New Mesh of Rules Seeks to Cut Appetite for Fishing

Tony Marquis pulled into port with considerably more cod than the law lets him land. Federal fish enforcers ordered him to stay docked the next day as penance, which left him less than repentant.

“They’re fish. I’m a fisherman. I got a net. This is what I do,” Marquis said, rationalizing loudly as he angled his vessel into a weather-beaten wharf at the end of a long day at sea. “That’s why they call it fishing.”

A week later, the government lowered the cod catch even more and closed off 900 square miles of gulf waters that the fishermen of Kittery--which rhymes with jittery--consider the dorsal fin of the local industry.

Now, some fishermen here and in neighboring Portsmouth, N.H., are talking about switching to lobster. One problem: The government is weighing rules to lower the amount of lobster that can be taken from North Carolina to Maine, where most of America’s scrumptious shellfish roam.

“Fishing’s no fun any more,” said Marquis, who has fished for a living for 30 of his 46 years.

The lobster and cod laws are only two loops of a vast, continually tightening and bewilderingly complex net of rules meant to curb the seafood binge by the nation’s fishermen, who already have sent some populations of good-eating fish the way of the American buffalo.

President Clinton travels to Monterey on Friday for a conference on the world’s oceans. Topping the agenda is the dwindling number of fish in the sea.

More than a third of the 279 species of sealife in U.S. waters are in trouble. A sampler platter of over-exploited species includes Pacific salmon, Maine lobster, Gulf of Mexico shrimp, California anchovies and Texas red snapper. More than twice as many boats are fishing for scallops in the mid-Atlantic than the species can stand. Under the 1996 Sustainable Fisheries Act, that has to stop.

Obstacles Hobble Prevention Efforts

Congress has given federal authorities until 1999 to halt overfishing in the nation’s waters. Eight regional councils made up of regulators, scientists and, most of all, fishing interests, are deep in contentious deliberations over dozens of management plans. Yet spotty enforcement, the parochial economic interests of coastal states and the average fisherman’s urge to protect a favorite spot, style and species--by hook or by crook--remain huge obstacles to success.

“Every aspect of every management plan is a compromise,” said Andrew Rosenberg, head of the National Marine Fisheries Service office that oversees the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic. “The alternative is for the government to just order people to stop fishing as it sees fit. [But] I don’t think that’s politically acceptable.”

As a result, the struggle to protect this once seemingly infinite resource has pitted town against town, state against state, sport fishermen against commercial trawlers and everybody against Uncle Sam, all of them admitting the need for tough action while at the same time promoting their own self-interest.

All of these conflicting agendas are played out almost daily along the New England coast, the birthplace of the nation’s fishing industry and its most seriously abused fisheries. Up here, debate over proposed rules regulating, say, the mesh size of a fishing net can trigger intense emotional reactions that can seem surprising to outsiders, but not to people bent on protecting their economic stake in an ancestral livelihood.

And nowhere is that livelihood more ingrained than in Maine, a state where fishing policy has long been dictated by fishermen, much to their lasting sorrow. In most parts of coastal Maine, for instance, there is no cod left and precious little haddock. And what cod congregate are mobbed by fishermen, who are happy to take at 2 1/2 pounds a creature which, given half a chance, could grow to 150 pounds.

Groundfish Stocks Begin to Rebound

In 1994, the New England Fishery Management Council--one of the eight panels charged with managing the fisheries--sharply restricted fishing on Georges Bank, a 12,000-square-mile plateau a hundred miles off shore. As a result, stocks of cod, haddock and flounder and other groundfish have begun to rebound for the first time in decades.

But the restrictions on Georges Bank also had the effect of increasing fishing in the Gulf of Maine closer to shore, devastating local stocks. After much hand-wringing and compromising, the council last month closed waters and reduced the amount of fish that could be caught in the gulf by 63%.

The ban includes a place called Jeffreys Ledge, almost the sole fishing spot for fishermen in towns like Kittery. The closure would last three years, though the council can always change its mind.

Already there is a pressure to reopen the newly closed areas. A new alliance, made up of fishermen who fish the southern gulf almost exclusively, has submitted an alternative plan to the tough one that took effect last month.

“These regulations are very restrictive and very confused and very contradictory,” said Erik Anderson, a fisherman in Portsmouth, which shares a port with Kittery.

Marquis and Anderson, who sits on the New England Fishery Management Council, were among a dozen fishermen who recently gathered at the Portsmouth Fisherman’s Cooperative to listen to state and federal enforcement officials explain the new rules that just might drive them out of business.

The co-op sells most of its daily catch to the Fulton Fish Market in New York City. The bulletin boards in the ramshackle office, where cod and flounder are offloaded and weighed and then trucked to the big cities for preparation in white-tablecloth restaurants, are filled with reports outlining which days and which nets and which style of fishing can be used to catch which quantities of which fish.

Right now, fishermen can only fish 88 days of the year--half as much as they could two years ago--and must call a hotline if they exceed daily cod limits. If they call before docking, the cod is deducted from future fishing days. If they don’t call, they can be fined.

Besides closing Jeffreys Ledge, the latest plan lowers the cod take from 1,000 pounds a day to 700. It also includes a series of month-long rolling closures farther out to sea that follow the migratory patterns of spawning groundfish. The new rules also require fishermen to stow their nets while crossing closed waters, something that could cost them additional hours of fishing time.

