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 35 Number 1
September 2007
NMFS to mandate sinking groundlines in 2008
AUGUSTA, ME – Many fishermen have finally had a chance to take their first look at new whale protection measures and, especially in the state of Maine, they were upset by what they saw.
The National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) officially released the Final Environmental Impact Statement (FEIS) on planned changes to the Atlantic Large Whale Take Reduction Plan on Aug. 17.
The document is a good indication of what will be in the final rule due out on Oct. 1, and the big change is a broad-based – meaning from Maine to Florida – ban on floating groundlines that the agency intends to implement in a little over a year.
In response to overwhelming feedback from lobstermen when all this last went out for public comment in 2005, the agency decided to set up “exemption areas” along the coast of Maine and in Long Island Sound.
Inside these areas, lobstermen will be allowed to continue to use floating groundlines, which are considered essential by those who work on hard rocky bottom to prevent potentially dangerous gear hang downs and trap loss.
But outside of the exemption area, the floating groundline ban will apply, even to lobstermen who only shift their gear outside for a few months or weeks each year.
NMFS defined the Maine exemption area using a line proposed by the Maine Department of Marine Resources (DMR) that was two years ago generally supported by the state’s lobster industry.
But that doesn’t mean anyone in Maine is happy about it.
“Basically, the line skirts inside state waters and breaks up lobstermen’s fishing patterns,” said Patrice McCarron, executive director of the Maine Lobstermen’s Association (MLA). “Everyone agrees the line needs to be pushed out.”
Impossible situation
Depending on where they fish, Maine lobstermen view the requirement to use sinking groundline as anything from a crippling expense to a death knell for their business and way of life. From Penobscot Bay to the east, it’s almost universally the latter.
“It won’t work. On rocky bottom compounded by the tide, you cannot do it,” said John Drouin of Cutler, chairman of the Zone A Lobster Council. “Some guys work 100% on hard bottom. If everything stays the way it is and this goes into effect in 2008, for all intents and purposes we’ll be out of business.”
Where Drouin fishes, the exemption line runs 1-3/4 to 2 miles off Cutler harbor. If the only option fishermen have is to move their traps inside that line, he predicted the end result would be overcrowding, difficult if not impossible working conditions, and way too much pressure on the lobster resource.
If lobstermen switch to sinking groundlines to comply with the new rules, Drouin said the result would be hang downs, gear parted off and lost to the fishermen, and more ghost traps in the water.
“Right now, we retrieve 90% of the gear we lose, but with sink rope for groundline, we’re never going to get that gear back,” he said. “It’s not fair to say we approved of that exemption line. It was the only option we had.”
How it happened
Following an Aug. 20 special meeting in Augusta of the DMR Lobster Advisory Council, the MLA, Downeast Lobstermen’s Association, Southern Maine Lobstermen’s Association, and the Maine Offshore Lobstermen’s Association, DMR Commissioner George Lapointe said the response from industry could not have been clearer.
“The fishermen are dismayed with the line,” he said.
DMR Deputy Commissioner Terry Stockwell pointed out that NMFS’s draft environmental impact statement (DEIS) contained no exemption area at all and that the DMR had supported DEIS Alternative 5, which had no expanded sinking groundline requirement but relied instead on expanded Seasonal Area Management (SAM) programs. SAMs require modified gear use, such as sinking groundlines and weak links, but only in areas and at times where whales are known to be especially likely to congregate.
However, the environmental community was so adamantly opposed to allowing the continued use of floating groundlines that everyone involved in formulating the Maine position supported the creation of an exemption line as a back-up plan, Stockwell said.
He added that the line allows 71% of Maine waters to be exempt from the sinking groundline rule and that no one in the DMR or industry is ready to accept it as a done deal.
“We’re looking at it as a starting point, not as a line in the sand,” he said.
If there is anything positive in the FEIS, it may be that NMFS actually took industry recommendations into account in that it intends to phase out the SAM and DAM requirements. It also did not adopt new and potentially onerous gear marking requirements.
More time
NMFS is accepting public comment on the FEIS until Sept. 17. Lapointe said he believed it was important for DMR and industry representatives to make a joint trip to Washington before the end of the comment period to stress the importance of the issue with NMFS and members of Maine’s congressional delegation.
One of the goals will be to convince the agency to extend implementation of the sinking groundline requirement from on or about Oct. 1, 2008 to June 2010.
Said McCarron, “2008 is too soon to comply and October is a horrible time of year for people to switch gear since they’re fishing full-throttle.”
But the other reason an extension would be helpful is that it will give the DMR and industry time to justify a redrawing of the exemption area line.
“The line we got was based on 35 years of whale sightings,” McCarron said. “But those sightings were not necessarily made where and when lobstermen were fishing.”
Added Stockwell, “We couldn’t justify the three-mile line or the 50-fathom contour based on the data we had to work with (in 2005).”
Said McCarron, “We’ve been backed into the concept of an exemption area. If we have to have it, we want it to be based on good data.”
Building a case
McCarron pointed out that over the last five years, Dynamic Area Management (DAM) actions, which are triggered by actual sightings of right whales, have been, on average, 31 miles from the coast off southern Maine and 57 miles off the coast for the rest of Maine.
McCarron added that 85% of the state’s lobster license holders don’t even have a federal permit that would let them operate outside of the three-mile state waters line.
There also are serious questions about what whales are doing when they are spotted along the Maine coast. The primary concern about floating groundlines is that right whales can get them caught in their mouths as they skim along the bottom while they feed.
But McCarron said fishermen strongly believe the whales are not feeding but rather passing through.
“We don’t believe the coast of Maine is compatible with the kind of food aggregations needed to support feeding whales,” she said.
Stockwell said that DMR is now in the process of researching and documenting forage availability for the whales.
Comment period
Both the DMR and the MLA will be submitting substantive comments before the Sept. 17 deadline. And all agreed that it was extremely important that the entire industry and the DMR be on precisely the same page.
“Regardless of people’s positions, it’s incumbent on everyone to pay attention, comment constructively, and stay engaged so we can all get in the best possible position,” Lapointe said.
McCarron agreed.
“We understand that Maine is not going to get anything unless we’re united,” she said.
McCarron said the MLA’s comments will focus on convincing the agency that there is important new information to consider before implementing the new program.
As examples, she mentioned: a new socio-economic report from the Gulf of Maine Research Institute that may help more fully explain the impacts of the sinking groundline mandate; the extensive gear testing the lobster industry has done that has yet to produce a sinking groundline alternative durable enough to be feasible for hard-bottom use; the need to analyze whale sighting data to determine if whales and lobster gear really interact off the Maine coast; and the need to answer the question of whether “float rope” really floats under actual Downeast fishing conditions where the current is extremely strong.
“There is a bunch of information we want to get on the record regarding the huge operational, safety, and economic concerns associated with the FEIS,” McCarron said. “Will we take legal action? It’s too soon to tell. But we’ll continue to build the record.”
Lorelei Stevens
Back to story list
|
|
Tell us what you think.
