September 15, 2014 — The Portland Fish Exchange's fortunes very much have mirrored the rise and fall of New England's offshore fishing industry over the past 30 years.
Inside the Portland Fish Exchange's cavernous warehouse on a hot summer's morning it's unseasonably cold, 38 degrees Fahrenheit according to a wall thermometer. An hour before the start of that day's auction, graders walk makeshift aisles of totes filled with iced fish that were offloaded in the early morning, sorted by species, size and quality and tagged with bar codes that tell buyers when the catch was landed and the boat that brought it in.
At 22,000 square feet it's one of the largest refrigerated warehouses in the state, the staging area where 90% of Maine's catch of fresh cod, dabs (lemon sole), flounder, haddock, hake, halibut, Maine shrimp, monkfish, pollock, redfish, skate, swordfish and tuna is displayed for buyers who'll make their bids electronically in an Internet auction that occurs at 11 a.m., Sunday through Thursday. Twenty years ago, the totes would have filled the warehouse. Now they take up less than one-third of the space.
"I was here from 1989-1996, when we opened up at 4 a.m. and sometimes ran until midnight," says General Manager Bert Jongerden, who returned in 2007 to run the all-display fresh seafood auction that opened in 1986 and quickly became the model for similar auctions in New Bedford and Gloucester in Massachusetts. "Back then, when we did 30 million pounds of fish, we had close to 65 people working here. From 1990 to 2003 or 2004, we were the No. 1 port on the East Coast for groundfish."
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