Sanctuary Seeks to Avoid
Shipwreck Disturbances

by Laurie Schreiber

The Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary is asking fishermen to be careful fishing around the 47 shipwrecks known to be there.

“One challenge we have at the sanctuary is to protect the shipwrecks’ located there,” the sanctuary’s superintendent, Pete DeCola, said during a session on the federal scallop fishery at the Maine Fishermen’s Forum in early March.

The sanctuary is home to 47 known shipwrecks and perhaps more than 200 all together. All of the known shipwrecks have had interactions with fishing gear, he said. It’s been the sanctuary’s policy not to reveal the wrecks’ whereabouts. Now the policy is under review, given the fact that they all have had interactions.

“The policy is probably not working so well,” he said.

For example, as many as 40 scallop boats were counted in the northwest corner on one day in March 2017.

“That’s where seven shipwrecks are,” he said.

One, he said, is the North Star (ex. Bonaventure), a 55-foot-long dragger built in 1967 in Portland and based in Gloucester, Mass. North Star fished in Massachusetts Bay until disaster struck in August 2003. During the intense fishing, many of the vessel’s components became widely dispersed, he said.

In 2018 and 2019, the sanctuary took a different tack and disclosed the shipwrecks’ locations.

“Now it’s a common responsibility,” he said, adding, “If you want to see a maritime archeologist’s head explode, tell them we’re going to disclose shipwreck locations and they’ll freak out real quick.”

In the two years since the notices started going out, the sanctuary has performed side scan sonar surveys for the wrecks and discovered they’ve been untouched, he said. In a 2019 post-season survey, respondents said they avoid shipwrecks to prevent lost gear and fishing time, he added.

“We found out what we knew all along—nobody wants to hit a shipwreck because of lost gear and fishing time,” he said.

The sanctuary asked for a 360-foot buffer zone.

“They thought that was reasonable,” he said.

The sanctuary is continuing the program in 2020 and providing electronic files that can be downloaded to a boat’s chart plotter.