Urchin license process faulted Orland meeting to address issue

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MACHIASPORT – John Polk has a $50,000 boat, a love of fishing and a workday that begins at dawn and ends at dusk

What the 24-year-old fisherman does not have is a 2002 license to fish for sea urchins, the spiny green creatures he has been dragging off the ocean floor for the past two years.

Polk lost his only chance to continue working in the lucrative fishery because he bought his urchin dragger in early 2001 – 26 days too late to qualify for Maine’s one-time urchin license transfer program.

“When I went to get the paperwork for the transfer, it said my boat name had to be on the license in 2000,” Polk said. “I bought the boat on January 26, 2001.”

With no urchin license, Polk now uses his boat to drag scallops, a fishery that takes him farther offshore than the shallower subtidal waters where sea urchins feed on kelp and other seaweed.

With boat payments to make and children to support, Polk said, he can’t afford to stay home when the weather makes scalloping dangerous. He has lost the option – enjoyed by most fishermen he knows – of switching between scallops and urchins in response to market prices or weather, he said.

“I only have the one thing to do and I have to go out,” Polk said in an interview. “There’s places where you can drag urchins where the weather doesn’t bother you.”

Polk plans to make his case for an urchin license Thursday, when an advisory group set up to help Maine run its urchin management plan meets in Orland.

The Sea Urchin Zone Council is made up of divers, draggers, urchin buyers and marine biologists who made the recommendations that are the foundation of the state’s management plan.

Polk is among a number of urchin fishermen who missed last November’s one-time window to gain entry into Maine’s second most valuable commercial fishery.

Sea urchins were a $17.7 million industry in 2000, second only to lobsters in annual revenues.

Urchin roe – the gonad of the tiny invertebrate – is considered a delicacy in Japanese cuisine. The market for urchin roe was so good and the resource so abundant in the early 1990s that urchin fishermen could make as much as $100,000 a year.

Overfishing took its toll, however, and the state and the industry adopted measures to protect the urchin stocks in 1994.

As of 1995, urchin licenses were limited to fishermen who had had a license the previous year, according to Margaret Hunter, a marine scientist for the Maine Department of Marine Resources.

Now, five people must leave the fishery before one new license is issued, and applicants for a new license are subject to a lottery system.

Hunter said the 1994 law included a provision that allowed boat crews to fish under someone else’s license – so long as the name of the boat they were working on was on the license.

So, over time, fishermen began leasing their urchin dragging licenses to other fishermen, she said.

That is what Polk was doing – fishing under a license that belonged to another fisherman.

“He didn’t want to fish, so I’d give him $1,500 and pay for the renewal of the license, which is $249,” Polk said.

Deputy Marine Resources Commissioner Penn Estabrook said the practice of leasing licenses was distinctive to the urchin fishery and the Legislature closed that loophole during the last legislative session.

“This is a limited-access fishery, like elvers and lobsters,” Estabrook said. “It didn’t make sense to try to reduce the number of people in the fishery if other people could come in and use a nonactive license.”

Hunter said last year’s legislation removing that loophole included November’s one-time window for people who no longer fished to transfer their license to the person who leased it.

“If the boat was named on the license, but the person named on the license did not own the boat, that person had an opportunity to transfer the license to the boat owner,” she said. “But the boat had to be named on the 2000 license.”

Thirty people took advantage of the transfer program, Hunter said, but she has received numerous calls from many others who wanted to, but couldn’t meet the qualifications.

Polk said he heard the state was going to change the regulations as of 2002 and thought he had prepared for the transfer program. The person whose license he fished under agreed to transfer the license to him and Polk bought his boat and had the boat’s name put on the 2001 license.

“I bought the boat on January 26, 2001, rigged it and fished urchins until the end of the season.”

When Polk realized in November that he couldn’t qualify because his boat name wasn’t on the license in 2000, he and other family members contacted area legislators and DMR in an attempt to remedy the situation.

“It’s not a new license – it’s the same license he’s been using,” said Polk’s father, John. “This is a boy who works seven days a week and has a heart of gold. It just doesn’t seem fair to me.”

Estabrook said he drafted proposed changes to the current law that would have addressed Polk’s situation, but could not submit a bill because it was after deadline.

Rep. David Lemoine, the Old Orchard Beach Democrat who co-chairs the Legislature’s Joint Standing Committee on Marine Resources, said Rep. Eddie Dugay, D-Cherryfield, approached him on Polk’s predicament and he and his co-chairman, Sen. Kenneth Lemont, R-Kittery, have had several discussions with DMR on the issue.

“No quick fix seemed available without undermining the management effort we put in place last year, so Senator Lemont and I wrote to the department asking for advice from the urchin advisory council,” Lemoine said.

Estabrook said the Sea Urchin Zone Council is the body that set the 5-1 exit ratio for new licenses.

The panel will meet at 5:30 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 14, at the Orland town office, and Polk’s case is on its agenda.