| Holy Mackerel, Where’d You Go? | |
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Summer in Atlantic Canada can be an unreliable thing, emerging reluctantly from the damp cold of spring. But a sure sign of summer’s arrival is the sudden presence of Atlantic mackerel, which first appear as the trees are becoming flush with leaves in May, and depart with the coming of cool temperatures in the fall, schooling in enormous numbers on their migration up and down the coast. Along the way, they’re often plucked from the water, with some ending up in cases on a wharf in downtown Yarmouth, a small town on the southern tip of Nova Scotia, where in July 2021 volunteers for Seafest are unloading those cases in preparation for one of the fishing festival’s most incongruously popular events: the 12th-annual mackerel toss. |
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As he watches preparations from behind the line of sawhorses meant to contain spectators, Dave Warner, Seafest’s former president, explains that mackerel are a logical choice for the event. They’re a local fish that often turns up on fishing lines and in frying pans in the community, but they can also be experienced as something else entirely: a slippery, hand-sized projectile for a competitor to chuck in batches of 15 as their teammate attempts to catch the fish in a plastic bucket held in outstretched arms. As the competition begins, pairs line up at either end of the wharf, two teams at a time; the first toss of the event unspools a scream from the seagulls hovering overhead, and soon, the wharf is littered with the results of throws too short or too wide, as the fish fly out of people’s grasp.
“It’s not like throwing beanbags,” Warner says with a chuckle |
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