November 21, 2014 — Maine’s scallop fishermen and state regulators have been working for years to rebuild the nation’s largest inshore sea scallop fishery. This week federal regulators gave them a boost.
The New England Fishery Management Council on Thursday approved a measure that would allow scallop draggers licensed to operate in federal waters in the Gulf of Maine to also take part in Maine’s winter scallop season in state waters – even after the total allowable catch limit is reached in federal waters.
“It’s a small victory for Maine scallop fishermen,” said Togue Brawn, who owns a Portland business that buys scallops from Maine’s small-boat fleet.
Maine’s fishery is a 70-day season that starts on Dec. 1 and ends in April or whenever fishery mangers decide it needs to be closed to protect the stock. Fishermen have daily catch limits.
The federal fishery, by contrast, has a year-round season and is managed by a system of individual catch quotas and limits on the number of days fishing boats are allowed at sea.
Made of two districts, the federal fishery has a small northern district between the Canadian border and Boston, and a huge southern district that includes the Georges Bank and in offshore waters in the Mid-Atlantic. The northern district has an annual catch limit of just 70,000 pounds. The southern district, which is dominated by large boats from New Bedford, Massachusetts, that go to sea for days at a time, yields about 50 million pounds of scallops annually and accounts for roughly 99 percent of the nation’s scallop catch.
Read the full story at the Portland Press Herald