Danish Gold

Twenty Families Strive to Preserve a Thousand Years
of Beach-based Fishing

by Paul Molyneaux

“The real gold of Thorupstrand,” say the people of this community, are the kids who come after school to process the day’s catch. Many fishermen say that without the help of their young people, the venture would not be possible. Paul Molyneaux photo

In a concrete building at the head of the beach in Thorupstrand, Denmark, a forklift sets plastic boxes of still flipping and gasping flounder, in front of a gang of teen-agers. Knives ready, the young men and women deftly gut and toss the fish into a steel hopper, sorting the largest plaice and occasional pollock or cusk. Another forklift empties the hopper onto a sorting table, where the older workers slide the fish, 25 kilos (about 55 pounds) at a time, into iced boxes and label them. In a flurry of activity that lasts less than an hour, one boat’s catch disappears into a cooler, and the cutters, some as young as 14, step outside to await the next load.

The familiar smells of seafood being iced and boxed in packing houses have disappeared from many American ports built on the fishing industry. In places like Key West, Fla.; Monterey, Calif., and Rockland, Maine, economic forces have changed the face of the waterfronts. But in Thorupstrand, home of a 1,000-year-old beach-based fleet, 20 fishing families have found a way to preserve their way of life.

In 2006, when socioeconomic engineering, in the form of individual transferable quota management, threatened Thorupstrand’s way of life, the village fishermen organized themselves into a quota buying company and used the market to secure their rights to their fishing stocks. They enlisted their children, “the gold of Thorupstrand,” as they call them, to keep the shoreside business humming.

On this bright September day, incoming boats can be spotted far out on Skagerrak, the 80-mile-wide strait separating Denmark from Norway. Other boats idle just off the beach, their bluff bowed, bright blue hulls rising and falling on gentle swells that break on a sandbar. A D-9 bulldozer clatters down the water’s edge, and from the foredeck of a small gillnetter that has been run up onto the bar, a man tosses a weighted line ashore. The bulldozer operator jumps down and hooks the light line to a heavy cable that the man on the boat winches out through the surf. He hooks the cable to a pennant connected low on his boat’s bow, and signals the bulldozer operator who begins backing the big machine up the beach.

The boat straightens up on the taut cable and moves toward the sand; it heels a bit to port as it comes across the bar, then straightens up in the gully and heels again as the dozer drags it onto the beach, the boat’s keel plowing a deep furrow into the soft sand. As soon as the vessel stops, a crowd of locals, plastic bags in hand, gathers round it calling out their orders. They press Danish kroner into the hand of a fisherman on deck as he passes back their bags heavy with flounder.

The bulldozer unhooks and rumbles down the beach toward a 53-foot Danish seiner, or flyshooter, that has driven itself aground on the bar, its skipper and crew ready for the ride ashore. Over and over the bulldozer drags boats up the beach until 20-odd vessels — most of them clinker-built in the Viking tradition — lie canted on the sand, their vulnerable hulls protected on the bottom with nylon chafing gear.

After a bulldozer dragged this gillnetter ashore, the crew sold much of the day’s catch, mostly flounder, over the side to locals, the rest will be boxed and shipped to larger cities and towns in Denmark. Paul Molyneaux photo

Asking directions to Thomas Højrup’s house, I’m guided toward a long white building that gives the impression of a ship with double chimneys and long rows of small windows. I knock, and a man opens the door. “Ah, you are the American,” he says, donning his coat. “I’m afraid I must go to Copenhagen right away, my flight is leaving in a few minutes. Everything is fine. You stay here and we can talk when I get back.”

Højrup, the man I have come to interview about how the small-scale fisheries of Thorupstrand have dealt with an ITQ management regime that has drained fishing rights from other small communities, slides past me and jumps into his car. I can still hear him shifting gears as I step inside. His wife and children welcome me into their home; they’re used to this, they say, and his son shows me upstairs to a room. Varnished wood floors and long galleries of windows reinforce the feeling of being aboard a boat. A large model of a sailing ship sits on a table, and a ladder leads up to a cupola with a view over the beached boats, and out across Skagerrak, hazy blue in the late afternoon.

