Haddock have put food on the table for local fishermen over the past decade, but mid-water trawlers that fish for herring are hauling up so much of the groundfish as bycatch that they desperately want the cap lifted, and that would slash the allocation for local ground fishermen.
The New England Fisheries Management Council met Tuesday (and continued meeting through Thursday) and agreed to ask for looser rules by a 14-0 vote.
“Haddock (or scrod when it’s small) is the number one codfish. It’s the most pounds we bring in,” noted Ben Martens, policy analyst for Cape Cod Commercial Hook Fishermen’s Association. “We got great prices for haddock this past year. We didn’t catch all of our allotment but it is a critically important species. Haddock kept ground fishermen alive the past 10 years.”
Haddock stocks on Georges Bank were way down before spawning areas were closed to fishing in 1994. Stocks rebounded from 11,000 metric tons of spawning fish in 1993 to an estimated 120,000 metric tons in 2003 (the greatest numbers since 1967).
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