Opinion

Don't let midwater trawl industry cloud issues of monitoring


Published: February 26, 2008

To the editor:

The midwater trawl industry has been attempting to cloud the public's vision recently, as seen in the recent letter from Dave Ellenton and Billie Schofield regarding management of the herring fishery off our coast.

First of all, let it be clear to your readers that the "conspiracy theory" story that the midwater lobby and their PR firm have been spreading about who is leading this fight for better management of the herring fishery is a bunch of nonsense. Fishermen (both commercial and recreational), whale watchers and others who work on the water have been working together since at least 2001 to address the problems the herring midwater trawl fleet was causing throughout the Gulf of Maine.

The midwater lobby would like to make your readers believe that it has been environmental groups that have led the fight because they want it to appear to be an "anti-fishing" issue and not an issue about a certain type of gear incapable of coexisting within the inshore waters off New England.

Make no mistake about it: most every fisherman in this part of the country knows the negative impact midwater gear has had, and continues to have, on inshore waters; and it has been, and continues to be, fishermen that are leading this fight. There has not been an issue that has so united the region's fishermen in years — if ever — and that includes herring fishermen, too. (The herring purse seine fleet and the herring fixed gear fishermen have been fighting alongside the tuna, lobster and groundfishermen from the start.)

Why? Because fishermen have been the ones who have seen firsthand what this fleet is capable of doing. Look at what happened to our inshore tuna fleet within a few years of the arrival of this efficient gear type in nineties. Groundfish closed areas were overwhelmed with midwater herring boats, capable of towing their large nets within inches of the bottom, devastating to the rebuilding of groundfish stocks. Groundfish fishermen have pleaded with NMFS and Pat Kurkul for years to stop the madness with midwater boats without our worries being listened to by Pat or her agency.

The fact of the matter, which the midwater lobby continues to deny, is that midwater gear can have a potentially massive impact on groundfish stocks. The gear is more than capable of being towed within inches of bottom and this was recognized clearly in the NEFMC's Herring Amendment 1.

Despite what Ellenton and Schofield say, herring spend much of their time on bottom; in fact, they often spend the whole day on bottom, only rising at night. Fishermen know this, but apparently the midwater lobby is hoping that the general public does not.

In reality, this gear is capable of fishing within inches of bottom (and often is). If it weren't, you would not have massive bycatch incidents like those a few years back where tens of thousands of pounds of baby haddock were landed by midwater trawlers.

And this gear is massive gear, towed by massive trawlers. Nets can take hundreds of thousands of pounds at a whack, and some vessels hold more than a million pounds. While the midwater lobby says a bus can fit through some parts of the net, much of the net is made of some of the smallest mesh in the world. It does not matter if a bus can pass through the outskirts of the net if the codend is made of tiny mesh. It is water pressure that makes fish swim to the funnel of the net, regardless of the mesh size in the net. And since it is towed faster than most trawl gear, there is serious potential for massive groundfish bycatch.

And while there was, as the midwater lobby points out, a rule that went in place to allow for a certain amount of bycatch ("bycatch cap"), the rule also made it legal to dump entire bags of fish so long as the fish are never brought physically onboard (FW 43). In other words, if a full net-load of haddock or cod comes up alongside, the boats can dump the whole load of fish. In even simpler terms, this is called a loophole.

And while a key part to an effective bycatch cap system is adequate monitoring, monitoring of the herring fleet is seriously deficient: since 1994, less than three percent of trips have been observed by NOAA observers. How the midwater lobby can try and spin that to be an effective amount of coverage is beyond me.

And what about funding for more observer coverage? While the midwater lobby has the audacity to assert otherwise, they have been the primary obstacle over the last year or two in getting more funding. Last year, when fishermen from this region attempted to push Congress to allocate money to NMFS specifically for herring observer coverage, some from the Midwater lobby fought to stop that from happening, and in the end, the money never came.

Now the midwater lobby is trying to appear to be fighting for more coverage in an attempt to protect their image; but fishermen and others who have been in this battle since the beginning know better, and won't be fooled. There has to be 100-percent observer coverage for an extended amount of time before any decisions are made regarding this matter. Hopefully your readers will not allow themselves to be fooled either.

It has been the fishermen of this region from all the fisheries affected by the midwater trawl fleet that have been pushing for better science from the beginning. No amount of spin from the midwater lobby will change that.

Put more observers on these boats, get better shoreside-monitoring, and get the data that is needed to manage this fleet effectively.

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Rich Burgess is a commercial groundfish and tuna fisherman out of Gloucester and a resident of Manchester.