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Commercial Fisheries News
Volume 33 Number 11
July 2006
DMF to propose new groundfish, fluke plans
PLYMOUTH, MA - The Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries (DMF) is preparing to propose comprehensive management plans for state waters groundfish and summer flounder fisheries later this summer.
During the June 9 meeting of the Massachusetts Marine Fisheries Commission, DMF Director Paul Diodati said a groundfish plan was needed to deal with several issues, including: a public petition seeking to ban gillnetting in state waters; changes in federal groundfish rules; and an evolving commitment by the commission and DMF to take steps to preserve the inshore commercial fishery.
“Our goal is not only to continue our fisheries but to see that they become institutionalized,” Diodati said.
DMF staff met with the commission’s groundfish subcommittee recently to discuss future policy for regulating state waters multispecies fisheries fished by individuals without federal multispecies permits.
In a memo to the full commission, Diodati said meeting participants agreed that these fisheries “have an important cultural role, perpetuate the Massachusetts heritage that its coastal communities are known for, and offer significant employment opportunity for many of the state’s citizens.”
Objectives
Diodati made it clear that the state plan would not be inconsistent with the goals and objectives of federal fishery management plans in effect in adjacent waters.
“Quite the contrary,” he wrote. “Fisheries in state waters, especially those that have recently come under increased scrutiny by federal regulators, must be accordingly sized and responsibly controlled.”
The management objectives of the state waters groundfish plan will be to:
Contribute to the goals of federal and interstate programs;
Make fresh-caught seafood available to consumers;
Consider the safety of fishermen;
Avoid high-bycatch fisheries;
“Maintain the tradition of open-access participation” to both preserve the fishery and support young people who may want to take up fishing as a career; and
“Favor small-scale operations striving to conduct diverse fishing activities.”
GEs
Diodati said the new groundfish endorsement (GE) has made it possible to develop such a plan by identifying the universe of state-waters-only fishermen and separating out latent effort.
The GE is available only to fishermen who don’t have federal groundfish permits and who held a state commercial fishing permit as of Nov. 4, 2004 and renewed it in 2005.
At the commission meeting, Diodati said a total of 887 GEs had been issued to date for the 2006 fishing year. That compared to the 7,436 permit holders who were authorized to catch and sell up to 800 pounds of cod daily in 2005.
The GE requirement also prevents fishermen with federal groundfish permits from fishing in state waters even if they had done so for years in the past.
Although Diodati has tried to explain that the action was necessary to protect what is perhaps the last significant concentration of spawning codfish in the Gulf of Maine, several fishermen, furious over being kicked out of the state waters fishery, were circulating a petition in June demanding the director be removed.
As for the gillnet prohibition petition, Diodati said he had been meeting with several gillnetters to come up with an alternative proposal that would allow gillnetting to continue at some level. That proposal will go to public hearing this summer.
Summer flounder
DMF is also putting together a plan to change its fluke fishery management strategy. The proposal, which will go out to public hearing in the summer, will modify fluke trip limits, amend limited-entry rules, and establish gear-specific seasonal quota shares.
This plan proposal is in response to what Diodati characterized as “dueling petitions” from the public. He explained that DMF and the commission had received four or five different petitions demanding different actions, including:
An increase in the commercial hook-and-line trip limit from 200 pounds to 300 pounds;
Limits on part-time access to the fishery;
Creation of a commercial hook-and-line permit transfer program; and
Restoration of the hook-and-line fishery to open-access status like the striped bass fishery.
Contentious history
The fluke fishery has been contentious since the early 1990s when commercial hook catches began making a serious dent in the state’s dwindling commercial quota.
Mobile gear fishermen argued that their landings were what had earned Massachusetts approximately 6.8% of the coastwide quota in the first place, and it was unfair for the state to permit continued open access to the hook fishery and allow the catching power of that sector to expand.
In 1999, DMF adopted limited entry for the commercial fluke fishery in response to “increasing permit numbers, accelerated season closures, and concern by mobile gear fishermen about growth in summertime landings by hook fishermen,” DMF said.