During the hearing, fisherman after fisherman fired one what-if scenario after another at the authorities until it was clear to many that the complicated new calculus of catching fish in the gulf was completely unfathomable.

“I’m so mixed up now I’m going to go home,” said one fisherman, throwing up his hands as he walked out. “My head’s spinning,” said another.

Though fishermen can face tens of thousands of dollars in fines and the loss of their licenses and livelihood if they get caught breaking rules, enforcement officials concede that cheating is tough to police.

Tony Forestiere is the only uniformed officer with the National Marine Fisheries Service patrolling the docks from Bar Harbor, Maine, to Boston, though the federal government has begun contracting with state wildlife officials nationwide to help enforce the welter of new rules.

He said virtually every community along the coast has a wharf and a boom with a hook capable of lifting a bucket of fish from a boat to a truck. “It’s like one trooper on a hundred miles of turnpike,” Forestiere said. “It’s hit and miss.”

When there’s a hit, though, it’s usually a big fish who gets caught. A few weeks ago, two brothers who ran a six-boat Cape Cod fishing fleet were fined $2 million in fines for 300 violations of federal laws. They allegedly kept a fake log that undercounted their catch and days spent at sea. They were also banned from fishing for life.

“Do we have enough enforcement to catch everyone who violates the law? The answer is, ‘No,’ ” said Gary Matlock, head of the National Marine Fisheries Service’s Sustainable Fisheries Office. “But we do have the ability to influence people to the extent that the compliance will be better than the noncompliance and the stocks of fish will improve.”

For all their, well, carping, most fishermen realize there is too much fishing. “But whenever it comes down to a particular measure that will affect a particular fisherman, there is a very good likelihood he will object,” said Eleanor Dorsey of the Conservation Law Fund, a Boston-based environmental group.

Earlier this year, Maine’s industry-friendly Department of Marine Resources floated a remarkably uncharacteristic proposal: A total ban on fishing along the entire coast during the key spawning months between April and June.

The ban would have covered only state waters, which extend three miles from shore, and would have dovetailed with tough federal restrictions that went into effect this spring.

The state polled influential trade organizations, and the response was: Go ahead and do it. Stop us before we fish again. Yet when public hearings were held earlier this year, people changed their minds.

“It was one of those things that everybody thought was a good idea, until we tried to implement it,” said Terry Stockwell, a Department of Marine Resources marine biologist. “The attitude was ‘Close down the guys in New Hampshire and leave us Maine guys alone. Close down the recreational guys and leave us commercial guys alone. Close down commercial guys and leave us recreational guys alone.’ ”

The proposal was shelved, a development Dorsey called “appalling.”

Example of Industry Influence

The fact that Maine backed down is a vivid example of how much the industry influences fishery management. In December, the state successfully fought off federal efforts to put the beleaguered Atlantic salmon on the Endangered Species list.

“It’s basically the industry in those [fishing] states developing the management rules,” said Rosenberg.

For Mainers, though, the real battle is just beginning. The federal government has been holding public hearings on a strict management plan for the creature for which this state happily reduces itself to mere adjective: the lobster.

Maine has a $107-million lobster industry, the biggest in the country.

“If lobsters collapse it will be worse than the groundfishing collapse because there are 10 times more lobster fishermen than groundfishermen,” said Dorsey.

At this point, lobsters seem to be literally crawling out from under every rock in the sea. But scientists say that overfishing has resulted in most lobsters getting nabbed before they are old enough to spawn, creating a dire shortage of egg-bearing females.

The Atlantic lobster, experts believe, is right where the Alaskan crab was in the late 1970s--harvested at record levels yet at earlier ages. That population subsequently crashed and has yet to fully rebound.

Because most lobster originates within three miles of shore, the states have more clout over regulatory efforts. In Maine, for instance, Gov. Angus King has lined up behind the lobstermen, who say there is plenty of lobster.

The federal government believes the rules in the state waters aren’t tough enough and want them to conform with federal rules. Officials propose limiting traps and creating a no-fishing buffer zone, a sort of safe haven.

“The American lobster is a resource at risk,” Harry Mears, a National Marine Fisheries Service official, tried to tell several hundred scowling lobstermen who recently packed a Holiday Inn conference room in Ellsworth, Maine.

Lobstermen, Allies Say They’ll Fight

Nobody was buying it. Local lobstermen and their elected allies along the coast have vowed to fight the restrictions.

Tony Marquis, with a crew and a family and a 38-foot boat called Rolling Stone to maintain, has some lobster traps. With the closure of Kittery, he figures he will increase his lobster take.

“Everybody today, they know how to do two or three types of fishing,” he said. “Shrimp, scallops. You need other things.”

Stockwell said fishermen in Kittery are lucky they still have a little fish left to catch. Most Maine fishermen these days don’t have any cod at all. Still, he has sympathy for the folks in Kittery, most of whom he knows. People like Marquis, he said, have built comfortable lifestyles on their fishing incomes.

“It will be extremely difficult for them,” he said. “A fisherman’s a hunter. When you have a chance to hunt fish, it goes against every instinct to pull up and move away from them.”