Dwindling Catches, Growing Rules Press New England Fleet

“Codfish, 215 pounds, gray sole 10, yellowtail 10, monkfish 30. . . .”

In the gloom of a wholesaler’s shed, cod fisherman Paul Cohan, in black baseball cap and big beard, toted up his morning’s catch and reached the usual bottom line.

“Pretty pitiful day.”

The days are growing more pitiful all along New England’s rocky fringe, in salt-caked harbor towns like Gloucester, whose people have gone to sea for centuries. And the nights are growing more fearful.

“I’m very apprehensive,” Cohan said of the road ahead.

Ocean stocks of cod, haddock and flounder--staples of the fishery--have collapsed. For three years, the federal government has been reining in New England’s fishermen step by step, limiting days at sea, closing ocean areas, cutting “fishing effort” overall by half.

But fear for the future extends far beyond Gloucester and the steel-blue waters of the northwest Atlantic, to corners of ocean and countless fishing communities around the globe.

Almost two-thirds of the world’s 200 commercially important stocks--distinct populations of fish--are either over-exploited or fished to the edge of what they can bear, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization says. The fish in trouble include Pacific perch, Caribbean redfish, New Zealand orange roughy, Atlantic swordfish and dozens of others.

There is an “urgent need for effective measures to control and reduce fishing capacity and effort,” the U.N. agency said in March.

Out on the oceans, the overfishing is unmistakable:

* Trawlers line up abreast to sweep the life from swaths of sea with nets so big that each could drag up a dozen jumbo jets.

* “Long-liners” trail out thousands of baited hooks on lines stretching up to 80 miles across the open ocean.

* Japan’s squid fleet is so huge that when it switches on its lights in the north Pacific night to draw prey to its nets, it can be seen by astronauts in space.

Over a single generation, giant vessels have combined with the latest technology--satellite navigation, spotter planes, fish-scanning sonar, lightweight nets--to turn “limitless” seas into all-too-finite resources.

It was a generation in which Cohan, 42, graduated from a 16-footer to a 22-footer on up to his current 40-foot boat, “Sasquatch,” a $150,000 gill-netter.

Earlier this breezy day, seven miles out, he and mate George Schlichte hauled in three sets of gill nets, each set up to two-thirds of a mile long. The nets, which entangle fish by their gills, had sat on the seabed for days, but bottom traffic clearly was light.

“Forty-five-minute waste of time,” Schlichte cracked as they winched up one rig sparsely dotted with silver-sided cod and hapless lobsters.

Cohan blames the big trawlers. “The damage was done by draggers over 50, 60 years,” he said. “They can pull up 20,000 pounds of fish in 20 minutes.”

But he also knows the problem is beyond finger-pointing. “Everyone agrees something must be done.” Then he grinned. “And everyone agrees it should be done to someone else.”

A day earlier, in nearby Danvers, the intramural sniping--draggers vs. gill-netters, lobstermen vs. shrimpers--played out at a meeting of the New England Fishery Management Council, a federal body largely comprising fishing-industry representatives.

Faced with enforced days at the dock and declining incomes, fishermen lashed out at the demands and complexity of the new controls.

“Boys in the prime of life, in their late 30s, are having the rug pulled out from under them,” Harriet Didriksen told a reporter.

The white-haired Didriksen, of Mattapoisett, Mass., said she and her husband sold one of their two trawlers to the federal government through a new buyout program. “I fear what’ll happen next,” she said.

The buyouts, taking boats out of action, are part of a many-sided federal plan that also closed much of the prime Georges Bank fishing zone east of Cape Cod, trimmed allowable days at sea to 88 a year for trawlers and raised minimum mesh sizes on nets, in order to let younger fish free.

It will take four or five years to restore cod and other stocks to “reasonable” levels, said Andrew Rosenberg, New England chief for the National Marine Fisheries Service.

“The challenge is that as soon as fishermen see some improvement, they’ll want to go out and get them,” the marine biologist said.

Conservationists, who fought for years to have limits imposed, fear the industry-dominated council will act too quickly to lift them.

“The fishermen have got mortgages, immediate financial pressures that overwhelm the long-term interest in preserving the fishery,” said Doug Hopkins of the Environmental Defense Fund.

New Englanders can look north to see what happens when a fishery is left unprotected: Some 40,000 Canadian fishermen and processors were thrown out of work when the cod disappeared off Newfoundland and the government completely closed the fishery in 1992.

Governments worldwide should have limited the number of fishermen years ago, said a top fisheries specialist with the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization.

“There have been too many fishermen and too many vessels going after too few fish,” Ulf Wijkstroem said in a telephone interview from the agency’s headquarters in Rome.

Encouraged by U.S. and other government subsidies, the world fishing fleet doubled in size over two decades and now includes 37,000 “industrial” vessels of more than 100 tons.

Naturally, the ocean catch exploded, from 18 million tons in 1950 to 90 million in recent years. But as stocks declined through the 1990s, production bumped up against a ceiling.

The impact on seafood prices has been moderate thus far, thanks in part to growing supplies from aquaculture--new fish, shrimp and scallop farms in China, Thailand and elsewhere.

Aquaculture may ultimately save hard-hit ocean fisheries, Wijkstroem said. But that is long-term. In the near future, governments must tighten fisheries management, keep stocks stable and coax more fishermen out of the water, he said.

“If nothing is done, the average marine catch could very well go down by 10 million tons a year,” he said--and the number of pitiful days for fishermen could continue to rise.

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The World Economics of Fishing

Fishing’s role in global economy:

Jobs: Directly or indirectly employs 200 million people worldwide.

Fleet: Estimated 3 million vessels, mostly small boats in developing countries. Includes 37,000 ships of more than 100 tons.

Production: Marine and inland “capture” production of 90.7 million tons in 1995. Aquaculture production of 21.3 million tons.

Value: $70 billion a year.

Associated Press