June 13, 2016 — The most incendiary divide between groundfishermen and fishing regulators in the past two years has been the discrepancy between what NOAA Fisheries says its stock assessments show and what fishermen are seeing on the water.
The groundfish assessments by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — particularly for the iconic Gulf of Maine cod stock and certain flounders — have been uniformly dire, leading to the virtual shuttering of cod fishing in the Gulf of Maine and scant quotas for other species.
Fishermen — including commercial groundfishermen, charter captains and even lobstermen — paint a very different portrait of what they are seeing on a daily basis: cod, cod everywhere, and not a one they can catch.
On June 20, the city’s Economic Development and Industrial Corporation and fishing stakeholders will host a presentation by a team of University of Massachusetts scientists on their current findings and methodology for fish population counting in the Gulf of Maine.