CHATHAM, Mass. โ October 5, 2012 โ At the town's community center Thursday night, there was little animosity on display, as is often the case when fishermen square off in a room with an official from the National Marine Fisheries Service, the federal agency charged with overseeing the commercial fishery. Perhaps that was because of John Bullard, the newly minted fisheries service Northeast regional administrator, and his gentle manner as he listened to what Cape fishermen had to say about fisheries management.
"You're an even-tempered, soft-spoken man. You got that thing going on," mused Provincetown fisherman Beau Gribbon.
Bullard, who began his job Aug. 6, replacing former regional administrator Pat Kurkul, has been conducting listening sessions around New England and as far south as Maryland to get a sense of what issues are important to fishermen and others in the industry.
About 40 people showed up Thursday night to talk to Bullard about the impact of predators such as seals and dogfish; the drawbacks and merits of opening up areas that had been closed to fishing for nearly two decades; the needs of small-boat fishermen; the burdens imposed by regulations that were not supported by good science or were unnecessarily harsh; and the agency's ability to meet all its responsibilities on a pared-down budget.
Bullard told fishermen that his agency had taken to heart the criticisms it received about mistakes made in the Northeast, which included overhauls of its enforcement program, inaccurate scientific forecasts of cod and other fish populations that are likely to lead to big cuts in fishing quotas this year, and a feeling among fishermen that his office wasn't listening to them.
"There was a lot of criticism in these three areas, and there are three new people, a new regional administrator, me, a new science center head and a new enforcement person," Bullard said. "I think you can take that as message received."
That did not mean that his message to them was going to be sugar-coated.
"There's not a lot of fish or fishermen, and there's not a lot of easy decisions in the future," Bullard said.
"My job, working for taxpayers, is to keep these working waterfronts open and to keep the people working, but we're on a razor's edge right now," he said. Complicating the task are environmental changes, such as warming ocean temperatures, that are making the comeback of stocks like cod a lot harder.
Chatham fisherman Stu Tolley told Bullard that reopening closed fishing grounds would only lead to the demise of whatever fish stocks remained there, and that would be the end of fishing and fishermen.
But his big concern was controlling seals whose numbers have grown exponentially over the past decade. Tolley said seals were eating fish all over the fishing grounds, even beyond a hundred miles out. The same held true for small sharks known as dogfish, he said.
"The cod started returning in the early 2000s and by mid-2000s they were dog(fish) food," Tolley said. And the fish that grew to larger sizes were gobbled up by the seals. If nothing is done about these predators, Tolley said, there wouldn't be any fishing in Chatham within a few years.
Andy Baler, owner of the Nantucket Fish Company, said fishery managers needed to protect forage species such as herring that formed the basis of the marine food chain.
Read the full story in the Cape Cod Times