Tag Archives: Fishing

It’s your turn.

20 Monday Aug 2012

Posted by in Culture, Newfoundland, Observations, Photography, Sea

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For a year now, arnnarn.com has been publishing my experiences in Newfoundland and about producing the book Arn? Narn. There is still more to come as we get closer to publication date – six weeks away – and I’ll still be writing about what happens afterwards! But as I have in the past, I’d like to shake things up and do something a little different for a bit.

Have you ever been to Newfoundland? Have you ever published a book? Have you done both? I would love to learn of your experiences. Many of you have commented on these posts and I would love to share them with this blog’s readers. Any dialogue we can create that explains, enlightens, illustrates in more detail the unique quality of Newfoundland is welcome.

Pictures regarding your experiences are welcome as long as they don’t violate any standards of good taste whatever those may be in this day of cable, internet, and such. Inclusions will be totally random and subjective.

Gros Morne, Newfoundland.

Ocean photography is also welcome and does not necessarily have to pertain to the above mentioned requirements. Since Arn? Narn.is about a culture that supported itself by the sea and its bounty and can no longer, the photos should be related to that. This is a global problem that is only going to get worse. Perhaps we all can help.

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The Queen’s Laundry Inspector and High Seas Confessional…

30 Monday Apr 2012

Posted by in Discovery, History, Observations

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My time photographing on Ramea has come to an end and I’m boarding the ferry Gallipoli back to the mainland of Newfoundland. It’ll be a couple of hours on the boat, disembark in Burgeo, then across the whole island once again to St. John’s. Gonna have to stop and get some chocolate covered crackers to sustain me on the trip back.

There’s not much to do on the ferry except sit and sleep, sit and watch the scenery and/or people, sit and eat, or sit and confess to the minister sitting next to me. This is the very same minister I met in church on Sunday on Ramea! She recognizes me immediately. Busted!

High seas confessional booth; doubles as a life raft… not really.

In all fairness, she’s a very nice person and from my point of view not a bad minister either. But, I was really hoping to be gently rocked to sleep by the boat’s motions, not get engaged in some ecumenical discussion of Goethe, Schleiermacher or the manichean view of right and wrong, darkness and light. (Just showing off here.) Thankfully, that is not what we talked about.

Instead, we talked about the plight of rural Newfoundland and the questionable future of communities such as Ramea. It confronts the same fishless future as all of the other outports with the added element of being an island dependent on sustenance and other commodities from the mainland. It is not a hopeful outlook. I agreed and told her that was what “Arn? Narn.” was to be about. She seemed to like the idea that this story would be told outside of Canada.

The Rev told me of some very small outports barely hanging on by their fingernails. How small? Try 8-10 people. Way too small for the government to provide services so eventually the fate awaiting them is of choice: the first is to resettle elsewhere; the other – die. Quite a template for survival and very depressing.

By and by, she told me I had created quite a stir on the island. It seems that within hours of my arrival, people were all abuzz of some guy wandering around taking pictures of laundry lines and things. (“Yes, ma’am, I’m from the Queen’s Laundry Quality Inspector’s office and your whites are quite nice really, but your colors…”).

The Queen’s Laundry Quality inspector.

It is after all a very small island. Everyone wanted to know who I was and what was I doing there. I’m sure that after my initial visit to Red’s Lounge, most fears were put aside by Gerard. Probably not yet by Jimmy.

So, when I showed up in church, they certainly wanted to know who I was and why I was there and what I was doing and where I was from and how I found out about Ramea. You know, the basic Journalism 101 questions: who, what, where, why, when, and how stuff. Now, when my new minister friend would report back to them at their next service, she could answer all their questions and confirm that she had dispatched me back to from where I’d come. Good minister!

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Canary in the global coal mine.

05 Monday Mar 2012

Posted by in Discovery, Fish, Food, History, Newfoundland

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Currently indigenous to Newfoundland are moose, caribou, salmon, and some remaining cod. There are no naturally residing canaries on the island. However, in this case, the island itself was the canary.

Why is Newfoundland important? In much the same way the canary in a coal mine is important. That bird is an early warning of impending trouble. Ignore it at your own peril. In 1992, that is what happened in Newfoundland. Heard, seen, and ignored – just the opposite of the military phrase HUA(!) – Heard, Understood and Acknowledged. They (the government) heard the canary, saw it laying there, and essentially said, “Don’t pay that any attention” until it was too late. It was mismanagement writ large.

So, what was this canary? It was the disappearance of cod stocks. Stocks that had been fished for over 500 years and sustained Newfoundland throughout that time. Then in 1992, the government realized that the cod stocks had plummeted to perilously low levels and imposed a 10 year moratorium on cod fishing. Historically, they knew if left alone for 5-6 years, the stocks should return to previous levels. They didn’t. In actuality, they were in worse shape than before.

