A few years after groundfisherman Cameron McLellan was married, he and his wife bought a tract of land in Edgecomb near Route One and built themselves a home. “My father was furious,” McLellan remembers. “He couldn’t understand why I wanted to be out of Boothbay Harbor.” A sixth-generation fisherman, McLellan was looking to the future. The small businesses he needed to keep his offshore trawler running were disappearing from Boothbay Harbor in favor of motels, tourist shops, and restaurants. “I knew the fishing industry would either be in Rockland or Portland,” McLellan recalls thinking in the early 1980s. “So I wanted to be pretty much equidistant.”
Now McLellan keeps his 73-foot vessel berthed in Portland. The engine repair, gear, and ice businesses he and other groundfisherman rely on have vanished from most of Maine’s small ports, such as Stonington and Rockland. Port Clyde is the last town with commercial groundfishing vessels north of Portland. What will happen when the new fishing regulations, known as Amendment 13, come in to force in May? Will McLellan and others stop fishing? Will the dozens of small marine businesses which dot Maine’s coast close their doors as well?
When Amendment 13 comes into force, fishermen will see their already limited days at sea cut nearly in half. Those precious days, when they are allowed to be on the water, will be divided into two categories: 60 percent will be “A” days, when a fisherman may fish for any species; 40 percent will be “B” days when fishermen may only fish for fish stocks that have been termed “healthy.” Three additional parts of the western Gulf of Maine will be closed, in addition to the 12,000 square miles currently closed at different times of the year to protect spawning areas and juvenile fish. Any vessel that hasn’t landed at least 5,000 pounds of groundfish during one of the past six years will not receive any days at sea allocation. Finally, fishermen will be allowed to lease their days at sea to other fishermen, within certain limits.
Fishermen like McLellan say that the new regulations, which will permit his vessel, the ADVENTURER, just 81 days at sea, will put them out of business. State officials worry that the loss of active fishermen will lead to an accelerated loss of related marine businesses and the long-term disappearance of Maine’s working waterfronts.
Fishermen are perceived as loners, but the truth is no vessel sails without the assistance of dozens of people. McLellan, for example, buys replacement netting and gear for his boat on a regular basis. He has to stock up on thousands of pounds of ice and gallons of fuel for each trip, and purchase food for the crew. He uses the Portland Fish Exchange to sell his catch. Fishermen like McLellan keep their money in Maine banks and use local accountants and bookkeepers to manage their business. The marine infrastructure found on a working waterfront is the direct result of successful fishermen who require these specialized services and products.
Unfortunately that marine infrastructure is fast disappearing from many of the smaller Maine ports. As Department of Marine Resources Commissioner George LaPointe notes, “Groundfishermen are pretty much gone from downeast Maine.” Fishermen left the industry throughout the 1990s, as regulations and a federal boat buy-back program reduced the incentives to fish. Thus, according to LaPointe, the impacts of Amendment 13 may turn out to be graver in Maine than elsewhere. “We’ve already lost so many fishermen prior to these new regulations coming in,” he reflects. “Look back over the past 20 years to see how much has changed.”
According to Cindy Smith, a consultant with the Department of Marine Resources, Maine has lost 25 percent of its federally licensed fishing vessels since 1994. “Because the stocks are rebuilding,” she notes in an e-mail message, “Maine has been able to hold onto its landings. Basically, there are fewer people landing more fish.”
The Portland Fish Exchange, the East Coast’s first display auction, has been a symbol of the changing fortunes of Maine’s fishing industry since its opening in 1988. The volume of fish landed at the Exchange reflects the dramatic decline in groundfish stocks during the 1990s and their slow rebound in recent years. Hank Soule, general manager of the Exchange, notes that the pounds of fish moved through the auction dropped significantly in 1994, after new regulations limiting days at sea were put in place. “But it’s back up, just as predicted,” he says. “There are fewer boats but they’re catching the same volume of fish.”
And there’s the rub. Maine needs a certain number of active fishermen to sustain the web of small businesses that comprise a vital waterfront. Smith, at the DMR, notes that Maine boats will have to leave the state if they can’t be supplied with the gear, fuel and ice that they need, landing their fish in ports that have those services. Soule calls it “the critical mass of infrastructure.” He sites, as an example, Vessel Services Inc., the last company on the Portland waterfront to supply ice to fishing vessels. “They’ve had some hard times. And we need them,” he says with a trace of anxiety in his voice.
Ed Bradley founded Vessel Services Inc. with two partners in the early 1980s. A legal specialist in admiralty and marine law and a founder of the University of Southern Maine’s Marine Law Institute, Bradley has been involved in Maine’s fishing world for more than 30 years.
“I predict that in five years, the Fish Pier will be a wasteland,” Bradley intones without expression. “In ten years, it will be a corporate fish complex.” In response to the growing conversion of waterfront land to other uses, the Department of Marine Resources and several other government agencies, private organizations such as Coastal Enterprises Inc. and the Island Institute, and the Governor’s Office came together last spring to form the Working Waterfront Coalition. The coalition’s goal is to preserve the small percentage of Maine’s coast that remains working waterfront through a combination of tax relief, government assistance, and community planning. “There are direct and indirect values from our working waterfronts,” continues LaPointe. “Amendment 13 isn’t the end of fishing in Maine but it will certainly have a big impact.”