The last time Hugo was in Barcelona, he went to the fish markets and saw a variety of cod, including cod tongues preserved in the most fanciful ways. But they were all from Iceland.
—
We decide to catch some cod for ourselves. The RIB has been brought ashore for the winter. And besides, it’s not really the right kind of boat for fishing, since it’s an inflated rubber boat. We will be using a lot of hooks, and an ill-placed fishhook could cause the boat to lose its breath. Instead, we’re going to take out Hugo’s fourteen-footer, a small, open boat made of plastic. But it too has been on shore since the autumn. It—and we—have a rather large problem. It has a leak in its hull. The channels, which should hold only air and create buoyancy, have filled with rain. And in the cold, the rainwater has unfortunately obeyed the laws of physics and frozen solid.
“The boat isn’t really on its best behavior,” says Hugo as I quietly think to myself that we’re going out in the Lofoten Sea in a boat that, to begin with, is much too small. Right now it also has minimal buoyancy, and I can’t say I like that idea. The ice will eventually melt, but it’s way below freezing outside and only a couple of degrees above freezing in the water, so that will take days. Nevertheless, the sea is swarming with cod, and we agree to make an attempt, provided the weather and the sea remain calm.
“If the boat isn’t seaworthy enough, we’ll turn around.”
I nod, look out the window, and don’t say a word.
We leave the boat in the water and head in for the night.
22
The next morning my phone rings and wakes me up. It’s an elderly gentleman I met two months ago in an antiquarian bookshop in Tromsø, the major city in northern Norway. He was taking care of the shop for the owner. I happened to mention that I was interested in Greenland sharks and that a friend of mine and I were trying to catch one. The man and I did not exchange phone numbers, but somehow he got hold of mine, and now he’s calling to give me some advice. Turns out his brothers once fished for Greenland sharks in the Arctic Sea back in the 1950s. His hottest tip to me: “Put a bunch of rotten herring in a fine-mesh bag, for example a net for oranges, and stick your hook in among the herring.” He makes me promise to call him if we catch anything, and he wishes me luck.
Hugo doesn’t like the fact that other people know about our plans. He thinks they’ll laugh behind our backs if we don’t catch a shark, and he’s probably right. When strangers from six hundred miles away call to hear how it’s going, we’re not exactly operating with the greatest secrecy.
—
Outside, Skrova is dusted with powdery snow. Ice crystals glitter in the pale sunlight, making our optic nerves vibrate. It’s rare for snow to be scattered so evenly across the island like this. Normally the snow is swept away by the wind, or it melts in the rain brought by a passing low-pressure system.
It’s picture-perfect, straight off a postcard. There’s a childlike simplicity to it. When kids draw pictures of the world, they often use bright colors, with simple jagged lines to depict mountains. Maybe they’ll add some scribbled green grass or a patch of blue for the ocean and then finish with a couple of old-fashioned houses. And right now that’s exactly how it looks in Lofoten. Somewhere in Norway a child is probably drawing this exact scene without even reflecting on it.
We set off from Skrova in the fourteen-footer, leaving from the back side of the island. Water flows into the bay from both directions via a small channel that passes between Risholmen and the largest of the Skrova islands. We’ve brought along a bottle of water to share, two chocolate energy bars, a hand-line for each of us, and the current issue of Lofotposten. The newspaper reports that yesterday a kaffetorsk, or “coffee cod,” weighing ninety-seven pounds was caught off the nearby village of Reine. A “coffee cod” is the local name for any cod weighing over sixty-five pounds and caught during the spawning season. Since the 1970s, Lofotposten has offered two pounds of coffee as a reward to anyone who brought in a cod of this size. Today’s newspaper also has a story about the annual cod parade, in which the children of Skrova walk through the streets dressed as skrei.
Today the sea is not quiet. We know that even before we reach the seaward side. But it’s not outright hostile either. The fourteen-footer sits noticeably low in the water, for obvious reasons. Luckily the sea isn’t too rough, just long breakers that won’t put our heavy, listless boat to the test. Of course that could all change, and much faster than the time it would take to get back to harbor.
