Work Through Time: Cape Breton Stories of Land & Sea

Early Fishing in Main-à-Dieu

Located on the scenic Marconi Trail between Louisbourg and Glace Bay, Main-à-Dieu today is home to a large lobster fishing fleet and, along with its sister fleet in Little Lorraine, every spring at the start of lobster fishing season the fishermen set out to make their catch, a two-month enterprise so collectively successful the area's been dubbed the "Lobster Land of the Maritimes."

In the late 1700s, fishermen from newly founded Louisbourg began moving their families to a tiny island a mile off Main-a-Dieu's shore, called Scatarie (also seen: Scaterie). Its location proved ideal, for a time. Being a mile offshore meant the fishermen would barely need to step into the water to get their catch. Until the second half of the last century, when the mass exodus left Scatarie the wilderness reserve it is today, there were as many houses on the island as there are in many of the nearby communities today.

“They fished when fishing was what we call fishing," says a fisherman today. Pretty well everybody came out of school - whether at the legal age of 16 or earlier - and got on a boat, on which there wouldn't be much need for an academic education. "I've got brothers," says another fishermen, "who've got more degrees than a thermometer, and they're walking the streets." A fishermen's education, on the other hand - like much of his life - happened on the water, in real time: a fourteen-year old "greenhorn" on his father's or his brother's or his uncle's boat, in the middle of the ocean, learning to swim in the deep end, so to speak. When he got his catch ashore, it was often his to keep.

"We didn't have a cent to bless ourselves with," an old fisherman says. So when each new fishing season started, fishermen would get local suppliers to "fit them out," that is, supply them with whatever they needed for the fishing season - on credit. If, by May, the fishermen had their doctor's bill and the outfitter paid off, they considered themselves set.

Fishermen from the area might spend the fishing off-season on a trawling boat, an icebreaker, on the coal piers that existed in Louisbourg at the time, or in the woods cutting timber. Back then, it wasn't unusual for Main-à-Dieu and area fishermen to walk to and from Louisbourg, morning and evening. "It didn't mean a thing," an old fisherman says. "But when you got home, you were ready for a meal!"

The Blessing of the Fleet

"The Blessing of the Fleet" remains an important tradition in Main-à-Dieu today, as it is in many fishing communities.

Meant to ensure a safe and bountiful season, it is also a time to remember fishermen who have died, including those who have lost their lives at sea.

The entire village comes out to participate in the event, and to commemorate the dead. The local priest presides over the ceremony, which includes prayer, music, and a few trips around the harbour in the boats.

The entire village comes out to participate in the event, and to commemorate the dead. The local priest presides over the ceremony, which includes prayer, music, and a few trips around the harbour in the boats.

Fishermen's Prayer:

God Bless the little
Boats from Main-à-Dieu
When they go out to sea.
Protect them from the furies
And from the Stormy Seas.
Guide them and Protect them
With your Hands
And bring them back safely
To our precious Land.
Amen

Then the day before the beginning of the fishing season, the traps are loaded onto the boats so that when the fishermen get up on the morning of "Setting-out day," they just put their bait aboard and wait for the sign: at around 5 in the morning, the Department of Fisheries officer blinks his vehicle's headlights, to signal the start of the season (which, barring inclement weather, runs from May 15th to July 15th).

Then and Now

Just as in the old days, when community members relied on one another to collectively provide the necessities of life, fishing today is not a solitary career. There are "helpers" aboard each boat, for everything from preparing the bait, sorting and measuring the catch, and banding the lobster claws to lending a hand with a heavy catch or just being on hand to snap the photo!

No man is an island: A team is necessary considering the heavy machinery aboard some of today's boats - like huge crab traps which could fit several men inside them.

Until recently, cold, wet, endless rope stood between the fisherman and his catch, as traps had to be hauled up by hand.

Today's catch, not surprisingly, is five or six times bigger than yesterday's.

Changes like these may make the form, if not the function, of fishing itself increasingly unrecognizable compared to four hundred... one hundred... even fifty years ago. But something essential and unchangeable remains, perhaps in the fisherman himself. A saying goes: "You can make farmers into fishermen, but you can't make fishermen into farmers." Meaning that, for those born to live and work on the water, dry land is just a stopover between outings. The fisherman has salt-water "in his blood," and when the sea calls, nothing can stand between him and the ocean.

Such radical transformation has prompted those who have witnessed the change over the years - from "wide-open" wooden boats to today's antennae-riddled cabins - to ask, paraphrasing the saying, whether you can make a computer technician into a fisherman?

Before the micro-computer age, the only navigational tools at the fisherman's disposal were a compass and wristwatch. A fisherman charted his course by marking how long he traveled at a certain bearing, a technique which could be relied on regardless of the weather and visibility. Even blinded by the most disorienting fog, this simple system could steer a fishermen home so long as the Earth's poles stood still, and time didn't.

In earlier eras, the operative term to describe fishing would have been "the catch"; today, not unlike the oil industry, it's more likely "exploration." Increasingly, the ocean is becoming the object not just of fishing but of fishermen themselves, as they gain more and more control over her, as more and more they attempt to tame her.

The ocean resists this move, perhaps most famously in its rebellion against the over-fishing of cod: the ocean simply refused to hand over any more fish. Cod haven't been fished in Cape Breton since 1992.

