January 8, 2018 — After 15 years of research and deliberation, federal fishing officials this week approved a landmark set of regulations that will open a large swath of the region’s waters to fishing while maintaining other closures to protect vulnerable species.
The opening of one area east of Nantucket, closed since the 1990s, could be extremely lucrative, allowing fishermen to catch as much as $160 million worth of additional scallops in the coming fishing season, regulators estimate.
“The scallop industry is thrilled to be able to access significant scallop beds,” said Drew Minkiewicz, an attorney at the Fisheries Survival Fund in Washington D.C., which represents the scallop industry. “Allowing rotational scallop fishing on these areas will increase the scallop fishery revenue in the short term and in the long run.”
Yet many in the industry had hoped that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration would go further.
Minkiewicz and others objected to the decision to maintain the ban on fishing on the northern edge of Georges Bank, where there are significant amounts of scallops but also vulnerable species such as juvenile cod.
Minkiewicz said the industry would continue to press NOAA to reconsider opening those fishing grounds.
“The scallop industry respectfully disagrees with [NOAA’s] conclusion that allowing limited scallop fishing [there] . . . was not consistent with the law,” he said.
NOAA officials said that opening such areas could be harmful to some fish.
Read the full story at the Boston Globe