ROCKPORT, Maine — March 1, 2014 — With big money changing hands over tiny glass eels, Maine’s elver fishermen have developed a bad reputation in other Atlantic states as renegades.
On Saturday afternoon, state officials told a packed room of elver harvesters at the annual Maine Fishermen’s Forum that they needed to change that this season so that regulators will not place drastic limitations on the fishery or shut it down altogether.
The most important step toward that goal will be to follow the recently set catch restrictions on the state’s 10-week elver season, which is scheduled to begin on March 22. Fishermen will be limited to a statewide harvest of 11,749 pounds, a 35 percent reduction from the amount caught in Maine last year. Some in the room called out that making individual quotas will be unfair toward the fishermen who have been working this fishery long before the price shot up as demand in Japan and China has increased. But state officials were unmoved.
“We’ve got to stay within our quota this year,” Terry Stockwell of the Maine Department of Marine Resources said during the first meeting of the Maine Elver Fishermen Association at the Samoset Resort. “We’ve got to demonstrate to the [Atlantic States Marine Fisheries] Commission that we’re not a renegade fishery.”