The boat could serve as a deep freezer. It probably contains enough ice for two thousand cocktails, and four thousand whisky on the rocks. A couple of drinks would be great right now, to stop me from worrying about heading into the open Lofoten Sea in this frozen boat.
The seagulls are silent, the snow sparkling white. Even the sun seems cold. For me, coming from the big city only yesterday, the dazzling clear surroundings and the wide horizon are refreshment for my soul. Yet there’s something about the sea today that has me concerned. What could be lurking behind the silvery-white and viscous fluidity? It’s like staring into a glass eye.
—
Hugo spots a bunch of small commercial fishing smacks a good distance away in Vestfjorden, and he sets course in that direction. They have echo sounders, and underneath the boats the skrei are bound to be plentiful. I like the plan, especially because at least then someone will be around to pull us out of the water if necessary.
After fifteen minutes of chugging along, our thirty-horsepower outboard motor gets us out to the fishing grounds. By the way, did I mention that the outboard is actually bigger and heavier than the boat is certified to carry, making the center of gravity wrong from the start?
We take up position an appropriate distance from the fishing smacks but close enough so we can see the nets and lines bringing in big, strapping skrei. All we have to do is lower our hand-lines, which have strips of brightly colored rubber attached, doing a not very impressive job of hiding the hooks. But it works. The skrei are about 130 feet down, and as soon as the hooks reach that depth, the cod start biting and we pull them up.
The skrei are at this particular spot due to the temperature. They like to be where the warm layer of the deep and the colder water closer to the surface meet. The Norwegian scientist Georg Ossian Sars was the first to discover this.
In 1864, Sars traveled to Lofoten to study the biology of the skrei. With Skrova as his home base, he was rowed around in Vestfjorden, presumably by people who lived on the island. In Skrova a little park is hidden away and might easily be mistaken for the lawn of a nearby house. But at this spot you’ll find a monument, put up in 1966 by scientists at the Institute of Marine Research and the Norwegian Department of Fisheries, to honor G. O. Sars. Etched into the stone, it says that from Skrova he had “elucidated the most important traits of the cod’s biology.”
—
During certain times in the spawning season, the skrei eat very little. Fishermen say that the fish are “moping” and use nets instead of hooks. But not much moping is going on below us today. The biggest skrei that we pull up weigh thirty to forty-five pounds. One of them close to sixty-five. Some have swallowed the hooks, but many have the hook affixed to the outside of the mouth, in the eye, or in the side of their body. They have to be hauled up horizontally, and it takes quite an effort to get them to the surface.
It’s hard to ignore the fact that the distance between our boat’s gunwale and the sea is less than desirable, and diminishing. Even the crews on the fishing smacks look startled when they suddenly catch sight of us at the top of a wave, before we disappear into the trough. Some of them shout and wave, and we wave back. Maybe they think we’re in need of rescuing. We’re not. At least not by our own definition. We focus on hauling in the skrei, which are swarming in big shoals down below.
Under such circumstances, it takes a special kind of person to decide to pack up and head for land, even though the boat is small, without buoyancy, and about to be filled wit
h several hundred pounds of extra weight. We’re not those kind of people.
—
For a few days, female and male skrei swim close together, with the males moving sideways. Roe and milt are sent out simultaneously from the male and female. Then the skrei use their tails to whirl the two together in order to fertilize the eggs.
The skrei we pull up are bursting with roe and milt; in other words, they haven’t yet spawned. They will very soon, and when they do a couple hundred trillion (not billion) cod eggs will be floating around in the Lofoten basin. A female cod can have up to ten million eggs. Not all will be fertilized, of course, and a lot can go wrong. In the beginning, the cod larvae live off their own yolk sac. The eggs that drift around may get destroyed or eaten by others. After a couple of weeks, when the eggs hatch, most of the spawn meet the same fate. They try to grab plankton—first phytoplankton, then zooplankton and krill. When the small, transparent fish are four weeks old, they leave the upper layers of the water. From then on, they will try to survive on the bottom as they drift north with the Gulf Stream toward the Barents Sea.
