Hooked
We drove south from Kautokeino with Jonathan Coleman’s assistant, Sindre, who played his new Senate CD seven times in a row before we caught up with Jonathan in a very small town, and boarded the train he got off. Jonathan and Sindre continued south to Oslo by car, while we took the train to Bodø, and continued by ferry to the Lofoten Islands. Once there, we were lucky enough to connect with Natalie Moore Topinka’s family, Otto and Anne Marit and their children Håvard and Ingrid. They kindly showed us around Vestvågøy, fed us fresh bread in their newly remodeled summerhouse, and took us on a hike through the infamous Kyllingdalen, or Chicken Valley! Otto also introduced us to the local harbormaster, Viktor, who helped us to meet many local fishermen.
We came to Lofoten to continue profiling North Atlantic cod fishermen. Norway, Greenland and Iceland are all places where dramatic short-term climate oscillations are the norm, including past warming events that may help to illustrate the future of cod fishing in a warmer sea.
Børge Iversen’s family has fished out of Ballstad for five generations. We left the harbor at 1 a.m. on his 53-foot boat, Iversen Jr., and started looking at the fish finder after sailing two hours into the middle of Vestfjorden. It was too dark to see the horizon, but we could see the lights of four other longline boats from Ballstad. The fishermen talked back and forth on radios. They did not register as many fish as they would have liked to, but at 4:45 a.m., just before dawn, we all set our lines at the same time in the same direction. It took Børge half an hour to set seven longlines of 750 meters and 300 hooks each. It takes him 14 hours to bait those lines with mackerel.
With over three miles of line behind us, we napped and rocked in place for four hours. At 9 a.m. the boats began to pull in their lines. Looking into the water you could see endless white bellies of fish being winched to the surface. Børge rhythmically reached over the side to gaff and toss them onto a stainless steel table. Once the table was full he killed the fish with one slice beneath the gills, and submerged them in a tank of water. We finished pulling in the lines at 1 p.m. in the afternoon and got back to Ballstad at 3 p.m.
We are currently on the Hurtigruten Coastal Ferry, sailing three days south for Bergen. Hard to believe we’ll be back to the US in a week!