Maine Lobstermen, a Dying Breed

By Tabor Chichakly @ Shutterstock.com

Originally posted June 22, 2023.

A Sea of Trouble

Teresa Mulls at the Spectator gets on-board to explain what is happening in Maine to the state’s iconic lobster catchers.

Green Energy Destroying NE Maritime

One couple she is interviewing is distressed about the government overreach…

… so-called “green energy” initiatives their neighbors have told them are apt to destroy the New England maritime economy and communities.

It’s early morning in Harpswell, Maine, and Teresa Mulls is talking with the Sgantas. All voices are low, as though not to disturb the wonder of the “peach and plum” sky dawning over Casco Bay. As the brilliant day takes off, Ms. Mulls, now on board the Haily Elizabeth, gets instructions for helping to skewer the hundreds of decomposing fish piled around her ankles. The rotting fish will end up as bait for lobster traps laid 300-feet on the ocean floor.

(B)oat owner and captain Matt Clemons runs the boat to buoys marked with his registered colors (the nautical equivalent of a brand on beef cattle).

Sternman Tylor and Riley, the Haily Elizabeth’s other sternman, use a winch to haul lines of fifty-five-pound traps up onto the boat.

They remove trapped lobsters, measure them, toss them back into the water if they’re longer than five inches or shorter than three-and-a-quarter inches, v-notch and toss lobsters back automatically if they’re carrying eggs or have been notched previously, and place the future halves of surf-and-turf dinners in a basket on deck. Tylor simultaneously rebaits the emptied traps and lines them up on the back of the boat, while I cling to the side of the bait station and stay far, far away from the ropes dragging the traps — kerplunk — back to the bottom of the sea.

In the wheelhouse, Ms. Mulls listens to Captain Matt Clemons’ views on the ramping-up of federal red tape, the catastrophic effects of which Ms. Mulls has heard about from other New England fishermen and lobstermen.

“The main thing is just the constant cloud over our head of a total shutdown,” (Matt) says. “I’d like the guarantee of a future, really. And it’s not just for me. I have four kids. Twenty years ago, I’d be like, ‘You gotta get into [this industry].’ Now, I don’t even know if that’s something you should push. There’s a wharf culture and a community culture, and that’s just dying, and it’s really, really sad.”

A list of federal rules distorts an even playing field:

• restrict catch quotas and shorten the fishing season
• implement expensive and onerous permitting requirements/rules
• mandate net sizes with a lower yield than those of Canadian competitors;

Federal rules also insist that lobstermen use complicated, costly “ropeless” gear as reasons Matt and “fellow lobstermen and fishermen fear for their livelihoods.”

Jerry Leeman was so uneasy he traded his 22-year career as a commercial groundfisherman for the executive director role of the New England Fisherman Stewardship Association (NEFSA), a newly formed non-profit, nonpartisan advocacy group fighting “against needless regulation and offshore wind development threatening the viability of the American fishing fleet.”

Jerry was at home, winding down after a 10-day trip at sea, reports Ms. Mulls, when he saw a television report of “the lowest landings of codfish in Maine’s history due to overfishing.”

“I was like, ‘You’ve got to be shitting me!’” Jerry recalls. “I’ve seen more fish now than twenty years ago when I first started fishing. I wanted to throw the damn clicker through the TV.

“I stewed on it,” Jerry continues. “Then I opened my mouth and I put my foot in it and now I have to chew it.”

Despite having spent more time on water than land in his life, Jerry has hit the ground running with NEFSA. He travels all over New England and to Washington, DC, meeting with stakeholders, lawmakers and agency directors. He’s been sounding the alarm to major media outlets and anyone who will listen about the myriad ways government policies are destroying the industry and heritage of so many New England families and threatening our national food security and fishing future.

Politicians at Work

For years, Jerry concedes, the mandates have been eating at him. Not until the more recent proposal of a ten-million-acre offshore wind energy project in the Gulf of Maine have the historically rivalrous lobstermen and fishermen really united.

Sinking turbines into the ocean would obstruct the seafloor and prevent trawlers and lobstermen from doing their work. NEFSA also cites European studies that have found that “cables carrying energy inland from wind farms can change fish migration patterns and deplete populations.” Construction noise can cause similar harm, “depleting our stocks without even touching our stocks,” as Jerry puts it. “There’s not one alive who agrees with it.”

Regulate Out of Business

There was a time when Maine families could make a good living shrimping. According to George Prince, a NEFSA member who has been involved in the fishing industry since Jerry was eight years old (he’s now 51), “The season was 365 days a year.”

They kept cutting it back. Without the shrimping, it became tough to pay for the boat with just the ground fish, because the permit we had at the time went on days at sea. We had eighty-eight days. With the dock fee, paying the crew, the insurance and everything — we got regulated out of business.”

The Blame

Tightening regulations make locally sourced, wild, sustainable, and ecologically sound seafood increasingly expense. As he points out, “other nations that don’t have fishing regulations sell their products in the United States.”

Talking with fishermen, Ms. Nulls learns that the agenda of NOAA, along with the climate change agenda, collects data to fit its agenda. The accusation is that fishermen are overfishing and lobstermen are entangling right whales.

Clueless Senator Susan Collins

According to our lobstermen, NOAA, has “a climate-change agenda and collects data to fit its mission… NOAA and conservation groups accuse fishermen of “overfishing” and lobstermen of entangling right whales. Jerry talked with Sen. Susan Collins and claims that the Senator “had not a clue. She’s been lied to. The public’s been lied to.”

According to the fishermen, NOAA and professors tied to university money collect faulty data because they’re gathering information based on computer-generated models rather than experience.

They do things like collect biomass assessments at a random spot when the fish have gone down in the water to breed and feed, say the fishermen, and then determine there’s no fish in that area at all.

The lobstermen, for their part, point out that Maine accounts for one half of 1 percent of all whale entanglements, not in one year, but in history. What’s more, Matt tells me, the last right-whale entanglement to happen in Maine took place in 2004, and the whale was released, unharmed.

As lobstermen have not changed their methods, except to comply with ever-increasing regulations, it stands to reason that any uptick in dead whales should be attributed to something else, such as seismic blasts conducted for mapping the ocean floor for wind projects that confuse the whales.