Maine to Feature in PBS World Survey of Fishery Management

by Laurie Schreiber



Portland fisherman Roger Woodman bought the replica schooner Alert to conduct traditional hook-and-line fishing. Woodman hosts Carl Safina as the latter films a PBS segment on fishery management off Bar Harbor. The boat deck is lined with tub trawl hook and line gear. Laurie Schreiber Photo

 

World-renowned marine conservationist and author, Carl Safina, planned to be on the water off Bar Harbor August 23-24, filming segments for his new Public Broadcasting System series “Saving the Ocean.”

The series, which premiered earlier this year, spotlights inspiring efforts from around the world to preserve our oceans and the animals that live in them.

Safina and producer John Angier will be sailing on a replica 19th-century fishing schooner with a team of scientists who are determining whether their efforts to restore the juvenile cod population in Frenchman Bay are succeeding. The segment will be part of an episode on similar efforts throughout the northeast coasts of the U.S. and Canada.

Safina is the founding president of the Blue Ocean Institute at Stony Brook (N.Y.) University. Among his works, he is the author of two New York Times Editors’ Choice books, “A Sea In Flames; Inside the Deepwater Horizon oil blowout” and “The View From Lazy Point: A Natural Year in an Unnatural World.”

Reached by telephone, Safina said the series has taken him and his crew to fisheries around the globe.

“We’ve been from Belize to the Indian Ocean off Tanzania, to Georges Bank south of Nova Scotia, and in September we’ll be going to the West Coast,” he said. “We usually have people explain what it is they’re working on, and show what they’re doing. We’re profiling them. They’re our heroes.”

For the episode that will include Bar Harbor, he said, “We are looking at a variety of aspects of the ecosystem of the Northeast and of Atlantic Canada. We’re going to be taking a look at the historic trends in several fish. We’re trying to understand the state of the art and why some fish are coming back and some not going back.”

Earlier this summer, Safina said, he and his film crew were in Nova Scotia to film a segment with the Swordfish Harpoon Association, whose fishermen use harpoons for catching the fish, rather than “the much more harmful net-catch methods.”

Other segments, he said, will cover cod, haddock and other groundfish; and scallops.
He said the waters off Bar Harbor drew his attention “because of its historic significance and its current activities, and because of some of the scientific work of the University of New Hampshire.”

Safina was referring to a collaboration between UNH researchers and a Portland fisherman, Captain Roger Woodman, who has been conducting experiments off Bar Harbor to see how much groundfish can be found in Frenchman Bay using a traditional hook-and-line method.

Woodman conducts his study from his 56-foot schooner, Alert, which was built in 1992 by York boatbuilder Paul Rollins, who specializes in wooden boat restorations and replicas. Alert was based on a design by early 20th century naval architect John Alden.

In an interview during his August 2010 visit to this area, Woodman said his hook-fishing experiments came about after his thriving career in groundfish went south with the imposition of onerous federal regulations.

In the 1980s and 1990s, Woodman owned four groundfish draggers. He was a founder of the Portland Fish Exchange and was instrumental in the development of the Portland Fish Pier. Woodman said he, like other groundfishermen, was “regulated out of the business.”

Woodman sold his four draggers, bought and refurbished the Alert, and decided to experiment with traditional fishing methods.

One of his goals, he said, was to figure out whether traditional methods can provide enough of an economic benefit, as groundfish rebound, to nearshore fishermen who once prosecuted a variety of fisheries throughout the year.

Woodman said he typically travels 50 to 60 miles out from Portland, as far as Platt’s Bank and Three Dory Ridge.

Woodman said he was drawn to check out the waters further Down East after he read a 2009 report called “Gulf of Maine cod in 1861: historical analysis of fishery logbooks, with ecosystem implications.” The study was headed up by Karen Alexander, William Leavenworth and Jeff Bolster. The three are researchers with the Ocean Process Analysis Lab at the University of New Hampshire, and Bolster is also a professor in UNH’s history department.

The study extrapolates codfish abundance and distribution using logbook data from vessels that frequented Frenchman Bay and other New England communities in 1861.

According to an abstract published on Northeast Regional Cod Tagging Program’s website, the group estimated that 34 small schooners based in the Frenchman Bay nearshore region “were able to bring in more cod in 1861 than were brought in from the entire Gulf of Maine in 1999.”
Alexander and Leavenworth provided Woodman with the coordinates of the Frenchman Bay study, so that he could re-sample the bay’s ledges and shoals.

Safina said that, on Alert, he and his crew will be joining a group from the Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory in Salsbury Cove, which is using the schooner to do some studies of juvenile cod.

He said the questions under study include, “Are juvenile cod coming back? What is their abundance trend? What factors are influencing their reproduction and abundance?”

The following day, he said, the UNH group will join him on the schooner to talk about how people fished in the 19th century.

Safina said his passion for the ocean came about when he was growing up on Long Island, N.Y., where he loved the coast and loved to fish.

“I’ve always had an inexplicable proclivity toward nature and a fascination with animals,” he said.

He said that, today, the health of the ocean is mixed.

“I would say the biggest improvements are probably improvements to fisheries management in the U.S. The limits designed to force recovery and rebuilding of some of these extremely depleted species, to a fairly significant extent, are working,” he said.

“However, changes from the warming of the ocean and the acidification of the ocean are really very serious. They have major implications for the distribution and abundance of marine life that will be possible. In a lot of the rest of the world, other than the U.S., Australia, New Zealand and Falkland Islands, I would say that the fisheries are very poorly controlled and, in many places, out of control and still having very serious problems. In the U.S., I think we have managed—with a lot of yelling and fighting—to stabilize the fisheries in many places and allow the fish to begin recovering.”

Safina said the orientation of “Saving the Ocean” (pbs.org/programs/saving-the-ocean) is to highlight the efforts who people who have been tackling the problems and finding solutions.
“In many cases, people who have big problems can’t envision what the solution will be,” he said. “This will show, here and there, people who have found a path out of these problems.”