Sunday, June 7, 2015

Lobstering - The Last Shoe to Drop





 June 7, 2015

LOBSTERING…..THE LAST SHOE TO DROP

The current brouhaha over NOAA’s proposal to install monitors on lobster boats is a bogus,  blatant attempt to put the little guy out of business.  While the EPA is hell bent on putting thousands of coal miners out of work , NOAA is  methodically destroying all that remains of the fishing industry, the successful small boat lobsterman. 

Every day hundreds of lobstermen,  small businesses all, employers, consumers and producers,  ply their trade in a dangerous environment.  These fishermen are a rare and vanishing breed.  Fiercely independent, already severely regulated with serious capital invested in sophisticated boats and fishing gear, they don’t need this dubious,  soon-to-be mandated  “monitor millstone”,  along for the ride.

From a marine liability standpoint, a young neophyte seasick monitor, face down in the scuppers, is the last added responsibility experienced lobstermen want on their small boats, while traps and related gear are hauled, serviced and hastily set out on the fly.  At best, it is a busy, dangerous, confined, rolling, pitching, working platform, even for the veteran experienced fisherman.

Protection and Indemnity (P&I) insurance for these “observers”, mandated by NOAA, will put lobsterman out of business.   This is the elephant in the room that will kill the industry.  Exorbitant costs,  P & I coverage  for inexperienced observers  (as a class, if available?) will shut the industry down.  (I speak from personal experience;  my agency insured Gloucester’s fishing fleet in the ‘70s and ‘80s. )  Add NOAA’s ($800+) daily surcharge for an observer, and the total cost destroys any incentive for the lobster fisherman.

Fifty years ago when I worked briefly for the then Fish and Wildlife Service statistics branch on Elm Street, I witnessed the beginning of the monitoring (observer) program.   Former fishermen, recruited by NOAA , employed as the agency’s law enforcement officers,  carrying  shoulder holstered weapons imposed their will on fellow civilian fishermen  (often their former civilian shipmates) in the execution of their policing duties.  As a port agent frequently collecting flawed statistical information from “cooperating fishermen”, I witnessed the beginning of this monitoring debacle now finally being  imposed  on lobstermen. 

This proposed monitor program by NOAA is a charade, carefully orchestrated to put the fishermen out of business.  It’s all about big money, saving endangered monitor’s jobs, and expanding the bureaucracy.  The MRAG America’s Company is a private entity spinoff, set up to cash in on this newly minted observer industry at the fishermen’s expense.

My question: where does the safety arm of the fishing industry, i.e., the U.S. Coast Guard, weigh in on allowing these seafaring greenhorns, with little  marine experience, board these workboats in the first place? It is a liability nightmare!

To Arthur “Sooky” Sawyer, Mark  Ring, Peter Libro, Tom Burns, Peter Mondello and hundreds of other career Massachusetts and Maine lobstermen, this is NOAA’s warning shot across your bow! 

If  my personal observations over 50 years is any indicator, the fishery biologist based at Wood’s Hole, Sara Weeks, with her smoke and mirrors analysis, is about to dance you lobstermen out of existence;  you are about to be taken for a bureaucratic Gloucester sleigh ride!

Ron Gilson