June 20, 2012 – NOAA bureaucrats are doing their best to sabotage five years of stakeholder work to put new standard operating procedures in place for an industrial fishery right off our shores. These are not radical changes that would cause financial hardship; they are commonsense solutions to a problematic fishery.
The fleet for Atlantic herring and Atlantic mackerel has been flying under the radar for decades. These roughly two dozen "midwater" trawlers are the largest fishing vessels on the East Coast and tow the biggest nets with the smallest mesh. They are capable of sweeping the ocean clean of herring and mackerel, leaving nothing for other fish to eat, not to mention their destructive catch of other species, or bycatch.
Many fishermen believe this gear is incompatible with traditional New England fisheries, and is displacing and destroying small boat jobs in favor of a handful of industrial operations.
We're all fishermen, and we have to deal with changing regulations, but we should be living under fair rules, and midwater trawlers have not had the same oversight as other vessels their size or even as New England's small boats.
Lots of us have been working through the public fishery management process to put better monitoring in place and reduce and limit the amount of other species they can catch "accidentally" as bycatch. This effort has resulted in strange bedfellows: Hundreds of recreational and commercial fishermen from diverse sectors have united in calling for changes that are so common-sense, it is a wonder that this fishery has been operating without them for this long.
Midwater trawlers can pull up 100,000 pounds of fish at a time, and hold a million pounds in their holds. With that huge amount of fish, they need a fisheries observer onboard each and every trip to document and sample the catch. They have to stop dumping huge nets full of fish just because they don't like the looks of them. That is a shameful waste. And a United States fishery based on the honor system of reporting what you catch just isn't a 21st century way of running a business.
Read the full story at the New Bedford Standard Times.