Groundfishing debate far from over New rules seen as unfair by Maine watermen, lax by environmentalists

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DEER ISLE – Strict new groundfishing restrictions are weighing heavily on his mind, but Scott McGuire is still hopeful that he can load up his boat, the Miss Whitney, and troll the Atlantic for a catch of cod, pollock and hake come spring.

This fisherman’s future – and the prospects for the entire 400-year-old industry – are as hazy as the morning fog that rolls across Deer Isle, where McGuire is the last of his kind.

Everyone else on the island has abandoned groundfish for the full-time financial security of the lobster boom.

Soon, McGuire, who has a growing family to consider and already lobsters half the year to supplement his income, might have to join them.

“It’s changing our way of life on the whole coast of Maine,” he said last week. “I just don’t see how people can survive.”

The New England Fishery Management Council recently approved strict new rules known as Amendment 13, which are designed to protect the region’s fragile fish populations from the sort of collapse that decimated the Canadian cod fishery a few years ago.

While the council’s rules still need final approval from the National Marine Fisheries Service, the federal agency has typically deferred to the regional board.

The final groundfishing rules won’t be applied until May, but already power brokers in Washington and Augusta are rushing to judgment.

Some call the rules unfair and say that regulation will be the demise of Maine’s fishermen.

Others complain that the rules are all bluster, and say that without stricter limits on fishing, species will disappear, taking Maine’s industry with them.

Either way, New England’s debate over the future of groundfishing is far from over.

Draconian measures

Following a meeting in Massachusetts, the new rules that make up Amendment 13 passed by a vote of 13-2 – with the opposing votes coming from George LaPointe, Maine’s marine resource commissioner, and Jim Odlin, a Portland-based groundfisherman.

“I didn’t think the state of Maine was getting a fair stake,” Odlin said, calling the Amendment 13 rules “draconian measures.”

Odlin is among a growing chorus of fishermen who complain that Maine boats would be at a disadvantage under the new rules limiting the number of days a boat can fish.

Maine boats must waste full days traveling to productive offshore fishing grounds and travel time counts toward fishing time.

Competing fishermen based out of Gloucester, Mass., and other southern New England ports can reach the Georges Bank fishing grounds much more quickly. One groundfishing operation has already moved from Portland to Gloucester on just the threat of a reduction in fishing days.

Under the new system, each boat will lose about half of the fishing days it had in 2001, then gain back a portion of them as “B-days,” during which the fishing will be severely limited.

Though details of the B system haven’t been worked out, it’s expected that sensitive species and certain geographic areas will be off-limits in hopes of limiting the fishing to healthy populations, Tom Nies, an analyst for the council, said in an e-mail Wednesday.

Large-boat fishermen and environmentalists alike say that the B-days have great potential. New nets and better science about where different species of fish spend their time allow fishermen to be much more selective about their catch.

“With today’s technology, it’s very doable,” Odlin said.

McGuire, however, argues that for small-boat gillnet fishermen like himself, targeting species isn’t possible.

“You can’t say, ‘I’ll just go catch this one thing today.’ It don’t work that way,” he said. “I think it sounds like I probably won’t even be going any more.”

But granting these additional days for catching healthy species is meant to blunt the economic harm of Amendment 13, the council said.

The system also provides an economic incentive for developing innovative ways of fishing better, said Peter Shelley of the Conservation Law Foundation in Rockland.

“The success of the B-day program is 100 percent dependent on the ingenuity of the fishermen,” he said.

But if the system isn’t well-designed and enforced, B-days could do more harm than good, say environmentalists.

They say fishermen struggling to make a living might have an incentive to cheat. And if their equipment doesn’t target individual species precisely enough, the system could create regulatory bycatch – fish that must be thrown overboard after they are caught – because the law doesn’t allow fishermen to keep them.

Fishermen hate the waste of throwing dead fish back into the sea, McGuire said.

And bycatch, the term used to broadly describe anything that a fisherman didn’t intend to catch, is a major reason why New England’s groundfish are struggling in the first place, according to studies like the Pew Ocean Commissions report.

A new program that will allow fishermen to lease their unused fishing days to other boats also has received mixed reviews.

For Odlin, the new leasing program was the only positive in more than 1,000 pages of bad news. “It’s the only thing in there that can help,” he said.

But Shelley and other environmentalists fear that the council did not take the effects of leasing into account when they agreed on the number of days at sea granted by Amendment 13.

Leasing will guarantee that virtually every day at sea is used, Shelley said. However, the formulas that the council used to forecast how many fish would be caught assumed that thousands of days granted to fishermen would go unused. Unless the numbers are adjusted, he said, overfishing is assured.

Recipe for disaster

Both Shelley and Geoff Smith, program manager for The Ocean Conservancy in Portland, worry that Amendment 13 could fail in its ultimate goal: a sustainable fishery that allows struggling stocks to rebuild. Of 19 groundfish species, eight are considered overfished.

“This plan allows overfishing to continue for years and years. … Allowing overfishing to continue on some of these weak stocks is biologically very risky,” Smith said, calling the current situation “a recipe for disaster.”

Five species, including Gulf of Maine cod, would be overfished under Amendment 13, Shelley said.

Every year, fishermen, even those who follow the letter of the law, catch more fish than the council’s formulas forecast, he said.

As a result, overfishing has continued for years under the days-at-sea limits. Fishing quotas are the preferred approach to fisheries management everywhere else, Shelley said.

“This is a Rube Goldberg device that New England thought up all on its own,” he said.

Unless the system undergoes fundamental reform, overfishing will continue, environmentalists testified throughout the Amendment 13 debate.

But several suggested solutions received little attention from the council, including a plan for regional, ecosystem-based management and hard quotas for the number of fish to be caught. Instead, the council’s version of Amendment 13 drew heavily from an industry proposal.

“All this focus on days is getting us away from the number of fish we’re catching,” Smith said. “We continue to believe that the days-at-sea reduction is a blunt instrument. We don’t think it has worked for the fish or the fishermen.”

Smith and Shelley said they plan to continue efforts to “inject accountability into Amendment 13” by lobbying NMFS and advocating some quotas and increased habitat protection.

But if the final rules, expected to be approved by NMFS sometime in early 2004, don’t meet the requirements of the federal Sustainable Fisheries Act, the groundfish debate could end up back where it began: court.

The debate started in 2001, when the Conservation Law Foundation filed a successful lawsuit charging the council with allowing overfishing. A federal judge agreed, and the long, winding road to better rules began.

If either CLF or NMFS believes that the final Amendment 13 does not meet the requirements of the law, the rules again can be challenged before U.S. District Judge Gladys Kessler, who has retained jurisdiction over the matter, just in case.

Damage control

Here in Maine, Commissioner LaPointe and the Department of Marine Resources are working to analyze Amendment 13’s effect on local fishermen. It could be weeks before the full picture becomes clear.

In the meantime, a state task force on groundfishing, led by former Sen. Jill Goldthwait of Bar Harbor, has started its work on preserving the fleet and ensuring the industry’s long-term sustainability both ecologically and economically, she said.

The congressional delegation has already taken some action. U.S. Sens. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins have called for an independent economic evaluation of Amendment 13.

And Thursday, Snowe called on William Hogarth, assistant administrator of NMFS, to consider the plan’s “inequities.”

“The rules in this plan favor other states over Maine,” said Snowe in a statement. “As I see it, the New England Fishery Management Council’s plan for Amendment 13 would simply shift the industry southward.”