Noted one Corea fisherman, Arvin Young: "I told them they can't drag here, it's all soft shell lobsters. It's just so ridiculous what they were doing. We've been working for years on conservation, and they drag right through."
Fishermen were upset with the timing of the trawl, which came at the height of the season for the vulnerable and conservationally important egg-bearing lobsters.
"The second sheds are coming out now, and the lobsters are as soft as can be," Young said. "The ones that come up in the drag are the lucky ones. There are thousands of soft lobsters on the bottom."
The point of the trawl, Sherman said, is to track trends and changes via the survey over several years.
"We are trying to get some fisheries independent data," she said. "Fisheries independent data goes a long way with the National Marine Fisheries Service and some of the other management groups in helping in stock assessments."
But what Sherman reported informally to Fishermen's Voice - a catch of about one egg-bearing lobster a day - seems in contrast to what Down East lobstermen were finding on their own that week. (See lobstermen's survey, page 5.)
As an example, Young's 300 traps produced 39 egg-bearing lobsters: 16 of those had already been punched, one was oversize, and the rest were notched. The previous day, when he was also keeping count, he hauled up 19 eggers, 10 of those already punched. The other fishermen had similar numbers, Young said.
The fishermen agree that the end-of-October weeks provide a representation of lobster resources. But many disagree as for the manner that the survey is being conducted, believing that their own insights and issues aren't being taken more on board.
Funded through the Northeast Consortium with federal disaster relief money for ground fishermen displaced by fishing closures, the DMR conducts 20-minute tows at 100 stations, covering a 3/4-mile by 30-foot-wide area. Among the species under study are cod, haddock, pollock, flounder, hake, herring, alewives, crabs and lobster.
Lobster data is taken first, so they can be returned to the sea alive. A modified otter-trawl net retains anything from less than a centimeter to about a meter. The cookie frame has six-inch cookie rollers in the belly, and the gear is considered pretty light. Species are identified, counted, measured and weighed, and age and gender are determined.
Bruce Crowley, another Corea fisherman, said fishermen had discussed their opposition to such a dragging survey a year ago, at a DMR meeting.
"We've been monitoring the stock for years, but the DMR doesn't believe what we tell them. Unless it's a biologist who says it, it doesn't count."
"The threat was, either you guys let us drag or the feds will close you down," Crowley said. "We said to John Sowles (DMR's director of the surveys), 'Is there anything you can do to stop this?' His final answer was, 'It's going to be done regardless.'
Pat White, the Maine Lobster-men's Association executive director, said that, although the trawl survey may not be the best way to go, it's useful as a method to substantiate what the status of lobster stocks is.
The MLA conducts its own annual survey of v-notched lobsters. There is increasing participation from fishermen around the state in an onboard computerized monitoring system, which allows them to tote up numbers of v-notches, eggers, etc.
"It all adds to the credibility of what we've all been saying," White said. "I have never been a big supporter of the trawl survey thing until more recently, when I found out how much it hurt not doing it."
White agreed the trawl may be harming soft shell lobsters. However, he called the survey trawl "a hell of a lot more benign than a scallop drag" - the scallop season begins in another month. He suggested the degree of information obtained through the survey far outweighs the amount of lobsters impacted.
"These guys need to understand the importance of what this is doing and it may be just a couple of more years that they have to do it," White said. "That's where we need to bridge the gap with industry and science, and we're doing it a little bit."
Young, the Corea lobsterman, said he knows of quite a few fishermen who have been against the survey since it was conceived.
"We just wanted to show," Young said, "that we care for our industry. And this industry is a natural resource that we have brought up from a fledgling nothing through no help from the State whatsoever. They have never done one blessed thing to help us. And we're the only industry in the state that gets no help from the State. We pay right through the nose for everything."
Added another Corea fisherman, Dana Tracy: "The DMR only sees the lucky lobsters that happen to get in the net. They don't see the ones that the doors and the cookies roll over and crush and mutilate. The lobsters in the areas they want to tow are pretty thick right now and they're out and about.
"Until they can show us it doesn't devastate them," Tracy continued, "then we're skeptical of it."
The Corea incident drew the attention of the lobstermen in Jonesport, where another, more hostile, confrontation took place one day after the Corea encounter. Several fishermen in Jonesport are decidedly against these DMR trawl surveys, a position that was well-pronounced last year at a meeting called by the DMR to discuss the matter.
