Commercial fishermen here have less than one month to decide if they will jump ship and plunge into the unknown — if they will abandon the so-called “common pool,” in which fishermen are regulated by how many days they spend at sea, and instead sign on to one of 17 inchoate “sectors” set up under a new rule known as Amendment 16.
For some, staying in the common pool is indeed comparable to clinging to a sinking ship — in recent years Provincetown fishermen have seen their allowable days-at-sea cut in half, their catch limits whittled to fractions of what they once were, making it nearly impossible for them to make a living. But details of the new brand of management that proposes to put fishermen into localized sectors, each of which is given a total allowable catch to parcel out to its members in “catch shares,” are so murky right now that fishermen are reluctant to buy into to it. The deadline by which they must join a sector is Sept. 1.
“I sympathize with those fishermen who thought they would like to get into sectors, because they have nothing they can grab hold of to explain to them what is going to happen to them. If I was in their shoes I would be very wary and uncertain,” said David Pierce, deputy director of the state Div. of Marine Fisheries.