In those first 10 years, because there was no fishing, 20% of Newfoundland’s population left the island. It was an out-migration the likes of which had never been seen. And the lack of fishing created much hardship throughout the province. Newfoundlanders continue leaving the island in search of work returning occasionally for vacation. The Newfoundland musical group Ennis addresses this beautifully in their song, “Fortunate Ones.”

Now 20 years later, the moratorium is still in place. But then in 2006, 14 years after the original moratorium was put in place, Professor Boris Worm of Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia published a paper that received world-wide notice. In this paper he predicted that by the middle of this century, the entire global stock of wild fish will be in total collapse. This is certainly the result of over-fishing; there is also growing evidence that ocean acidification may be contributing to this as well. Either way one looks at it, both of those causes are man-made.

The “canary” was laying there, gasping for breath and people essentially just walked on by. It has taken too long to realize what this means.

In the short term, forget about your seafood dinner, that isn’t going to happen unless you’ll be willing to take out a mortgage on it. Any fish we’ll have will come from farmed stocks and their purity is suspect.

In the long term, your guess is as good as anyone’s. No one knows what will happen to the seas themselves because of this shock to its eco-system.

So much for Red Lobster!

I go, you go, Fogo!

31 Tuesday Jan 2012

Posted by in Culture, Discovery, History, Observations, Photography, Travel

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                                                                     From a more hopeful time.

Pardon the silliness of the title, but I’ll be off to Fogo Island on the north coast of Newfoundland. It, after arriving in St. John’s, will be the first stop in my second trip up there. It is there where I hope to find and start to photograph the newly realized core of my book, “Arn? Narn.”

Just what is that core? It’s what I had already known but not realized; then realized but didn’t understand; and now it was a growing awareness of the impact of the fishing moratorium and it’s subsequent long-term effects. It was as my Fogo Island innkeeper was to tell me, “What you see now will not be here in 10-12 years.” That wasn’t prescient; it was fact: one I was still to discover first hand.

Fogo Island is so uniquely Newfoundland. (Where else could you be greeted by The Mouse?) The name was originally Y del Fogo, meaning island of fire. There is speculation as to the origin of the name: perhaps it was the native Beothuk’s (now extinct) campfires or multiple forest fires, but no one is certain.

The island supported itself solely on fishing as had the entire province. Now it was suffering the same fate as that of the larger “mainland” island. True, it had the annual Brimstone Head Folk festival each summer on Brimstone Head, (reputed by the Flat Earth Society to be one of the four corners of the earth!) but that was in early August for only a few days. A week before that is the Ethridge Point Seaside Festival in Joe Batt’s Arm. These bring some tourists in but for a short time, not enough to make much of a difference.

I was to be here for nearly a week in which I would be able to roam and photograph across the island, talk with people directly, and get a better feel for this environment. I would learn that Fogo was the main outport/town on Fogo Island – do not confuse the two. Fogo (the town) is joined by the communities of Joe Batt’s Arm, Seldom, Little Seldom, Tilting, Barr’d Islands, and Stag Harbour. In 2006 they all came together to form the Town of Fogo, while retaining their individual personalities. More to come on Fogo soon.

There’s a fjord in your future.

19 Monday Dec 2011

Posted by in Discovery, Fish, Geography, Newfoundland, Observations, Uncategorized

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There used to be only the Big Three automakers – Ford, GM, and Chrysler. That was it. None of the others that populate our driveways today were in sight back then. Life it seems was much simpler then.

This is a Ford.

So imagine my surprise when I heard about fjords. I was certain some under-educated person misspelled the ever-oh-so-easy name of Ford. Never mind that its usage in the sentence was peculiar, I figured they just spelled it wrong!

But noooo, I was the ignorant fool. Every Norwegian child worth their salt (and much salt is used to keep and preserve cod and other delicacies – don’t even mention Lutefisk to me!) knew what a fjord was. No Ragnar, a fjord doesn’t have four wheels! Yes, Bruce (the teacher said patiently), a fjord is a u-shaped valley carved out by glaciers a long, long time ago. Pay attention!

This is a fjord.

So, right about this time you’re asking yourself what does this have to do with Newfoundland? And my book “Arn? Narn.”? Good questions. As it turns out, a lot. On the western coast of the island is Gros Morne National Park. Gros Morne is French for the less than poetic sounding “large mountain standing alone.” And in this park is the Western Brook Pond fjord. It is your typical, everyday, run-of-the-mill, drop-dead, central casting beautiful fjord.

This is a fjord too. See the difference? – Western Brook Pond fjord.

The western coast is the final stretch of the Appalachian mountain range and it alone is worth the trip to Newfoundland. An area of unimaginable beauty, it is home to mountains, fjords, caribou (more on them at a later post), moose and the Tablelands. There was also very fine salmon fishing here, but it too like cod fishing is highly restricted. This is a problem that affects the entire island and it’s been learned a global one as well.

So if you go and I do recommend it, get yourself a Ford. It’ll give you a certain symmetry.