Miss Sonya captain: Fishing 'harder than it's got to be'

By Richard Gaines
Staff writer

Tue, May 13 2008

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Until it sank Tuesday morning returning from Stellwagen Bank, the two-day fishing trip of the dragger Miss Sonya and its two-man crew proceeded routinely, according to federal fishery regulators.

That is to say Capt. Matteo Ferrara and his longtime mate Joe Lucido quickly found and hauled up the two-day limit of cod — 1,600 pounds — and yellowtail flounder — 500 pounds — then spent the rest of the trip — Monday night and early Tuesday morning — in a time warp, wasting fuel on a fool's errand.

It was what they had to do to keep the trip legal.

Having caught the two-day limit of fish in less than one day of fishing, they had to keep fishing without catching cod or yellowtail — or at least stay at sea — so that the tally at the auction would show no more than 800 pounds of cod and 250 pounds of yellowtail per day for the two days out of port.

The financial penalties for overcatching are extreme and can include the loss of permit. Fishing boats typically try to catch a bit less than the maximum allowed in case their rough, running estimate of the weight of their catch is a little off.

The time warp which engulfed the entire trip was the federal rule that doubles their fishing time on Stellwagen Bank — to inhibit the take from the fertile, convenient fishing grounds. A day of fishing on Stellwagen is charged as two against the days at sea allowed on each boat's permit.

The Gulf of Maine multi-species groundfish permits allow 48 days of fishing, and sell on the open market for between $100,000 and $150,000 for boats about the size of the Miss Sonya. The 36-year-old Miss Sonya has a steel hull that measures 43 feet.

The rule effectively halves the value of a permit. "It makes fishing less efficient, and has been disastrous to the owners," said Jackie Odell, executive director of the Northeast Seafood Coalition, which includes boat owners and shoreside businesses from Maine to New York.

According to Vito Giacalone, a fisherman, businessman and lobbyist, the "trip differential" rule also encourages fishing in more extreme conditions when the catch is found and discourages fishing trips anywhere but where the fish are known to be concentrated.

The regulatory approach is a variation on the "effort control system" that has been in place since the early 1980s in varying incarnations under the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act, which established the 200-mile limit to U.S. waters to bar foreign factory ships that had been pillaging the great fishing banks since the middle of the last century.

Ferrara said the permit belonging to the boat's owner, Corrado Buccheri, had 14 or 15 days left on it when he spent about $3,000 to put 1,000 gallons of diesel fuel in the Miss Sonya before noon Monday, and set out for Stellwagen with Lucido to catch cod and yellowtail.

The opportunity to fish the nearby bank ends Monday — when that area closes for the year — and most local fishermen, especially those with small boats, consider it the most desirable fishery because of the quantity and quality of the fishing and convenience of location.

Once it closes, the boats will be forced farther out to the northeast and southeast sectors of the Gulf of Maine to find the same top-choice cod and yellowtail, whose stocks have been recovering nicely.

So efficient was the Stellwagen fishing Monday that Ferrara said he and Lucido had two-days' limit of cod and yellowtail in the hold in a couple of hours.

Then, with the fishing clock running at double time, they began cruising around Stellwagen, which begins about 20 miles southeast of Gloucester, as Ferrara checked the fishfinder for haddock.

Ferrara, a veteran fisherman who had operated the Miss Sonya exclusively for Buccheri most of this year, said he can usually read "different colors" in the fishfinder to tell haddock from cod despite their close lineage.

"There was nothing," said Ferrara. He wasn't surprised at this because haddock aren't expected in the area until a bit later in the season — after Stellwagen Bank is closed to fishermen.

Rolling closures, designed to protect vulnerable stocks, is another side of "effort control" — forcing fishermen to fish inefficiently.

The catch limit part of effort control impelled the crew of the Miss Sonya to keep fishing overnight without any real expectation of catching. The two fishermen were kept at sea longer than they needed to be, as the price for being too good at catching the previous day.

Before dawn Tuesday morning, with nothing but cod and yellowtail showing on the fishfinder, and a miniature nor'easter whipping up, Ferrara decided enough was enough.

After fishing and intentionally not catching for half a day, the old dragger was turned toward home. It got to within a couple of miles of the Dog Bar breakwater, began to take on water, turned over and sank just minutes after the Coast Guard rescued Ferrara and Lucido.

"The life of the fisherman is dangerous, we know this," said Ferrara, 52, who for more than 30 years has fished out of Gloucester and in the past few years has fished out of Alaska in the summer. "Recently, it has gotten much harder than it's got to be."

Richard Gaines can be contacted at rgaines@gluicestertimes.com.

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