As a result, the number of permits issued annually to the hook sector has declined somewhat through attrition. In 2000, DMF issued 1,268 permits compared to 1,085 in 2005. The agency issued 307 mobile gear fluke permits in 2005.
New plan proposal
Diodati and DMF Deputy Director Dan McKiernan said that new, more reliable, and real-time catch information collection technologies now made it possible to track landings by both mobile gear and hook fishermen. And that made it possible to divide the summer quota between the two groups.
Currently, 30% of the state quota is reserved for the winter mobile gear fishery and the remaining 70% is set aside for the summer mobile gear and commercial hook fisheries.
Diodati said he had weighed all the petitions, technology developments, and industry concerns and was considering proposing the following:
Maintaining the 30% set-aside for the winter fishery;
Dividing the remaining 70% quota share between mobile and hook gear sectors based on each group’s landings since 2000;
Increasing the daily trip limit to 300 pounds for those hook fishermen who can prove that their annual harvest and sales have equaled or exceeded 1,000 pounds for four out of the past five years;
Requiring those hook fishermen who qualify for the 300-pound trip limit to purchase a commercial boat permit in order to take the higher trip limit;
Lowering the trip limit to 75 pounds for those hook fishermen who cannot meet the threshold of 1,000 pounds of commercial landings in four out of the last five years; and
Restoring open access to the hook fishery, but limit new entrants to 75 pounds per day.
DMF did not yet have the landings information to determine what the split of the summer quota would be between the mobile gear and hook fishermen. The 2006 commercial fluke quota for Massachusetts is 932,000 pounds.
Criticism
Mobile gear fisherman Ron Borjeson was in the audience during the June 9 meeting and was not happy with the proposals. He told the commission he had asked DMF in 1991 to restrict the issuance of fluke hook permits.
“In the interim, this hook fishery has blossomed and we lose quota all the time and you’re going to have open access on a fixed quota? Where’s the equity there?” he asked.
Diodati and McKiernan tried to explain that fishermen who obtained the open-access permit would be restricted to a 75-pound trip limit and that all of their landings would come out of the hook-only portion of the summer quota.
“The open access would be part of the hand-gear quota,” Diodati said.
But commission member John Pappalardo, policy analyst for the Cape Cod Commercial Hook Fishermen’s Association, said that the idea of open access in the hook fishery didn’t sit well with him.
“I’d have to see good rationale for opening up the hand-gear permits,” he said.
Diodati replied that restoring open access to the hook fishery would be in lieu of creating a hook-and-line permit transfer program that would benefit only the “cottage industry” that has developed to handle limited-access permit transfers.
Enforcement report
There was some compliance trouble with the state’s three-year ban on the take of river herring once the stripers started running this spring and recreational fishermen went on the prowl for bait.
Environmental Law Enforcement Maj. Kathleen Dolan characterized the herring situation on Cape Cod as “not bad at all.” Regular patrols turned up few violations and the takes observed by Native American tribe members had been “minimal.”
Most of the violations were along the Charles, Mystic, and Merrimack Rivers, and a few poachers became so hostile that environmental police officers had to call in local police to lock them up.
Striped bass season
The commercial striped bass season was set to begin on Wednesday, July 12 under the same rules that were in effect last year:
• The 2006 quota is 1,140,807 pounds;
• Fishing is allowed on Sundays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays;
• The minimum size is 34”; and
• The commercial possession limit is 30 fish Tuesdays through Thursdays and five fish on Sundays.
Diodati said that these rules seemed to work for the fishery in 2005 when prices paid to fishermen went up.
DMF has had some calls about a substitute bait for herring called “black salty,” which is a species of goldfish. While they are prohibited for use as bait in freshwater because they are an invasive, aggressive, non-native fish that carry diseases and deplete aquatic vegetation, DMF was investigating whether the black salty could be used in salt water, where it is unlikely to live long enough to cause environmental problems.
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