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Commercial Fisheries News
Volume 32 Number 12
July 2005
Eric Hesse, Committed to fishing, Cape Cod
HARWICH PORT, MA - At the end of the second week in June, Eric Hesse was down at Saquatucket Harbor on Nantucket Sound starting to get his boat, the 34' Tenacious, ready for bluefin tuna season.
Earlier that morning, a crane truck had set up the tuna tower. So, Hesse and his brother, Jon, who is also his mate, were tightening the bolts in the deck and on top of the pilothouse to secure the structure and to hook up control cables.
Hesse has been harpooning tuna since 1991 and admitted he’s pretty good at it. But on this particular overcast, warm, and breezy day, he had a lot more than bluefin on his mind.
A member of the Cape Cod Commercial Hook Fishermen’s Association and the Georges Bank Cod Hook Sector, Hesse has been steaming the Tenacious 110 miles out to the Northern Edge to catch groundfish for the last two months.
“Some people say we’re nuts, but there’s nothing else,” Hesse said. “That’s what it takes at this point.”
And it’s part of the reason he finds it so hard to accept that the New England Fishery Management Council’s groundfish committee is even talking about possibly reducing the commercial haddock minimum size from 19" to 17".
Hesse compared such an action to past liberalizations of the Gulf of Maine cod trip limit that he believes were made “to keep multispecies boats fishing.”
“That’s what a lot of us feel killed the cod fishery here,” he said. “I’m going to be 41 this summer. I’m probably one of the younger people in the hook fishery down here, and most of us don’t feel that we’re going to see cod come back.”
Haddock concerns
Despite reports of record numbers of young haddock showing up in the 2003 and 2004 bottom trawl surveys, Hesse is convinced that lowering the haddock minimum size is a bad idea for a lot of reasons.
“One, are there really that many juvenile haddock out there? Do you trust that number? Two, we don’t have a good idea of what the bycatch is. Three, I don’t think you can make a conservation argument for catching a fish before it spawns,” he said.
“Four, this industry is on the ropes. Perpetuating management practices that have led to its demise doesn’t make any sense. Five is the market. It’s a lot of work for not much yield. And to catch any amount of weight, the numbers will be ridiculously high. So how long will it take us to go through, whatever, 90 million fish?”
The list is a reflection of Hesse’s approach to fishing and fisheries management issues – serious and meticulously thought out.
Observer questions
Another management issue on his mind is the deployment of federal fisheries observers. He recently wrote to National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) Northeast Regional Administrator Pat Kurkul pointing out that an observer had been assigned to his 34' boat for five out of six separate day trips to the Western US/Canada area.
Obviously, it’s easier on observers to go out for one long day than on a five- to 10-day trip, but Hesse questioned whether such a distribution of observer coverage could actually achieve NMFS’ goals for the observer program.
Instead of having a target of placing observers on 50 percent of groundfish trips, he suggested changing the target to 50 percent of “days-at-sea usage.”
“Capturing more of the expended effort will increase our understanding of the different fisheries, including discard rates and interactions with stocks of concern,” he wrote.
Native Cape Codder
Hesse grew up on Cape Cod, but he laughed at the suggestion that he must have come from a fishing family.
“My dad was a salesman for Proctor and Gamble and he was the worst fisherman,” Hesse said, recalling a few entertaining but unsuccessful recreational fishing jaunts as a kid.
Today, he and his wife, Lee Ann, have two sons – Cooper, 8, and Zachary, 9 – and Hesse confesses that he, too, tends not to catch a whole lot when he takes the boys out for a little fun.
“They can’t believe I fish for a living,” he laughs.
Of his family, he said, “I’ve been fortunate to be surrounded by people supportive of this choice of lifestyle. My parents have always been supportive of anything (Jon and I) have tried to do with a passion. My wife is very tolerant of all the time away. I’ve missed a lot, including the birth of my second son!”
Getting started
Hesse’s real fishing connection began in 1984 when he started working for local legendary striped bass fisherman “Cappy” Joe Eldredge. In 1986, he wound up tuna fishing aboard the Sea Baby while a student at Bates College in Maine.
“I missed a lot of rugby, but we had a great year. We never had to leave Cape Cod Bay,” he recalled.
After graduating from Bates, Hesse took his tuna earnings and spent a year in Australia. In 1989, he ran boats in Antarctica for a National Science Foundation program.
When he finally “ran out of adventures,” he went back to school and eventually earned a master’s degree in environmental engineering with a focus on water issues from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
“I loved the Cape and felt like that would be something in demand here,” he said.
Still fishing
But still he went fishing and eventually bought the Tenacious. The South Shore 34 is powered by a 430 horsepower Volvo TAMD 74 CDC, which, like everything else on the boat, is kept in tiptop condition.
“It’s a lot of horsepower, which is a function of the tuna fishery,” Hesse called from below deck where he was changing the oil.
He and Jon are partners in a second South Shore model, a 30-footer they built in 2001 so they could continue fishing in the general category once the harpoon category was closed.
In what turned out to be a somewhat ironic choice, the brothers named the boat Mattanza, the Sicilian word for the ancient bluefin tuna harvesting ritual that’s been going on in the Mediterranean for thousands of years.
“It’s been anything but a Mattanza on this boat,” Hesse remarked.
Bluefin strategy
Like everyone else in the bluefin fishery, Hesse has been hit hard by the redistribution of the big fish over the last few years.
“I think success in the tuna fishery is tied to opportunity,” he said. “We probably only had 25 to 30 chances last year (to stick a fish) and not all of them were good ones.”
Hesse said that, for years, his strategy for the fishery was to go looking for the fish. But that’s changing.
“I always had in my head that those fish were out there somewhere. So the first nice day after June 1, it was our job to go out and find where. More times than not we found them,” he said.
“But the last couple of years, that philosophy has cost us, both in spirit and financially,” he continued. “Now they’re out there, but maybe not in US waters. I think this year it may be better to rely on information (from other sources).”
Like everyone else, Hesse said he has his own opinion of what’s going on in the bluefin fishery. Yet, while he believes midwater trawling on herring stocks in the Gulf of Maine may be a “big part” of the story, “it’s not the whole story.”
“In 2001, people had seen fish in May. We caught one on June 1 and nine on June 2. I think the harpoon category was closed around the 24th of June. Now we’ve had a few extremes the other way,” he observed. “Maybe climate has something to do with it. There’s more movement along the Continental Shelf and less inshore. Canada’s had record early closures. That suggests a shift in the population, not a drastic decline.”
Sector holds promise
While Hesse hasn’t given up hope that bluefin will once again be big, over the long term, he said he has more confidence in groundfish as his staple fishery.
“Forming the hook sector is one of the only things I’ve ever done from an advocacy perspective that had an immediate benefit – it got rid of the (cod) trip limit,” he said.
“We went out for 3,000 pounds when it was profitable and stayed home when it wasn’t,” he explained. “The other guys were stuck with a 1,000-pound limit.”
And he believes haddock will be a big part of that future, too, if managers and the industry give the little ones the chance to grow up.
“Chances are if you’ve made it this far, you can hang on a couple more years,” he said. “The aggregate fishery will be worth so much more if we can wait.”
Lorelei Stevens
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