Gloucester: Stellwagen crowded with boats, fish and whales

By Richard Gaines
Staff writer

June 24, 2008 05:34 am

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Second of three parts.

Between the boats, the whales, and the fish that both pursue, there's so much action out on Stellwagen Bank, especially in summer, it can be easy to forget it's a sanctuary.

But it is, has been since 1993, and the small agency within the massive National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that exists to manage it has undertaken an ambitious effort to make it a sanctuary in more than name.

Among the most critical problems is the close quarters that whales find themselves in on the bank, a short run to the south from Gloucester, to the north from Provincetown and due east from Boston.

Whale watchers, the commercial boats operated as a business and the miscellaneous recreational boaters, who can converge around a breaching whale in frightening speed, are one problem.

Another is fishermen, divided along the same lines. And another is big ships, cruisers, freighters and tankers that crisscross the boundaries of the sanctuary as quickly as possible — time being money.

Tankers will be even more frequent as the second of two new liquefied natural gas terminals, just outside the western boundary of the sanctuary, goes into regular use in the near future.

Even now, according to the agency's draft management plan and environmental assessment, the bank is both an essential, highly desirable place for humpbacks and other endangered species of whales — especially for pregnant and postpartum humpback females — and a lethal zone, too.

"Don't play in the traffic" or the equivalent should be in their songbook.

What to do about the mix of people at play and work and whales, not to mention other mammals, fishes, birds, amphibians and the lesser animals and plants of the ocean, is one of the dilemmas the agency has begun to wrestle with.

A parallel problem involves the fouling of the great wrecks on the bottom, including the remains of the Portland, which went down with 192 on board in an 1898 storm.

As the wrestling match goes on — and time in this sector of the government moves at a glacial pace — other agencies within NOAA and the federal government are certain to become involved.

For starters, however, sanctuary Superintendent Craig MacDonald said he has been charged with deciding what uses of Stellwagen are compatible. His draft plan states as a goal "an objective approach (that) incorporates the best scientific information."

It is a plan to devise a plan.

According to the draft, "The goal is to develop a framework to assess and evaluate whether existing or proposed human uses (of Stellwagen) are compatible with the sanctuary's primary objective of resource protection."

But the 32-page summary of the 368-page draft plan gives vivid testimony that many human actions on the bank are horribly wrong.

Photos of distressed, pained and abused whales make the 32-page summary of the draft difficult to look at. The photos also have elicited complaints that the work, presented as hard science, was tinged with more than a bit of advocacy.

In Portsmouth, N.H., on June 16, at the sixth of eight public meetings held to present the research and management plan to the public and gather input, and in Portland, Maine, earlier in the month in a presentation to the New England Fisheries Management Council, MacDonald heard complaints about bias in the selection of photos used to illustrate the big document and the brochure.

One shows a humpback whale foul-hooked with a monofilament line of a half dozen plastic squid. It was used to illustrate the whale entanglement section.

The tackle type is used to troll for giant bluefin tuna.

In Portland, Dave Preble runs charters from Rhode Island and serves on the council that advises NOAA on fishery management. Preble said he found the hooked whale photo "highly emotional. The use of the picture is slanted," he said, expressing a view that was echoed two weeks later in Portsmouth.

Not backing down, MacDonald said it was indisputable that tuna fishermen were using whales and whale-watch boats "to locate the forage fish" that attract their prey along with the whales, thus creating the close proximity that makes the outcome in the photo predictable over time.

Mason Weinrich, executive director of Gloucester's Whale Center for New England, said such fouling is sufficiently common that the illustration of it was fair photojournalism.

"The report is not inflammatory," Weinrich said. "It happens with increasing frequency."

He gave the same endorsement to another photo, of a humpback whale literally surrounded by three recreational fishing boats and a sailboat.

Not disputed were notices in the draft management report that 10 percent of world vessel strikes of whales occurs in Stellwagen, that the operating speeds of commercial whale-watch boats in the sanctuary doubled between the periods 1980-1987 and 1998-2004, and that noncompliance with regional whale-watch guidelines was 78 percent.

Paul Frontierro, founder-owner of Seven Seas Whale Watch, scoffed at the idea implicit in the agency's presentation, that commercial whale watchers put whales in danger.

"We are an easy target," he said. "Whales are accustomed to (the boats). They are acclimated to whale watchers."

Still, Frontierro agreed that the boats have been moving too fast.

"They are more lax on exit speed," he said.

"Are lobster fishing and gill net fishing compatible with whale conservation programs?" the draft plan asks. "Is diving compatible with shipwreck preservation? Is trawling compatible with sea floor habitat protection?"

The list goes on.

These are the gritty issues that must be addressed eventually.

At this stage, the next five-year action plan will merely hope to figure out how to figure all this out.

"No one knows who decides compatibility," said MacDonald in an interview. "There are no criteria or standards. We're the first to look at how to do this."

Richard Gaines can be reached at graines@gloucestertimes.com.

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