December 11, 2020 — When Grant Moore first started lobstering, he thought of the ocean as a vast expanse with an endless supply of marine life ripe for the catching.
But when he took to his boat off the coast of Massachusetts, it wasn’t long before he began bumping up against the operations of Canadian fishers. And over the course of his 40-year career, he has seen new restrictions and closures that have further reined in the claims he and his competitors had laid on the seas.
“The ocean got smaller and smaller and smaller,” said Moore, who serves as president of the Atlantic Offshore Lobstermen’s Association.
It’s about to shrink again — unless Moore and other fishers can convince the Supreme Court to get involved in a legal battle over a marine monument that will soon block crab and lobster operations in a Connecticut-sized chunk of the Atlantic Ocean where the two fisheries generate an estimated $15 million in annual revenue.