It is fact the much of the fish population along Maine’s coast has disappeared. The government is now considering different ways to ensure the same thing doesn’t happen to the state’s fishermen. It is found that the local fishing groups and the state have launched separate programs to buy commercial fishing permits so that when fish stocks recover off the Maine coast, fishermen will be able catch them.
The main purpose for this program is to improve the health of the fish stocks and keep the centuries-old fishing tradition alive in the small ports that pepper the state’s long and rugged coastline. Dwight Carver, one of the participants in the programs, said, the locals used to catch groundfish three or four months of the year to supplement their lobster fishing income.
The fishing fleet across New England has shrunk in recent years as fishermen contend with declining fish populations and regulations that severely limit how often and where they can fish. It is said that in the present system, fishermen can buy and sell federal fishing permits allowing them to fish in New England waters. When the fishing populations declined, most eastern Maine fishermen sold their permits to other boat owners or in government-funded buybacks, or lost their right to fish because they stopped fishing. Many of the permits left the state.
Jason Joyce, an eighth-generation fisherman from Swans Island, will also be fishing as part of the program. As a young man, he worked on boats that harvested groundfish, scallops, shrimp, urchins and lobsters. Nowadays, lobster is about all that anybody goes after.
