Fishin' for Fish

Peggy's Cove appealed to me since I like small fishing villages, and my mother's name is Peggy. Less than an hour south of Halifax the landscape changed from heavily-wooded mixed coniferous-deciduous, like most of NS we have seen, to tundra-like: a few, small trees and mostly rugged grasses and low shrubs. No agriculture present, not even blueberries.

We approached the village; a large electronic parking sign showed how many parking spots were available in each lot. The sign wasn't operating, but both lots had four character displays, so presumably parking for thousands. At the end of the road was the lighthouse, said to be the most photographed lighthouse in the world, probably an invented factoid by the Chamber of Commerce. There are over 750 lighthouses in Canada; Peggy's Cove is number 19 on this slide show. Ho hum, I have visited a lot of lighthouses from Iceland to Pemba Island to Matinicus Rock.

In October, well after tourist season, one 1000+ spot parking lot was 3/4 full and had about 10 tourist coaches. The shoreline is very broad of extensive granite bedrock, covered with tourists.

Tourist are tourists, so note the sign on the lighthouse. 

There are at least another 1,994 more tourists just out of the frame, all over the rocks! Maybe they are Darwin-award worthy waiting for next rogue wave?

I hadn't noticed the village on the way to the lighthouse. I walked 100 yards back and -- the village harbor was so small I actually had not noticed it. The harbor is a tiny crack in the granite with five docked fishing boats (c. 45' long). There might have been room for a sixth, but there absolutely was no room for any moorings. 

That's the whole 'world famous' harbor 

From the opposite end of the harbor. Note the narrow entrance; it's a pretty tight berth in a storm.

All the boats were working fishing vessels, none of them were rigged for sport tuna fishing. The fishing  season there is November through May.

Remarkably, there were large, clean public toilet facilities. An unusual aspect was the commodes did not flush with water. When occupied, a continuous flow of slow moving soap suds oozed down from rim into the fixed opening at the bottom. The was no flush button; suds just oozed, powered by a pump which went off when one left. I think they were freeze-proof -- the "tank" was made of stainless and seemed to be a heated container. There is no possibility of septic tanks on top of the granite, and this system would use very little water. 

The toilet in continuous sudsy flush mode

Near Peggy's Cove is a memorial to Swiss Air Flight 111 that crashed 9/2/1998 in the ocean a few miles offshore. Plane caught on fire, pilots died, crashed into ocean, all 229 on board died on impact. There also is a Prigozin-like wackadoodle conspiracy that the plane was taken down to get rid of one passenger, a double crossing spy. Turns out the spy wasn't even on board, too.

Another day we visited Lunenburg (not to be confused with Lüneburg, Germany), which was founded in 1753 as part of Britain's attempted genocide of Acadians (more later). Protestant Germans were promised land near Halifax to dilute the impact of Catholic French Acadians. The British did not keep their promises about integrating Germans into Halifax, so 1,431 Germans (including a few Swiss) were transported to Lunenburg to found a new settlement.

The population of Lunenburg has been remarkably stable: 1,431 in 1753, 1,014 in 1910, 2208 in 2000, 2396 in 2021. It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site; not much has changed since the early days.

Lunenburg is famous for its fishing fleet of schooners. The schooners fished with dories and long lines with hundreds of hooks on a bottom line a mile or more in length. There were 200 schooners reported fishing out of Lunenburg in 1919.

Salt cod was the primary catch. Salting allowed the cod to be kept for a long time (many months) without refrigeration. Originally salt cod was an expensive delicacy shipped to Europe, but the Europeans only accepted the best cod, and there was no market for inferior product. 

There became a huge demand for cheap salt cod in the South and Caribbean -- to feed enslaved workers at forced labor camps. Nova Scotians (as well as the fishing fleet in Gloucester MA) made a fortune supporting slavery. The return voyage brought rum and molasses back.

I had grown up thinking all the wonderful white fisherman in New England and Canada had nothing to do with slavery. Bzzzzt! They were important in feeding the enslaved cheaply.

Rum ended up being a very important cargo, especially from 1920 to 1933, during US prohibition. Lunenburg was important smuggling to the US.

The most famous fishing schooner was the Bluenose from Lunenburg. Bluenose is a demonym for a person from Nova Scotia. She was built in 1921 to win the International Fisherman's Cup. Gloucester and Lunenburg, the two most important cod fishing ports, competed in a best of three race series every year. Contestants had to be working fishing boats with fisherman crews -- no yachties permitted. 

Bluenose won every year until 1937, when the races ended. The era of working sailing ships was over: engines and refrigeration took over. The original Bluenose was lost in a shipwreck off of Haiti in 1947. Bluenose II was built in 1963 as a replica which now takes visitors out for day sails. She was in the process of being put her away for the winter when we visited. 

