Cape fishermen angry over herring monitoring changes
By Doug Fraser
Cape Cod Times
July 27, 2013 12:00 AM
CHATHAM — Until last week, many local fishermen thought the herring problem had been solved.
After nearly a decade of a hard-fought grass-roots campaign to have fishery managers more closely monitor herring — a keystone species in the food chain — a plan finally emerged.
Central to the plan developed last year by the New England Fishery Management Council, was a requirement that all Atlantic herring trips by large vessels, generally more than 100 feet long, be covered by federal observers who would note what was being caught and what was being thrown back.
But last week, the National Marine Fisheries Service disapproved the 100-percent observer coverage requirement as well as two other measures considered by advocates to be vital to protecting herring stocks: a requirement that fish dealers weigh the catch and not use estimates based on volume or other methods, and a limit on the number of times herring fishermen could invoke an emergency clause and dump fish from their nets without them being counted by an observer.
"They basically approved nothing," said a frustrated and angry John Pappalardo, the CEO of the Cape Cod Commercial Fishermen's Alliance and a former member and onetime chairman of the New England council.
"They kicked the can down the road," Chatham fisherman John Our said after returning Tuesday from a day's fishing for skates and dogfish.
Atlantic and river herring are important because they eat plankton and, in turn, supply the protein needs of predator species like cod, bluefin tuna and whales that eat them.
Cape fishermen suspect that the disappearance of many of the valuable commercial fish species from local waters may have something to do with the relatively recent technique of pair trawling for Atlantic herring, where twinned vessels tow a large net between them capable of catching hundreds of thousands of pounds of fish per tow. There's no herring, fishermen say, to attract predator fish close to Cape shores.
Fishermen also say the decline in the river herring that return to the Cape's rivers and streams each spring to spawn coincided with the debut of the pair trawling technique in 2005.
When the monitoring proposal was rejected, local fishermen were particularly galled at the National Marine Fisheries Service's contention that the agency couldn't afford observers for the herring fleet.
Back in 2010, the New England Council estimated the annual cost of placing observers on every trip by the larger vessels at between $1.88 million and $2.36 million. In the new plan, the herring fleet was contributing $325 of the $1,200 estimated daily cost for each observer.
Since June 1, the Chatham fleet has carried observers on 74 trips, the most of any port, according to Fixed Gear Sector Manager Eric Brazer. But the Chatham fleet fishes for dogfish and skates, which have a history of extremely low discards of unwanted species, something observers are looking for. Since the fleet catches very little else besides its target species, they have no need to be monitored, fishermen said. Bycatch is so low, in fact, the fleet recently received an exemption from carrying observers when catching dogfish and will be seeking one for skates as well.
"It's a total waste of money," Chatham fisherman Jan Margeson said.
John Our thought they should take the money used to monitor the local fleet and put it into herring observers.
National Marine Fisheries Service spokeswoman Teri Frady said the money to pay for observers in one fishery cannot easily be transferred because there are scientific objectives tied to a certain level of observer coverage. Around 40 percent of trips by large herring vessels, and between 4 and 8 percent of groundfish vessels, carried an observer in 2011, according to the agency's data.
In disapproving the new measures, NMFS said the agency hadn't yet developed a legal way to split the cost of paying for total observer coverage between the herring industry and the fisheries service, as proposed in the amendment.
And budget concerns made it cost-prohibitive to hire additional observers. Agency officials also had legal concerns over the fairness of how to apply the proposed limit on dumping fish.
Pappalardo said the fisheries council and the fishing industry had been misled by the fisheries service and that the federal agency had an obligation to work to resolve differences rather than disapprove them.
"They (NMFS) knew the council wanted a high rate, if not 100 percent, observer coverage. "» And, they also knew there was a high level of concern by the public and council about dumping fish at sea unobserved," Pappalardo said. "All the while, to have the (fisheries) service present at all of the meetings, and to have them not say a thing and reject the entire section because they can't figure out how to make it work, is so disingenuous as to be willful ignorance."
New England Council fishery analyst and herring plan coordinator Lori Steele said she was surprised that NMFS rejected the measures, saying there seemed to be communication between the parties that indicated things could be worked out.
"We have correspondence from the service where they expressed concern about these measures, but we thought we addressed it and apparently we didn't," Steele said.
Steele wasn't sure what the next step will be, but NMFS has said it will continue to work with the council to find a funding solution for observer coverage.
