Tag Archives: Captain Alex Saunders
Northern cod numbers may have moved out of critical zone, says federal scientist
Captain Alex Saunders has more experience fishing northern cod than most fishermen. At 81 years old, the fishing captain has fished for cod off the Labrador coast for six decades. This year, he says, was a banner year for that fishery. “There were no codfish in northern Labrador for about 60 years, but this summer the cod were all along the Labrador coast from Blanc Sablan in the south to north of Nain,” Mr. Saunders says. A good catch rate this season meant Mr. Saunders’s crew hauled in 
gillnets every day for weeks, returning to communities such as Pinsent’s Arm, a fishing town of about 50 people along the Labrador coast, to land cod at the wharf. But the season’s quick success also meant its early closing. “On a Friday afternoon they said, ‘Get your gear out of the water Sunday by six o’clock,’” Mr. Saunders says of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans’ (DFO) decision to shut down the fall northern cod stewardship fishery weeks earlier than planned – a measure to ensure fishing did not exceed season limits. Photos, >>click to read<< 08:33
The cod delusion – A moratorium on cod fishing that was supposed to last two years has now lasted 30.
Three decades on, the latest DFO science still puts Atlantic cod in the critical zone. “I hope politicians and bureaucrats in Ottawa have learned something, because I’ve learned something: the moratorium was the biggest catastrophe ever heaped on the people in this province, ever. Nothing has been as bad as this,” says Captain Saunders, an 80-year-old Inuk. Seated in the wheelhouse of his longliner, docked in Pinsent’s Arm in late September 2021, Saunders speaks with the authority of someone with six decades of fishing experience, backed by centuries of hindsight. “Newfoundland and Labrador people fished for 500 years and didn’t damage the stocks. What Canada done was an atrocity in my opinion. It ruined a way of life. It ruined culture. All the stages, stage heads, they’re all falling apart, they’re all deteriorated — that’s the government did that.” >click to read< 17:40
