Second Helping

ol. 2 Second Helping continues the narrative begun in Molasses Bread and Tea of Newfoundland Labrador and Nunavut stories from the 1950s and 1960s and is now available. But this memoir also takes a wide ranging look at historical Newfoundland-Labrador, the Grand Banks fishery over the centuries and observations on the current state of the world's oceans and their inhabitants made during numerous world wide travels in the 1990s and 2000s. Many amusing personal anecdotes are also included to lighten the text along the way. The book examines in some detail overfishing of the oceans' resources with much finger pointing: starting with the collapse of the cod fishery on the Grand banks in 1994 after a 500 year history of sustainable fishing. Now a single huge modern refrigerated bottom trawler equipped with state of the art radar, satellite tracking beacons, and fish finding sonar now rake the sea bottom, destroying its bio habitat. Since the early 1970s a single one of these monsters takes as much fish out of the ocean in a day as an entire fleet of schooners did in a month a single generation before. What chance has any sustainable fishery? Throw into this murderous mix 50 mile plus gill nets and trawls and the fish are being left with no place to hide. Widespread ocean pollution caused by throw away human garbage like plastic bags is now wiping out sea turtles on a massive scale. These animals feed on plastic bags mistaking them for jelly fish ( King Jellies) their chief food. The throw away so called bio catch i.e. the bio kill, represents upwards of 70% of trawl fishing catches today with only 30% representing the targeted species. And so it goes...... A best possible saving solution regarding overfishing might lie in the setting up of large tracks of the world's oceans as protected marine reserves free form all fishing activity.