There is a thoughtful pause, then he imper-
ceptibly looks up from his task, both eyes light
up from the low angle of the sun and he asks
me a question, “You know the hind ground?”
“Yes.”
“Well, before it was called the hind ground,
it was the grouper ground. You couldn’t
catch a hind there; the grouper ate them all
and we ate the grouper. The grouper have
been gone for over 30 years now, so it be-
came known as the hind ground, but now
you have a hard time catching hinds… it’s
all coneys and barbours.”
And I ask myself, “From grouper, to hinds,
to coneys, to what?”
This is difficult to take in. I am, at heart, an
optimistic person. In my own lifetime I have
witnessed decline and, happily, what I perceive
to be a few hard-won improvements in Bermu-
da’s fishery. What I learned today is that I have
no idea of what it was like 40 or 70 years ago.
The “baselines” have shifted dramatically, and
because our own experience is limited by the
span of our lifetime, we are trying to maintain
what we have without knowing what we are
missing. With each generation the downward
shift takes us further away from the knowl-
edge of what an actual healthy, sustainable
ecosystem looks like. It is possible that even
with the positive steps Bermuda has taken,
Tucker’s 40-foot fishing boat, sea Foam,
designed for hauling shrimp in Florida
We have to leave enough of “something” out
there that is doing that wonderful dance with
“something else” out there; otherwise we will
end up with nothing out there.
Coneys are the catch of the day
