The Craft-Fishing Revolution Is Here, Now
Daybreak. It’s the dead of winter, below freezing with an icy chop, and the F/V Finlander is rocking in 299 feet of water 60 miles off the Maine coast. We are here because the fish bite at dawn. We left the docks at 1:30 a.m., steaming due east for four hours and passing right over some of the most productive cod fishing grounds on the coast, an insane act we’ve been driven to by an insane system of fishing regulations.
We shouldn’t be out here this time of year in a boat this small, on water so cold that you could count your survival time in minutes. No one else is. The whole way from shore, I watch the eerie silence on the Finlander’s radar screen. Not a single blip.
When I point this out to Tim Rider, captain of the Finlander, he says in his coastal New England accent, “Rowan, from November to April, I have never seen another boat fishing where we fish. Not a one in my life.” Rider is in his early 40s, wiry and stubbly and intense. He anticipates my next question: “If we have a situation right now, in a 36-foot boat, we are most likely a fatality. They will never get to us in time.” Rider tells me about some of his close calls—the 44-knot storm that would have flipped the Finlander if he’d taken his hands off the wheel; the massive wave last year that cracked the windshield and ripped the life raft from its cradle atop the cabin—and then he casually flips the reel on his rod and drops his line into the depths.
Insane, yes, and many have accused Rider of being just that. But he pushes himself and his boat to extremes for two clear, if fanatical, reasons: because he wants to have the best fish in the country, and because he wants to change the system.
The moment my lure touches bottom I feel hits from multiple directions, like linebackers popping a ballcarrier, and then I’m cranking an uncooperative force 299 feet to the surface. All five crew members are doing the same. Three Atlantic pollock are hooked on my line, sleek and silvery with gunmetal backs, and we wrestle them aboard and do what Rider and his crew do with every fish: cut the artery under the jaw to bleed it out immediately, then gently sink it into an ice brine to shock-chill it.
And then it’s back to fishing. “Get those hooks back in the water, Rowan,” Rider barks out. “This isn’t a party boat.”
Rider grew up working party boats on the New England coast, helping weekend warriors preserve their catch at the peak of quality. When he finally saved up enough money to buy his own boat and become a commercial fisherman, he kept doing things the way he always had: treating every fish as if it’s going to be served for dinner. It just never made sense to him to ruin a fantastic fish by throwing it around or letting blood soften the meat, even though he got no premium for his efforts. Like most fishermen, he sold his catch at auction to wholesalers, and he had no control over the price, which would plunge whenever a big commercial trawler came into port.
Those large trawlers are where most classic whitefish comes from—cod, haddock, pollock, flounder. They can stay at sea for two weeks at a time, raking half a million pounds of fish off the sea floor into weighted nets. This is the source of the fish that fill most seafood counters and restaurants.
Unfortunately, in the Northeast there’s no alternative to the current system, which rewards a few fat cats at the expense of owner-operator fishermen like Rider. The problem started in 2010 with the implementation of a fisheries management system called catch shares. Stocks of cod—the big-money species—had been declining for decades, and catch shares were supposed to prevent overfishing. The government calculated the number of fish that could be sustainably harvested and then divided those shares among active fishermen. The fishermen were free to do what they wanted with their share—they could fish it, or they could sell their rights to those fish on the open market.
What the government hadn’t anticipated is that a handful of well-funded fishing empires, which had the big boats and the economies of scale, would buy up the shares and drive the little guys out of business. Of the more than 1,000 fishing boats that plied New England waters in the 1990s, less than 400 are left, and many of those work for corporations.
Rider has to pay $3 per pound for the right to catch cod, which is sometimes more than he can get for the fish. “I tell people, try paying 30 percent of your income in royalties to someone who did your job years ago and see if you survive financially,” he says. “It’s painful.” This is why we had sailed over the near-shore cod grounds to risk our lives on the pollock grounds 60 miles out. Pollock is more abundant and in less demand, so its quota price is negligible.