Kimberly Orren and Leo Hearn of Petty Harbour operate Fishing For Success, which takes people out to catch cod during the summer food fishery. Hearn, who’s been fishing out of Petty Harbour for decades, said he’s seeing fish show up in places that they haven’t been seen for a generation or more.
These days, Hearn said that when he was out on the water over the past few weeks, the fish were everywhere.
“Last year was a pretty good sign of fish around, and this year was even better — more places, and a really good sign, places like Renews Rock. They hadn’t been there in 15 years, and the fish are back there now,” he said.
“Ferryland right on down to Calvert, Bay Bulls, all those places are seeing a lot of fish.”
Hearn and his wife, Kim Orren, operate Fishing For Success, an organization that aims to help youth connect with Newfoundland and Labrador fishing heritage and traditions.
You probably don’t have to talk to somebody like Hearn to know the cod are coming back in a big way. If you’ve got a Facebook account, you’ve probably been inundated with pictures of your friends showing off their recent catch.
George Rose, director of the Centre for Fisheries Ecosystems Research, said the scientific surveys it has done of cod populations bear out what fishermen and your Facebook friends are saying: the cod are back.
“It’s definitely picking up steam, and one of the big things that we noticed in our survey this past spring is a range expansion,” he said. “What we’ve noticed in the last year is the fish, the centres of spawning aggregation that are out there, are all the way out to Labrador, which is great news.”
But Rose is a lot more guarded when it comes to the idea of increasing the allowable cod quotas.
Whereas Hearn said the government should allow people to fish from June to October for personal use, Rose said the food fishery remains a mystery from a fisheries management perspective, because there are no tags, and it’s impossible to get a clear sense of how many fish are being taken.
Rose also said even though they make for a terrific trophy, he’d really appreciate it if people would throw back the really massive fish that are caught, because they can produce tens of millions of eggs, compared to just a few hundred thousand for smaller fish.
“If we could somehow get people to put those big fish back in the water, it would do the stock a world of good,” he said. “Having those big fish in the population is just so important to production, you know, how well they’re going to reproduce every year.”
Long-term, though, Rose acknowledged the fish are coming back, and it’s time to start thinking about what exactly that means for Newfoundland and Labrador.
Related story: Harvesters want more quota as cod rebounds
“There’s absolutely no real logic in harvesting a lot more fish at a very low price. We want to get out of that mentality,” he said. “Norway has been harvesting almost a million tonnes of cod a year, and they’re marketing it. There doesn't seem to be any shortage of demand for very, very high-quality white fish, and cod is the best of the best.”
