A Dec. 15 "Your View" piece by Peter Moore entitled, "Sea herring fishery, like others, needs emergency action" presented Standard-Times readers with an incomplete and inaccurate characterization of haddock bycatch problems in the midwater trawl fishery for Atlantic herring.
Most importantly, there is quite simply no emergency. While herring trawlers are, appropriately, held accountable to a bycatch cap for haddock, that cap has not been reached for this year, and there is absolutely nothing stopping herring fishermen from fishing on Georges Bank at this time. Decision makers at the New England Fishery Management Council quite rightly recognized this and decided instead to address the issue properly through consideration of a management action in the public arena, one that considers a full range of alternatives rather than simply giving more groundfish to herring trawlers.
And that's a good thing, because there is an even larger issue here that herring trawler representatives don't like to talk about, which is that their vessels were introduced to the New England fisheries under the premise that they were incapable of catching groundfish. These are supposed to be "midwater" trawl nets, fishing up in the water column away from groundfish. That's why they're exempt from important groundfish protections like mesh size, closed areas, and prohibitions on pair trawling (towing one net behind two vessels, which is banned in the groundfish fishery).
Read the complete piece from The South Coast Today.