ELLSWORTH, Maine — Sept 3, 2012 — Officials with Maine’s Department of Marine Resources do not yet have a preliminary estimate for the landings value of this year’s elver season, but the 2012 figures they have compiled so far indicate that it will be much, much higher than it has ever been.
According to comments made in early August by DMR Commissioner Patrick Keliher to the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s eel board, the value of the 2012 sales added up so far by DMR is close to $40 million. At that value, the elver fishery now ranks as the second most valuable in Maine behind the state’s $335 million lobster fishery and ahead of soft-shell clams, herring, shrimp and scallops among others.
That $40 million figure is more than five times higher than the value of the elver fishery last year, when a spike in demand from Asia caused the price to skyrocket. Elver fishermen in Maine ended up earning a cumulative figure of $7.65 million — a record at the time — for the 8,500 pounds of juvenile eels that they caught during the 10-week season in 2011, earning an average price of nearly $900 per pound. The elver fishery was the fourth most valuable commercial fishery in Maine last year.
In 2010, a year before a March 2011 tsunami that wiped out aquaculture ponds and fishing fleets in northern Japan, elver fishermen in Maine earned a cumulative total of $584,851 for the 3,100 pounds of elvers they caught. The average price elver fishermen earned in 2010 was $185 per pound.
This past spring, the season opened with elver fishermen earning more than $2,000 per pound and, by the time the season ended 10 weeks later, roughly $2,600 per pound.
Deirdre Gilbert, DMR’s director of marine policy, said Friday that the figure cited to the fisheries commission by Keliher is not a preliminary estimate for the entire 2012 season. The state has collected reports from only about 75 percent of Maine’s licensed elver dealers, she said, and none that DMR has received has been audited yet for accuracy.
Read the full article at the Bangor Daily News