I'm a groundfish fisherman in New England and I operate under bycatch caps.
There are limits on what we can catch for a reason, and I have to work to find ways to stay within the limits I'm given — even if I have to change where and how I fish to do it.
We had to leave the Eastern Georges Bank area this year before we used all our haddock quota because we hit our cod limit.
Nothing's different here. For some reason, the big-business herring trawlers can't get their act together to change their practices. If the government steps in to "help" these boats, it'll be guys like me that pay the price.
For years, herring boats were able to fly under the radar.
Sure, they had a cap on the amount of haddock they could catch. But there were so few observers that there was virtually no data, so of course the fishery never approached its cap.
Read the complete letter from the Gloucester Times.