The Provincetown waterfront is coming alive with the lifting of the bay-wide 10-knot speed limit. Our first high-speed ferries from Boston arrived this week. Our first cruise ship also came into the harbor. Lobstermen are now getting their trap gear ready to go in the water. Whale watching has been good, with fin whales and humpbacks close by and actively feeding. And charter and party fishing boats are either preparing to book trips or are already going out. So here we go.
But fishing is still very much awash with question marks. What we have seen in the past few years is a shift in when we stop talking about spring and summer gets underway — no matter what the calendar tells us. Everything seems to be running a month late: air temperatures, water temperatures, and the seasonal shift in wind direction. Consequently, what we used to know as normal for April is now becoming normal for May.
The fishing at the moment is fair at best. Flounder are still not biting, as bottom temperatures remain very cold. Striped bass are here, but we haven’t really seen a big body of fish anywhere yet. There are a few fish on Billingsgate Shoals and a few fish around the Race, but that’s pretty much it. The Cape Cod Canal, which is traditionally the best indicator of the scope of migratory fish present, has been strangely quiet so far.
Combine all this with the fact that areas to our south have not had a great spring at all with the bass, and you can’t help but ask where all the bass are.
I have fewer answers for you than I used to. With all the shifts that climate change has created in the marine environment, it’s really difficult to reach judgments about what is going on here. I’m learning that it’s probably best to sit back and see how things develop. One thing is certain: depending on decades of historical data is no longer a reasonable way to predict what comes next with these fish. My advice can only be this: expect the unexpected.
Speaking of which, scientists at the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences in Boothbay, Maine are puzzling over new data that suggest the Gulf of Maine may be experiencing another kind of unprecedented climate shock. Data from buoys indicate that over the last six months deep water temperatures in the gulf are quite a bit lower than what the long-term average has been.
At first this seems like an impossible finding. The Gulf of Maine, we’ve all been learning, is one of the fastest-warming areas of ocean on the planet. The ocean’s major warmup, which came to everyone’s attention in 2012, is about ocean surface temperatures, though.
Apparently, what’s happening at greater depths is another story. “It’s not just cold in the deep waters right now, it’s really cold. And it’s fresher,” Nick Record, a senior scientist with Bigelow Laboratory told the Bangor Daily News last week. “These are very unusual conditions, so I think there’s a lot that we can learn by watching how the year unfolds.”
Decreasing salinity in the Gulf of Maine, something that shellfishermen on Cape Cod have already taken note of, is the tip of the iceberg, so to speak. More than a decade ago, NOAA’s Ocean Acidification Program reported that researcher Zhaohui “Aleck” Wang, a chemical oceanographer at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and his team were warning that the Gulf of Maine’s growing acidity problems could be linked to melting sea ice and glaciers that feed the Labrador Sea.
So, we have cold fresh meltwater flowing with the Labrador Coastal Current down into the Gulf of Maine added to the mix affecting our fisheries. And according to NOAA’s 2013 report, fresh water from those sources is more acidic than ocean water, too.
Slowly, we are learning how significant these changes are to the marine environment. Not even the most seasoned and knowledgeable fishermen and scientists quite understand all these dynamics yet. All the more reason to expect the unexpected.
