July 25, 2018 — A hint of optimism creeps into Darius Kasprzak’s voice as he pilots his boat, the Marona, out of the harbor in Kodiak on a calm day in early May.
“We’re in the morning, we’re at the start of the flood tide,” Kasprzak said. “This is where you want to be.”
On the screen of Kasprzak’s echo sounder he sees a dense cluster of dots on the ocean bottom.
“Let’s drop on it,” Kasprzak said. “That looks pretty darn good.”
Kasprzak kills the engine, leaps onto the deck and lowers one of his fishing lines into the water.
And then… nothing.
For years, Alaska fishermen like Kasprzak have worried that climate change would threaten their livelihoods. Now, it has. The cod population in the Gulf of Alaska is at its lowest level on record. The culprit is a warm water mass called “the blob“ that churned in the Pacific Ocean between 2013 and 2017.