Fun with fish
Cod are more plentiful than they have been in years
Goldie and I just finished off a delicious late evening meal of cod tongues, cheeks, and britches.
Supper ran quite late, because this afternoon we made our first outing on the salty ocean to fish for cod.
Recreational fishing has been permitted on the weekends since Canada Day, but I have been so occupied with other outdoor pursuits.
Just a week ago I returned from two weeks of tenting and angling in Labrador. Salmon fishing trumps most everything but family in my life. So between the jigs and reels I managed to launch my boat last evening for another cod season.
We couldn’t go out this morning because of a medical appointment.
I retuned home from the hospital about 10:30 and finally had coffee and some breakfast. It was one of those fasting appointments that I hate. Skipping morning coffee is not pleasant for me.
Anyway, there wasn’t much wind, in spite of a forecast with gusts to 50-km/h. Wind like that can really blow around an aluminum skiff. Wind usually puffs up around midday, meaning we’d just get out there and have to beat back up the bay in the teeth of that stiff breeze. Goldie would not be pleased. I decided to go swimming and fish late in the afternoon. By then there would either be too much wind or no wind for the day, or so I figured.
I returned home from noon swim at the pool and had a leisurely late lunch.
By now it was approaching 3:30, but still no wind as forecast by Environment Canada. I pulled the boat into our wharf and loaded our fishing rods and gear. Goldie and I headed out past Green Head with a lovely
“Normally you would find a spot of fish, catch a few, and then steam back upwind for another pass. Not today, this was a huge continuous stretch of very big cod. I’ve never really seen anything like it before. My sonar was lit up with fish the whole time, and it took quite a while to muscle up those big fellas from 90 feet of water. It was a brilliant afternoon.”
late afternoon sun warming our backs. It was fantastic to be back on the ocean again.
There has been so much water under the bridge since I stored my boat last fall and winterized my outboard. Fishing for cod on the ocean makes me feel so young again, like back in the day, the 1970’s.
For the whole summer of 1978 I worked construction in St. John’s. I became friends with a carpenter from Trinity Bay who built boats and moonlighted has a fisherman. Or maybe he was a fisherman posing weekdays as a carpenter.
Anyway we talked many hours about boats and fishing, enough that I decided to build a boat and go fishing.
I built a wooden craft that winter, when I wasn’t studying at MUN, and in the spring of 1979 I was on the water with my own fishing enterprise. I fished eight gill nets, three tubs of trawl, and a couple of hand lines.
I salted 50 quintals of fish that summer, and made $5,000 for myself. It was hard work and long hours but I absolutely loved it. Today, for a little while, I felt like that kid again, full of energy and charged by the surrounding sea air.
Back to the reality of 2016, and a recreational limit of 10 cod for Goldie and I, there would be no loading boats deep to the gunwales today.
But I’ve never in my life seen cod so plentiful on our Spaniard’s Bay fishing grounds.
I was wrong about the wind, and it actually started to puff up with a vengeance about 4:15, just as we started fishing.
I forgot my drogue and our boat drifted much to fast for sensible cod fishing. But it was no matter.
The cod were so plentiful that we caught them anyway, and very big ones at that. We had 10 cod in about the amount of time that it took to crank them to the surface. Fishing was nothing like this in the ’70s.
With fish this abundant I’d have salted a thousand quintals. The wind pushed us pretty near parallel to the shoreline and we must have drifted close to a kilometre while catching our allotment.
Normally you would find a spot of fish, catch a few, and then steam back upwind for another pass. Not today, this was a huge continuous stretch of very big cod. I’ve never really seen anything like it before. My sonar was lit up with fish the whole time, and it took quite a while to muscle up those big fellas from 90 feet of water. It was a brilliant afternoon.
It’s refreshing to be able relay good news. There’s lots of fish in this neck of the waters.