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Commercial Fisheries News
Volume 34 Number 11
July 2007
Safety Alert: Sink rope hang downs
The Maine Lobstermen’s Association (MLA) knows what it is talking about when it says, “The Maine lobster industry can’t live without floating groundlines.”
The MLA is fighting an anticipated ban in parts of its state waters designed to prevent whale entanglements.
Massachusetts now requires all lobstermen fishing in state waters to use sinking groundlines, even inshore on the hard bottom that whales rarely, if ever, inhabit. Lobstermen here have already experienced more hang downs, trap losses, and wear and tear on their lobster gear, boat, and themselves than ever before.
Even worse, the floating groundline ban has created a new safety hazard – the risk of capsizing during swelly or choppy sea states, especially for the one-man, small-to-medium-sized lobster boats equipped with hydraulic pot haulers.
I am a Pigeon Cove harbor lobsterman and nearly flipped my 20' lobster boat. It happened one May morning with a good sea running while I was working a five-pot trawl with sinking groundline set on rocky bottom off of Rockport, MA.
My pot hauler kept on pulling in groundline as I emptied and re-baited the first two traps of that string away from the hauling station. Suddenly, the hauler came upon a section of groundline that was hung down solid, and the only thing that wanted to give was the boat. It would have kept heeling over in the big seas if I hadn’t lunged at the hauler’s control valve at the last second.
As it was, the lobster and gas tanks all rolled to one side, and I was left shaking like a leaf in a northwester, totally exasperated by the foolishness of the floating groundline ban inshore where I never – and I stress, never – have had a whale entanglement in my 49 years of lobstering there.
Peter K. Prybot
Pigeon Cove lobsterman Peter Prybot is a field correspondent for Commercial Fisheries News.
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