Gone Fish(ing)

Earlier this month, a newspaper headline caught my attention:  “Anglers are in Dire Straits along Istanbul’s Bosphorus.”

Okay, I don’t fish. I haven’t tried to bait a hook in decades. I’ve never cast a rod into river or stream. I don’t trap, trawl or rake. But fishing is crucial to the island. It’s shaped our history. It's key to what our community is today and, depending on future events in this “most fishery-dependent region of New England,” to what it might become. So I pay attention. And though I’d like to think that in recognizing the significance of fisheries here I’ve become more sensitized to their issues elsewhere, I have to confess that this particular newspaper headline also caught my eye because Bob and I, at the urging of friends who live there, are planning a trip to Istanbul this spring.

Going through a few guide books and attempting to acquire knowledge of a place and history about which I know little has sometimes felt as dizzying as watching a whirling dervish. Byzantines and Ottomans. Mosques and minarets. A grand palace and bazaar and harem. Unfamiliar names with odd spellings and pronunciations my eye and brain can’t seem to telegraph to a twisted tongue.

But the WSJ headline promised more familiar ground – fish.

In Istanbul each fall, according to reporter Marc Champion, lots of folks go “nuts for fish.” As they have for thousands of years. (Okay, so they’ve got that on us – thousands of year. History lesson: Deer Isle was incorporated in 1789.) In what’s known as the annual mass migration, fish head south from the chilly waters of the Black Sea toward the warm Aegean. To do so, they must shift from the roomier routes of open sea and, like commuters funneling down to merge onto a crowded freeway, squeeze into the 20-mile Bosphorus strait that at its narrowest is just 820 yards. And here’s where it gets tricky – they must pass through a gauntlet of shoulder-to-shoulder anglers armed with multiple-hooked rods and nets. More than 10,000 of them – some of whom are members of loosely-organized tag teams staunchly defending their self-proclaimed “stations.” And this doesn’t include boats large and small that are hooking and hauling out on the water. All lending perspective to our regulated 800 traps per lobsterman, no?

And yes, I know: fish are fish and lobsters are crustaceans. Fish have fins and scales while carapace-armored lobsters have legs and menacing claws. But lest we be confused, fishing on the island primarily means lobstering. Ask the whereabouts of a lobsterman on a sunny August morning and you’re more apt to hear he’s out fishing than he’s hauling traps. Plus, cautionary tale warning: our beloved Homarus Americanus may be universally desired, but it’s also just about the only plentiful and sustainable marine species local fishermen can catch and earn a dime doing it, thanks to the depletion of native groundfish populations.

But back to Istanbul. There, according to Champion, things haven’t been looking so good for Bosphorus anglers. From what used to be a diversely populated fish migration, the tuna and swordfish have long been absent. More recently, the large bonito and Atlantic mackerel have all but disappeared. Such demise is unthinkable for a lot of Turks, and no doubt couldn’t have been imagined by the conquering Byzantines who, in 1453, so giddy over their newly claimed empire, stamped coins with an image of a bonito. It’s even believed the famed Golden Horn estuary that flows off the Bosphorus may have gotten its “golden” from the large quantities of tuna caught there during the fall migration. As Champion notes, so rich were the Bosphorus fishing grounds, even Homer in the Iliad tapped into them, having Agamemnon offer them to Achilles as a bribe to keep fighting at Troy.

Fishing grounds as bribes (though they’re likely more euphemistically and transparently called something else) is not new territory in this country. Nor is the disappearance of certain fish species. The Turks’ mackerel is, say, our Atlantic cod.

And here, folks, I’m really on familiar ground, thanks in large part to what I’ve learned from islanders who remember our “golden” days (maybe silver?) when Atlantic cod was still abundant in our waters even if not in the astonishing numbers their forebears hauled ashore using hand-lines and setting out in dories with just a watch, compass and lantern. When cod might grow to six feet and weigh two hundred pounds. When familiar elements of the island’s landscape included cod drying on racks or clotheslines. When island kids might still pass a morning tom-codding as the old-timers were just beginning to notice the absence of cod where once they flourished.  All before, that is, the cod collapse of the northeast Atlantic.

Over on the Bosphorus where “dire straits” causes that could lead to species collapse are being debated, there’s a lot finger pointing going on. Commercial fisherman with their sonar fish finders and large encircling nets object to proposed regulations and blame them on what they say are the false accusations of independent fishermen who claim the big boats with their large nets are indiscriminate in catching mature and young, undersized fish alike, leaving only the smallest specimens unable to repopulate a depleted fish stock. Environmentalists get in on it, too. In their sights are the increased traffic of churning tankers and container ships and the polluted run-off of a city grown more than ten times its size of just 50 years ago. And then there are the ancient rivalries revealed in the claims that limiting catch sizes would only allow more migrating fish to swim further into the Aegean and be caught by the Italians and Greeks. Apparently, a big no-no. And as objectionable to those folks who say fish caught within Turkish borders ought to be processed within them, too. “It should be the Turks,” claims a fisheries adviser to the Prime Minister, “who put three hamsi (Black Sea anchovies) in a can, squirt some sauce on it and sell it to the Americans.”

So, regardless a language’s odd-to-my-ears-and-mouth pronunciations, doesn’t this sound familiar?

Or this? That on the Bosphorus, despite the conclusions of research currently underway, a consensus seems to be building that the biggest culprit is overfishing. Mismanagement. Depleted fish stocks. Lack of replenishment.

I’m not sure what a decline in fishing would mean to a thriving, diversified city like Istanbul, with its astonishing 17 million inhabitants, its multiple bridges spanning the Bosphorus and linking its two sides – the European and the Asian. Yes, a city of two countries. Surely the impact would be different for an island with a single bridge over the Reach connecting it to the mainland, whose year-round population of approximately 3,000 inhabitants unlikely swells to more than double that come August yet all of whom depend in crucial, rippling ways on an eggs-in-one-basket lobster fishery. Fortunately, like Istanbul, the ending to our cautionary tale has yet to be written.

No doubt come spring, I’ll be just one more traveler who’s appropriately mind-boggled by the span of time and history Istanbul’s sights represent. I’ll be amazed and humbled by Topkapi Palace and Haghia Sophia, sense-assaulted in the grand Spice Bazaar. But there, too, when standing atop the Galata bridge and taking in the view of the Bosphorus and Golden Horn, I may well recognize a bit of the familiar.