Fishermen are often at odds with environmentalists, but both sides are increasingly finding themselves in agreement behind a movement to jettison the current method of restricting New England fish catches in favor of locally managed fishing sectors.
The Pew Environment Group released a report on Wednesday that aims to bolster the move to sectors – a change that many fishermen hope could be put in place by regulators by the start of the next fishing year in May 2010.
The sector system would essentially give groups of fishermen assembled by port an annual limit on the amount of certain kinds of groundfish they could catch. The fishermen could then decide how those limits would be divvied up among themselves.