Faith in fishing

Perkins Cove — Carl McIntire, Sr., told me everything I or anyone else ever needed to know about fishing for a living.

"There'll be times when you think you're going to starve to death," he said, "but you won't. There'll be times when you think you're going to get rich, but you won't do that either."

That's what it comes down to.

We can assess stocks and set biomass targets. We can build population models using sophisticated mathematics. We can throw the models out and build new ones. We can fret about choke species, age-to-weight ratios, and the prospect that we're "fishing down the food web."

It's what known as talking fishing.

You can always find company if you want to talk fishing. But be careful. The U.S. government talks fishing all the time and eliminates fishermen with every breath.

In Carl's time, the free market oversaw the fishing fleet. Some fishermen survived, some did not. Those who failed for the most part eliminated themselves, mostly by dint of a lack of commitment. The "times you think you're going to starve to death" are not for the fainthearted.

Fish came and went. When they came, the fleet went after them. When they went, the fleet went somewhere else. Extinction as a result of fishing pressure was not a real liability. You can't catch them if they aren't there, but you can go broke trying.

Instead, when cod tailed off you went for haddock, then grey sole, then yellowtails, and so on. Swordfish and tuna were not out of the question, and generations of Mainers fell back on lobsters. Different regions had different cycles, but the rhythm was the same from ocean to ocean. You caught what you could, you moved on, and things evened out in your wake. Nowadays, regulations lock you into fisheries. You don't just catch fish anymore; you pound them into submission.

That is just one aspect of fishery management. Other facets — scheduled openings, limited entry, quotas, the catch history imperative — all threaten fishermen while doing little for fish.

To say nothing of the dubious notion of building fish populations by controlling fishing effort. The harvest of fish is a factor in fish abundance, but so, too, are predator-prey relationships, water temperature and other environmental conditions, and forage populations. Depending on what's going on in the ocean, stocks can skyrocket or crash with a given level of fishing pressure. Abundance does not always correlate with the prospects for a given population of fish.

Truth is, once the government got involved in fishing the die was cast. The Capital Construction Fund was a grand gesture intended to capitalize the fleet with the advent of the 200-mile limit in the 1970s, but it was without question a subsidy. No longer did a vessel have to pay its way to the extent it once did.

Governments (other than the Chinese, who believe it's too soon to divine the meaning of the French Revolution) tend to take the short view. The truth is that a fishing season or two — or 10, or even 20 — is the twinkling of an eye in the Earth's life. It's one thing to react to changes in the environment; it's a conceit to suppose fishery management plans represent historic achievement.

Yet down this road we go. I believe it's because as Americans we have lost touch with nature. Many of our grandparents reckoned with nature in their daily existence. Likely they didn't have air conditioners or oil furnaces; they needed deer, clams, or fish to get through the winter; they counted on the iceman and the farmer; they were their own woodcutters. They saw years of plenty and years of less, but the natural world was woven into the fabric of living, as was the wise use of resources to better their lives.

Today we are connected with nature by our obsession with being "green." There is room for neither competing priorities nor economic considerations. The mandate is conserve everything.

We live in a world of smart phones, high-speed Internet connections and cars that converse with us. In the minds of some of our most highly educated people our wild planet has become a concept so abstract they needed a term — "real time" — to describe something taking place in the world around them.

As though otherwise, no one would know it was there.

There is no question that modern technology is wondrous. But old Carl could watch a gannet diving on a school of herring 15 fathoms below the surface of the ocean and see the wonder in that. Which is why he was such a good fisherman, and why the ocean never ran out of fish.

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Carl's grandchildren are fishermen, and one of them, Billy McIntire, will be chasing bluefin tuna in a new (to him) boat this summer. The first time I went fishing with him he was so small his father made him wear a life jacket. Corky Decker, a former crew member of mine who went on to considerable success as a trawler captain in the North Pacific, has returned home and, like Billy, will be chasing tuna this summer in his own boat.

Faith in fishing is trait common among Mainers. It is sadly lacking among federal fishery managers, and I don't know that we'll ever change that.

The bluefin are out there, that much we know. How Billy and Corky will do is less certain. That's the nature of fishing. But like the tuna, they'll be out there come summer. "You have to go every day you can," Carl never stopped telling us. "If you miss a day you can never make up for it, not if you go every day for the rest of your life."