Fishing for Non-fishermen: “A perfect mixture of art and science”
Fisheries regulators take to the water to experience what it’s like to be a fisherman

New Hampton fisherman David Goethel remembers grumbling a few years ago to [UNH Cooperative Extension educator] Rollie Barnaby and [fisheries specialist] Pinguuo He, “that the people who write the text of the regulations are up in their offices dealing with a topic they have no direct experience of, without any idea of the impact the words they write will have on the people they regulate. I had 20 talking points I’d been using when giving testimony before various committees involved with fisheries regulation. My last point was that people who write the fishing laws ought to spend a week a year on the boats they regulate. That always drew a laugh.

“But Rollie said, ‘Well, we can write a grant to do that. We’ll call it Fishing for Non-fishermen. So Pinguuo wrote the grant and that’s how it started last year.”

This past summer half a dozen officials and staffers from the National Marine Fisheries service and from the offices of U.S. Sen. John Sununu and Judd Gregg and U.S. Rep. Jeb Bradley, a few state regulators, and others spent three days in late August learning about commercial fishing from Goethel and other veteran New Hampshire fisherman. The workshop featured a day of land-based lectures and demonstrations and two days at sea on commercial fishing vessels.

“More and more people without any commercial fishing experience: fisheries managers and staff members who work for various committees, councils and commissions, federal and state fisheries departments, funding agencies supporting cooperative research on fisheries, congressional staffers, and representatives of conservation organizations are involved in fisheries management processes and debates,” says Ken La Valley, the UNH Cooperative Extension commercial fisheries specialist who organized the second Fishing for non-fishermen workshop with funding from the National Marine Fisheries Service.

“Last year we had eight participants, but word of mouth alone attracted 23 people this year; 18 of them stayed the entire three days,” La Valley says.

Regulatory burdens on fishermen increase
“Fishermen are overburdened with regulations,” La Valley says. “Their days at sea keep diminishing, along with their daily quotas. Their permits are restricted. More and more areas are closed to fishing. What’s more, the regulations change constantly. There hasn’t been the rebounding in fish stocks they’ve been promised since the 1980s. In the past three years, we’ve lost a third of the total fishing industry workforce in New Hampshire, with more losses to come.”

While regulators, legislative staffs, funding agencies, and conservation leaders “have various strengths in their respective professions, they lack hands-on experience with fishing gear and commercial fishing operations,” says La Valley. “To improve communication these groups of people need to have better knowledge and understanding of commercial fishing gears and their operations. But key decision makers and regulators haven’t had much opportunity to go to sea on fishing trips. We designed the workshops to overcome this gap. Attendees increase their technical understanding of how the policies and regulations they adopt will impact the fishermen. The fishermen and regulators have a mutual information exchange and begin to understand the others’ points of view.”

A day on land, two at sea
The first day of the event, billed as “teaching non-fishermen what goes into being a fisherman,” participants met in a classroom at the Urban Forestry Center in Portsmouth, where they learn about fishing gear types and their operation, fish behavior and conservation issues involved in harvesting operations. They have opportunities to see and handle the gear on land and get instruction in net-mending techniques,

“On days two and three, participants went to sea to experience a day each of fishing with trawl gear (mobile gear) and gill net (fixed gear) fishing, “says La Valley. “There they learn first-hand that it’s a lot more than ‘Hey, let’s get a boat and throw a net into the water.’ Fishermen are highly skilled individuals. They work with an impressive amount of technical gear on board: fish detectors, satellite Internet, navigation equipment, temperature and depth detectors, mechanical and hydraulic equipment, radios and satellite phones. They need to know about fish behavior and biology, meteorology, and the ocean itself.”

 La Valley adds, “Fishermen in general get a bad rap. But fishermen are conservation-minded and future-oriented.”

A regulator’s enthusiasm
George Darcy, assistant administrator for the Sustainable Fisheries Division of the Northeast regional office of the National Marine Fisheries Service headquartered in Gloucester, Massachusetts, attended the workshop with several members of his staff. Trained as a marine biologist, Darcy says, “Although I’ve spent 25 years in fisheries management, I’d never actually been on a commercial fishing boat. The workshop was valuable and enjoyable, really fun.”

