in Chesapeake Bay," Baynard said. "If the resource can be managed in a way that allows for some limited commercial exploitation, fine. But that shouldn't come first."
For a glimpse of the worst that can happen when commercial interests do come first, at the expense of all else, one need go no farther than Murphy's Cove, Nova Scotia, where the fishing was once the best in the world, and now there's none left at all.
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CCA-Md's free symposium, "Saltwater Fisheries Management for the 21st Century," runs from 7-10 p.m. Oct. 3 at the Loews Annapolis Hotel, 126 West St. For a detailed agenda, check the Web site http://www.ccamd.org .
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