The first year is the most dangerous. After that, cod face few threats.3 Cod that survive for seven years are ready for the long journey back to Lofoten, where they will spawn. Of the many millions of eggs from each female, at least two individual cod must survive in order for the stock to remain stable. No one can say exactly why this year in particular seems to be a banner season, with many hundreds of millions of skrei swimming below us.
—
Most people know that the world’s richest cod stock spawns off Lofoten and Vesterålen. But those same areas of the ocean are also very important for halibut, which also spawn in the winter, and herring, which spawn in the spring. Then there are the stocks of rosefish, pollock, haddock, wolffish, and angler. Traditionally, Lofoten has millions of seabirds as well, just like other places near the sea in Norway. But in many instances, the numbers have decreased to an alarming level. Many types of fish, on which the birds depend for food—such as the sandlance, capelin, blue whiting, and Norway pout—have been subjected to overfishing. Not as food for humans, but for farmed salmon.
—
You might be surprised to know that cod and Big Oil like the same thing: plankton. While the cod eat the plankton fresh in the sea, the oil companies prefer it to be two hundred million years old and transformed into sticky black fuel. The new Norway depends on this oil, just as in the past we depended on cod, cod oil, and herring oil. In the old days, the fishermen would toss oil on the water to break up the waves when they were trying to rescue the crew from a sinking ship. Today commercial trawlers throw fish into the sea. One thing is for sure: the world’s richest spawning banks are threatened by oil. If it comes to a blowout, the Lofoten Wall is at risk of acting like a long natural oil boom, trapping the oil along its beaches and killing off everything from seabirds to plankton. Even tiny amounts of oil can destroy fish spawn.
If Tanzania started to drill for oil in the Serengeti, the whole world—and presumably with Norway at the forefront—would protest. We would find it barbaric, and maybe we’d even donate a billion kroner to stop them. Norway already doles out billions to save the rain forests in Brazil, Ecuador, Indonesia, the Congo, and other places in the tropics. Yet Norway has an equally unique area, an underwater Serengeti. In this place of unparalleled fecundity, which is world renowned for its beauty, Norway, in spite of being one of the richest countries, wants to start drilling for oil.
Melville’s subterranean miners keep on working.
—
As we drift, hauling up skrei, I tell Hugo that in the 1960s, Soviet marine biologists developed a theory that the sperm whale uses its enormous sound organ as a weapon, an “ultrasonic projector” or “sound laser.” The idea was that highly concentrated and precisely aimed sound waves enable the whale to paralyze squid and other prey. American scientists have followed up on this research, hoping to put it to military use.
Like the Greenland shark, the sperm whale catches animals that are much faster (squid can reach a speed of thirty miles an hour), and it often does so in total darkness, way down in the deep. But until recently no one had ever observed the sperm whale in action. Close to the beginning of the new millennium, Danish whale researchers investigated the theory off the Norwegian island of Anøva in the Vesterålen archipelago. Using advanced hydrophones, they discovered that the clicking noises made by sperm whales were focused and could, to a great extent, be directed at specific targets.4
Before the world’s oceans became filled with noise from propellers and machines, whales could hear one another at a distance of about six hundred miles.
Over the past few years, because of possible oil, a lot of seismic surveys have taken place near Andenes, Vesterålen, and Lofoten, as well as in many other places farther north. Sometimes called “seismic shooting,” this involves sending shock waves through the ocean. Active fishermen on Andøya think this is why Vestfjorden—in fact, the whole region—is teeming with mackerel. Seismic shooting keeps away minke whales, pilot whales, killer whales, and other mackerel eaters.