At 5 the next morning, with the sun still hundreds of miles away and Thorupstrand rolling steadily toward it, I meet Kern Kristensen and his crewman, Jørgen Josefsen, on the beach. The running lights of a couple of boats can be seen heading offshore, and while the task of bringing boats ashore seems simple, the mystery of how to get 20 tons of wood and steel off the beach unfolds slowly.

Kristensen’s English is jovial, but limited — my Danish non-existent — so I watch as he takes a shackle attached by a leader to a heavy cable, and slips it between two flanges on the aft end of the A-20’s substantial keel. He drops a pin down through the flanges fastening the shackle and tugs lightly on a line of twine running from the pin up over the transom; it’s apparent this line will be used to pull the pin loose.

The heavy cable leads offshore, through a massive mooring Kristensen tells me — “big” — and back through a large iron fairlead to a winch rooted deeply in a concrete shack well above the tide. We climb aboard, and Kristensen radios the winch operator. In moments the cable tightens and disappears into the sand, the boat starts with a jerk and then slowly slides down the beach as if by some invisible force. Once over the bar, the cable goes slack. Kristensen starts the engine while Josefsen slips the pin free. Turning the boat north, Kristensen steers into the wind, riding over the growing swells.

In the dark wheelhouse a narrow beam of light above the chart table illuminates Kristensen’s hands, holding dividers and a pencil, charting a course to an area of flat bottom, ideal for his gear. “How do you call? We call, flyshoot, flyshooting,” Kristensen says with a big smile and pats me on the back. There won’t be much in the way of Q&A out here; it’s all about watching the art of flyshooting.

Josefsen drops an anchor over the side with a thick green weighted line attached and tosses a marker buoy while Kristensen powers ahead. The sun crests the horizon and bathes the boat and gear in golden orange light, casting bouncing shadows as the line unwinds off the tall narrow drum of the starboard winch. After about half a mile, Kristensen makes his first turn, roughly 90 degrees to starboard, and after another half mile he and Josefsen set the net, letting loose the starboard wing and body. At the wheel, Kristensen powers ahead, stretching out the port wing, while Josefsen attaches it to another heavy green line from the port side winch. Kristensen turns to starboard again and runs a course parallel to his first, but in the opposite direction. After an-other half mile he turns back to his starting point and picks up the starboard line, having laid out a giant square of line with the net catty-corner to the boat.

As soon as Josefsen hooks the line back to the starboard winch they begin the process of hauling in. At 2 knots, the boat rides over the long swells with both winches turning slowly, drawing the long ropes across bottom, gently herding fish as the wings begin to close. As Kristensen increases speed, the trapped fish slide deeper into the net. The groundlines tighten and snap as the weight of the full net comes on them.

The winches raise the wing ends up. They hook them to the net reel and begin to wind them aboard, shaking gilled fish out of the meshes until the bulging cod end nears the surface, and Kristensen turns to bring it along-side. Hoisted from a boom high on the mast the bag swings aboard amidships, and hangs heavily above a big aluminum culling box. Josefsen pops the pucker string open and fish spill into the box; he ties the cod end back up and tosses it over to allow the fish still in the net to fill it again. After three splits, they sort the catch by size and species, kicking the still lively juveniles overboard.

Leaving Josefsen to finish sorting, Kristensen winds the empty net aboard and heads the boat for home. “No good,” he tells me, wobbling his hand to indicate the rocking of the boat. Kristensen has leased his quota from the community guild, so he does not have to race for the fish.

