The council voted to adopt a lower fishing level (0.2) instead of 0.24, and the result will be a cut in the days at sea allocation from approximately 39 days this year to 29 days per vessel.
At the same time, NMFS announced that part of the reason for this is that they believe this year there are about 20 or 25 more full time scallop vessels fishing on the resource than they had counted in last year’s plan.
But the primary reason is that the SSC thinks fishing effort on scallops has been too high. Preliminary calculations suggest that this year’s level of fishing is at F=0.30, which is above the target fishing level for the stock. SEAFOOD.COM NEWS by John Sackton – Nov 19, 2009 – Newport, RI- Despite avoiding additional cutbacks due to yellowtail flounder, scallopers were glum after yesterday’s council actions. After all, they had lost about $300,000 per boat.
The council voted to adopt a lower fishing level (0.2) instead of 0.24, and the result will be a cut in the days at sea allocation from approximately 39 days this year to 29 days per vessel.
At the same time, NMFS announced that part of the reason for this is that they believe this year there are about 20 or 25 more full time scallop vessels fishing on the resource than they had counted in last year’s plan.
But the primary reason is that the SSC thinks fishing effort on scallops has been too high. Preliminary calculations suggest that this year’s level of fishing is at F=0.30, which is above the target fishing level for the stock.
The reductions mean first, boats will lose one of their trips to the closed scallop areas, reducing the number of trips annually from five to four, and they will also be cutback in the number of days at sea.
A number of scallop vessels stack their days at sea, but overall, the measure will reduce fishing time.
The average scallop boat has a gross stock of about $1.2 to $1.5 million, and according to industry representatives, this action will chop about $300,000 off the gross stock of each vessel.
Scallopers did make out better on the two other action items before the council on scallops. One was turtle interactions. Despite the extremely low level of reported turtle interactions, NMFS is developing a protection measure to reduce the impact of scallopers on turtles. The measure adopted would close the elephant trunk area during September and October, when interactions with turtles are most likely to occur. This is not a prime time for fishing in this area, and the industry feels this will have little impact.
A more serious issue was a NMFS proposal to create a new closed area in the Great South Channel. Although the industry has had good experience with rotational closed areas, analysis of this plan showed it was flawed. First, it would displace a lot of effort into a smaller area outside the closure, resulting in more intensive dredging of the bottom. Secondly, there would be a tremendous revenue loss, but little return from the closure. As a result the idea was dropped.
Finally, the scallop industry had to deal with yellowtail allocations. The basic problem is that the aggressive rebuilding plan currently in place for yellowtail reduces fishing far below levels that are permitted in Canada, and represents allowing only about 20% of the tonnage of yellowtail that could be landed legally under Magnuson without overfishing occurring.
For Georges Bank yellowtail, the total US TAC is around 1500 tons. This amount has to be divided between scallopers and ground-fishermen, and is a limiting factor in both fisheries.
The initial proposal before the council was to limit scallopers to 90% of their necessary allocation in 2010. This would have resulted in another 9% reduction in revenue, on top of the cuts already made.
Ron Smollowitz, speaking for the Fisheries Survival Coalition, made a strong point that it was unconscionable for the council to be even considering further reductions on scallop effort due to Yellowtail by-catch considerations, after the industry had already made a great many changes and sacrifices to reduce the by-catch.
The momentum of the meeting seemed to change, and quickly an amendment was adopted to allocate 100% of Yellowtail needed by the scallop fleet in 2010 from the Annual Catch Limit.
John Sackton, Editor And Publisher
Seafood.com News 1-781-861-1441
Email comments to jsackton@seafood.com
Source: Seafood.com News