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Part IV: Too many fishermen, too few fish By Paul Davis On an early spring morning aboard the Tiger Shark, U.S. Coast Guard Cmdr. Grant Thomas peers through black binoculars at a cloud of gulls 200 yards away. Out there, beneath the frenzied wings, he spots a black-hulled fishing boat. After a minute, Thomas reads the boat’s name: Traveler. “Good morning, captain,” says Thomas over the radio, as the 87-foot cutter glides beneath the Newport Bridge, moving closer to the boat. He gets the captain’s name, date of birth and registration number, then asks: Why are you on the water today? “I’m looking for a few squid, butterfish and I guess a few fluke and flounder,” responds Captain Matthew Kearns. “Do you have a commercial safety sticker?” “No, we’re not a part of that program,” says the captain, referring to a voluntary safety inspection program. Thomas mulls over the situation. He checks the Traveler’s records. When last inspected, roughly six months ago, it had three violations. “We’re going to send over a small boat with a boarding team,” Thomas tells Kearns. During a 20-minute inspection Petty Officers David Bourbeau and Glenn Browning check the bilge for water, a safety measure, and make sure the catch is legal, a regulatory matter. The ship passes inspection and the captain is cooperative. That isn’t always so. Reeling from high fuel costs, declining catches and tightening regulations, fishermen don’t always welcome enforcement officers. “If it’s a bad day and they’re getting under way late, nobody wants to be bothered,” says Lt. Ryan Hamel, a Coast Guard commanding officer on Cape Cod. The complex laws change so frequently that both fishermen and enforcers have trouble keeping up. Coast Guard officers must attend a two-week course before they can board a commercial fishing boat. The regulations can change from month to month, often in response to changing fish-stock assessments, and the officers have to keep up with 17 different fishery management plans, says Hamel. In state waters, enforcement is the job of 35 officers with the state Department of Environmental Management who divide their time among policing parks, enforcing hunting regulations, Homeland Security and monitoring local waters. When on marine patrol, they carry a gun, a gold badge and a three-ring binder full of regulations. Back in 1984, the officers had to contend with two or three fishery plans, says Kurt Blanchard, deputy chief of the DEM’s law-enforcement branch. The regulations were on one page. “Now they’re 56 pages, and there are 22 plans.” The combination of complex federal and state plans makes it tough for fishermen to comply. Says April Valliere, the DEM’s principal marine fisheries biologist, “Anyone out there fishing at any hour of the day is probably in violation of something.” Fishermen also complain that the laws are overbearing. Before they leave port, they must tell the National Marine Fisheries Service where they’re going and how long they think they’ll be gone. Their boats carry tracking devices, making it possible for regulators to know exactly where they are at any given time, and captains must keep fishing logs that list everything they catch. If they want to bring a few fish home for dinner, they must tell the government that, too. CENTURIES AGO, no one regulated the sea. New England fishermen headed for Georges Bank, or closer waters, and filled their holds with cod, flounder, haddock and lobsters. In the 1800s, fish processing plants opened in Newport and elsewhere. “Healthy fisheries have existed from the end of the last ice age up until the last few decades,” says David Preble, a member of the Rhode Island Marine Fisheries Council and the New England Fishery Management Council. Just 30 years ago, “there were still respectable scientists who said it was impossible to cause the extinction of an ocean species through overfishing.” That perception changed when, in the 1960s and 1970s, international fishing fleets began to scour New England’s waters, sometimes 15 to 20 miles offshore. The 400-foot fish factories, from the Soviet Union, Japan and elsewhere, dragged nets the size of a football field and emptied local fishing grounds. Robbed of their catches, New England fishermen lobbied Congress to push the foreign fleets back 200 miles from the shore. Congress agreed, but went further. Under the 1976 Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act, Congress began to regulate the U.S. fishing industry. “The fishermen wanted a one-sentence law that said no foreigners can fish within a 200-mile limit,” says Dennis Nixon, a marine science professor at the University of Rhode Island. “They got a 77-page law instead.” Congress, concerned about the nation’s aging fleet, also backed a round of low-interest boat loans. Local banks peddled them to fishermen. With the foreign fleet gone, the fish returned. The surge in fish, coupled with investment breaks and easy loans, sparked a fishing boom. “Dentists and doctors got into the business,” says Valliere. One loan officer, who operated out a Point Judith coffee shop, approved so many loans he earned the nickname “the boat fairy.” “It was really hard not to make money,” says Nixon, a former fisherman. “You had guys dropping out of high school making $50,000 to $60,000 a year as deck hands.” Fishermen also got better at what they did, largely through new technology, including high-speed diesel engines, lightweight nylon nets, radar and sonar and hydraulic systems for hauling nets. “Now, it became possible to fish every piece of the ocean bottom,” says Preble. “By the mid 1980s we were overfishing the area as hard as the Russians.” IN AN EFFORT to deal with overfishing, the 1976 Magnuson Act established eight separate fishery councils, including the Mid-Atlantic and New England Fishery Management Councils, which both govern local fishermen who work in waters three or more miles from shore. The regional councils included fishermen who fought against too-aggressive conservation plans. And state regulators tended to side with the fishermen to keep the peace, says Richard B. Allen, a Wakefield-based fisherman and consultant. “They didn’t want people calling the governor and complaining,” he says. “It was a fairly non-functional system for a long time.” In June 1991, the Conservation Law Foundation filed a landmark lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Commerce to force an end to overfishing of New England’s bottom-dwelling groundfish, including cod, haddock and flounder. In response, regulators in l994 promised to reduce the region’s fishing effort by 50 percent over five years. They limited the number of fishing permits and increased the mesh sizes by a half inch. When scientists reported that the cod stock in Georges Bank had collapsed, regulators took emergency action and closed