Just as big eat the little fish in the sea, Cape Cod’s fishing fleet is being swallowed by larger pockets that are buying the available quota of cod and other catch.
Can the small family-owned boats survive or will the remaining fishermen wind up as sharecroppers for someone else’s fleet?
It would be nice to think if we wanted to go fishing we didn’t have to work for anybody else but with consolidation it doesn’t seem to be going that way, said Jason Amaru, who fishes ground fish put of Chatham.
Who Fishes Matters held a forum at Cape Cod Community College Tuesday to grapple with the problem.
This is a family industry, observed 26-year-old Nick Chaparales, who has been fishing since he went tuna fishing with his father Bill in fourth grade. I see father and son teams. The industry was always about family and tradition. We’d go off Chatham and come back with two or three thousand pounds of fish. But looking to the next generation is there going to be a next generation?
He recalled a friend set 2,000 hooks and caught just one codfish.
For the first time in decades you can’t go out in the winter and make a living, Chaparales said. This Amendment 18 is really our last stand our last chance to push the big boats (back) offshore. To me Amendment 18 is a chance for us to have a future. I want what you guys have done I want to be able to make a living for my family catching fish.
In 2010 fisheries management shifted from a soup of days-at-sea, trip limits, gear restrictions, rolling open blocks, etc. to a sector system where rather than government micromanaging each boat catch shares were allotted to sectors made up of fishermen and they determined their own approach to hitting the quota.
But bigger boats and companies started with bigger quotas and they’ve been able to lock up more from fishermen who are quitting or find it isn’t worth their while to go out for a few hundred pounds of fish. