August 6, 2018 — The news emerged on July 19 that NOAA approved a plan that may now permit some New Bedford fishermen to go back to work.
It has been eight months in the making since the National Marine Fisheries Service shut down Sector IX last November after Carlos Rafael was convicted for falsifying landings and jailed. His fishing operation was so large that the closure impacted a lot of people in the business, both afloat and ashore.
In March, fishermen with quota in Sector IX moved to join Sector VII, which also operates out of New Bedford, but that quota remained frozen while the people at NMFS worked to determine how to correct for the “overage” — how much and of what species — that resulted from the fish caught and mislabeled by Rafael’s boats.
So while this decision is a small step forward for the groundfish industry here, it is not yet time to set the church bells ringing since the majority of the inactive quota is owned by inactive fishermen. When the catch share system was introduced in 2010 it gave all permit holders a slice of the pie — the “pie” being a share of the TAC, or total allowable catch, for the annual fishing year, which for groundfish begins on May 1. Individual allocations were based on a permit holder’s catch history over a ten-year period from 1998 to 2008, I believe it was.
This effectively means that all of the cod, haddock and flounder swimming around on Georges Bank, more than one hundred miles offshore, have someone’s name on their back, similar to a herd of cattle. And like cattle, these fish can be leased, sold or traded. So this allowed some fishermen to retire, stay home every year, and lease their quota. Also, you are not required to have a boat to keep a permit.