So this Sunday I am going codfishing- I hope. Like most saltwater fish, cod has greatly declined over the last thirty years, one of the only places you can reliable catch fish is Georges Bank. Georges Bank is basically a flat-topped underwater mountain off the end of Cape Cod. It holds an abundance of marine life, but the same conditions that fish love- the mixing of cold and warm water combined with a rapid change from abyssal depths to rocky shallows makes the weather completely unpredictable. These trips get cancelled a lot.
I have no logical reason for enjoying codfishing. They’re hardly gamefish, like tuna or striped bass, they fight for a few seconds then you’re pretty much hauling dead weight to the surface. You usually go in the dead of winter when the guys fishing on the bow (and it’s almost always all guys- women are generally much too smart to codfish) actually have to bring their rods into the cabin to melt the giant iceblocks that formed on their rods during the ride offshore. I like eating cod, but there are better tasting fish a lot closer to home. Still, if I could pick any trip as my favorite, it would be this one.
Maybe it’s because my Dad always enjoyed codfishing. When I was small he would take my older cousins out to Montauk. I was insanely jealous even though I knew I was much too young for an offshore fishing trip of any kind, never mind one where ten foot seas were considered pretty normal. When I was finally old enough to go I felt so adult I didn’t even mind not catching anything. It wasn’t until I was in college and we made a trip out of York Beach in Maine one summer that I actually landed my first cod.
The trips out of Hyannis to Georges Bank are a bit different than the ones I went on with my father. Most of the fishing is done with HUGE metal jigs. These suckers can weigh more than a pound and you tie them to your line with some extra hooks located anywhere from six inches to two feet above the jig. It’s not unusual to catch two fish at a time. Even a rank amateur like me has done it a couple of time. For most types of fishing you can buy ready made rigs (that’s the part of your fishing gear with the hooks), not so for these trips, you have to tie your own. My know tying skills are. . . well.. let’s just say I wouldn’t have gotten a merit badge for knot tying even if I had joined the Boy Scouts.
I do get a charge out of the, (and I’m keeping a straight face here), historical value of codfishing. There is a good chance Basque cod fishermen were landing on Newfoundland a couple of hundred years before Christopher, “Thanks for the corn and potatoes, here’s some smallpox”, Columbus blundered across the Atlantic, though some think he got the idea of a short westward journey to land from those same Basques. Since cod can be salted, dried then sold hundreds of mils inland, it was an invaluable source of portable protein for Europeans. The prospect of catching cod was one of the main lures of settling in New England. Mark Kurlansky wrote a short but great book called Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World. A fun read, highly recommended even for those who wouldn’t go fishing on a bet.
I have no logical reason for enjoying codfishing. They’re hardly gamefish, like tuna or striped bass, they fight for a few seconds then you’re pretty much hauling dead weight to the surface. You usually go in the dead of winter when the guys fishing on the bow (and it’s almost always all guys- women are generally much too smart to codfish) actually have to bring their rods into the cabin to melt the giant iceblocks that formed on their rods during the ride offshore. I like eating cod, but there are better tasting fish a lot closer to home. Still, if I could pick any trip as my favorite, it would be this one.
Maybe it’s because my Dad always enjoyed codfishing. When I was small he would take my older cousins out to Montauk. I was insanely jealous even though I knew I was much too young for an offshore fishing trip of any kind, never mind one where ten foot seas were considered pretty normal. When I was finally old enough to go I felt so adult I didn’t even mind not catching anything. It wasn’t until I was in college and we made a trip out of York Beach in Maine one summer that I actually landed my first cod.
The trips out of Hyannis to Georges Bank are a bit different than the ones I went on with my father. Most of the fishing is done with HUGE metal jigs. These suckers can weigh more than a pound and you tie them to your line with some extra hooks located anywhere from six inches to two feet above the jig. It’s not unusual to catch two fish at a time. Even a rank amateur like me has done it a couple of time. For most types of fishing you can buy ready made rigs (that’s the part of your fishing gear with the hooks), not so for these trips, you have to tie your own. My know tying skills are. . . well.. let’s just say I wouldn’t have gotten a merit badge for knot tying even if I had joined the Boy Scouts.
I do get a charge out of the, (and I’m keeping a straight face here), historical value of codfishing. There is a good chance Basque cod fishermen were landing on Newfoundland a couple of hundred years before Christopher, “Thanks for the corn and potatoes, here’s some smallpox”, Columbus blundered across the Atlantic, though some think he got the idea of a short westward journey to land from those same Basques. Since cod can be salted, dried then sold hundreds of mils inland, it was an invaluable source of portable protein for Europeans. The prospect of catching cod was one of the main lures of settling in New England. Mark Kurlansky wrote a short but great book called Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World. A fun read, highly recommended even for those who wouldn’t go fishing on a bet.
No comments:
Post a Comment