Areas 2 and 3 originate south of Cape Cod and continue along the EEZ to the west and east.
    The ASMFC has additional state measures, including regulations that govern fishing during the spawning season, rolling closures, effort controls and trawling prohibitions in Maine state waters.
    When the plan was first written, said NEFMC fishery analyst Lori Steele, many in the industry called for limited access.
    `Limited access didn’t make it into the original plan and herring didn’t make it back onto the council’s agenda until this year. Limited access, with the development of certain qualifying criteria, is now a primary consideration, especially with the increasing presence of highly efficient trawlers.
    The amendment is in the preliminary stage; submission to the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) isn’t expected until early 2005, with implementation expected in 2005 or 2006.
    “It’s an evolving document,” said Steele, “and it’s going to change significantly in the next few months.”
    The council next has herring on the agenda for its March 2004 meeting. The ASMFC will discuss herring in January.

Protect Inshore Grounds
    “The industry has been urging the council to talk about limited access in Area 1A for some time now,” said Steele, “because that’s the area where most of the fishing effort is concentrated.”
    The bulk of the catch is landed in Maine and at least half the fleet is concentrated in Maine. But larger boats from Maine and elsewhere are highly migratory and travel with the herring on their migration from Nova Scotia to North Carolina.
    In Area 1A, the catch quota is generally fished out before the end of the fishing year; this year, the total allowable catch (TAC) was filled by mid-November, in a January through December season. Affected most when the TAC is finished, Steele said, are Maine’s purse-seiners because they’re too small to fish far from shore, as well as fixed-gear and weir fishermen.
    For trawlers, finishing up the 1A TAC is not a problem; the boats are larger, generally 100 feet or more, with a maximum size limit of 165 feet, and can easily steam to Georges Bank.
    “A lot of trawlers fish wherever the fish are,” Steele said.
     Because conditions have changed considerably, as more trawlers come on line, the council is looking at limited access in all the areas.
    The midwater trawler question has raised considerable ire between fishery associations.
     Letters submitted to the NEFMC by the Coalition for the Atlantic Herring Fishery’s Orderly, Informed and Responsible Long-Term Development (CHOIR) and the East Coast Tuna Association (ECTA) expressed concern about the “deleterious impacts of localized resource depletion caused by the efficiency and fishing pattern employed by midwater vessels.”
     The East Coast Pelagic Association (ECPA), representing 80 percent of the fleet — with five boats in Maine, three in New Hampshire, five in Massachusetts, four in Rhode Island and three in New Jersey — says CHOIR has “misreported” data and calls the association’s rationale “flawed.”
     ECPA met last year with ECTA to discuss herring and tuna trade-offs.
     “Traditional tuna grounds are the same as traditional herring grounds, so it’s kind of a tough issue,” Tooley said. “We offered to negotiate. That means each side gives something. They weren’t willing to give anything.”
    The tuna association, in turn, said midwater vessels leave tuna, groundfish and whales with an inadequate density of herring to serve as forage.
    The presence of single and pair trawlers has prompted a proposal, developed by the NEFMC’s plan development team (PDT) to allow only purse-seine and fixed gear in 1A, either seasonally or year-round.

