It is four a.m. and very calm, no breeze. It feels unseasonably warm for a February night on the coast of Maine.
I am walking out on the groundfish wharf in Port Clyde, a dim light from the fish house at the end of the wharf reveals only edges between land and water. Looking out to sea from the wharf a boat down toward the mouth of the harbor has its running lights on and within a few minutes it heads out into the night, search light scanning the water’s surface to avoid running down other boats resting on their moorings.
I turn to see Glen Libby and Raymond Upham pull up in front of the bait shed at the back of the property in Raymond’s pickup truck. They jump out and beckon me to follow them down a ramp to the skiff. Glen is in his mid-50s, a lifelong fisherman and president of the Midcoast Fishermen’s Association. Raymond is in his early 40s and a lifelong lobsterman. He goes fishing with Glen in the winter to make some extra money. They show up at the dock, Glen wearing torn black coveralls to fight the cold temperatures and Raymond in orange Grundens.
With the small outboard engine humming we step down into the aluminum skiff and head out into the darkness to find F/V Skipper, a 55- foot dragger, resting on its mooring. We climb aboard as Raymond banters with Glen about the privileges of a captain. Raymond starts in on Glen, “poor bastard can hardly get up on his own boat any more, look at that,” as Glen pulls himself up over the gunwale. Glen responds sarcastically, “it’s the easy life I’ve been living.” Raymond follows, “I’ll be surprised if we see Glen outside the wheelhouse today. He has a hard time walking out on deck…” This goes on lightheartedly as night turns to day.
As we head out of the harbor, it is nearly impossible to see other boats or moorings floating in the harbor. “This is the worst part of the day,” says Glen as he carefully maneuvers the boat through the harbor. “It’s easy to mess up,” he says, and I infer that he does this maneuvering by memory and with the help of his crewman Raymond. Raymond calls out from the starboard side “full back” as Glen nearly hits a mooring that emerges from the blackness just a few feet from the boat. He runs the boats engine hard in reverse. The boat stops, the bow is reoriented and we proceed again. After slow progress we steam out of the harbor for an hour or so before setting the first trawl.
As we progress Glen fires up a computer system in the wheelhouse. The computer tower that runs the Captain Navigation software package is bolted down to a cabinet on the starboard side of wheelhouse, as is the computer screen. A chart of ocean bathymetry, showing contours of ocean depth, blinks to life as Captain Navigation boots up.
Once everything is running, a keyboard and mouse allow Glen to drag the chart across the screen as he determines where he wants to set his first trawl. I am naively surprised to find that the electronic chart on the computer screen has dozens of colored lines on it representing trawl paths that have been tried in the past.
Over the course of the day I learn that this is not Glen’s data. Today Glen is using his brother Gary’s data, accumulated over years of the brothers
going together back to the same fishing grounds. Glen has his own database, but his computer is on shore getting fixed.
All day long we watch the Captain Navigation System as we move across the ocean. This technology provides waypoints for Glen that could be viewed as an historical sedimentation of a sort, of his family’s knowledge of fishing this area of the ocean.
Glen, Gary and other fishermen have been working for the past three years to modify fisheries management to acknowledge that they don’t fish everywhere in the New England region, they fish in a specific place, and that the people who fish particular areas of the ocean should be empowered to manage the fish stocks in those areas.
In the afternoon, over a lunch of leftover doughnuts and coffee, Glen and I reflected on the past two and a half years working together. We talk about getting trounced in the fisheries management process while trying to establish management through territories that matched fishing community uses of the ocean-what was termed “area management” by proponents. We talk about the success of the Port Clyde Fresh Catch brand, and about creating the first Community Supported Fisheries project in the nation. And we talk about working to create fisheries management that is responsive to communities and about the role that locally sold fish could have in terms of creating awareness among consumers about the problems in the ocean.
The tows last for two hours each, sometimes longer, at which point Raymond comes up on deck to help bring the catch aboard. We continue “the grind” as Glen calls it, for 13 hours before heading home.
Much of the time Glen talks about how the fish interact with the bathymetry. He points out how the boat feels when we are dragging through mud (where he wants to be) or over less desirable gravel (hard bottom). When we come across hard bottom Glen marks it on the Captain Navigation chart by selecting a rock pile avatar and dragging and dropping it onto the chart. He does this, he explains, so that he can be sure that this particular variance in the tow pattern is not tried again. All day long he experiments and adds new information to the database
And there is strategy involved in deciding when to “haul back,” to pull the net aboard. Glen anticipates where the shrimp will bunch up along canyon walls. He will try to tow the net up in these locations. The entire day, typical of other trips during the year, is spent tracking the location of the vessel relative to bathymetry, connecting with people in the fishing community via the radio or on cell phone (or watching them with binoculars to see how much they bring aboard-are they “into them” or are we doing better?).
Over the course of the day we average about 200 pounds of shrimp per hour of trawling, a decent day for this time of year. Perhaps most remarkable of all, we may have had only five pounds of bycatch the entire day! The reason for this is that many Port Clyde fishermen now use a double only Nordmore grate.
The Nordmore grate was designed to eliminate catching small shrimp and in doing so it also reduces bycatch of small fish in shrimp nets, protecting stocks of haddock, cod, and flounder. The double grate is not mandated by any governing body, it is simply a choice that many fishermen in Port Clyde are making to do something for the environment-and while they are doing this they are also gaining efficiency in their fishing operation because they can spend so much less time picking non-targeted species out of their catch.
This level of conservation in a trawl fishery is astounding, and certainly makes shrimp caught in Port Clyde and by others using the double grate system some of the most sustainably harvested shrimp in the country if not the world. Perhaps it is time to consider the utility of certifying shrimp caught using this shrimp as sustainable.
Rob Snyder is vice president of programs at the Island Institute. You can also follow him on Twitter@ProOutsider.