Atlantic Scallop Fishery Booming

NEFMC fields controversy over
opening closed area to dayboats

by Laurie Schreiber

A few of the fishing boats that fish out of New Bedford. The scallop fishery has made New Bedford the leading dollar value port in the U.S. Largely an offshore fishery, it is beyond the practical and safe reach of dayboat scallopers. Opening more accessible closed areas to dayboats has been proposed and opposed by some. Tom Seymour photo

PORTLAND—The Atlantic scallop fishery, one of the nation’s top 10 fisheries in value, realized about $450 million in 2015 and continues to be successful and sustainable, with prospects for the future that continue to be encouraging, said National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration northeast regional chief John Bullard.

“The bedrock of the sustainability of this management system is rotational closures,” Bullard told the New England Fishery Management Council (NEFMC) at its Dec. 1-3 meeting.

Nevertheless, NEFMC grappled with a controversial question related to the rotational closure system, on the way to deciding to provide access for small dayboats to the northern portion of an area closed to fishing, called the Nantucket Lightship area, off Cape Cod.

The issue came down to policy versus the ability of small boats in the northeast to safely make the 60-hour round-trip in order to fish open areas further south in the mid-Atlantic.

Some fishermen told NEFMC that there aren’t a lot of scallops inshore to fish, and the trip to the mid-Atlantic is too long and hazardous in their vessels.

“I’d like to get into the Nantucket Lightship area for a few trips,” said a Chatham, Mass., fisherman. “I’d like to be able to fish closer to home rather than have to go to the mid-Atlantic area.”

“I’d like access to that fishing area without having to leave my homeport and my family,” said a Cape Cod fisherman.

But others said that, while they sympathize with the plight of the small-boat fleet, it’s important to continue the protection of scallops, especially juveniles, in closed areas.

“We don’t want to damage any small scallops,” said Eric Hansen, a full-time scalloper and member of NEFMC’s scallop advisory committee. “If you decide to give access to a small portion of fleet, it’s a major policy shift. I think you’ll find a lot of dissatisfaction with the other 95 percent of the limited access fishery. This policy shift will have far-reaching effects.”

“This issue has two aspects,” said the Fisheries Survival Fund’s Ron Smolowitz. “One is the allocation issue. A number of guys from New Bedford think they bent over backward to allow limited access, general category vessels to be able get a larger share of the access areas. That they’re apt to try to get access in the Nantucket Lightship area is blindsiding them. They’re really angry, if they see special treatment.”

From a scientific standpoint, Smolowitz said, the fleet is better off putting effort into the mid-Atlantic.

“There’s a large quantity of scallops down there,” he said. What’s questionable is whether there will be an increase in natural mortality. [But] we haven’t seen any sign of depletion or damage. It seems that resource is capable of holding up.”

“One of the principles of this fishery is making hard choices, and equity among all the sectors,” agreed Drew Minkiewicz, an attorney representing the Fisheries Survival Fund. “The Lighthship area is not ready. No one should be going in there. We make hard choices in this fishery so that we have sustainable fishery going forward.”

Minkiewicz noted that the majority of the limited access fleet is in New Bedford, requiring all of them to travel. “You can’t benefit one community over another,” he said. “This is a dangerous precedent to set in this fishery.”

NEFMC member John Quinn also opposed the idea.

“I’ve got great sympathy for small operators of any industry,” said Quinn, who called the Lightship area “the future of the resource.” The New Bedford scallop fleet, he said, steams right by the area now, headed to the mid-Atlantic. “They want to preserve it for their future.”

“This is a really difficult decision,” said NEFMC member Ellen Goethel. “I do think one size does not fit all. We’re talking about two different fleets, and they have different needs. I feel we have tried to put everyone into a square hole with our management, by expecting every size vessel to go along with every single rule. And it has killed our small-boat fleet by dong this. I feel strongly that we need to look outside the box. I’m not convinced that it’s biologically sound to open the Nantucket Lightship area, but I also feel we have not taken into account, for small vessels in any fishery, [the issue of] safety at sea. I feel we’re disadvantaging small boats, and we have to think about this in every plan that we have.”

But Bullard said that opening the area to one group will be the start of chipping away at the system as a whole.

“At what point do we not have the system that created the nation’s most profitable, most productive, most sustainable fishery?” Bullard said. “At what point do we say, it really isn’t a rotational closure system anymore: It’s a system where we decide who goes where at what time, and the concept of rotational closure really disappeared?...That’s the policy aspect here. I understand the motives and I sympathize with the motives, but rotational closure is what built this fishery.”

The robust nature of the fishery is illustrated in new fishing specifications approved by NEFMC. The specs, which go next to the National Marine Fisheries Service for approval in the form of Amendment 19 to the scallop management plan, cover fishing years 2016 through 2018. They increase allowable landings and days-at-sea by about 30 percent. If approved, Amendment 19 will also change the start of the scallop fishing year from March 1 to April 1. The fishing year will continue to be a 12-month period, ending on March 31, rather than February 28/29. This measure is expected to reduce administrative burdens.

NEFMC established the scallop plan in 1982. A number of amendments and framework adjustments have been implemented since then. In 1994 a limited access program was introduced to stop the influx of new vessels. Qualifying vessels were assigned different day-at-sea limits according to which permit category they qualified for: full-time, part-time or occasional. Other measures included new gear regulations to improve size selection and reduce bycatch, a vessel monitoring system to track a vessel’s fishing effort, and an open access general category scallop permit created for vessels that did not qualify for a limited access permit. Also in 1994, Amendment 5 to the Northeast Multispecies FMP closed large areas on Georges Bank to scallop fishing over concerns of finfish bycatch and disruption of spawning aggregations.

In 1998, two new scallop closed areas (Hudson Canyon and VA/NC Areas) in the Mid-Atlantic were established, to protect concentrations of small scallops until they reached a larger size.

In 1999, scallop fishermen were allowed into portions of the Georges Bank groundfish closed areas for the first time since 1994, after surveys and experimental fishing activities identified areas where scallop biomass was high due to no fishing in the intervening years. This successful “experiment” with closing an area and reopening it for controlled scallop fishing motivated NEFMC to shift overall scallop management to an area rotational system that would close areas and reopen them several years later to prevent overfishing and optimize yield.

Formal rotational area management—closing areas that contain beds of small scallops, then opening the areas when scallops are larger—was introduced in 2004. Instead of allocating an annual pool of days-at-sea for limited vessels to fish in any area, vessels had to use a portion of their total days-at-sea allocation in the controlled access areas defined by the plan, or exchange them with another vessel to fish in a different controlled access area.

As the scallop resource rebuilt under area rotation, biomass increased inshore and fishing pressure increased by open access general category vessels, starting in 2001. Landings went from an average of about 200,000 pounds from 1994-2000 to over one million pounds consistently from 2001-2003 and 3-7 million pounds each year from 2004-2006.

In 2007, a limited entry program for the general category fishery was introduced, where each qualifying vessel received an individual allocation in pounds of scallop meat with a possession limit of 400 pounds. The qualifying vessels receives a total allocation of 5 percent of the total projected scallop catch each fishing year.