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Changing Tides: A new blog post on the marine environment written by U.S. RESIST NEWS Reporter Katherine Cart

Fishing Boat Dispatch # 2

March 1, 2021

I came to Amaknak Island by plane. The mountains the plane passes between were, in June, very green. The visual sense that the Aleutian Chain gives is of a treeless Hawaii – its geology is similar; the landscape is very young, and active volcanoes grow the islands sporadically. Extending like a hooked arm, the Aleutians delineate the southern edge of the Bering Sea. Amaknak rises from the North Pacific, 800 miles south of Anchorage. Around the smidge of land that is the Aleutian Chain, there is very little but sea.

Amaknak’s Iliuliuk Bay, where 300 foot vessels dock, offload fish, and fuel, drops dramatically to twenty fathoms. The basalt and andesite flows and pyroclastic rocks that form the cliffs of Mounts Ballyhoo and Split Top, and through which obdurate roads have been blasted, rise nearly two thousand feet from the bay edge. Thin soil, reddish, capped by tall grasses and shrub like a fur, holds tremulous purchase on the volcanic substrate. There is a wildness and fragility to Amaknak. With nearly three thousand residents, Amaknak is the most populous of Aleutian islands, and where Dutch Harbor provides anchorage to the North Pacific fishing and shipping fleets. Billions of dollars pass through each year.

The litoral margins of islands Amaknak and Unalaska house factories, supply stores, dynamite-blasted roads, and small mountains of CONEX containers that grow and shift and diminish as they are offloaded, filled with frozen fish product, and locked onto the decks of six-hundred foot carrier vessels. Semis move containers from factory to dock. Upon completing a two week trip, the lines of factory fishing vessels are caught by longshoremen, and crews of thirty or a hundred begin offloading into warehouse and waiting CONEX hundreds of thousands of pounds flash-frozen pollock, flatfish, rockfish, cod – reduced from individual entities to fillet, surimi, a gutted, buyable product. Everyday, at any hour, this churn twists. There is no night in Dutch Harbor.

I have walked across the island in winter, when the sun has set hours before and only rises perfunctorily. Darkness on the road is a brief punctuation between fluorescent, dazzling lights. Trucks drive back and forth and back again, from Westward Plant on Unalaska Island, to City Dock in Iliuliuk Bay, from Kloosterboer to town. Across the roads we have cut into the land, the dirt bleeds, sod hangs like skin, basalt is boney, black. There is the sense everywhere of wounds not quite healed. And very tired people scurry, moving fish.

Once, during the second world war, Dutch Harbor was a military base. Its ordnance formed Alaska’s Iron Ring and suffered in June of 1942 a Japanese air strike. You can see the remains of the fortification everywhere, and especially well from Mount Ballyhoo. Artillery digs make oddly geometric lines across the hump of Bunker Hill. Cement bunkers sit atop many hills, and beneath, into the rock, are bored caves like wormholes for storage and infantry movement. On Ulakta Head sits the highest battery in North America, at 897 feet. Below, anti-submarine nets once crossed the mouth of Iliuliuk Bay. On Hog Island, in spring, flowers nearly cover the gun shields of Fort Learnard. When the war ended, the U.S. navy leaked away, leaving the cement husks of conflict in the landscape.

Before the war, and before commercial fishing, and before Russian fur-trappers arrived in the eighteenth century and erected the green-steepled Church of the Holy Ascension on the slopes of Unalaska, indigenous Unangan people lived on the islands for thousands of years – though you’d be hard pressed to find their any obvious trace. The last several centuries of human development have been like the sudden, fitful seep of a volcano, radically amending landscape.

Beneath the water, we dig holes too. Trawlers whose nets scrape the benthos pull black mud, coral, old plastic, unsellable sculpin, sand lances and dollars, crab (last summer, a codend dumped five metric ton crab to deck – a slowly crawling mountain, up which deck hands ran, laughing), all to target this fish or that fish, at the whim of buyers. The seafloor we gouge with codends like bombs dropped from the sea roof is delicate spawning ground, quiet habitat in which competition has evolved for millenia. The act of trawl fishing seems to me much like spraying a machine gun through a forest, hoping to kill a deer. I don’t know how long it takes the mud to settle. Perhaps not so long as the ratifying of litigation that would eliminate wasteful fishing, but long enough.

Two noticeable heat “blobs” have bloomed off the west coast of North America over the last decade. In aerial heat maps of water temperature anomalies, the Bering Sea, during these events, registers a deep, brickish red. The color denotes an average temperature increase of 3ºC. Pacific cod, a fatty fish whose eggs are susceptible to heat flux took – and are taking – a beating. The alarmingly low cod stock, when I was collecting data aboard a pollock dragger last winter, limited catch size across fisheries and threatened to close areas to trawl fishing.