Down East Dilemma
     On the other side of the question is the dilemma of Down East fishermen, said Down East Fixed Gear Fishermen’s Association president David Turner.
    Turner is on the NEFMC, ASMFC and DMR advisory boards and runs the Eastport plant for Engelhard, a worldwide company that produces industrial pigments. The Eastport plant produces natural pigments from herring scales, called pearlescence.
     Turner said many Down East fishermen would like to get involved in the management process but are effectively shut out by long travel times to get to meetings, generally held outside Maine.
     “We’re not well-represented,” Turner said. He praised Steele, however, for getting involved in Down East issues.
     Many small purse-seiners Down East, said Turner, dropped out in the early ‘90s because the fish weren’t there. They are concerned they could be cut out of purse-seining if their history occurred prior to control dates, Jan. 1, 1993 and Sept. 16, 1999, proposed for limited access.
    “We don’t want to be cut out because of a date,” Turner said. Still, he said, there is a strong tradition of fixed-gear use in his area. “Most fixed gear people don’t even like purse-seiners,” much less trawlers, he said. Weir fishermen are a “dying breed,” Turner said. “There are not very many of us left,” he said, “but what’s left are stubborn.”
    His organization has about 15 members, but fewer each year build weirs, largely because fish don’t come in to the coves much anymore.
    Some speculate herring stay away because there are no groundfish to chase them in, Turner said; others say landside light pollution repel herring.
    Weir catches have fallen off considerably over the past decade. Maine weirs today catch about 100 metric tons (mt); in the past, the average was perhaps 20,000 mt.
    To keep Down East fishermen going, NEMFC is considering a provision to count Down East fixed-gear landings as part of the neighboring New Brunswick TAC.
    A TAC of 20,000 mt has been allocated to New Brunswick, because it’s assumed those fish are part of the U.S. stock component.
    “They’re within a couple of miles of the New Brunswick weirs,” Kanwit said. “Their fishery is late in the season, when Area 1 quotas will already be met. So they want to be incorporated into the 20,000 mt quota.”
     “There’s no sense in us having conservation measures in that transition zone that aren’t matched by Canada,” said Turner. “We let the fish go tonight, the fish go to Canada a few miles away, and they catch the fish a few hours later.”

Changing Times
    The herring fisheries are among the oldest in the western Atlantic, dating back over a century. Atlantic herring is one of the most biologically and economically important species in the gulf.
    Fishing boats move along the coast with the migrating fish, from the Gulf of Maine during the summer, around Georges Bank in the fall, and south of Rhode Island for the winter.
    Weirs and stop-seines once dominated the fishery, when herring schooled near-shore late summer and fall. In the 1980s, purse seiners took over. Midwater trawlers, which fish both solo and in pairs, came along in the early 1990s. According to some fishermen, trawlers, which can fish more herring in one day than purse seiners collectively, diminish the purse seine fleet’s access to the fishery because they land the inshore quota too quickly.
    Midwater gear is similar to bottom-trawling gear, except it is designed to fish up in the water column, where herring spend most of their time. The nets are light and lack rollers.
    The fishery is not huge. The entire fleet consists of only about 35 boats, averaging 100 feet or more in length and catching 95-98 percent of the fish. About two percent of the fleet is small boats catching a little bait for niche markets.
    In Maine, there are now perhaps a dozen pair trawlers and several single trawlers, most home-ported in Portland and Rockland. Very few, only four or five, purse-seiners are left.
    Hard TACs are designed to ensure the stock is not overfished. But the rapidity with which the quota comes out of 1A has alarmed many fishermen.
    In contrast, offshore quotas have rarely been approached.
    The nature of the industry involves hauling up five-cent fish in volumes that average perhaps up to 200,000 pounds per trip, depending on the market. In 1A, boats generally go out nightly and return to port every day. Travel to offshore areas means going out every two or three days.
    Sixty to 70 percent of the catch goes for lobster bait; lobstermen need herring locally available through the end of the year. Most of the rest goes to Maine sardine canneries or frozen food processors, either to Gloucester and New Bedford, Mass., where new plants were built in 2001 and 2002, or to foreign processing ships that anchor inshore or offshore in Areas 2 and 3. A tiny amount goes for fishmeal.
    The presence of foreign processors has become “a pretty controversial issue lately,” Steele said. Foreign processors have provided a good market for the U.S., she said. But now, she said, the industry would prefer to support the Massachusetts plants.
    A reduction in TACs, Tooley said, could tip the balance away from foreign processors.

