The Bermudian - Fall 2015

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PREMIUM PAINT

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such as banning fish pots, protecting spawning aggregations for certain commercial species as well as size, and seasonal limits in our lobster fishery, that the recovery we are aiming for, and think we see in some sectors, is still far below the actual restoration needed to sustain a yield over years, decades, generations.

For many people the obvious question, when faced with a story like this, is what hope is there for correcting this situation and getting things right?

These octogenerians are fond of saying that at their age the best fishing day is the one you are alive to experience. And so I am struck that as he finishes “the best fishing day ever,” Donald proposes a solution that would potentially see his favourite fishing spot become a “no fishing” area beyond his reach.

If this group of ocean experts, with all they have seen, experienced and know, bothers to make a suggestion that might work, then it hints that they have not resigned themselves entirely to the total and inevitable decline they have witnessed over the course of their lives. This suggests to me that there might be some hope.

So while we are gambling that we have the

On this day, Canton and Tucker fish about seven miles southwest of the Island.

wisdom to do something to address these declines, let us also hope that it can actually be extensive enough to pull us back into alignment with the basic principles of reproduction: life on the reef and in the ocean that surrounds it needs, at a fundamental level, to be left to itself.

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.

It is as simple as that.

Yeats said, “Things reveal themselves in passing away,” but perhaps out there below the water we have missed it.

If these elders can see it, if they can call for it, I believe that there is no one that can argue against it. There can be no rational reason for not pursuing a dramatic and meaningful solution: to do nothing in one special, set-aside place and let nature restore itself.

And so we come back to the end of a perfect January fishing day—coney skins lying unmolested like orange stoplights on the bottom six feet below. Will we keep going as we are or change direction? Will we bother?