Coastal fishermen, environmentalists, and whale researchers fear that the shock waves may injure or kill whales—and maybe also fish spawn. They point out that whales do not behave normally in areas where shooting goes on, because it may damage their ears. For whales, the sound waves must feel like sonic carpet bombing. After all, the sound has to penetrate several layers of mountains on the seafloor.5
Hugo shakes his head, as if to say that he’s lived long enough for this not to surprise him. He saw on the news that the bodies of twenty-six dead pilot whales had washed ashore in Vikna municipality in northern Trøndelag while a seismic survey was going on in the ocean offshore.
I happen to think of something else I read recently. In the 1950s, an American scientist, Dr. Harry Wexler, came up with the idea that the earth—or at least the United States—would benefit if the North Pole became free of ice. Global transportation would be easier, and arctic raw materials would be more accessible. Wexler proposed detonating hydrogen bombs under the polar ice cap. Maybe only ten would be needed, each around ten megatons. This would create enough steam to encapsulate the entire North Pole in a thick mantle. And then the ice could no longer reflect sunlight. The heat would become trapped—the greenhouse effect was already well known—and the rest of the ice would melt.
Hugo looks at me as if he thinks I’m joking.
23
By now we’ve slipped into a rhythm and we haul yet another big, wriggling cod up through the water column. Then we hit it on the head with the gaff and lift it on board the fourteen-footer, where we swiftly stick a knife in what the old folks used to call kverken, the “craw.”
Each cod hauled onto the boats crowding the Lofoten Sea has been swimming for years over several thousand miles. Right now all that matters is spawning, but the ones we catch are stopped just before they reach the finish line. The fish that takes our bait may not understand what is happening, but it does have a nervous system. What a shock it must be to find itself suddenly nabbed and then dragged up toward the light by an invisible force. Yanked way from the other fish in the shoal (do they notice it disappear?), pulled from a depth of 150 or 200 feet all the way up to the surface. Of course the fish struggles with all its might, and it might even manage to wriggle free (does it feel relieved?). But most get knocked on the head by a gaff and are then hauled over the gunwale into a boat where many other fish have already suffered the same fate. Do they have any biological or intuitive understanding that they’re about to die? Or do only more evolved animals have that sort of awareness?
One more fish, and then another. For us, it feels equally great each time, and that’s the problem. Serious numbers of skrei are swimming below us. And serious numbers of skrei are beginning to fill up the boat.
Hugo tells me that in the old days cattle were fed protein-rich skrei milt and roe, if it could no longer be used for caviar. He also says t
hat the Japanese and some Lofoten inhabitants drink the milt as a cocktail or aperitif, called a krøll. Hugo feels nauseated by his own story, but of course he’s unable to vomit.
—
The sea renews itself with each moment. Everything glitters. As usual, everything is in motion out at sea. When we started fishing, the rhythm of the waves was steady and calm, like the breathing of a huge, slumbering creature. Now the swells are intermittently breaking up, getting choppier and rougher. Our boat turns its stern seaward, and the tongue of a wave reaches over the gunwale and into the boat. Something is about to change. Black patches are hovering over the open waters. It’s a strange sight, because in other places the sun breaks through the cloud cover in vertical shafts of light that sporadically disappear as the weather system moves around, like in a cartoon or on the stage set of an opera.
I don’t know whether Hugo has noticed, but for the first time in all the years we’ve gone out to sea together, I don’t feel safe. The RIB we usually use cannot sink. Not completely. Even if all the pontoons get punctured, the hull will more or less stay afloat. The fourteen-footer is a different matter.
In general, Hugo feels perfectly at home out at sea, and he knows these waters like the back of his hand. He has also survived the most unlikely situations on the ocean. And since it has “always ended well” for him, maybe that’s why I’m thinking right now he might have become a little reckless. You need only one exception to the “always ended well” pattern. It suddenly occurs to me that the stories we tell are those that end well, meaning the person is still around to tell the tale. Could this be the one time when things will go badly? Will this be the story others will reluctantly have to tell?
Shark Drunk Page 15