Amendment 13 Hit From All Sides
by Laurie Schreiber
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Four lawsuits have been filed against the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) with the adoption of Amendment 13 (A13) to the groundfish management plan.
Two environmental groups say the new plan does not go far enough to protect critical fish stocks. Two fishing industry groups say the plan fails to provide fishing opportunities that were negotiated during the planning process.
Significant Loss
A filing from the Northeast Seafood Coalition (NSC) is intended as a place-holder of sorts, said executive director Jackie O’Dell. The NSC expects most, if not all of its concerns will be addressed through the framework process, she said.
The filing will allow NSC to continue to have a voice, however, if the development of measures is not progressing satisfactorily.
NSC contends the overall effect of A13 “will be to marginally accelerate ongoing rebuilding efforts, at significant loss of fishing opportunity with resulting damage to fishing interests, shoreside business, communities and consumers, with a resulting long-term loss to the nation. As such, the amendment must lessen adverse impact as much as possible, and afford access to healthy fish stocks to allow achievement of optimum yield in those fisheries.”
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Sorting fish at night on the F/V Adventurer. If all these guys needed to worry about was sorting the cod, haddock and pollack, life would be great, but with four new lawsuits pending in regards to Amendment 13, that is not the case.
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A13, the filing says, fails to include special access programs and provisions for the use of category B fishing days-at-sea (DAS); places unworkable restrictions on fishing effort under the U.S./Canada Transboundary Sharing Agreement (TSA); and contains default measures — providing for further, automatic reduction in DAS in 2006 — based on disputed biological information.
“This backdoor reliance on these biological reference points in the first five years of the plan completely contradicts the adaptive management strategy upon which
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Amendment 13 is based,” the filing says. “Under this strategy, the plan is deliberately and unambiguously intended to be a purely mortality-driven plan for the first five years. Moreover, one of the reasons this adaptive, mortality rate-driven plan was adopted was to defer consideration of the controversially high biomass targets developed by the 2002 Working Group for five years until a reassessment, based on five years of new information, could be undertaken.”
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A Century of Boats
by Mike Crowe
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A couple of miles up the Cousins River in Yarmouth is the Lowell brothers boatyard, Even Keel Marine Specialties. It has been there since Carroll Lowell set up shop in 1961. The building looks like a lot of boat shops, big, plain and surrounded by all kinds of boats. The family, like a lot of Maine boatbuilding families, has been building boats for a long time. But, in at least one way, the Lowell’s are different. The family has been directly involved, for nearly the last 100 years, in the design and development of the modern lobsterboat.
The family history is filled with stories that are the history of the powerboat. That history includes the Red Baron, rumrunning boats, lobster boats and a long list of contemporary builders working off Lowell designs — including Jarvis Newman, Bruno Stillman, Nauset, Duffy, Webber Cove and others. If powerboat building was a religion, Will Frost would be its messiah. When the Frost and Lowell families joined, a generation of designer/builders was born.
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Will Frost (1874-1967) in 1952 at his South Portland Shop. Frost’s boatbuilding shop
was in a factory building at the time. He and his sons would have shops in other
locations, building draggers on the Portland waterfront and other boats
in Yarmouth.
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