In 2019, another heat-bubble bloomed, moving from the South Pacific north, changing ecosystems, coastal climate, weather patterns. I saw, and became quite used to, many tons of northern sea nettle falling like giant raindrops from net to trawl alley. Jellyfish are impossibly durable invertebrates: they can survive in low-oxygen water when other species might seek cleaner currents. Warming trends boost plankton growth, diminishing oxygen. On a different boat, a factory vessel, there were, for a few days, as many jellyfish as pollock in my samples.

A broad sheet of sea ice seen on a clear winter dawn is a tremendous thing. It is soft and pinkish until the horizon, and behind you, the Bering Sea is black, gold, pink, translucent and green at wave tip – it is a field of rippling mirror. Sea ice, each winter, shrinks. Its southern edge moves north. Fish whose habitat is frontier ice move north. Do we follow?

Things are moving. We are moving. Of course, migration is a constant. Living matter seeks new ledges on which to root. Monarchs cross the Atlantic. Humans walk land bridges and steel bridges. Last week, the Perseverance Rover landed on Mars. Cold flamingos come down from the mountains, and the mountains rise up from the sea. The Earth grows callus in ridges, absorbing stampede, monsoon, quake and rot.

Looking at Dutch Harbor from Ballyhoo, I was reminded of a child’s playthings, spilt across a carpet. Blue-roofed houses, factories billowing fishmeal steam, roads that, from so high above, appear benign, even quaint. It’s impossible not to wonder what will happen to that place when, inevitably, we move onwards, perhaps northwards, and settle our boxes and buildings and giant semi trucks elsewhere. How long does it take an island to grow up, grow over, reclaim? And can the seafloor recover?

Learn More:

“New Marine Heatwave Emerges off West Coast, Resembles ‘the Blob’” NOAA (5 September, 2019), retrieved 27 February from: https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/feature-story/new-marine-heatwave-emerges-west-coast-resembles-blob

Changing Tides : A new blog post on the marine environment written by U.S. RESIST NEWS Reporter Katherine Cart

# 3  Fishing Boat Dispatch

March 26, 2021

Walk to Maine’s midcoast and look southwest. Unless you’ve gotten yourself in a spruce thicket, you will see Atlantic water filling the hole that is the Gulf of Maine. Likely, you will hear the sea, smell it, be standing in its sandy refuse. It will very possibly feel colder – or at least damper – here than a mile inland. Chilled oceanic air is sucked landwards, dumping sludgy precipitation, heaping fog, painting rime on roof, pine, window pane, dune hollow. A weathered-in gulf can be, to the casual observer, somewhat benign, rather like watching on a TV screen an avalanche shift some unpopulated mountain. Storms are spectacular to witness from the beaches, nasty to endure offshore. Inland Maine is a stronghold well protected from tidal degradation by granitic coastline, carved out over several millennia by the heaving of the Laurentide ice sheet over Appalachian stone. If you are standing at the coast and look down, between your feet you will see the long lateral scratches the Laurentide left, sloughing southwest into the sea. One cannot help but to think of fingernails, and a general determination to cling on.

I am a deckhand on a Maine lobster boat. We fish out of Bailey Island, in Casco bay, where the Atlantic can roll storms that break the shore rocks. The coastline, though mightily old, is still changing. Islands degrade by bits. The wind in the Gulf of Maine whips from the planar globe storm swells that feel sentient in their hostility. Like an obnoxious housecat, the wind comes and goes, hisses at you for no good reason. It will outlast us.

Yesterday, fishing offshore, the shaft of our old 40 foot Novi cracked. In the hour that we waited for a good samaritan to finish hauling his own strings and snag us for a tow to land, we were pushed by the wind against an outgoing tide nearly one mile towards Small Point, and began taking on a little water. Not too much. Enough to notice. Over the radio another captain warned: “supposed to breeze up.” We were lucky – yesterday was the first true day of warmth offshore. The wind, though sustained, was mild compared to the winter blows we’ve sat out or – miserably – fished through. It was a glorious day. A good day to be on the water. A good day to ride the bow, toss lines, catch a ride, if we must.

Twenty-eight miles northeast of us, eighty lobster boats congregated at Monhegan Island. In single file, they traced the path of the proposed underwater cable that would link a future 12 megawatt wind turbine to South Boothbay, linking offshore wind energy to the main power grid. This seabed path, since the beginning of March, has been under survey by research vessels. Lobstermen out of Friendship, Monhegan, Bristol, Boothbay and other port towns have experienced disruptions in set strings of traps, feel that the proposed wind turbine is a threat to current and future livelihood. I’ve experienced snarled and cut strings – detangling hundreds of pounds of lobster trap and line is hellacious, time-consuming, dangerous and costly. Another boat’s gear can be caught up, a string set over another by accident. Frustration is standard fare in lobstering. And while such frustrations are an expected, though unwelcome, part of the job, one does not relish the idea of an outside source – say, research vessels with no traps or profit to lose – causing further gear-loss. Tangled gear costs money. Time costs. Such aggravation is sapping in an already tiring day.

