May 12, 2015 — The following newsletter was released by the New England Fishery Management Council:
Groundfish
Amendment 18 moves on to public hearings
Now that it has identified its preferred alternatives among the provisions in the Draft Environmental Impact Statement for Amendment 18 to the Groundfish Plan, the Council will schedule public hearings for late July and August. An announcement with the details will be widely distributed to encourage public input.
Amendment 18 focuses on accumulation limits and fleet diversity by including measures concerning Potential Sector Contributions (PSC) and permit caps, Handgear A permits, data confidentiality, formalizing redfish fishing opportunities, and the delineation of inshore and offshore fishing areas in the Gulf of Maine.
The following section describes the categories of management measures in the amendment and the preferred alternatives identified by the Council within those categories. The choices supported in April do not bind the NEFMC’s 18 voting members in September when final decisions are to be approved. Here’s how it went last month.
- Accumulation limits – Create two types of accumulation limits — on individuals and entities: 1) On the Potential Sector Contribution that may be held in aggregate to no more than 15.5% of the aggregated stocks in total, and 2) on the Northeast multispecies permits that may be held to no more than 5%. The PSC cap selected (Alternative 6) would be the least constraining on fishing businesses, but does limit holdings.
- Handgear A Permits – Create a sub-annual catch limit for Handgear A (HA) permits, remove the March 1-20 closure for common pool HA vessels, remove the standard fish tote requirement for Handgear A vessels, and allow sectors to annually request that HA vessels fishing in the sector be exempt from the requirement to use a vessel monitoring system, but instead be allowed to use an Interactive Voice Response (lVR) Call-In System. IVR is already used in the groundfish fishery and is a less expensive data reporting alternative than VMS.
- Data Confidentiality – Do not adjust current fishery data confidentiality practices and protocols, specifically the price of annual catch entitlement (ACE) transferred within a sector or leased between sectors. The Council felt it is unnecessary to make changes to data that are currently considered confidential and had concerns about the legality of releasing price information.
- Inshore/Offshore Gulf of Maine (GOM) – Do not consider the establishment of an inshore/offshore boundary within the GOM and associated measures. The Council considers this type of measure unnecessary, given the current restrictions on the groundfish fishery in the area at this time.
- Redfish Exemption Area – Define an area where sector vessels could fish with a smaller net mesh (5.5 inches) than the standard size to target redfish. This would allow groundfish sector vessels to target redfish without applying for an annual sector exemption, thereby streamlining the process to access this resource.