The New England Fishery Management Council has approved a suite of new rules that chop the days at sea for big trip boats from 37 to 29, and will also eventually reduce the share to the total scallop catch allotted to the small boats that sail from Cape Cod. It is states in the Amendment 11 that “Small boats received 10 percent of the overall quota with the understanding that as soon as the quota was implemented it would be 5 percent because that would lead to consolidation and boats would be left out of the fishery.”
Tom Dempsey of the Cape Cod Commercial Hook Fishermen’s Association informed that was agreed upon three years ago [in Amendment 11]. He added that Amendment 11 put the squeeze on small boats. Provincetown scalloper Mary Beth DePoutiloff said that they get 400 pounds a day and they squeezed us all out and the trip boats got two extra days. Now NEFMC is putting the squeeze on them.
The earlier rule change, which has yet to go into effect, to halve the small boats’ share of the total catch will replace a 400-pound limit with individual allotments based on each boat’s reported catch from 2000-2004. DePoutiloff said that their permits were cut in half and the ones left didn’t have hardly enough quota to make it. None of the five boats in Provincetown will have enough so one fishermen will buy the other four out.
They’re pretty much united in not liking one aspect or another of the coming rules but there is more to the decision than worries about scallop numbers. The New England Marine Fisheries Management Council calculates all aspects of mortality and then derives an F-value as a target to keep things sustainable. These rules are all part of Framework 21. In addition there are several limited access or closed areas.
