Not all harvesters are willing to manage the stocks properly

I was listening to CBC interview with John Efford, Jr., a fishing captain who made the statement, “no one outside the fishery should have any say about the management of the fishery.”
While I don’t know John, I did know his father well, he was a good politician and was around at the time of the fishery collapse. I served on a committee with him, and he didn’t care who was involved in saving the fishery as long as it was saved, (but it wasn’t).
As a boy I fished for a living but went to Deer Lake to better myself. I always said I went there to get enough money to buy a boat. There were no Loan Boards then. After 23 years I returned to the fishery in 1977 because I couldn’t get the salt water out of my veins.
I soon found out there was a lot of changes in the fishery and not for the better.
Being out of the fishery for a long time, I had a different view and had to learn all over again. I didn’t like certain things I saw. It seemed no one was concerned about quality, leaving nets out too long, using rusty prongs to unload fish, putting out caplin traps and catching a lot of small cod too small to sell. People were catching caplin and bringing it to the plant with too much redfish or too much male caplin and it was dumped because the market didn’t want it, couldn’t sell male caplin.
There was as much caplin dumped as was sold. What a waste.
When the moratorium was called, it was because we had destroyed the fishery, and 30,000 fisher people were out of a job. It was not good management by the fisher people.
John Efford Jr., stated that the fisher people want to manage the fishery so that they will have some for next year. From what I have seen in the last 50 years, 50 per cent of the fisher people care about the future of the fishery and 50 per cent only care how much they can catch for themselves and don’t care for tomorrow and that’s the reason that our oceans, as the late Gus Etchary stated many times, “are producing only a small percentage of what they did and could do the same in the future if managed properly.”
Gus didn’t live to see it happen and I’m sure I won’t either, all because the will is not there by the people who fish and by Ottawa which is supposed to manage our oceans and haven’t done a very good job according to their record.
(Ret.) Capt. Wilfred Bartlett
CBS, NL
wilfbartlett@hotmail.com