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Growing up in the 1940s-50s, we used capelin as a bait for fishing cod, used it for fertilizer for our gardens, salted and dried them to eat in the winter , dried them for food for our pigs. Never a shortage of capelin would be around for weeks, when one group came ashore to spawn when finished another one moved in.
The cod got scarce, fisher people were having a problem feeding their families, plant workers were getting less work, gillnet fisher people went from 6.5-7-inch, mesh nets to 5.25-5.5-inch cod trap, fisher people went from the traditional cod trap to the Japanese trap all small mesh and a roof where no one could escape. We were catching fish that was once left in the water to reproduce and grow to a more marketable size.
The first year they caught 50,000 mt ton, I passed them that all while returning from Makkovik to my hometown, the next year they caught 1000 mt, they caught them all. This was the end of the cod on the Labrador Coast. In 1990, there wasn’t 500 lbs caught in Makkovik, there was a moratorium on the Labrador two years before it was shut down in 1992, the capelin stocks were at an all time low, the cod had all disappeared.
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