Photo by Ken Freel.

Cod. It’s the fish that built America. It was the omnipresent stocks of codfish in the Northeast that filled the bellies of our early Pilgrim countrymen and gave them the energy to build a nation. It wasn’t too long ago when everybody and anybody could go out and reap the rewards of the prolific cod fishery called the Georges Bank. Times have changed. Mismanagement of stocks and overfishing in the 1990s decimated cod stocks down to a level where they may still not be recoverable by a generation, or so it seems. So, how do codfish anglers fare right now along the New England coast?

GEORGES BANK
Georges Bank lies east and southeast of Martha’s Vineyard; it is a monster shoal off Massachusetts larger than the state of Massachusetts itself, extending for about 200 miles off the coast of southeastern New England. The bank is a historically rich fishing ground for cod, haddock, herring, yellowtail flounder and sea scallops. Historically, it is known as the cod playground where both recreational and commercial anglers could continually reap a bounty day after day, year after year, to load up coolers and nets. Nowadays, closures have finally been enacted to protect breeding stocks and to rebuild the fishery after a drastic drop in catches.

Captain Joe Huckmeyer of the Helen H out of Hyannis, Massachusetts, has built a living on the species. He well knows the plight of codfish.

“Up to about 2002, it was easy pickings, and anyone could go out basically anywhere, drop down and find nonstop action with cod. Then it became an issue of finding where the schools of cod starting bunching up and you had to find where they were located. There was easily a point to say that the cod were being overfished and were not as abundant.”

Many blame the commercial fishery for years of intense fishing pressure on the stocks, but more than anything, it has been an issue of not enough regulations enacted quickly enough to stop the decimation.

As it stands, there are three main areas closed off permanently to commercial and recreational fishing. Area 1 extends in the deep waters off Nantucket shoals to Georges Proper. Area 2 is the Eastern End closure. Area 3 entails the Nantucket Lightship closure, which has an exemption for recreational anglers pending a letter of recommendation from the authorities.

“The NMFS (National Marine Fisheries Service) was too late on putting the closures into place; they’re about five to eight years late. If they did it then, the program could be working full force, but it took too long through bureaucratic legislation to make it happen that it truly hurt the premise of it. A small cutback 20 years ago would have given us plenty of fish today. The days of thinking that cod are an inexhaustible resource are gone. That’s old thinking, but at least the effort is there now,” Captain Huckmeyer said.

SOUND THE SIRENS?
Make no mistake, it’s not like codfish have gone the way of the dodo bird. That’s just not the case. Codfish trips to Georges Bank are still choked with incredible catches of fish anywhere from 6 to 60 pounds.

“Through everything, cod fishing is excellent here, we just have to look a little bit now, find them and then set up on them. We used to be able to drop anywhere and start bailing them,” Captain Huckmeyer remarked.