May 31, 2017 — Tom Orrell was under the impression he’d entered the charter fishing business with his Gloucester-based Yankee Fleet. He didn’t know it came with such a large roller-coaster.
Up one incline, down the next, riding the rails of ever-changing regulation while plying the Atlantic in search of the fin fish and fishing experience his recreational fishing customers seek.
It doesn’t appear that 2017 is going to provide much solace.
Orrell and the rest of the Cape Ann for-hire charter fleet are bracing for a mid-season audible by NOAA Fisheries that could change the rules of the game right at the height of the season.
“It’s unreal,” Orrell said Wednesday. “It makes it very difficult to run a business.”
Citing recreational catch excesses in haddock and cod in the 2016 season, NOAA Fisheries seeks to enact measures to produce a 20 percent reduction in daily bag limits for haddock while taking away the solitary cod recreational anglers currently are allowed to catch and keep each day.
But the most significant impact on the recreational segment of the fishing industry could come in the fall, when charter owners have the Hobson’s choice of a four-week closure that includes the bountiful Labor Day weekend or a six-week closure that wipes out the last half of September and all of October.
“It’s not much of a choice,” Orrell said. “It’s like picking out your cleanest dirty shirt to go to work.”
Still, Orrell said, his preference would be to suffer through the later, longer closure rather than lose his Labor Day trips.
“Later on, the weather changes and it becomes more unpredictable and the pollock start moving in,” Orrell said. “And once you take the people off the boat, they don’t just turn around in the fall and come back fishing.”
NOAA Fisheries, which also is proposing a spring closing from March 1 through April 14, is seeking public comment on the proposed changes. An agency spokeswoman said they could be enacted as soon a late June or early July.
At its January meeting, the New England Fishery Management Council voted to ask NOAA Fisheries to enact new measures on cod and haddock because preliminary 2016 data showed recreational anglers substantially exceeded the annual catch limit (ACL) for Gulf of Maine cod and haddock.