A sizeable fraction of the small boat fleet based here is given no chance of surviving by a fleet owner and the executive director of the Gloucester-based Northeast Seafood Coalition, where the vast majority of the cooperatives are being organized.

"Federal law has set fisheries up to fail in New England and across the nation," the coalition said in a statement.

Richard Burgess, who owns a four-boat business, and the coalition's Jackie Odell yesterday cited the conservative catch limit on Gulf of Maine cod — the stock on which the port of Gloucester most depends — along with a radical clamp-down on pollock — a stock subjected to rebuilding for the first time — as writing exit visas from the industry for dozens of day-boatsmen.

Many of them have been hanging on for years, via bank loans and second and third mortgages, Burgess said, hoping to remain on the water when the long rebuilding process, begun with the first Magnuson-Stevens Act in 1976, finally pays off with a sustainable and dependable fishery.

If not at hand, those days are coming into view.

But to Burgess and Odell, the continuing regulatory consolidation of the industry has a bitterly ironic edge: Although the biomass is increasing, the total allowable catch is getting smaller. And with a smaller allowable catch, said Odell, the fleet will shrink, too.

Odell said the real culprit in New England is the conservative catch limits.

Read the complete story at The Gloucester Daily Times.