Fewer fishing days alloted to groundfishermen

[Sam]

NEW BEDFORD — Struggling fishermen start the 2007 groundfishing season today with fewer than 50 allotted fishing days to sustain them through the year. Fishermen also face a 70 percent reduction in the amount of yellowtail flounder they may catch each trip. During the 2006 fishing year, which ended last night at midnight, fishermen were allowed to land 10,000 pounds of yellowtail per trip in Georges Bank fishing grounds known as the U.S.-Canada Management Area. This year, vessels will be restricted to 3,000 pounds of yellowtail per trip.


"It's going to be more difficult now," Fairhaven fishing Capt. Michael Matulaitis said. "Now we have to fill in the gap with other species and it's getting thin with what we can fill it with. "Yellowtail are flat fish that swim on the ocean bottom. Both fishery managers and fishermen were surprised when a stock assessment released in September 2005 showed that yellowtail was "overfished," meaning the stock had dropped below sustainable levels.The stock was believed to be in such good shape that fishery managers created a special program in 2004 for fishermen to target yellowtail. Scientists later concluded that modeling errors led to an overestimation of the size of the yellowtail stock and an underestimation of the rate at which yellowtail die from fishing.


Fishermen are still paying for those errors, Mr. Matulaitis said.
Today, yellowtail are overfished and overfishing is still occurring, according to the National Marine Fisheries Service. The agency reduced the yellowtail trip limit for 2007 to prevent fishermen from harvesting more than the U.S. share of the Total Allowable Catch (TAC), which is set each year by U.S. and Canadian fishery managers. Fishing regulators set TACs to keep fishermen from catching more fish than are needed to rebuild groundfish stocks to sustainable levels. The 2007 yellowtail TAC for the U.S.-Canada Management Area is set at 900 metric tons — a 43 percent reduction from 2006, according to a letter the agency sent to groundfishing permit holders.
"Without an action to reduce the current trip limit, there is risk that TAC could be exceeded in 2007," National Marine Fisheries Service spokeswoman Teri Frady wrote in an e-mail. "If the TAC is exceeded, then the overage would come off of next year's allocation."


The lower yellowtail trip limit should keep fishing grounds in the eastern half of the area open long enough for fishermen to "more fully harvest" their share of cod and haddock, according to the letter. In previous years, fishermen were denied access to other stocks once the yellowtail TAC was reached. Fishing regulators currently manage three different stocks of yellowtail: Cape Cod/Gulf of Maine, Georges Bank and Southern New England/Mid-Atlantic. Some fishing industry representatives believe that yellowtail may swim from one area to another and should therefore be managed as a single stock.


Researchers at the UMass School for Marine Science and Technology are tagging yellowtail to track their movement through the ocean, said professor and fishery scientist Brian Rothschild.
"If these studies show they don't swim back and forth, then the regulations make sense," Dr. Brian Rothschild said. "If they do swim back and forth, maybe the regulations need to be changed."

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