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Sunday, July 6, 2003
Flirting with disaster
Copyright © 2003 Blethen Maine Newspapers Inc. | ||||||||||||||||||
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Also on this page: UNDER PRESSURE: Maine's Lobster Catch | |||||||||||||||||
Another lobster season is beginning on the coast of Maine. Thousands of fishermen are setting millions of wire traps on the ocean's floor, hoping for another record haul and the profits that come with it. Never before has so much been riding on the success of the state's lobster fleet. Maine has become so dependent on lobstering after 10-year string of record catches that a major decline would devastate the state's fishing industry and change the character of coastal communities, an examination by the Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram has found. Yet despite warning signs that the lobster boom could end at any time - including a mysterious disease and collapse of the industry in southern New England - there's no consensus among state regulators and lobstermen about how to prepare for such a decline, let alone prevent one. The numbers are troubling. Lobster has historically accounted for about half the value of Maine's fishing catch. But that has changed dramatically. In 1992, lobstering totaled 44 percent of the state's fishing revenue. Last year, it accounted for 70 percent of Maine's fish catch. That's partly because other significant fisheries - sea urchin, cod, shrimp and scallops - collapsed from overfishing and, in most cases, are tightly restricted. Lobsters, meanwhile, have undergone a baffling population explosion that has filled bays and harbors with the critters. The combination of abundant lobsters and fishermen trading in fishing nets for lobster traps has tripled the catch and increased its value from $71.8 million in 1992 to $207.3 million last year. Scientists, bureaucrats and lobstermen interviewed for this series said they fear the boom may be setting up coastal Maine for a devastating fall. And the impact could be permanent. Upscale retirees and vacation-home buyers are flocking to towns along the Maine coast, driving up property values. In Cape Porpoise, Harpswell, Stonington and many other towns, lobster fishermen are among the only groups slowing the trend, because they're earning enough to hold their ground. As long as the record lobster catches hold up, that is. "The thing that troubles me the most is that we don't know why there are so many (lobsters) and how long it will last," said Robin Alden of Stonington, a former commissioner of the Maine Department of Marine Resources. The loss of other fisheries and the ability of fishermen to adapt could be disastrous, she said. "It's horrible what's happened to this state," Alden said. "Ecologically it doesn't make any sense and economically it doesn't make any sense." At McLoon's Wharf in Spruce Head, lobster dealer Terry Costa lowers a basket of lobster bait to a local boat, the Tammy D, using a hydraulic winch bought with the profits of the lobster boom. Costa points to an idling forklift, a late-model pickup truck and a shiny black flatbed trailer piled high with wire traps ready to be hauled out and set in Penobscot Bay. "If you brought someone back who lobstered 20 years ago, he wouldn't recognize it," Costa said. "It's big business. It's just really exploded." And, Costa adds, "It's always on the edge of disaster. This could be gone tomorrow." Lobster has long been identified with Maine and its rocky coast, which is the prime habitat of Homarus americanus. But a combination of forces in the past decade turned the state's icon into economic savior. Rick Bubar, like many of the fishermen in the Hancock County town of Stonington, used to catch cod and other groundfish, drag for scallops or shrimp, or dive for urchins and trap crabs. "We only went lobstering from August to November," he said. "Five hundred pounds was a good day. Now kids in outboards can get that." Now there are more than 300 boats in Stonington harbor. Virtually all, like Bubar's, haul nothing but lobsters. And the number of lobster boats and traps continues to grow at harbors all along the coast as anyone with a license seeks a piece of the pie, lobstermen say. "Everybody's coming out of the woodwork," Bill McKay said last week, as he repaired his boat, Rebounder, next to Cape Porpoise Harbor in York County. "There's a guy who just launched his boat the other day." There is a minority of women operating and working on lobsters boats in Maine, although they typically refer to themselves as lobstermen, too. Full-time lobstermen have been landing about 40,000 to 60,000 pounds a year, depending on where they set traps and how hard they work them. The top boats in the Penobscot Bay area exceed 100,000 pounds. The catches bring a boat $130,000 to $200,000 or more in annual sales. Some boat owners are earning incomes of more than $100,000 from a fishery that used to be one of many seasonal jobs. Some lobstermen - those who remember leaner times - are saving for retirement for the first time in their lives. But the big incomes, ironically, have led to more borrowing by many lobstermen. Lobstermen are investing back into their businesses, in part to avoid paying higher income taxes. They fill parking lots with shiny new pickups and decorate harbors with new boats that cost as much as $250,000 to build. As a statewide industry, lobster ranks well below the top 10 in revenue and employment. There are about 11,500 commercial harvesters on nearly 7,000 boats. Unlike forest products or the health care industry, however, lobstering's impact is concentrated in a narrow region and includes a significant secondary work force. Last year's $207 million lobster catch translates into $517 million or more in direct and indirect income for Mainers, according to a formula created by University of Maine Professor Jim Wilson. That's because so many other small Maine businesses depend on lobstering. "It's kind of a home-grown industry," Wilson said. "The boat building is