180,000 Whales

My first real job was with the Virginia Department of Conservation. I ran the Chesapeake Bay Youth Conservation Corps. It was a great job. I got to give away money, which is a good job to have, even though I made very little money myself. I learned a lot in those years about how different people – and groups of people – have an effect upon resources in the public domain.

I grew up around Watermen. They were independent people who almost always worked alone, hard, and for long hours. And except for a few exceptional situations – unusual circumstances outside their control, or some new technology at their disposal that tipped the scales unexpectedly, or a technique that proved more destructive than productive – they rarely had a lasting impact on the fisheries. As independent fishermen, the system was brutally but effectively self-regulating. If there were not enough fish to catch, using only the limited crude methods at their disposal, most of them would lose everything and look for work elsewhere. Only the most determined and those willing to live on the most modest means survived to fish another day.

Nobody got rich fishing anymore. Those days were long gone.

But, like many things, that whole equation changes when corporations take over the business of fishing. With vast capital resources at their disposal, and hard science and technology at their fingertips, the equation gets skewed. It’s like a few men with chain saws and teams of horses logging sustainably for generations, because they can’t do otherwise given their tools, compared to heavy equipment hydraulic tree harvesters and helicopters airlifting clear-cut forests out of the mountains to railroads specifically built for hauling logs. It’s a whole different ballgame.

My great uncle James was a cook on a Menhaden ship in a fleet that operated in the Chesapeake out of Reedville. He made an awesome Waldorf Salad. Once they started using airplanes to spot the scattered shoals of fish from the air, scooping up what was once an entire season’s catch of the diminishing fish in a few sets of the net, the whole situation changed from sustainable harvesting to endgame resource extraction. And he quit.

So this story really interests me. It’s a good story, even if you don’t have that background, because it follows parallels in so many areas; because human beings are remarkably consistent in our behavior. But it really speaks to the challenges facing any attempt to regulate any resource management that assumes self-regulation by the interested parties.

180,000 whales killed in the span of a few years. Not back in they heyday of whaling. No, this was when they were already endangered. Killed off the books, and illegally. By just one country’s fleet of three factory ships.

A good read. And worth keeping in mind whenever we discuss fishing quotas, resource management, and basics of human behavior:

The Most Senseless Environmental Crime of the 20th Century

180,000 whales. Gone in just five years.

Now imagine a coal or oil or gas industry making decisions in any way other than those that increase the short term value for shareholders. Or willingly harvesting less Menhaden, or Cod. It’s their job to obfuscate the facts if those facts are inconvenient, just as it’s the job of a horse trader to hide the real age of his mares. Imagine fur trappers leaving pelts for another day, and trusting each other to do the same. Or African ivory, or rhino tusks.

We cannot assume that they are not lying.

White Hurricane

the Great Lakes in winter

“White Hurricane” by Lou Blouin of FoundMichigan.org

An excellent story of an epic storm that struck the Great Lakes 100 years ago today.

Modern weather forecasting was in its infancy. At the time, basic weather observations were gathered by hand by people scattered across the country, like human instruments, then wired back to the Weather Bureau in Washington, DC, where it was all compiled, analyzed for patterns and clues, regurgitated, codified, and wired back. These “forecasts” were a half day or more out of date by the time they arrived. Fast changing conditions simply charged through the open cracks. The warnings of a major storm sometimes arrived after the storm did.

That’s what happened in 1913. A fierce arctic gale out of Canada crashed into a warm gulf front pouring over the Appalachians. The collision occurred over the Great Lakes, and caught the whole region by surprise, exploding into a storm never seen before. Two feet of snow fell overnight. Winds went from balmy to hurricane force within the span of a half hour, whipping up waves 35 feet high. Ships and sailors on the notoriously dangerous waters were caught vulnerable and woefully unprepared for what lay in store.

By the time it was done, 12 major ships and over 250 men were lost in this single storm – more than in all the seasons of the decade before combined. Bodies of sailors washed up on the shores for days, as did parts of their ships, often scribbled with their forlorn farewells to loved ones.

A great story well told, well worth a read.

 

MASCF 2013 ~ How to Shuck an Oyster

 

Video from the Mid-Atlantic Small Craft Festival
Clips from Friday and Saturday.

Back when the Depression hit (the one in the ’30s) my grandfather, my dad’s dad, hitched a mule and plow to a fence post in a field in Arkansas. He walked into the road, thumbed a ride with a trucker, and left home and never went back. According to his brothers, this made his father – who was known across three counties for epic rages – mad as hell.

Besides lying about his age to get into the army, among other things, he believed he could scrape together a living if he could play music. He taught himself to play fiddle and started a band. They travelled all over the country playing dance halls and pasture parties full of Oakies and other desperate displaced persons. When he noticed saxophone players were getting better-paying gigs, he taught himself sax and learned to swing. There was a faded black and white photo of him on the wall in the house, wearing a suit and a skinny tie on some stage in a barn in the mid-west, a framed playbill next to it.

By the time I was 12, he’d forgotten how to play most of the songs from those years, and most of the guys who knew them had died.That didn’t stop him and some local buddies from trying, though, after a they’d had a few beers. Eventually, there were only about four songs they could play drunk with a fiddle, a guitar, and a gut bucket. Sitting up with them late at night I learned them all.

“Goodnight Irene” was one of them.

 

Boats and Bikes ~ Boats and Boatbuilding at the Adirondack Museum

 Guideboat under construction

direct video link 

 

 

 

One day it rained. Almost all the day it rained. We could have stayed inside by a window and read, but instead went to the Adirondack Museum on Blue Mountain Lake; because a) it’s a really great museum with lots of very cool stuff to see, and b) I remembered they have a terrific collection of boats on exhibit. Continue reading “Boats and Bikes ~ Boats and Boatbuilding at the Adirondack Museum”

Boats and Bikes ~ Saranac

Saranac & Saranac on a Saranac

 

Saranac, New York
Saranac River
Town of Saranac
Town of Saranac Lake
Saranac Chain of Lakes
Upper Saranac Lake
Middle Saranac Lake
Lower Saranac Lake
Six Different Saranac Beers

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Boats and Bikes ~ Bixi Montreal

pianos and bikes in the park 

 

Montreal was founded hundreds of years before the automobile, and never really got on board with the whole idea. Many streets in the old quarter are still cobblestone and narrow, more suited to carriages and peddler carts. That’s part of the appeal. And like many old cities, they’ve only grudgingly made concessions to cars. Parking is a hassle. Within 8 hours of arriving, we got our first parking ticket. That’s what the nice lady who let us in was trying to say: We had to move the car by morning for the street cleaners, and shuffle from spot to spot like a shell game every few days, or we’d start paying fines. Once we found a safe and free place to leave the car, we did, and didn’t fool with it again for the remaining three days in the city. And, fortunately, didn’t need to. Bicycles were a much better way to get around. Waaaay better.

 

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Boats and Bikes ~ Montreal, Quebec

Montreal Cathedral by night

 

Getting into Canada was a real a pain. The drive from Burlington would normally take about 2 hours door to door. But there was some sort of security alert in effect, coupled with a whole bunch of Canadians returning from some weekend event in the States. It took four+ hours, two of that to go one mile at the border. We almost went through a back country crossing, one we saw at the north end of Lake Champlain, but didn’t have a map or GPS for the country roads beyond. Should have. Even lost and wandering in the woods would have been a faster than the highway.

 

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