Pick a Number
    The development of the amendment is complicated by inconclusive results from two stock assessments conducted by U.S. and Canadian scientists. The Transboundary Resource Assessment Committee (TRAC) met in St. Andrews, N.B., last February to review the two models.
    The Canadian assessment is based on a “virtual population analysis” (VPA), which works backward through a fish population based on the latest information about age structure.
    The U.S. assessment is based on a “forward projection analysis” (FPA), which projects forward through a population.
    Both assessments used the same data from trawl and larval surveys, and landings, but the Canadians did not include data from offshore hydroacoustic surveys conducted by NMFS and inshore acoustic surveys conducted by the DMR with the Gulf of Maine Aquarium, which show a large biomass of herring.
    The two models produced very different results.
    In general, said Steele, the U.S. assessment comes in about three times higher than Canada’s.
    The disparity is not surprising nor particularly troubling, said Tooley.
    “Assessments always raise questions,” Tooley said. “You have to go through the process to come up with the numbers, but for the fishery, it comes down to the TACs. That’s where, from the industry perspective, you become concerned.”
    According to Dr. William Overholtz, a stock assessment scientist with the Northeast Fisheries Science Center in Woods Hole, Mass., and a TRAC meeting participant, the U.S. model is thought to be more flexible, allowing for the utilization of more information.
    U.S. surveys show increasing spawning biomass and uniform age distribution, as opposed to the 1980s, when stocks crashed and only young herring were seen.
    DMR scientist Matthew Cieri, who participated in the TRAC process, has said stocks are doing well and the age structure is filling out.
    The two assessments agree on historical herring biomass estimates until about the mid-1980s and diverge from about 1985 onward. Biomass figures from both studies show the stock is not overfished. However, Steele said, there is concern about localized overfishing and depletion in the Gulf of Maine.
    One piece of the puzzle still to be determined is the status of inshore stocks, Kanwit said. An inshore assessment has never been performed, although hydroacoustic surveys have been performed now for about four years.
    The existing “meta-assessment,” Kanwit said, fails to break out the inshore component and can mask any problems the stock may be having.
    “We just don’t know,” she said.

Placeholder Value
    The result of the disparity is the creation of “proxy” figures to be used until the next assessment is complete.
    When TRAC scientists failed to come to a consensus and NEFMC scientists also declined to fully endorse either assessment, the council’s PDT developed proxy numbers, based on historical figures, to be used until the discrepancies are resolved or a new assessment is completed, probably in two to three years.
    The proxy for maximum sustainable yield (MSY) - the amount of herring that can be sustainably fished - is based on average biomass estimates from the 1960-1970 time period, when the biomass was still at a high level and mortality from foreign fishing activities had not reached peak levels.
    The PDT selected an average biomass of 1 million mt, rounded down from the actual value of 1.13 million mt.
    The council’s Science and Statistical Committee (SSC), the amendment’s discussion document says, agreed fishing mortality of about 20 to 25 percent of the biomass is a “reasonable” figure.
    The resulting figure, the document says, is considered “precautionary” and will serve as a placeholder until the next assessment.
    The council will also consider an MSY based on the 1.13 million mt figure. All together, there are three options on the table, depending on whether the 1 million mt or 1.13 mt figure is used, and whether a 20 percent of 25 percent fishing mortality rate is used.
    The figures affect the quota that will be allowed in each management area.
    Both surveys came out with the same fishing mortality range of 20-25 percent, an interesting development, said Steele, considering the biomass values varied so widely.
    “Ideally, it should be a technical, scientific decision,” Steele said. “Ideally, there should be only one MSY.”
    Over the last 15 years, the fleet has landed an average 100,000 mt; the current overall TAC is 250,000 mt. Depending on which MSY and which method of evaluation is chosen, the overall TAC in Amendment 1 ranges from 150,000 to 165,000 mt.
    “There will still be room for growth in the offshore area, which is the healthiest part of the resource,” Steele said. “It’s sort of like a cut in something not being utilized yet.”