The captain of the Robert Michael, Sean Hayes, said he and his boat were verbally threatened one day after the Corea incident. He termed the subsequent Marine Patrol presence aboard his boat an "armed guard," and said he ran a 24-hour watch from that Monday through Thursday. During Mon-day's confrontation, Hayes said, the Robert Michael was "in danger of collision" with the surrounding fishing boats. He called the confrontation a "blockade."
Others had a different interpretation.
"'Armed guard' makes it sound like there was a higher threat level than it was," said Marine Patrol lieutenant Alan Talbot. "We put an officer on board just to observe, so he could know exactly what was going on, because the fishermen said one thing, and the people on the trawler said another thing. It wasn't because we thought anything was going to happen."
Talbot agreed there were verbal threats made on the radio. However, he said, it appeared the trawler was never impeded in its progress, although it was unable to continue its tows. After Tuesday, the trawler stayed away from the nearshore tow areas.
Until the Corea incident, said DMR biologist Sherman, there had been some scattered resistance this fall, but no organized opposition.
"I think they believe we are doing more damage than good," Sherman said. The resistance typically manifested itself as a refusal to remove lobster-fishing gear from the tow area.
Where there was gear, the DMR called the Marine Patrol to help move it; local lobstermen also pitched in, she said. If the tow was too full of gear, they skipped it. The most gear was encountered inshore, in depths of 5 to 20 fathoms. The situation, she said, was pretty much coastwide, although a little more concentrated in Penobscot Bay and thence Down East.
Otherwise, there was good cooperation from New Hampshire to Small Point, Hayes agreed. But less so at Boothbay Harbor and Pema-quid Point.
Corea and Jonesport were something else again, said Hayes.
Sherman said they try to tell fishermen as exactly as possible the time the DMR will be in the area.
"We are trying very hard to work with people to minimize this effect as much as possible," Sherman said.
In addition to the week's confrontations, there was also a situation in Winter Harbor, Saturday, October 20, which may have presaged subsequent events. That Saturday had been a make-up day for the trawler.
"We had announced on the weather radio and also on our hotline that we had a weather day on Wednesday of that week, and that we would be a day late working all of these tows," Sherman said. "We try to keep everyone advised when we do have a problem like that. We try to stick to the schedule as closely as we can, but the weather fouls us up sometimes and that's what happened.
According to Winter Harbor lobsterman Reggie Knowles, no one was notified the trawler would be coming through on that Saturday. In addition, Knowles said, the trawler towed along a different line than specified in the mailing fishermen had received.
Hayes acknowledged he had tried to get by Knowles' buoys.
"We don't just go to a spot and tow down the line without taking a look," Sherman said. "We run down it, scan it and run back again and look to see if there are any buoys in the way. And we make a judgment looking at it to see whether we have room enough to get through there or not. That tow, we did judge we had room enough to go by and then, yes, we did pick up one of his traps.
"He called us, and we told him that's what happened. Basically it was unsafe to try to tie it off, so the trap was lost. It might have been a pair, but that was it. It wasn't done on purpose.
"As far as I know, it was his pair or a single trap. He's saying there was more than that, I guess."
Another lobsterman out of Winter Harbor, Jayson Knowles, also said he lost three pairs of traps.
"I'm not happy about it," Jayson Knowles said. "I left them there just hoping they wouldn't tow there, but they did anyway."
"We followed him for about 45 minutes," Corea's Crowley added. "We saw him cut off four pairs of traps as he was moving. He cut buoys and traps. Each buoy costs about $150. If he got four pair in 45 minutes, you can figure how much that adds up to over time."
Given the notification procedure, said the project's chief, DMR scientist John Sowles, loss of gear isn't a legitimate complaint.
"People can argue this," he said. "But our line is that we feel our notification is sufficient and we make an effort to stick to schedule. If their gear happens to be caught because we don't see it, we don't do it deliberately. That's our position. We can debate that, maybe, over the winter."
Fishermen agreed, however, that the gear damage is not the real issue.
"They've all tried to work together down here and it hasn't been a problem," the MLA's White said. "As I say, the DMR has got to get up there ahead of the boat and do some PR and explain to the guys the value of this and what's going to happen with it."
Sherman said the trawl came up with about one egg-bearing lobster per day. She had not yet totaled up the other data, and it would be several more weeks before the data was ready to release, she said. Generally, however, she said the trawl tended to catch more lobsters this time of year in the shallower strata, between 5 and 35 fathoms. Few lobsters showed up at depths of 40 to 70 fathoms, she said.
