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Commercial Fisheries News
Volume 36 Number 2
October 2009
ME adopts scallop plan, ponders next step
AUGUSTA, ME – After two years of often difficult debate between fishermen and state regulators, the Maine Department of Marine Resources (DMR) Advisory Council gave final approval to a complex area closure plan for the state’s scallop fishery on Sept. 16.
The plan allows for a 70-day season that begins Dec. 15 and closes on March 24, 2010. Fishing is prohibited on all Sundays and Mondays and on the Fridays of Dec. 25 and Jan. 1.
The core of the plan, which is designed to rebuild the state’s sea scallop resource, is the closure of nine areas along the coast to all scallop fishing for three years.
Starting on Dec. 15, it will be unlawful for anyone to fish for, take, or possess scallops taken by any method in specifically defined closure zones within these general areas: Casco Bay; Damariscotta/Sheepscot; Muncongus/Western Penobscot; Eastern Penobscot; Blue Hill Harbor/Morgans Bay; Mount Desert; Gouldsboro Bay; Jonesport/Machias; and the St. Croix River.
In addition, the plan establishes a two-year closure within the Whiting Bay and Denny’s Bay area that will apply to both scallop and urchin harvesting. This unique area closure went into effect on Sept. 21.
The new plan does include a transiting exception, which allows any vessel possessing scallops to steam across the closed areas, but only if the vessel has all fishing gear, including dredges and drags, securely stowed.
More information, including specific details on where the closures are located within the areas, is available on the DMR web site at <www.maine.gov/dmr> or from DMR Resource Management Coordinator Togue Brawn. You can call her at (207) 624-6558 or e-mail her at <togue.brawn@maine.gov>.
Long process
The long and contentious process that produced the plan involved last year’s extremely controversial DMR closure proposal for a 52-day season with massive area closures, 17 meetings between the DMR and industry members, and many back-and-forth discussions with the DMR Scallop Advisory Council, according to Brawn.
So, in some ways, the quiet approval by the DMR Advisory Council was not a surprise.
“All of the questions have been answered,” Brawn said.
But no one believes the advisory council’s unanimous vote means anyone is happy about it.
Noting that opinions of both the scallop advisory council and the industry varied widely on both the closures and the season, Brawn said, “This was definitely a compromise.”
She added that fishermen also wanted substantially smaller closure areas.
“But we needed them to be larger for enforcement, management, and stock rebuilding purposes,” she said.
However, Brawn was quick to acknowledge that the plan that finally emerged from the intense industry involvement was an improvement over the DMR’s original approach.
“The closure areas we have now are better,” she said. “There has been more industry input and there is more industry buy-in.”
Needed to be done
DMR Scallop Advisory Council Chairman Dana Temple of Crescent Bay LLC in Cape Elizabeth was keenly aware of the opposition some fishermen had to the final closure plan.
“This is very difficult to accept, especially for the fishermen who fish day in and day out and know that, if they could just get the chance to go, they would catch something,” he said.
But declining signs of new scallops growing to fishable size, combined with drastically declining landings over the last 20 years, convinced many others that steps had to be taken to protect the remaining resource.
“The first thing we felt strong about was that something needed to be done. The Maine scallop fishery is a shadow of what it used to be,” Temple said. “It doesn’t last as long as it used to and it doesn’t generate nearly the amount of money it once did.”
According to the DMR, scallop landings declined from a peak of nearly 4 million pounds in 1980-1981 to less than 400,000 pounds in 2001. In 2008, landings were just 137,000 pounds.
The DMR began conducting dredge surveys of the resource in 2002, and results from those surveys also have shown a significant decline in abundance in most coastal areas.
On the bright side, Temple said that, thanks to the input of fishermen on the local level, he and others believe the areas protected by the closures have serious potential for producing a lot of scallops in the future.
“The fishermen were good enough to tell us where these areas were, and the DMR surveys confirmed that,” he said. “We have every reason to believe that whatever scallops settle there will stay there and reproduce.”
Next steps
The approval of the plan is not the end of the Maine scallop plan development process – far from it. Both Brawn and Temple said the next step is figuring out how to responsibly reopen the closed areas three years from now so that fishermen will best benefit from their sacrifices.
Brawn explained that the DMR is not planning to manage scallops through zones like it does with lobsters. That’s in part because some scallopers travel from area to area to fish and the zone system isn’t set up to accommodate that “mobile” component of the fishery.
Instead, the DMR will be working with advisers to see if strategies such as the federal rotational area management program, which involves closing areas to protect concentrations of juvenile scallops until they grow to marketable size, can be applied to the Maine fishery.
“Now we’re going to have to work even harder,” Brawn said. “We have to figure this out. The trick will be defining the term ‘area management’ in a way that makes sense for the Maine scallop fishery.”
Temple said he is counting on industry participation in the next phase of the scallop management process.
“Fishermen didn’t show up at all these meetings because they didn’t care. They do,” he said. “They’re thinking that times are changing and we’ve got this great fishery. We have to find a way to preserve it for ourselves and our kids.”
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