Other skippers have made the same choice, and when we arrive back at the beach several boats lay at water’s edge waiting to be hauled out. When his turn comes, Kristensen bounces his boat across the bar and steams up the gully parallel to the shore until he comes even with the bulldozer and then turns sharp to port and drives ashore as far as he can. Josefsen tosses the weighted line, and soon the bulldozer pulls the boat high up the beach. A forklift makes its way across the sand to offload the fish.

In spite of their efforts, Thorupstrand’s fishermen remain caught in a quota system that favors the highly capitalized fleet. Declining fish prices, combined with rising interest payments and quota prices driven up by speculators, forced some fishermen to quit, reducing the number of boats from 20 in 2007 to 13 in 2011. As Højrup sees it, the quota system represents the end game for venture capitalists trying to gain control of fisheries resources, and the end of those for whom fishing is primarily a way of life.

“The reason why it is necessary to carry out an enclosure of the commons at sea — a privatization by quota — is so that the life modes of venture capitalists, managers and wage earners can squeeze out the life modes of self-employed fishermen from their home waters,” says Højrup. “And that is the core cultural conflict in the struggle for sustainability in the coastal communities of Europe, and beyond.”

Paul Molyneaux, veteran Maine fisherman and author of The Doryman’s Reflection, and Swimming in Circles: Aquaculture and the End of Wild Oceans, is investigating promising fisheries initiatives.

THE FACTS

Thorupstrand Flyshooting

Thorupstrand is one of the longest occupied fishing villages in Europe, its proximity to the fishing grounds more than made up lack of a harbor back when a few men could drag a wooden sailboat up the beach. Now a large bulldozer drags boats of over 50 tons up onto the beach after every day’s fishing. A cable anchored offshore and looped through a winch on shore is used to haul the boats back into the water. Paul Molyneaux photo

• Boats: Most of the Thorupstrand boats are around 43 feet and 20 tons. Half a dozen boats are 33 feet and under.

• Crew size: Two or three.

• Gear: The smaller boats use gillnets, and the larger boats use Danish seines and gillnets.

• Fishing area: Out to 35 miles, primarily in Skagerrak.

• Season: Cod in winter and plaice in summer.

• Capital investment: For boat and gear the average is $1 million U.S.

• Permits/quota: The Thorupstrand community owns about $8 million worth of quota, with individuals holding $0.5 to $2 million worth. Thirteen boats are fishing at present, with three idle awaiting new ownership.

• Landings: The Thorupstrand fleet lands around 400 tons of cod per year, and 1,300 tons of plaice.

• Prices: Plaice runs around $1.10 per pound, cod fetches $2.

• Markets: About half is exported to the EU, the remainder is sold locally.

Maintaining Access

Over dinner, Højrup explains what happened here. He frames ITQs as a tool enabling the heavily subsidized industrial fleet owners to leverage the resource away from traditional smaller-scale fishermen.

“Because fishing with small- and medium-sized fisherman-owned boats is the most competitive form of fishing for the fresh fish market, a confiscation of the common right to catch has become the ultimate means to facilitate the capitalist alternative,” says Højrup.

When Denmark put its inshore fisheries under quota management in 2006, and a few fishermen began shifting quota away from Thorupstrand, it served as a warning, according to Højrup. “After that, 20 families pooled together their resources to keep the village alive,” he says. “These people formed an action group of two elder and experienced fishers and several young fishermen with the aim of forming a common quota company.”

In 2007, these families formed the Thorupstrand Guild of Inshore Fishermen. Reflecting the share system used on the boats, each member would have an equal vote in common decisions. The 20 families who started the company financed the project through entrance fees and €20 million ($30 million) in bank loans. After one year of buying, they had enough quota to ensure access for the next generation of fishermen.

The guild regulates quota rental fees annually to service its debt; each member pays rent for the quota he wants in a given year. If a fisherman wants less than he has access to, the rest is distributed to members who want more. “The guild now functions as the common quota company of the community,” Højrup says. “It has [replaced] the state as the institution which is securing fishing people’s access to their local fishery resources. Without access you cannot be a fisherman.”