Ebb & Flow: Herring a hit again for trawl fishermen

The bait trucks are rolling into and out of Gloucester again — and the herring fishermen here are no longer dragging their feet.

"This is heaven for the midwater trawl fishermen," said Peter Mullen, father of Gloucester's first long-term herring mid-water trawl fishery. He started it in the late 1980s with his old Western Venture.

The western spawning area of herring zone 1A — the inner half of the Gulf of Maine — re-opened to midwater trawling around Oct. 15, and the fishing there can't get much better, especially for the local crewmen and captains on five Gloucester-based pair trawlers and two visiting ones working it here from Rockland, Maine.

The herring are plentiful, and right around the corner from Gloucester; they're of good quality, there's still quota left, and diesel has dropped from around $4 per gallon to $2 per gallon levels.

Mullen and the crew members on his midwater trawlers — the 109-foot Osprey and 165-foot Western Venture, along with the owners and crewmen of Western Sea Fishing Co.'s pair trawlers — the 149-foot sister ships Challenger and Endeavour and the 140-foot Voyager, experienced the hell side of herring fishing much of the last two summers, when a new rule for Area 1A stopped midwater trawling there and made it largely seine-only from June through September.

This is where the catchable herring are that time of year. A spawning closure in the western Gulf of Maine further prevents midwater trawling there until mid-October. The boats and crews basically spent much of the last two summers either idled at the dock or burning a lot of expensive fuel fruitlessly looking for herring elsewhere, especially on Georges Bank.

Trying to seine with the Western Venture the last two summers only added to Mullen's and the crew's frustrations. He had the Western Venture specifically built as a European-style combination midwater trawler/seiner so it could seine in 1A summers and midwater trawl the rest of the year. The men finally succeeded with seining at the very end of this year's purse-seine-only season. Mullen also owns the 78-foot seiner Western Wave, which has successfully seined herring off Maine for years.

Midwater trawl fishermen have lately become the most-bashed fishery group in the Northeast, and they're not even running for political office. Many recreational and commercial fishermen and environmentalists fear their midwater trawling, which involves either a single boat or a pair towing a large net that can catch herring and mackerel at any depth within the water column. They say it is too efficient — that it undermines an area's food chain and biodiversity by catching up feed fish, driving away other targeted fish species and sometimes netting large by-catches, which get discarded.

The midwater trawl fishermen say their fishing method is primarily a clean one, and most other fisheries have by-catch.

"When fishermen fight fishermen, fishermen lose every time, and that goes across the board," said Mullen.

The rules continue to tighten for the midwater trawlers, even though the herring stock is not overfished. That species is primarily regulated by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission. After successfully pushing for the Area 1A seine-only during the summer, opponents are now pressing herring regulators to close more inshore areas to midwater trawlers and require 100 percent observer coverage on them.

A new regulation designed to stretch out what's left of Area 1A's annual 45,000-metric-ton quota and keep the supply of lobster bait flowing, allows fishermen to only land their herring between midnight Monday and midnight Wednesday. Vessels can fish before the unloading period and fill up, but can't return to port before then.

"It's a pain ... to have to wait at sea. At least let us come back to the dock to wait," said Lenny Young, skipper of the Voyager.

"There's a lot of fish," said Danny McCallig, captain of the Challenger. "These are the same herring they catch off Maine in the summer, and they are just moving south. They'll end up on Middlebank and off of the backside of the Cape. They'll keep going south."

The Rockland, Maine-based pair trawler team, Sunlight and Starlight, have been lately working out of Gloucester and "smokin' the herring" nearby.

"Sometimes you have to tow (the mid-water trawl) four to five hours and other times just 45 minutes to get a trip," said Jody Martin from Gloucester. He skippers the approximately 116-foot Sunlight.

The approximately 79-foot Starlight, captained by Ned Lakeman from Maine, got a brand new 1,000-plus horsepower main engine last spring.

"We can tow the net 4 mph now compared to 3 mph before," Martin added. Horsepower catches herring and mackerel. The midwater trawler fishermen find their quarry with sonars, and cod-end sensors in the net tell them how much fish is in the net. The catches are pumped aboard and stored below deck in refrigerated seawater tanks.

Vessels will bring in what their food and bait markets want, which often is in the hundreds of thousands of pounds of fish a trip.

The Starlight and Sunlight switch to seining from June through September.

"We have seine and trawl guys aboard. The guys would rather be trawling. Now, I don't have to come out on deck," said Martin. In contrast to seining, the boat does most of the pair trawling work, and the crew can rest in between tows.

Bill Hoffman, an aquatic and marine biologist for the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries, has been coordinating the state's herring sampling program.

"The current herring are of good quality. They average about 10 inches in length, and every fish sampled was spawned out. They're not feedy fish, and they're firm," he reports. Feedy fish soften very quickly after being caught.

The truckers who pick up herring at different ports, especially in Maine and Massachusetts, and deliver these to their or others' bait companies or processors, are glad to see herring being landed again in Gloucester

"The boats just couldn't catch enough fish in September. We (the truckers) didn't do anything that month," said Jamie Brown, a driver from Union, Maine, who trucks for Purse Line Inc. in Sebasco, Maine. Big trucks like his can each carry about 40,000 pounds of herring in either a series of vats on a flatbed or in one big tank.

Rick Libro and Myron LaPine, who run Cape Seafoods Inc.'s, bait division at the Jodrey State Fish Pier, are also happy to see the fresh herring coming in again as are their many lobstermen customers. The current quality herring last longer in their traps as bait than the smaller, softer fish which sometimes are the only bait available.

"October has been a busy month for Cape Seafoods Inc." said LaPine.

Its suppliers, the Challenger, Endeavour and Voyager, found herring on Georges Bank in early October before fishing closer to shore in the western Gulf of Maine. Peter Mullen's Osprey and Western Venture did the same thing, and his Western Venture is finally doing at times what it was built for — catching and carrying more than 1 million pounds of herring a trip.

Once 1A's quota has been netted, the midwater trawlers will follow the herring south in other zones with quota. Some vessels will stay on the herring, while others will target mackerel south of Cape Cod from late December through the spring.

Jack Flaherty, a Gloucester crewman on the Osprey, took a practical approach.

At least as of now, he said "I can tell my two college-age daughters there's going to be a Christmas."

Peter K. Prybot writes about fishing and related issues for the Times.

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