Lots of mackerel in the sea to be caught but nowhere to sell it

Two Southport fishermen found the fish easy to catch, but said they often had to dump dead mackerel back in the ocean because of a lack of processors.

Land & Sea 1980: Mackerel

CBC News Posted: Oct 27, 2018 10:28 AM EDT | Last Updated: October 27, 2018

The mackerel are there for catching, the two fishermen say, but once they're back from fishing, the work to find a processor begins. (Land & Sea 1980)

For two mackerel fishermen in Southport in 1980, the problem wasn't a lack of fish it was a lack of places to sell and process it.

Max Lambert and Eric Dean fished mackerel out of Southport, in Trinity Bay on Newfoundland. The area was a popular one for fishing mackerel, the pair said, though it was the kind of fish where you might get tens of thousands of pounds a day or none.

The communities in Trinity Bay were small, but the mackerel fishery was going strong. (Land & Sea 1980)

That uncertainty meant the fishermen had to go out daily to catch fish, because you didn't know when a day spent fishing might be a bust. But the two men found that even days when they had a great catch might also leave them empty handed because a lack of places to sell the fish.

Lots of fish, nowhere to process it

SouthportProducts, a salt fish and pickling plant, couldtake about 50,000 to 70,000 pounds of the fish a day, but had no freezing capacity and couldonly pickle the fish a big job to be done by hand.

The plant was taking in its capacity for mackerel, or even more than its true capacity, Lambert and Dean said, but that was the total catch of just two or three fishermen. They tried to spread their take around, the men explained, but that still left many people scrambling to get rid of mackerel that would keep for only a day.

Millions of pounds of mackerel could be caught in Trinity Bay during a season, the fishermen say, but the time period was a short one, just a couple of months in late summer and early fall. (Land & Sea 1980)

That often meant making long-distance phone calls to other plants up until midnight, then waking up to dump the fish that couldn't be sold.

"Ithink anybody got an idea of how one feels when it comes to going fishing, and then you have to come in and dump it," Lambert said.

"It's a very hard thing to have to do, Itell you.It's very sickening."

Almost half a million pounds of mackerel that couldn't be sold were dumped in just the previous two days, said Dean, as he sat in a boat holding 35,000 pounds of mackerel he wasn't sure he could sell later that day.

There were many days when fishermen had to dump the previous morning's catch back in the ocean because they didn't have a place to sell it. (Land & Sea 1980)

"'Tis not too encouraging, not for we fellers at all," he said.

But the next morning, the two men would get up and go fishing again hoping that if they did get fish that day during the short mackerel season, they could sell it.

The fishery has a lot of potential, the men said, with fishermen who want to go out and fish there to be caught. As Dean saw it, the obligation was on the government to make sure that fish ended up in a processing plant, not back at the bottom of the Atlantic.

For more archivalLand & Seaepisodes, visit theCBC Newfoundland and Labrador YouTube page.

CBC's Journalistic Standards and Practices|About CBC News

Corrections and clarifications|Submit a news tip|