parts of the area, along with some waters in Southern New England. Not satisfied with the results, four environmental groups sued the regulators in federal court in Washington, D.C., in 2000. A year later, a federal district court ruled that the National Marine Fisheries Service had violated the federal Sustainable Fisheries Act of 1996 by failing to rebuild fish populations. The agency, the court said, had failed to prohibit the continued overfishing of cod and other groundfish. The lawsuit forced the New England Fishery Management Council to create tougher rules. Out of that effort came a new plan called Amendment 13, which created management plans for more than a dozen species. Fishermen, and some regulators, say the measures aren’t always effective and, in some cases, are backfiring. Restricted from catching one species, more fishermen are going after fish they never sought before, threatening new stocks. Facing daily quotas, fishermen are throwing mind-boggling amounts of catch overboard to avoid fines. “I kill 10 times more fish through legal discards than I did 10 years ago,” says Point Judith fisherman Brian Loftes. “I’m killing fish because of their conservation laws. The stocks are rebuilding like crazy. But we can’t catch them.” The existing regulations “are slowly strangling the industry without doing what we want them to do,” says Preble, the fisherman-turned-regulator. He says a fresh approach is needed. Many experts agree on one thing: fishing is inherently difficult to control. “Using a net for groundfish is like harvesting potatoes with a bulldozer,” says URI’s Nixon. “When you pull up that net, it’s like Christmas morning under the tree. You get a mix of fish that all school together,” he says. With that mix, fishermen end up with both marketable, legal fish and species they have to toss back, which can lead to waste, he says. “You can’t deal with it just through mesh sizes or by closing areas,” he says. “It’s very hard to come up with a plan to deal with all of this.” MEANWHILE, THE SITUATION is worsening, say some scientists, conservationists and regulators. In March 2006, the Marine Fish Conservation Network — a coalition of more than 100 local and national fishing, conservation, and scientific organizations — issued a report that said nearly half of New England’s fish stocks are in jeopardy. The New England approach to fisheries management “is a failure. It’s not working for the fish and it’s not working for the fishermen,” said Roger Fleming, a lawyer at the Conservation Law Foundation, a founding member of the Conservation Network. A year later, not much has improved, says Peter Shelley, senior advocate for the Foundation. “Cod continues to be in the tank and there’s no recovery trend, despite a management plan.” The yellowtail flounder stock is also weak, he says. The problem isn’t just local — it’s global. Last year, researchers in Nova Scotia said the world’s commercially harvested fish populations could collapse by 2048 if overfishing continues. Researchers, who analyzed both historical records and 40-year-old data, said that marine biodiversity — the variety of ocean fish, shellfish, birds, plants and micro-organisms — had declined dramatically. Almost a third of the world’s marine species were already in collapse, they said. Regulators point to some success stories. Striped bass are returning and the haddock population is rebuilding, they say. “Progress is being made,” says Teri Frady, a spokeswoman for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Northeast office. “We didn’t start working on this until 1994. But as far as groundfish populations go, they are better off than when we started.” Rhode Island fishermen pursue 48 state and federally managed fish in 62 stocks. (Some species have more than one stock: Georges Bank haddock and Gulf of Maine haddock, for example.) More than half of the stocks — scup, butterfish and yellowtail flounder among them — are considered already overfished. Nearly another third — black sea bass, Gulf of Maine cod and Southern New England American lobster — are being fished at a rate higher than the federal government wants, she says. Not everyone agrees. Some fishermen argue that scientists are sampling the wrong areas in the ocean, or are measuring fish at the wrong time, and therefore are coming to the wrong conclusions. Those who make a living on the sea, they say, understand better how fish move, feed and spawn. And they are finding plenty of fish, they say. Some groundfish, such as fluke, are plentiful, despite new catch limits, they say. “There’s got to be a happy medium,” says Heidi Smith, who plans to fish with her father off Block Island this week. Smith says she plans to make a video of the groundfish her father pulls up. “There’s so much fish he throws back” after quickly reach-ing his daily limit, she says. THIS SUMMER, the New England Fishery Management Council met to consider new long-term approaches to conserve fish, while giving fishermen greater control over how that goal is accomplished. Under the different proposals, fishermen would shed daily catch limits and restrictions on their time at sea. But they’d also be responsible for the health of the stock, which would discourage them from overfishing and ruining their livelihoods. They plan to accomplish this in different ways. One would set annual catch limits for groups of fishermen. Working together, they would determine when and how to fish and when to stand back if the population is shrinking. Two groups are using the approach in Massachusetts, and more than a dozen others have applied to the New England Fishery Management Council for similar plans. Another approach would be to assign values or points to different species and give individual fishermen a maximum limit. They would be free to choose which species to catch, but going after threatened species would cost them more points than pursuing healthy species. Such plans are likely to be complicated, and controversial, too. But no matter which plan — or combination — is adopted, overfishing must stop immediately, say experts like Allen and Preble. “The idea that you can fish more as a stock rebuilds is a mistaken one,” says Allen. If the stock isn’t given time to rebound, it’s like drawing down on the principal, not the interest, he says. “Technically, it’s simple. You’ve got to let the stock grow. You can’t catch more than the stock produces.” Fishermen may be freed somewhat from the government’s clutches but no one is predicting that they’ll be satisfied. “How do you protect the fish and also protect the fisherman? These things are hard to reconcile. It’s enormously complex,” says Preble. “There are not enough fish and too many fishermen. The regulations try to recover the fisheries and not impact the fishermen, and it just can’t be done.”
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