The last time I checked, Rhode Island was still part of New England, its residents still entitled to a share of our region’s fish stocks, many of which, like pollock, have been removed from our waters by failures of the NMFS. Wouldn’t it be fairer if the NMFS said anglers in Massachusetts, north of the Cape, have pollock but people in southeastern Massachusetts and Rhode Island are out of luck — and we the managers really don’t have any plans to bring them back.
The NMFS’s release seems aimed at scoring political points with Northeast politicians with clout in the present administration, which controls the budget of the NMFS.
An interesting sideline to all this is that while Rhode Islanders have had fisheries removed from their waters, the NMFS office in Gloucester over the years has hired more staff and gone through a building expansion to house them.
One might ask which of the new hires is working on a plan to bring pollock back to our inshore waters. Which of those people is working to bring mackerel back to our waters? We used to have mackerel all summer long off places such as the rocks along Hazard and Newton avenues in Narragansett. Which of the new hires is working to restore whiting to its former levels of abundance? Today we have younger fishermen in our state who have never seen whiting.
Read the complete opinion piece from The Providence Journal.