The decimation of the cod stocks is in some ways a grim reminder that part of the fisherman's life is knowing there may come a time when it will become necessary to struggle through the lean years - when a 5000-pound weekly catch suddenly becomes the haul for the whole season.

The Lord Giveth, and He Taketh Away: After the cod fishery collapsed, the crab fishery exploded: cod eat small crab.

Swordfishing in Main-à-Dieu

No such gifts resulted from the over-fishing of swordfish. Not too many years ago, swordfishing was so popular, lucrative, and downright enjoyable, that there were close to a hundred boats in the area carrying harpoons.

An average swordfishing boat might be 55-feet long, with a raised "ring" (from where the watchman would look out) above the spar (where the harpooner, or "striker," would stand). The ringman would holler down to the helmsman when he saw a swordfish underwater. (It was another man's job to spot the fish when they were "finning," meaning when they came up to the very top of the water, presumably to enjoy the warmth of the sun on their backs.)

The harpoon was on a 12-foot pole, attached to 100-150 feet of rope. Alternately, when the boat came right up on the catch, the striker might "hand jab" the fish, meaning he wouldn't need to throw the harpoon at all - but the fish would just as often "twitch," meaning as soon as the boat got too close the fish would run off.

A good striker could catch two-dozen swordfish in a day; a boat could bring in 400 in a season.

It didn't take much - least of all a great amount of technology - for the swordfish to disappear from the area. It's an irony of the business, nonetheless, that every innovation in fishing that makes the catch an easier one, poses, at the same time, a threat to the fishermen's livelihood, by virtue of their utter dependence on the continued existence of the resource. Indeed, it would be wrong to think of fishing as exclusively taking fish out of the water, when so much of the fisherman's concern, nowadays at least, is in keeping fish in it. An acute failure to remember this rule can lead directly into what's been termed the "progress trap." As the tools of the trade improve, each fisherman's catch improves, and with it his ability to afford more and ever better gear. With better traps, and more of them, on bigger boats; with more and more fishermen on the water, answering the echo of a market boom; and especially with smarter computers involved, the industry runs the risk of creating an underwater Easter Island. In Main-à-Dieu, this increasingly unlimited capacity to expand is moderated by the fisherman's old-fashioned reverence for the sea, resulting in much-needed conservation efforts.

Conservation Efforts

The most obvious conservation method is the fishing "season," meaning that, for example, lobster fishing is only permitted for two months in the summer. (When that season starts, though, can be a bone of contention. Lobster fishermen are constantly fighting to get their season to start on the 15th of May instead of the 1st, in order to ensure they don't lose valuable fishing time due to the stubborn ice that might delay their launch.)

Within the season, there is a total ban on spawning lobsters, which when caught are gently released back into the water to ensure the continued survival of every next generation of lobsters in the area; and there are restrictions on the minimum size of the catch, the absence of which would mean lobsters being caught before they've matured and had a chance to reproduce, thus causing a rapid decline in the stock. The lobsters deemed too small according to these rules don't even make it aboard, as they are allowed to escape through specially designed hatches in the traps.

The self-regulating conservation efforts of the fishermen are, in a way, about protecting them from themselves; but a broader conservation regime is needed to protect them from large corporations whose trawling nets can dredge the ocean of sea life, destroying the ocean floor - and, in the process, local fishermen's livelihoods.

The fishermen are discovering ways to combine modern scientific findings with old-fashioned agreements in order to avoid taking the fish out from under the man and it's not just science and protectionism that determines the nature of the hunt. A "gentlemen's deal" exists in Main-à-Dieu and area that keeps the fishermen at home, and generally off the water, every Sunday. Most area residents are Christians, for whom Sunday is the "day of rest."

Always in fear of the "bad year" - and in mortal fear of over-exploitation - the fishermen know the only way to safeguard their own future is to limit their present behaviour. But charts-and-graphs solutions are nothing without the policies to back them up; the market, which many take at face value as a benevolent guiding hand, is myopic, and at best ambivalent. Today's boom may directly cause tomorrow's bust.

A bust was narrowly averted when, in the 1970s, there was little money in the lobster fishery and the fishermen "banked" their licenses, meaning they put them in safety deposit boxes or hid them under their pillows, took their boats out of the water, and went at something else.

In their absence, the oceans rebounded, so that by the 1990s, the fishery was a huge money-maker.

Doubtless, 21st-century high-tech and higher insecurity rule. It's all the more comforting then, to know that although so much change, even upheaval, has occurred especially throughout the last half-century in fishing, the vocation itself remains largely unchanged. Fishermen can still occasionally be found in their workspaces, hand-weaving the meshing for their traps, just as their fathers before them, and theirs before them.

And just as important to remember is that while they're out to sea, their loved ones still worry, knowing full well how unforgiving the ocean can be. If a mean Nor'easter were to come upon the area suddenly, wives will be found at kitchen windows, looking to the water, not saying a word to the children for fear of scaring them, but likely unable to hide the concern from their faces, nor the white from their knuckles.

This essay was provided by the Main-à-Dieu Community Development Association. The Boats of Main-à-Dieu & Area: A Multimedia Narrative History, including audio, video, over one hundred photos, and the complete story, is continued online at: coastaldiscoverycentre.ca

ⓒ 2008 Main-à-Dieu Community Development Association.