Last year's count, she said, showed there was little damage to soft or berried lobsters.
Of 7,100 lobsters caught last year, about 21 percent were damaged, most amounting to a lost claw or leg. Of that, only 2 or 3 percent didn't survive, she said.
Most that lost claws were small and would regenerate, posing no economic loss when marketable, Sowles said.
The trawl seems to have had little impact on berried lobsters, Sherman said, largely because they didn't catch many. This kind of gear selectivity, she suggested, could fail to provide a complete picture.
"I firmly believe that the more information you can get, the better off you are," Sherman said.
White added: "What we're asking folks to do is weigh the benefits against the damage. It's a little bit crazy to be managing Maine's fisheries based on out-of-state data."
Until now, pointed out both White and Sowles, management decisions for inshore Gulf of Maine have been based on extrapolations of data compiled offshore by the National Marine Fisheries Service and off Massachusetts.
"That's why we were getting hammered with these ludicrous numbers before; that just didn't make any sense," White said. "We've been stuck in the same box as Massachusetts Bay. That's data they've been recording that is supposed to be happening here."
Even though DMR has now started surveying the Maine coast directly, Sowles isn't completely satisfied with the results.
"The reason I'm concerned," Sowles said, "is that if we don't tow on those prescribed locations, the numbers are going to come back looking like there aren't any lobsters. And that's going to backfire on the guys, in that the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission is going to think there are fewer lobsters than there actually are."
"The difficulty," said DMR commissioner George Lapointe, "is that we are collecting a lot of different kinds of data. But to get data that's not tied to the fishery is important. People have to remember that lobster is not the only species in the ocean we're interested in. It's a multi-species survey and it gathers important information - and we're going to lose all that. Why have we been fighting so hard with the Atlantic States Commission? Because, in the past we've not gathered the data we need to tell people what our own resources are like."
After the confrontation, Sher-man said, "I decided to call it a day, because I didn't want an incident to happen. We're not going to get into anymore adversarial situations. If we see people getting upset, we'll move on."
The schedule, which was to wind up that Friday, ended up being slightly curtailed, Sowles said.
"Tempers were so hot the other day that someone could get hurt, either one of them or one of us. So we're going to finish the offshore tows, and then sit down with the lobstermen over the winter and figure out how to go forward. We're not going to consider not doing the survey. We're going to do it. It's to their benefit to talk things over."
One of the benefits of towing, Sowles added, is that managers can see that lobsters are as abundant as fishermen say they are.
"Unfortunately, those who support it are being hurt. Not towing is going to make it seem like there are fewer lobsters out there than there actually are" - a risk that could lead to federal interference, he said.
Sowles also said the gear is too light to cause damage. Some want to know, he said, why a few lobster-men should have to sacrifice by moving their gear.
"Flip that on its head and ask, 'Why should others have to pay for the lack of cooperation of a few?'"
DMR biologist Sherman said it's uncertain whether a simple count provides enough information. The DMR survey gets further biological data, she said, such as carapace length, the age and quality of the v-notch, and the stage of the eggs.
"The idea with collecting information the way we do is to get different aspects," she said. She pointed out that the trawl survey is not focused only on lobsters. She also suggested that data from active traps offers only selective information. The traps, she said, are likely to be in known fishing areas, at the same time that they are a draw for lobsters. "It's hard to say," she said. "There's a lot of information being collected."
Sherman said the DMR plans to get out, talk with people, and address their concerns. In early November, they will be taking an underwater camera to the area of contention, to get an idea of the number of lobsters actually there. For the future, they plan to mount a camera on the trawl net or door to see if lobsters are being crushed by the drag to the degree lobster-men say.
But some fishermen still said they plan to stop the survey.
Corea's Young is one of them: "We're going to have a hell of a ruckus and go against them and oppose them however we can, through legislation or something. We have monstrous broodstock on the bottom."
The alternative to the survey, the fishermen maintain, is recognizing that the different habitats warranted different approaches. They proposed bringing biologists aboard their boats, or doing the counting themselves, along lobster bottom. Dragging for a fish count was a viable option offshore, some said.
"We don't want to catch the last lobster," Corea's Tracy said. "We want it there for our future. We want it there for the whole state's future. To try to tell that to the scientific community and have them believe you is almost impossible."
Sowles encouraged discussion of the issues; he may be reached at 633-9518. "I'm happy to talk with these guys," he said. "I wish I'd been able to. I think we could have avoided all of this."