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Commercial Fisheries News
Volume 33 Number 9
May 2006
Whiting, hakes up for limited access, TACs
MYSTIC, CT - One of the last open-access fisheries in the region is about to come under increased restriction.
The New England Fishery Management Council is developing a new amendment to the groundfish plan to bring three small-mesh species into the limited-access fold. The species are:
• Whiting, Merluccius bilinearis, also known as silver hake;
• Red hake, Urophycis chuss, also known as ling, especially among recreational fishermen; and
• Offshore hake, Merluccius albidus.
At its April 4-5 meeting here, the council voted to reaffirm its intent to use the March 25, 2003 control date for limiting access to “small-mesh multispecies” – the collective name for whiting, red hake, and offshore hake.
And it also approved numerous items for a scoping document, which will be used to gather preliminary industry input about the fishery. Feedback received at scoping will be used to develop alternatives for a more official public hearing document.
The council intends to address three issues in the amendment:
• Limited access;
• Hard total allowable catch (TAC) limits to maintain fishing mortality at appropriate levels; and
• “Dedicated access privileges” through sectors, community quotas, harvesting cooperatives, or other mechanisms.
For years now, many fishermen with significant stakes in the fishery have urged the council to develop a small-mesh limited-access program, and last November, the council agreed to put whiting on its 2006 workload priority list.
At the April meeting, the council took its first look at a draft scoping document and then voted to add several items to the package, the two most significant being discards and the juvenile whiting fishery.
On the first point, the council agreed to solicit input about the possibility of allocating amounts of whiting and red hake to cover discards in other fisheries.
“If we don’t address the discard issue, it will be hard for me to justify limited entry,” said Massachusetts council member David Pierce.
Second, the council wanted to seek advice about possible restrictions on the catch and landing of juvenile whiting “to increase yield and maintain fishing mortality at acceptable levels.”
Vito Calomo, executive director of the Massachusetts Fisheries Recovery Commission, said flatly, “I think you should stop the juvenile fishery for the Spanish market.”
Several council members expressed concern over the juvenile fishery, and New Hampshire council member David Goethel, who chairs the whiting committee, supported adding the issue to the list.
But he warned, “We had long and exhaustive discussions about this topic in Amendment 12 and we never figured out how to resolve this problem.”
History in fishery
The council first developed a limited-access program for small-mesh multispecies in the late 1990s as part of Amendment 12. The amendment was implemented in April 2000, but the limited-access portion was disapproved after the National Marine Fisheries Service determined it needed more details.
This time, the council seems committed to the idea and is citing limited access as the primary reason for initiating the amendment.
The move has strong supporters but is also generating some concern.
Maggie Raymond of Associated Fisheries of Maine expressed her group’s long-standing worry that New England fishermen might be locked out of the whiting fishery.
“Our concern is if we do limited access, fishermen along the coast of Maine, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts won’t have any qualification history,” she said. “We want to try to preserve some mechanism for fishermen from those coasts to have access to the resource.”
Amendments 5 and 7 to the groundfish plan greatly restricted small-mesh fishing in New England. Although a few exemptions have since been implemented, the whiting fishery in the Gulf of Maine outside of the Cultivator Shoal has been largely nonexistent for roughly a decade.”
Whiting vs. offshore hake
Jim O’Malley, executive director ofthe East Coast Fisheries Federation, urged the council to better define the difference between whiting and offshore hake.
The inshore Merluccius bilinearis whiting fishery off New Jersey, New York, and Southern New England began plummeting two decades ago.
However, landings statistics, especially from New York, Rhode Island, and Connecticut, don’t adequately reflect the trend, possibly because some boats fished farther from home to catch offshore hake, Merluccius albidus, and it was all lumped together as “whiting.” Furthermore, increased landings from the Cultivator Shoal might have masked a decline in the inshore Mid-Atlantic fishery.
“If you’re going to put this fishery back into the condition it was, you’ll need to look at both species,” said O’Malley.
Council Chairman Frank Blount of Rhode Island also reminded the council to solicit input from the recreational fishery, which the council readily agreed to do.
“There’s a huge recreational fishery for red hake,” he said.
Janice M. Plante
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