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EveryFish

Fishing harbour, Norway

Lofoten

Arctic islands where the skrei cod come to spawn each winter and are dried on wooden racks as stockfish.

The Lofoten Islands rise from the sea off northern Norway, inside the Arctic Circle. Every winter, mature Atlantic cod called skrei swim south from the Barents Sea to spawn in the waters of the Vestfjord between the islands and the mainland. The Lofoten fishery, from about January to April, has been held for more than a thousand years, and its cod is dried into stockfish on racks across the islands.

Skrei and stockfish

Fishers in small boats catch the skrei with gillnets, longlines and handlines. The cod are headed, gutted, tied in pairs and hung on wooden racks called hjell to dry in the cold, windy air from February to June, with no salt. The dried stockfish keeps for years. Much of it is exported to Italy and Nigeria. Stockfish from Lofoten is a protected geographical name.

A cod stock that held

The north-east Arctic cod, which spawns at Lofoten, is today the world's largest cod stock, managed jointly by Norway and Russia. Unlike the cod of the Grand Banks, it recovered from low points in the 20th century under quota rules. Its size has fallen again in recent years, and quotas have been cut. Proposals to drill for oil and gas off Lofoten have been opposed by fishers and set aside for now.

Still to be written: Atlantic cod, Pollachius virens, Haddock.

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