FROM THE CROWE’S NEST

Do Something About It

Is there an echo in here? Every time the crisis flags come out in the fishing industry anybody who knows anything about what’s happened in the last forty years yells industrial fishing. Anyone who knows anything about management’s response has said, what the hell are they doing?

From the foreign factory ships in the Gulf of Maine in the 1970’s to the mid-water trawlers there now, the keyword is impact. During these declines management has screwed around with days at sea, tweaking gear this and mesh that, while technological advances in fishing gear ran far ahead of them.

As one midcoast Maine fisherman put it, they will continue to build a better mouse trap, but at some point there will be no mice.

Fishermen in mid-coast Maine have formed an association that will give them some organization and authority. Through their perspective of decades of experience they are making a plan to preserve and grow the ground fishery into what it used to be for them. Fishermen in Casco Bay, independently drew the same conclusions. All of them, like most fishermen, are not big corporate operators whose influence directs the industry from the top, but many small boat operators.

Why hasn’t government and management been able to do anything in forty years? Politics? Money?
  
Red flags have been raised by fishermen in recent years and months, over changes to sea life in the Gulf of Maine. The markers are the absence of tuna, swordfish, whales, groundfish, seabirds and others. They have reported seeing groups of mid-water trawlers sweeping areas like Jefferies Ledges of herring and taking anything in their path. They have reported huge quantities of bycatch, a swath of the food chain, being dumped dead at sea. Fishermen from Cape Cod to Eastport are describing this as a tragedy.

Tuna fishermen have cited it as the cause for tuna not coming into the gulf, because there is nothing for them to eat. This combined with the failure of the U.S. to press Europe into protecting their end of the bluefin tuna’s migration route, seems likely to force out of existence this great, majestic, highly prized and spectacular fish. The great, highly prized, and majestic Gulf of Maine may go with it.

Politicians are a part of the process that created this situation. The elected officials are the ones who can act on this now. They need to be told to stand up and do something about it now.