BOSTON — Oct. 25, 2010 — Tales of huge haddock hauls were a few of the fish stories that came with the boat Chris Brown bought last year from a Canadian. To Brown, they were stories of missed opportunity.
The previous owner told Brown that for years the vessel trolled the edge of an area closed to U.S. fishermen for conservation. Because no one told the fish the Canadians hadn't signed on, the fish grew undisturbed in U.S. waters, then swam east into the nets of waiting Canadians.
"They were incredibly grateful for our conservation efforts," Brown, of Point Judith, R.I, said dryly.
Such circumstances are one cause of under-fishing — a phenomenon that has struggling U.S. fishermen catching a fraction of what regulators say is a safe amount to take from rebounded stock, leaving millions in potential revenue in the water.
Haddock is the prime example. The stock rebounded spectacularly after plummeting in the 1990s and is one of the few completely healthy groundfish species.
in 2009, Northeast fishermen caught just 6 percent (13.4 million pounds) of the roughly 235 million pounds scientists said could be safely gathered on Georges Bank, the lucrative fishing ground between Nova Scotia and Cape Cod. The percentage was the same two years ago and lower in 2008, when fishermen caught 4 percent of their allowed catch.
"I think it's just a tragedy," said Steve Ouellette, a fisheries attorney in Gloucester who has studied under-fishing. "Hundreds of millions of dollars of fish are being wasted."
Under-fishing is the opposite of the far better-known problem of overfishing, but it's directly tied to it.
Ouellette said regulators have wrongly tried to protect the overfished species with such low catch limits that fishermen who go hard after healthy species will catch too much of the unhealthy ones, and be forced to shut down.
Fisherman Jim Odlin, who owns five boats out of New Bedford, Mass., and Maine, said the old system tried to protect fish by giving fishermen a decreasing number of fishing days, so it forced them to use their limited time to catch whatever they could, as fast as they could — "almost fishing stupid," he said.
But the time pressure is gone now, said Odlin, a member of the regional council that helped make the new rules. Fishermen now work in groups called "sectors" to catch their annual allotments on their own time.
Odlin said that gives fishermen more freedom to chase under-caught stocks, such as the healthy but little-sought redfish that Odlin has his captains hunting in hopes of rebuilding its market.
Brown, the Rhode Island fisherman, added that the cooperation in the new system makes fishermen more open to sharing what they're seeing at sea — crucial for finding and avoiding certain species. When everyone was a competitor, he said, "a lot of guys would be very careful with the truth."
Scientists also aim to reduce under-fishing with gear designed to haul up more of the healthy stocks. The existing "eliminator trawl," for instance, has large openings at the bottom of its net so cod and flounder — which dive when pursued by a net — can escape. But smaller openings on top snag haddock, which swirl and swarm upward when chased.
But gear advances take considerable time to be perfected and accepted by fishermen, and the industry is looking for urgent relief.
Dick Allen, a former commercial fisherman from Wakefield, R.I., who consults for groups including the Environmental Defense Fund, cautions that if Locke raises catch limits, he would simply be allowing fishermen to catch on the high end of a range scientists guess is safe. If the science is wrong, stocks could be damaged.
Still, Allen said regulators must do more to reduce under-fishing. For instance, because haddock is so healthy, why not open part of the closed area near where Brown's Canadian friends made a killing?
"Everybody's got to kind of switch their mode of thinking about how we're controlling this fishery," Allen said.
Read the complete story by Jay Lindsay of the Associated Press at the Boston Globe.