“I learned about how gear is configured and set. [Seabrook trawler captain Joe Jurek] showed us how small changes in the way gear is rigged can make a big difference in what the gear catches.

“I’d worked with [fisherman instructors] Eric and David through formal meetings of the regional councils and committees,” Darcy says, “but those are very formal occasions—it’s almost like you’re on stage. You have to be very careful about what you do and say; there’s always a little bit of gamesmanship involved.

“But in the workshop setting, I was able to get to know those two guys in a way I never did before. It was more casual, more collegial outside our normal roles.”

Darcy identifies two beneficial aspects to the workshop for him and his staff: “The first is technical. Seeing and holding the gear and seeing how and why it’s rigged is valuable to me when I’m discussing, reviewing recommendations, writing regulations. I’ll have a better idea of just how a suggestion is going to affect the guys with the boats.

“Second, there’s the personal side of it. We established a better rapport, leading to more empathy with what fishermen go through on the water.”

U.S. fisheries regulation
The Magnuson Fishery Conservation and Management Act of 1976 and its subsequent amendments created eight regional fishery councils, comprised of commercial and recreational fisherman, marine scientists and state and federal fisheries managers, who combine their knowledge to prepare Fishery Management Plans (FMPs) for stocks of finfish, shellfish and crustaceans. to manage the living marine resources within the U.S. economic fisheries.

“The council system is the only thing like it in the United States’ government, maybe even the world,” Darcy says. “All stakeholders have representation on the councils, which hold meetings every two months and pass recommendations along to the regulators who translate them into regulations.

“Such openness and flexibility is a double-edged sword,” he continues. “On the one hand, it enables us to fix things that are wrong. But it also leads to frequent changes in regulations so there’s no long term stability for fishermen. Every time they get into a groove, we change it. That’s difficult, even when fishermen themselves have pushed for changes.”

“I’m surprised at how many fishermen actually do have a good grasp of the regulations. They’re extremely complex,” says Darcy. “Unlike with agricultural crops and livestock, researchers and fishermen can’t see fish and count them. It makes the science inexact.”

A fisherman-instructor’s perspective
“The reality is, there’s only so many fish in the ocean, so the fisheries can support only so many fishermen,” says commercial fisherman David Goethel. “When I started 20 years ago, the mandate was, “Go forth and harvest as many fish as you can catch.”

These days, he says, “I have [a book of fisheries’ regulations that] looks like the Encyclopedia Britannica on the dashboard of my boat, and I’m known as the guy who knows them all. At 4:30 a.m., the government offices aren’t open, so I’m likely to get a call from another fisherman.”

He adds, “Even if a regulation makes no sense at all, you don’t fool around with any gear experiments without permission. The penalties for breaking fisheries regulations are harsh. They start at $10,000 and go to $1 million.”

Goethel has served as a fisherman-instructor at the fishing for non-fishermen workshops both years. He says of the three-day event, “This is a vital service—a combination of world class scientists like Ken and Pinguuo, plus fishermen with hands-on experience. It’s one thing to have an idea like I did for making regulators spend time on commercial fishing vessel, but another thing to pull it together. That took UNH Cooperative Extension. A ton of work went into this event. It’s the perfect mixture of art and science.”
 
“What I’ve learned from the workshops is that people who come out here without a suit coat on seem much more human. They want to know how things work. They ask a lot of questions. They want to increase their knowledge of the ocean. [The fishermen instructors] are four people in their Rolodex, who, when they’re writing regulations, they might pick up the phone and ask, “Hey, does this make sense to you?”

One thing all parties agree on: UNH Cooperative Extension should continue organizing the annual workshops and members of environmental groups with an interest in fisheries should attend.

 “I hope they keep doing these workshops. I have other staff I’d like to send,” says Darcy. “Some of the environmental groups should send representatives. Many environmentalists don’t have any idea at all of what happens on the water. They’d have more credibility, particularly with fishermen, if they knew more.”