January 9, 2017 — It’s a classic New England scene, colorful lobster traps stacked up along a dock.
But for fishermen in South Shore lobster ports, those grounded traps are a symbol of hard times ahead.
A ban that keeps most of their gear out of the water for the winter is entering its third year, despite arguments that it causes them unfair economic hardship.
“If it made sense, that would be one thing,” Irvine Nash, a lobsterman for 48 years, said as he stood on a dock in Green Harbor. “But it don’t,” he said.
Behind him, fishermen were pulling traps out of the water and loading them on trucks. They will sit empty in yards and garages until May, when the government lifts the ban.
Under a recent rule from the National Marine Fisheries Service, all traps from outer Cape Cod to Cape Cod Bay and parts of Massachusetts Bay must be out of the water by Feb. 1. That’s an area just under 3,000 square nautical miles.
The federal agency first imposed the ban in 2015, to decrease the likelihood of endangered North Atlantic right whales, which come to Cape Cod Bay every winter, from entangling themselves in lobster lines.
There are now only about 520 right whales left, according to the North Atlantic Right Whale Consortium, up from about 300 in the 1990s.