These days, the Cod is pretty much gone from the Cape. Bob Luce, 63, sits on a bench and explains why. Luce, who has an artificial knee from the wear and tear of fishing and knuckles tattooed “love” and “hate” in honor of the Robert Mitchum movie The Night of the Hunter, fondly remembers the days in the 1970s when he could drop hooks to the seafloor 15 miles out and reel in 30 to 50 pound cod. By the 1990s, the Cape Cod fishing grounds were barren. Fishing had gotten too efficient for its own good, says Luce.
In 1980, many fishers began switching from hooks that caught individual fish to nets that snared cod by the gills, whole schools at a time. At the same time, big trawlers began dragging rollers across the rocky seabed to force the bottom-dwelling fish upward into nets, capturing massive amounts of cod and, some critics claim, destroying its preferred habitat. “They caught all the big ones and wiped them out,” says Luce. Now New England is trying to rebuild its cod fishery, opening deep divisions among fishers in places like Chatham.
When cod stocks collapsed in the 1990s, the federal government closed thousands of square miles of fishing grounds and limited fishers’ “days at sea.” The cod population has rebounded, says Steve Murawski, a scientist at the National Marine Fisheries Service, but to reach historic levels, the total mass of cod still needs to grow eightfold on Georges Bank, east of the cape, and about threefold in the Gulf of Maine.