The intended wind turbine does not immediately impact the waters that I fish in. Talk in Mackerel Cove, where I dock, hasn’t yet focused on wind energy, though the issue has gained central focus in the Maine Lobsterman’s Association Newspaper, which my captain brings to the boat and does not read. As a sternwoman, however, I feel the shuddering brace of the Maine lobstering community. Pulling wildlife from the ocean is a volatile vocation. This year, nearly every boat I knew of turned to pig hide for baiting: sandfleas, which prosper in warming waters, were cleaning traps of the standard baitfish before lobsters could wander their dim demersal way through trap kitchen to parlor. The Gulf of Maine is warming faster than 99% of all global waters. American lobster are susceptible to infinitesimal changes in water temperature; in the larval stage, they can expire en masse, and as adults, shell disease, which appears like rot on the carapace, proliferates in warmer waters. Day after day last fall, we hauled empty traps. When I was given my 1099 last month, my captain looked at my total revenue: “should have been twice that.”

I have only lobstered since August and have no real dog in this fight. I have no payments to make on a boat, no family to support, no children who expect to apprentice under me, gain a captain’s license, buy their own vessel. The patterns of the day (up at 3:00 am, on the water by 5:00 am, hauling, hauling, reeking of ripe fish, ludicrously worn-out, docked by evening), however, are appealingly forthright. That women and men fish lobster their entire lives does not surprise me. These are hard, honest days.

In college, I interned with Aqua Ventus’s VolturnUS 1:8, the pilot wind project deployed by the University of Maine in 2013 near Castine, ME. (I spent, on average, an hour a day for a year and a half clicking through stilled images of the bobbing, yellow VolturnUS 1:8 turbine, watching for bird strikes and any evidence of detriment to marine life – I saw none.) During that time, former Maine Governor Paul LePage discouraged Statoil’s proposed $120 million Maine offshore wind project by reopening state waters to potential wind investors. Statoil has since relocated its investment to Scottish waters, and in 2017 began successfully producing energy. In May of 2014, Aqua Ventus was awarded just $3 million of the $47 million the project was hoping for in federal support. Four years later, as offshore wind energy in Maine again began gaining momentum, LePage ordered a moratorium on the development, citing potential risk to Maine’s tourism economy. It has not been an easy ride for wind power investors with sights on the gulf. Incidentally, LePage was the sole Atlantic Coast governor to support the former president Trump’s 2018 proposed “Outer Continental Shelf Draft Proposed Oil and Gas Leasing Program,” which would have opened Maine waters to oil drilling. Now, Maine Governor Janet Mills supports Gulf of Maine wind power. She has opened conversations with the Maine lobstering community and issued a ten-year moratorium on wind projects within three miles of the mainland and inhabited Maine Islands, excluding the Monhegan Island project. Today, that project is using the technology of the floating VolturnUS 1:8 scale pilot turbine. There is no doubt of the potential benefit for Maine energy consumers and job seekers.

These two perspectives have split for me an uncanny rift. The coastal strip that is the lobstering community is a Maine symbol. That it might face its end within my lifetime is wrenching. Fishing communities are so entrenched that peninsula-dwellers speak with unique accents; of the man who towed us ashore yesterday, my captain said: “well, it’s not strong, but he’s sure got the Small Point accent.” Small Point is seven miles as the crow flies from Mackerel Cove. Fishing is, perhaps, the most deeply generational tradition we have in our country. These are lifestyles passed hand over hand like line to kin. There is a romance to lobstering; even the casual observer, those who watch us fish through blows from the safety of shore, cannot deny that.

If you are reading this, there is a good chance you support renewable energy. I do. I have. I will. In my logical brain, I support wind energy in the Gulf of Maine, whatever it may mean for the lobstering community. And to be clear: nobody seems particularly certain what impact wind energy might have on the lobstering community. It is the unknown, yet visible (climate change, unfortunately, is less acutely so), that has piqued fear. Logic aside, in my gut I, too, fear for those few whose children are fed, clothed, housed, by what is pulled from wind power’s path. I worry for my captain, and his son who is one of the fastest sternmen in the cove. To lobster is to both slow time’s twist towards frenzy and to put your eye to the speeding time-keeper that is the warming, shifting Atlantic. I mourn the ending of things as they are.

Changing oceanic ecosystems will bring the end of Maine lobstering before wind power ever does. Of that I am certain. But for those fishing families who feel the acute pinch of wind development already – what comfort does the broader strokes of future history bring?