A final decision on regulations limiting access to lobster fishing in federal waters in the Gulf of Maine is expected this spring. The new rules most likely will restrict lobstering in federal waters in the Gulf of Maine (GoM) to those who have been actively catching lobster during a recent four-year period. It is not expected to change access to the GoM for most fishermen with federal permits in Maine, say officials, but instead could prevent overtaxing the lobster resource in the gulf.
The proposed rule would restrict access to the Area 1 federal lobster fishery to those who held federal tags for the fishery between 2004 and 2008, said Peter Burns, a NOAA fishery management specialist. The National Marine Fishery Service wants to keep access at 2008 levels, but officials expanded the criteria to incorporate 2004 to 2007 fishing records to include fishermen who may have had to take 2008 off, Burns said.
Federal fishing permits currently are transferable between management areas. While the lobster fishery in the Gulf of Maine is doing well, other lobster fisheries along the northern Atlantic coast are limping along. In southern New England, regulators originally proposed a five-year moratorium on lobstering, but eventually agreed to cut catches by 10 percent.
It’s still a mystery why the lobster fishery is doing so much better in Maine than in other areas, said Burns.
“It’s really got the scientists scratching their heads,” he said.
But while lobster numbers are holding steady in the Gulf of Maine, the population may not be strong enough to support more fishermen, Burns said. Gulf of Maine lobsters already have to run a gauntlet of traps in federal waters.
“There’s a lot of fishing effort and as soon as the lobsters are big enough to be harvested, they’re taken out,” he said.
It’s still unclear what the ramifications of such a switch in regulations would be for Maine lobstermen. Lobstering in federal waters makes up a small, but important part of the Maine lobster industry, with many lobstermen moving to federal waters in the winter. For most Maine lobstermen, the new regulations will not cause much of an interruption of business-as-usual, said Jim Dow, who is on the board of directors for the Maine Lobstermen’s Association
But Downeast Lobstermen’s Association treasurer Mike Dassatt believes the shift could have major unintended consequences. Dassatt understands the need to limit access to the Gulf of Maine fishery, as he’s watched more and more fishermen crowd into the gulf when other lobster fisheries have failed. Under federal permitting rules, out-of-staters can fish in federal waters off the Maine coast, Dassatt said.
Dassatt fears that restricting federal permits would only drive up the asking price for those permits by tens of thousands of dollars and make the permits unreachable to most entry-level lobstermen. That would leave the field accessible only to large-scale lobstering operations, which might result in higher lobster mortality in the gulf, he said.
“The snowball that they’re trying to melt, they’ll make it bigger,” Dassatt said.
There has been little opposition so far from lobstermen along the rest of the east coast, Burns said. Mike Theiler of the Connecticut Commercial Lobstermen’s Association said he doesn’t begrudge protections to keep the Gulf of Maine fishery strong.
“I don’t really meddle with what they got going on up there, and I hope they wouldn’t meddle with what we’ve got going on here,” Theiler said.
Richie Madeira, a Connecticut fisherman also with the association, accepts the proposed rule, but worries it may join a quilt of patchwork regulations that keeps lobstermen from different parts of the Atlantic coast from uniting as an industry.
“I’d like the whole northeast to be on the same page,” Madeira said.
Now that the public comment period has closed, the proposed regulations still must be approved through several agencies and the Secretary of Commerce before going into effect, said Burns. If the regulations are approved, letters will be sent out both to qualifying permit-holders to opt into the new system and to those who don’t seem to qualify to verify they are not eligible.
“We’re giving the people the opportunity. The ball is in their court,” said Burns.