COMMERCE
Subscriber Services
Classified Ads
Subscribe
Advertise
NEWS
This Month
Editorial
Letters
F/V Safety
Past Issues
ABOUT US
Contact Us
Latest Issue
Subscribe
History
MORE CONTENT
CFN Archives
Links
Each month exclusively in the PRINT edition of CFN
Along the Coast
Ask the Lobster Doc
Bearin’s
Classifieds
Coming Events
Editorial
Enforcement Report
FISH SAFE
Fleet Additions
Letters
Lobster Market Report
New Boats
News Catch
Quahog Market Report
|
Commercial Fisheries News
Volume 36 Number 7
March 2009
2009 scallop year underway; gen cat IFQs on hold
GLOUCESTER, MA – Limited-access scallopers began the 2009 fishing year on March 1 knowing exactly what they were up against in terms of fishing time.
Full-time vessels started out with 37 open-area days for the year and five access-area trips – one in Closed Area II, three in the Elephant Trunk Area, and one in Delmarva – with an 18,000-pound possession limit. Part-time vessels were allocated 15 open-area days and two access-area trips among the three available areas, though not more than one trip could be fished in either Closed Area II or Delmarva.
General category (GC) vessels, however, were still in a state of transition, and many fishermen remained uncertain about their future under Amendment 11 to the federal scallop plan.
The amendment converted the former open-access, 400-pound-per-day scallop fleet to a limited-access fleet with individual fishing quotas (IFQs).
But vessels had to qualify for the new IFQ permit and, at press time, the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) was still going through the lengthy qualification and appeal process.
With a significant amount of work left to do, NMFS announced on Feb. 17 that it was delaying implementation of the IFQ program for a year – until March 1, 2010 – in order to allow enough time to finish issuing permits and thoroughly hear all appeals. According to officials, only then would the agency know the full universe of final qualifiers – and how much IFQ to allocate to individual GC permit holders.
Quarterly quotas
Meanwhile, NMFS said the 2009 limited-access GC fishery will operate under a hard total allowable catch (TAC) of 4,590,024 pounds allocated as follows:
Quarter I, March through May: 35% of the TAC, which is 1,606,508 pounds;
Quarter II, June through August: 40% of the TAC, which is 1,836,010 pounds;
Quarter III, September through November: 15% of the TAC, which is 688,504 pounds; and
Quarter IV, December through February: 10% of the TAC, which is 459,002 pounds.
Who can fish
According to NMFS, any vessel that already has been issued an IFQ permit is qualified to fish under the 2009 quarterly quotas.
In addition, vessel owners who were denied a permit but appealed the decision have been issued a letter of authorization (LOA), which allows them to fish under the quarterly quotas pending the outcome of the appeal. The possession limit is 400 pounds per trip, and vessels cannot land scallops more than once per calendar day.
NMFS said all scallop landings by both IFQ permit holders and those with LOAs will be counted against the quarterly TACs, including scallops harvested in access areas. Allocations of extra poundage to help defray observer costs will not be deducted from the quarterly TACs.
If a quarterly TAC is reached, then all vessels with an IFQ permit or LOA will be prohibited from “possessing, retaining, or landing scallops for the remainder of the quarter,” said NMFS.
Limited-access general category vessels electing to fish in the Northern Gulf of Maine Management Area are limited to 200 pounds of scallop meats per day. The TAC for this area is 70,000 pounds.
Vessels issued an “incidental” permit are limited to possessing 40 pounds of scallops.
Worries abound
Amendment 11 was developed by the New England Fishery Management Council to cap general category landings. It has proven to be extremely controversial, however, because numerous fishermen who used to possess open-access general category permits did not qualify for an IFQ permit.
To qualify, vessels must have had a federal scallop permit during the qualification period and landed 1,000 pounds of scallop meats during any single fishing year between 2000 and 2003 or during the 2004 fishing year between March 1 through Nov. 1.
In addition to the many disenfranchised people who didn’t qualify for an IFQ permit at all, another problem has surfaced. Those who did qualify are discovering that there will be a big problem with their initial IFQ allocations.
“No one will have enough allocation to run a viable business,” Tom Dempsey of the Cape Cod Commercial Hook Fishermen’s Association (CCCHFA) told the New England council during its Feb. 9-11 meeting.
“All we’re interested in is making this fishery work,” he said. “As it is now, it can’t function. We need to make a functional quota system for general category IFQ fishermen.”
Association members asked the council to include two provisions in Amendment 15 to help make the GC IFQ fishery more workable.
First, Dempsey asked the council to allow fishermen to form a GC sector so the group could acquire scallop quota to secure “healthy fishing businesses” for sector members. This proposal had been brought up at previous meetings of the council’s scallop committee.
Second, the group asked the council to remove the permit-splitting prohibition on GC IFQ permits so the scallop permit could be transferred independently from all other permits.
“We’re trying to keep this a small-boat fishery, but I need to buy more quota to stay viable,” said Chatham, MA fisherman Tom Reilly.
Fisherman Bob Maxwell added, “We need to be utilizing multiple permits.”
The fishermen explained that permit splitting is needed because buying a full package of permits would be cost prohibitive.
New Hampshire council member David Goethel vehemently opposed the permit-splitting proposition.
“When you split off that scallop permit, the rest of those permits will go off somewhere else,” he said. “It’s not mortality neutral. We’ll have an explosion of effort. It could be fluke, it could be monkfish, it could be herring.”
NMFS representative Hannah Goodale expressed reservations as well.
“This would be a big change,” she said. “All of the limited-access permits in the region are bundled.”
Permit splitting vote
But the council declined to quash further analysis of the idea. Instead, it voted 9-to-5 to allow the measure to go forward, along with consideration of permit splitting for the Northern Gulf of Maine GC permit.
The council also voted that the CCCHFA’s sector proposal could go forward but without any of the “exemptions” that were part of the association’s initial request.
The council will review a wide range of Amendment 15 alternatives at its April meeting after its plan development team conducts further analysis of many of the proposals.
Janice M. Plante
Back to story list
|
|
Tell us what you think.
