Greg Mayhew, captain of the 75-foot dragger Unicorn out of Menemsha, is the last Vineyard fisherman still groundfishing on Georges Bank. And this year might be his last on the legendary fishing ground.
“I don’t know if I’m going to even go next year because it might be better just to lease the days out and get half price for them,” he said.
Mr. Mayhew’s story is familiar to small owner-operated fishing outfits throughout New England, who under the new catch shares fisheries management system have found themselves saddled with small catch allocations and burdened by new regulations intended to bring accountability to the capture of fish species in federal waters that have been pushed to the brink of extinction in recent decades.
The catch shares system was enacted this year.
“It’s a free market right now for permits and the only way you can increase your allocation is by buying another permit that has catch history associated with it, and that catch history is expensive,” he said in a telephone interview. “So you’re stuck in a Catch 22: if there weren’t any fish to catch during the qualifying years and then you don’t get an allocation to be able to catch the fish, even as they come back, you won’t have the rights to catch them.”
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