The Food Fishery

Although Cod has been under moratorium in Newfoundland since 1992? there is an Annual food fishery. During this fishery people are allowed to catch a limited number of fish for personal use. Generally people go out in small boats and fish a few Km off shore.

This year has been a bit strange, there was a massive amount of ice early in the year and this has effected our weather and I am sure will have some impact on marine ecosystems. The Caplin, a small very numerous fish used to spawn on the beaches around here in july, but for the past 10 years they have been getting earlier every year, now they spawn in june. This year they spawned in june, but are spawning again now in August. I am not sure what the impact of this is in the big scheme of things, I guess it is just their way of dealing with the changing ocean environment. what evey the case, it means that there are caplin near shore during the food fishery, and cod like to eat caplin. I figured that I'd try to take advantage of this. Lewis and I went down to middle cove and did a bit of beach casting. I figured that if I could cast out behind the schools of caplin I might stand a chance of getting a cod. Sure enough, after hooking a handfull of caplin (two on a single hook at one time) I had a big tug on the line and after a short battle I landed a nice cod, this was soon followed by another. Lewis caught a load of caplin, hopefully he'll get a big one next time we go out.