March 2, 2013 — In a Feb. 5 letter to the Marine Fisheries Advisory Commission, Paul Diodati explained that he would not allow the state boats greater access to intermittently closed areas because just outside the state waters, bigger boats — boats of a scale and equipped for the rigors of offshore Georges Bank — have been scooping up cod.
At the back of the groundfishery’s pecking order is a small group of small boat fishermen operating in the three-mile wide confines of state waters with state permits.
Don King is one of them.
A number of years ago, King, who was featured in the NBC News segment on the demise of the cod fishing way of life in Gloucester Wednesday night, built a boat for himself, named Scotia Girl, designed to allow him to gillnet for fin fish while also lobstering.
Subsistence fishing at the smallest scale demands creativity, King explained in an interview Friday.
But innovation sours when not combined with opportunity, and opportunity is what King and his cohorts — about 20 full time and 40 more part-time state fishermen — have been denied by Paul Diodati, the director of marine fisheries for Massachusetts.