The Rockland-based O'Hara corporation serves many aspects of the fishing industry, including boat storage and repair. But it's the bait side of their operation that has Maine's lobstermen excited at the moment. Company vice-president Frank O'Hara Jr. says federal cutbacks in the herring quota a few years ago have led to an ongoing shortage of bait for the lobster industry. But he's confident this is about to change, following the recent acquisition of a 58,000 square-foot warehouse on Route 1.
Most of the facility, O'Hara says, will be given over to boat storage and office space, but a significant amount of space is also being used to address the bait shortage, "using about 25 percent of it for a freezer to hold bait that's coming in from the west coast, from Iceland and New Zealand to replace the shortage of fresh herring that we're unable to catch now," he says.
This roughly doubles the amount of bait storage space the corporation has. O'Hara says fresh herring used to provide 70 to 80 perecnt of the bait used by the lobster industry. Now the amount of herring being caught is less than half of what it was.
Furthermore, the bait crisis has been made worse by the fact that the herring are getting harder to catch, says David Libby of the Maine Department of Marine Resources.
Read the complete story and listen to the audio from The Maine Public Broadcasting Network.