SEABROOK, N.H. — The cod isn’t just a fish to David Goethel. It’s his identity, his ticket to middle-class life, his link to a historic industry.
“I paid for my education, my wife’s education, my house, my kids’ education; my slice of America was paid for on cod,” said Goethel, a 30-year veteran of these waters that once teemed with New England’s signature fish.
But on this chilly, windy Saturday in April, after 12 hours out in the Gulf of Maine, he has caught exactly two cod, and he feels far removed from the 1990s, when he could catch 2,000 pounds of the fish in a day.
Fishing along the coast of the Northeast still employs hundreds. But every month that goes by, those numbers fall. After centuries of weathering overfishing, pollution, foreign competition and increasing government regulation, the latest challenge is the one that’s doing them in: climate change.
Though no waters are immune to the ravages of climate change, the Gulf of Maine best illustrates the problem. The gulf, where fishermen have for centuries sought lobster, cod and other species that thrived in its cold waters, is now warming faster than 99 percent of the world’s oceans, scientists have said.
For the fishermen of the northeastern U.S., whether to stick with fishing, adapt to the changing ocean or leave the business is a constant worry.
Robert Bradfield was one of the East Coast’s most endangered species, a Rhode Island lobsterman, until he pulled his traps out of the water for the last time about a decade ago.
He now works on a pilot boat, guiding larger ships in and out of the harbor. He is glad he’s still on the water, but he misses lobstering and the community of fishermen he used to see in Newport.
“Of all the guys I fished with, I was a lobsterman for 30 years, and there’s maybe three left,” he said.
The number of adult lobsters in New England south of Cape Cod slid to about 10 million in 2013, according to a report issued last year by an interstate regulatory board. It was about 50 million in the late 1990s. The lobster catch in the region sank to about 3.3 million pounds in 2013, from a peak of about 22 million in 1997.
Bradfield, a father to three grown children, said his decision was more about economics than science. He is glad he left the business, as painful as it was to leave a piece of his identity behind.
“There’s a saying: Behind every successful fisherman is a wife with a good job,” he said.
Michael Mohr harvested surf clams for almost 30 of his 55 years, and his desire to stay in the business takes him far from his family.
About 10 years ago, he started commuting from Mays Landing, N.J., six hours each way to the former whaling port of New Bedford, Mass. He has also switched clam species; he got his start fishing for Atlantic surf clams but now pursues the ocean quahog.
“We’re finding clams in deeper water instead of inshore water, where we used to work 25 years ago,” Mohr said.
Whether Mohr can make holidays like Thanksgiving is “hit-and-miss,” said his wife, Melanie.
Mohr is undaunted. Clamming has been good to him, and if he has to spend more time on the road as he nears 60, so be it.
“It’s just a way of life,” Mohr said. “You’ve got to go where the money is at, and you’re happy. Right now, I’m happy.”