Northern shrimp fishery regulations announced Nov. 1, including a sharp cut to the quota, have created uncertainty for local shrimpers.
Arnie Gamage, of South Bristol, captains the Gail Patricia II.
A sternman on a lobster boat since age 10, Gamage’s experience spans nearly a half-century. He started dragging for shrimp alongside his father in 1969, bought his first boat in 1974 and switched to trapping in 1982. Today, he continues to lobster full time and shrimp in season, as do his two sons.
Gamage regularly attends meetings of the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (ASFMC) Northern Shrimp Section, the fishery’s regulatory body.
The Section set the 2012 quota at 2000 metric tons, half of the 2010-11 quota and one-third of the 2010-11 harvest.
The 2012 trawl season starts Jan. 2. The Section will permit three landings a week, on Monday, Thursday and Friday. The trap season starts Feb. 1 with a 1000-pound limit per vessel, per day.
Last season, Gamage set 240 traps, about average for local shrimpers. He estimates the average daily yield per trap at 10-15 pounds, meaning he could bring in as much as 2400-3600 pounds per day, while his younger, more aggressive sons landed 3000-4500 pounds per day.
The landing limit will slash everyone’s revenue this year. Gamage hopes he’ll be able to set and tend far fewer traps, cutting his expenses, such as bait and fuel, in the process.
His ability to do so will depend on the plenitude of the shrimp. “If the scientists are right and the biomass is down, catching shrimp isn’t going to be nearly as easy as it was last year,” Gamage said.
The length of the upcoming season concerns Gamage, perhaps more than the landing limits. The trawlers will have 13 days of shrimping before the trappers start.
The Section will assess catch rates Jan. 18 and reserves the right to impose further limitations on the trawlers to ensure a trap season. Gamage trusts they’ll do so. He expects to be able to shrimp through February and hopes to fish 20 of the 28 available days.
“If it’s less than 28 days, I’d say we got treated really, really bad,” he said.
Trappers, including Gamage and John Seiders, a fellow South Bristol resident and member of the Section Advisory Panel, fought for their season, Gamage said.
Previous proposals included a two-week season with a 50 or 75-trap limit or three-day weeks, like the trawlers, with a 75-trap limit.
Those proposals “didn’t seem feasible,” Gamage said, and would have essentially excluded trappers by making it nearly impossible to earn a profit. As it is, the boat price will determine “whether there’s any profit in it or not” this year, he said.
Gamage doesn’t expect the price to drop, as it did after short seasons in the mid-2000s. Last year, daily landings were too big for Maine processors to handle, and some Maine shrimp were sent to Canada.
This year, the Maine processors will likely be able to process the entire harvest and might compete for the limited amount of shrimp, creating favorable conditions for a price increase.
The 2012 regulations will hit small draggers the hardest, Gamage predicted. Large boats (50-140 feet and built for hard weather) will fish in January gales with winds as high as 50 knots, he said, while their smaller counterparts, including many converted lobster boats, sit idle.
A storm blowing in on a Thursday and lasting through Friday – not uncommon in mid-winter – could quickly take a big bite out of a small dragger’s earning potential. “Mother Nature’s going to control the Monday-Thursday-Friday fishing,” Gamage said.
Common sense says the decrease in competition for the large boats further tips the scales in their favor. If 10 big boats are fishing in an area where 50 boats of all sizes might fish on a calm day, it stands to reason the big boats will harvest more shrimp, Gamage explained.
“I don’t think that’s fair,” Gamage said. “I think it puts the small draggers at a real disadvantage.”
The small draggers, unlike the large draggers and the trappers, weren’t represented at the most recent Section meetings, Gamage said. He encourages the small draggers to maintain a presence in the future.
The rules also hurt shrimpers Down East, where the shrimp don’t arrive in large numbers until late February or early March, Gamage said.
Gamage believes the Section will “stick close” to the quota this year, a year after allowing the fishery to exceed the quota by one-third, or 2000 metric tons, a figure equivalent to this year’s entire quota.
The 2000-metric ton quota is equivalent to about 4.4 million pounds. “If it gets hard to catch the four million pounds, it’s going to show the science is right,” Gamage said. “This might be a good year to test the science, to see what’s out there.”
Gamage doesn’t know what future seasons will look like, but he predicts big changes on the horizon.
“Shrimp fishing is going to be regulated in a different way after this year,” Gamage said. The fishery “can’t support the amount of boats that are fishing right now.”
The Section will likely consider options like limited entry and/or transferable quotas.
“I’ve always been against limited entry. I always thought people had a right to go fishing,” Gamage said. Unfortunately, “it’s looking like shrimping can’t be run that way,” he said.
Some shrimpers criticize the science behind the shrimp quotas – the biomass, fishing mortality, and other complex statistics the Section’s Technical Committee collects and bases its recommendations on.
Gamage is hardly enthusiastic about stricter regulations – he would have preferred an earlier start with no landing limits – but he understands the need for monitoring.
“They want to take care of the fishermen and they want to take care of the shrimp at the same time and that’s a balancing act,” Gamage said. “I think they’re probably doing what they have to do this winter. They have to make that serious cut to know what’s out there.”
“Shrimping is important to Midcoast Maine. It’s important to the people that are going and that have a history of going,” Gamage said. “If it’s not managed right, those people aren’t going to be there. Nobody’s going to be there.”
