Word: swordfishing
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...continue, at our present rate, to strip-mine the sea of its living resources, 25 years from now we'll be lucky to find a seafood menu that offers a rock sandwich with a side order of kelp. Consider the swordfish: angler's prize, gourmet's delight, fisherman's livelihood. In the mid-'60s, when I was in my mid-20s, I caught a swordfish off Long Island. I wasn't trying to; it took bait meant for sharks. The fish was weirdly, atypically lethargic. It didn't struggle much, didn't leap at all, just tugged for a while...
...died quietly, and I watched (with some, but not enough, regret) its gleaming gun-metal skin fade swiftly to death's dull gray. It wasn't a particularly big swordfish; it weighed only 247 lbs. A big swordfish would weigh more than half...
...been able to know back then that what I had just caught was one of the last stragglers of a vanishing species--that within 35 years a 247-lb. Atlantic broadbill swordfish would be as rare as a tyrannosaur--I would have set it free, administered CPR or, if all attempts at resuscitation had failed, I would at least have had the carcass of the mighty fish gilded and sent to the Smithsonian...
Today the average Atlantic swordfish caught weighs 90 lbs., and the figure drops by a pound or two every year. Because swordfish don't breed until the female is five years old and weighs 150 lbs., we're killing and eating the teenagers before they can reproduce. And though the U.S. is trying, at last, to lead a campaign to stop the slaughter, the effort is too little, too late. Swordfish, like tuna and the other pelagic (open-ocean) fish, roam far from American jurisdiction. There have been reliable reports of commercial fishermen in the Mediterranean routinely landing swordfish weighing...
...East Coast." The Hungry Ocean is Greenlaw's account of a 30-day trip aboard the 100-ft. sword boat Hannah Boden as it steams out with a five-man crew from the Massachusetts coast to the Grand Banks and then strings out 40 miles of line to catch swordfish. The book brims with the expertise of commercial fishing--and is especially interesting on Greenlaw's championship knack for reading subtle changes in water temperatures to find where the fish are. The captain radiates brisk sanity and humor. Being a woman, she declares, is "no big deal" (though Greenlaw...