The province is very proud of the Bluenose, she appears on the NS license plates, the Canadian dime, and postage stamps.

I was always interested in the fishing fleets as a kid. I grew up sailing, and Rudyard Kiplings's Captains Courageous was a favorite book. It's the story of a spoiled, very wealthy kid who falls overboard from a steamship in the late 1890s. The ship can't find him, but the kid is recued by a fisherman in a dory from a Gloucester boat. The kid demands to be taken ashore; the captain doesn't care. They keep fishing for another three months while the kid learns to work hard, be responsible, fix nets and lines, and be a good crew member. Eventually they get back to port, dad is so happy the kid is alive and grown up, happy ending all around.

The museum at Lunenburg was interesting about current fishing technology. There was an exhibit about an 80% plant based bait for lobster fishing. From a sustainability POV, lobsters are inefficient. It takes 1.9 lbs of bait to get 1 pound of lobster meat. We are depleting the oceans of small (bait) fish and should be finding alternatives. The company claims it fishes as well as regular bait.

Another exhibit was about so-called "ropeless" lobster fishing. Most lobster is caught with a trap (or several) at the bottom, and a line to surface with a buoy. Many environmentalist object to all the lines in the water. Whales get caught and injured in the gear. Recreational boaters complain about gear getting wrapped around their propellers. The more plastic in the oceans, abrading away, the more microplastics pollute the ocean.

Ropeless fishing has all the rope at the bottom contained in a special mechanism. The trap is sunk, and no lines float to the surface. Each location is noted by GPS coordinates. A few days later, the fisherman returns and signals the trap with a sonar signal. One system releases the line and float buoy to the surface, then the trap is hauled conventionally. Another competing system inflates a balloon below the surface, and the traps floats up to be recovered.

Both types of system are in very early phases of testing. Most fisherman are extremely resistant to these possible changes. I am extremely skeptical that this will work reliably in the real world. 

Marine growths can foul almost anything. Underwater mechanisms are very prone to failure, especially when they are electronic and need batteries. The mechanisms are expensive, much more than the cost of the trap itself. The time to reload the canister/mechanism on the boat is slow, much longer than the time needed to remove lobsters and rebait the trap. The complicated nature of reloading will not be easy in rough weather.  This will slow the productivity very significantly, and may reduce the number of traps that can be hauled per day by 50%.

Coral from deep in the Gulf of Maine

Pemba "caught" by a giant lobster trap

Acadia!

The Acadian flag

The Acadians were French settlers in what is now known as Maine and the Maritimes. (The Maritimes are the provinces of PEI, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia.) They often lived with the Mi'kmaq indigenous people. This is the source of name for Acadia National Park.

When the British started colonizing Canada, they saw Mi'kmaq and French as the enemy. In 1755 Governor Lawrence decided to eliminate the French, by forced deportation, destroying their property, and seizing their land. Survivors who fled were hunted down in the remote areas. On one Sunday, all the Catholic churches were surrounded during mass and all the men captured. 

About 11,500 were deported, thousands of others died. The British colonies to the south didn't want them either. They were then sent to the Louisiana territory under nominal French control. King Louis XV was in the middle of the Seven Years War with Britain, and not really paying attention to the Americas.

Some scholars call this a genocide.

In Louisiana the name Acadians became Cajuns. We (Americans) got a win with their great culinary contributions to American cuisine. 

Some Acadians evaded the British. We saw this flag a lot in NS and PE.

OK, now I have a question for any Canadians reading this. I've been fishin' for fish to cook, but there is hardly any Canadian fish in the markets here. Not New Brunswick, PEI, nor Nova Scotia. We found excellent mussels in PEI, yet the fish market there was tiny and had only imported frozen fish. We have been to quite a few supermarkets with tiny fish market sections, and almost exclusively fish sand shrimp imported from Asia, mostly China. I've asked about fish markets and told there really weren't any.  I have not found any fresh scallops, even though they are cultivated in Nova Scotia. One Halifax supermarket had scallops labeled made "fibrinogen", from China. I had never heard of that, and does not sound appetizing.

"[Scallop] Medallions are created when fibrinogen, a protein derived from beef blood, is used to glue a bunch of small bay scallops together. The mixture is then pressed into a mold or casing and refrigerated until it is firm enough to be sliced into uniform pieces and packaged for your supermarket" Yuck. 

I had some "scallops" at a restaurant on Cape Breton last week, which were terrible: mostly fried bread crumbs with some white unidentifiable content -- probably fibrinogen.

The camp owner told me "The best scallops in the world" are plentiful in Digby, so I will find out soon. 

We haven't seen any fresh or frozen Canadian tuna or salmon. We found some very small cod filets in a supermarket last night, but nothing exciting. We did have some nice oysters tonight in an upscale restaurant that were local. 

Happy Trails,

Krem and Barbara