ELLSWORTH, Maine — August 6, 2013 — A year after a production issue arose with the state’s prior contractor for lobster trap tags, Maine Department of Marine Resources is dealing with another production issue with the new contractor.
As a result, DMR is allowing lobstermen who received tags prior to May 1 to replace all damaged or lost tags, regardless of amount and at no additional cost. The manufacturing issue was fixed in late April, according to DMR spokesman Jeff Nichols, so only lobstermen who received tags before the end of that month should be affected.
Under normal gear loss conditions, lobstermen can replace up to 10 percent of the total number of traps they are licensed for, but they have to pay for the replacement tags. Most lobstermen in Maine are limited to 800 traps. Tags — plastic strips a few inches long that are looped and fastened through a trap’s wire mesh — normally cost 50 cents apiece and have to be purchased new each year.
Nichols said last week that trap tags made earlier this year by Cambridge Security Seals of Pomona, N.Y., were not durable enough and have been breaking, making them unreadable to Marine Patrol officers who may want to determine trap owners. In some cases, Nichols said, the tags have broken off completely and disappeared.
Though the problem was fixed in late April, defective tags still are being used, according to Nichols. DMR is not replacing tags that may be defective but are still intact, he said, only those that have broken partly or completely off. Fishermen do not have to provide identification numbers for defective tags that have fallen off their traps.
“The [Marine Patrol] officers in the field have replacement tags,” Nichols said. “We’re going to replace as many as we can. We are confident this is not going to be an overwhelming enforcement issue.”
The replacement tags are numbered sequentially and are entered into a DMR database as they are handed out so Marine Patrol knows whose traps will bear the replacement tags. Nichols added that DMR has not put a time limit on how long the free tag replacement offer will last.
Read the full story at the Bangor Daily News