here. The trap building is here. The bait, of course, is here. When it does well, it generates a lot of other business." Many scientists see the dramatic shift in fisheries as evidence of major ecological imbalances in the Gulf of Maine, caused by environmental changes or by overfishing that removed predators from the food chain, or both. Some fear the rapid pace of ecosystem changes will continue to have unpredictable effects on fisheries, including lobsters. A team of top Maine biologists issued a warning in 2001 that the population decline was coming in the next two to four years - or right about now. The scientists had seen a substantial drop-off in the number of baby and juvenile lobsters. So far there is no evidence that the decline they foresaw has had an impact on the number of adult lobsters, which has defied the assumptions of fisheries scientists for decades. Despite repeated warnings of a crash, and the depletion of other fisheries facing similar pressures, Maine's lobster catch remained at about 20 million pounds a year for more than four decades after World War II, and then rose rapidly after 1990, reaching 62.3 million pounds in 2002. Scientists say fluctuations both up and down are still a rule of nature - even for lobsters. And now, perhaps more than ever, lobstermen are convinced the predictions of a decline will come true, and perhaps sooner than later. To our south, the once-booming lobster fishery from Cape Cod to Long Island Sound is collapsing for murky reasons, apparently connected to a lobster-shell disease that swept through inshore waters in the late 1990s. Fishermen and scientists there say Mainers ought to consider their plight as a warning. "You think it's going to keep producing and keep producing. But it only takes a couple things in nature to change it," said Frank Garofano as he stowed gear last month on his boat in Point Judith, R.I., that state's busiest fishing port. Like Garofano, many Rhode Island lobstermen are trying to sell their boats to Maine lobstermen after seeing catches fall by 50 percent in the past two years. It's unclear if Maine is next. Some lobstermen have found lobsters with shell disease in Maine waters. But scientists say a small number is probably natural and not cause for alarm. On Long Island in Casco Bay, Mike Hanson said he's afraid the mysterious disease could ride up here on the Gulf Stream. "I hope it just blasts by here," he said. Steve Train, another Long Islander, said he's planning ahead for whatever ends the lobster boom by trying to buy one of the relatively few active groundfishing permits available on the coast. "Up until the disease there in southern New England, most guys didn't think they had anything to worry about and lots still don't think they have anything to worry about," he said. "I don't like to have all my eggs in one basket." Unfortunately, that's exactly what's happened to the state's fishing industry. Between 1992 and 2002, the sea urchin catch dropped 63 percent in value, the cod catch dropped 70 percent, shrimp landings dropped 86 percent and scallops plummeted 73 percent. That leaves lobsters to carry the load. A decline now, with all the money invested in the industry and no other fishing jobs around, could bankrupt many lobstermen, especially younger fishermen who have seen only the good times. Some old-timers joke that the coastal banks had better have big parking lots for all the boats they'll own when lobster catches fall. "Lobstering is holding everything together for the moment," said Pat White, a lobsterman from York. "I'm very concerned that if we had a 25 percent decline in catch, which wouldn't be anything unusual for us, a hell of a lot of people would be hurt." The risks to Maine's coastal character are clear in year-round island communities and remote mainland communities that are far from commercial centers and job opportunities. On islands, such as Vinalhaven or Chebeague, an exodus of lobstering families could start a domino effect that leads to a summer-only population. "Without lobster, we don't have a year-round community," said Train, of Long Island. "I don't think we could keep the school open." A similar upheaval would face mainland communities such as Friendship or Stonington. Fishermen say the only jobs available besides lobstering would be building homes for retirees and summer residents who are ready to move in. The red-hot demand for coastal properties driving up house prices and property taxes is already changing villages such as Cape Porpoise in York County, where people have worked on the water for centuries. Big lobster catches have been the only thing slowing the trend in many towns, and residents say a downturn would force fishing families inland. "Right now, the fishermen own the waterfront (in Friendship). They own the whole harbor," said Diane Cowan, a biologist and founder of The Lobster Conservancy in Friendship. "If that's lost, they can never get it back. How many bad years would you have to have?" Slowing the gradual conversion of fishing piers and commercial waterfront into homes, inns or restaurants is already the focus of a high-level state task force. "That (access) is critical to all the fishermen in Maine," said George Lapointe, commissioner of the Maine Department of Marine Resources. Maine's tourism industry also could clearly be hurt by a lobster decline. Maine lobster is marketed around the world, making it a signature export and a powerful draw. Tourists along the coast say Maine's fishing villages and fresh lobster are a big part of the reason they're here. " What would happen if we didn't have affordable lobster dinners in the summer in Maine? Nobody thinks about that," said Peter McAleney, owner of New Meadows Lobster in Portland. Linda Squibb said she can buy Maine lobster at her local supermarket in Bellvue, Colo. But she rarely does. When she recently dined at the Lobster Shack in Cape Elizabeth, Squibb said it just felt right. "It's worth the wait," Squibb said. "The fresher the lobster, the better." Maine's overreliance on lobster is beginning to attract discussion, but there is little consensus about what the state should do, or could do, to protect its fishery, coastal economy and character from a lobster decline. The predicament came up at a recent meeting to plan the Governor's Blaine House Conference on Natural Resources, which will be held this fall. "I raised my hand and said, 'We're really a single-species fishery, more or less, and we've got to address that,' " said Sue Inches, of the state Department of Marine Resources. "Everyone's known it (the problem) is there, but it hasn't really been formally put on the table. . . . It's staring everyone in the face, it's just a such a huge thing." The state's dependence on the catch has made reining in the fleet politically difficult, if not impossible. The state and industry have taken steps to prevent the lobster populations from being fished into a collapse. Trap limits in the 1990s forced many boat owners to scale back from 1,200 or more traps to 600 or 800, depending on the part of the state where they fish. But the benefits of those limits evaporated quickly, as lobstermen with fewer than 600 traps added some, and the number of people fishing for lobsters rose. Instead of dropping, the overall number of lobster traps in Maine swelled from 2 million to about 3 million during the 1990s. Maine also has cut off entry into the industry. New lobstermen must go through an apprenticeship period and wait for as many as three working lobstermen to retire before they can set traps on their own. Still, Maine's industry continues to rely most on long-standing protections for breeding females, which are marked and thrown back, and large lobsters that are over the legal market size. Scientists have warned for decades that Maine lobstermen are killing too many lobsters before they have had a chance to reproduce. But state officials and scientists now say environmental factors or disease, not overfishing, are more likely to end the boom. "We could eliminate the fishery and the stock could still drop by half," said Lapointe, the state marine resources commissioner. Fishing pressure is still a major part of the risk, scientists and state officials say. A population that has begun to decline because of disease or environmental changes is much more vulnerable to being overfished into a collapse that could last a decade or more. And the fishing pressure in Maine has never been greater. "You're primed to exploit the hell out of the resource, and you're going to drive the resource off a cliff if you're already in a downward decline," said Rick Wahle, a biologist at the Bigelow Laboratories in Boothbay. It's not clear what the state will do when it sees the first signs of a decline. "We're just beginning those discussions," Lapointe said. "One of our biggest strategies is talking about it openly. If something like that happens. . . . It's something we have to act on very quickly." It could be necessary to cut back lobstering by 60 percent to 80 percent to prevent a long-term collapse, he said, but that would be a huge task politically because of the short-term costs to families and communities. "My fear is that . . . we'll do nothing and just let nature and economics take their course," Lapointe said. Some are pushing the state to restore alternatives to lobstering before it's too late. Alden, Lapointe's predecessor, argues that communities such as Stonington need permission to adapt to a decline in lobster by catching more groundfish, which are beginning to shows signs of a rebound. Fishermen who stopped setting nets for cod and flounder when they became scarce in the 1980s and early '90s - a group that includes virtually all the fishermen in small ports such as Stonington, Boothbay and Rockland - are no longer permitted to catch groundfish because of rules intended to rebuild the fishery. The catch is now allocated primarily to boats that fish from Portland. "The state is not doing enough on that, because they have not been preserving access for these guys to other fisheries. As a result, (Stonington) has no options," Alden said. "They need to ask: If lobstering hiccups and in two years this becomes a tourist town, is that OK?" Lapointe said the state is fighting to make sure those towns and fishermen will be allowed back into the groundfishery when it is rebuilt. But, he said, the state can't afford to have its fishermen shifting to species that can't sustain the pressure, repeating the cycle of boom and bust. Shrimp, for example, are cyclical and are expected to rebound more quickly than other species. But, Lapointe said, "we don't want three times the amount of effort in shrimp either. What you would want is to have enough of those other species out there to take up the slack." Rebuilding the depleted fisheries to the point where they are sustainable again, and restoring some ecological balance in the Gulf of Maine, has proven to be a slow and painful process. For now, everyone simply hopes for more time. Lobster catches were slow all spring, something blamed mostly on the cold water that makes them lazy and less likely to crawl into a trap. The occasional report of a lobster with shell disease added to the nervousness along the coast. But trapping season doesn't really start until this month. And even during the slow spring, lobstermen said traps in Stonington and South Thomaston came up with plenty of smaller lobsters and females with eggs. The Maine coast is rich with lobsters to keep the population and the fishery going, said South Thomaston lobsterman David Cousens. It's what he can't see that worries him. A disease like the one in southern New England could wipe out Maine lobstering in one year, he said. "I don't expect that to happen, but we're going to go down. We're not going to keep going up," Cousens said. He described the past decade as "like going to Las Vegas and throwing the dice, and we've been hitting lucky sevens every time." Eventually, he said, Maine's luck will run out. Staff Writer John Richardson can be contacted at 791-6324 or at:
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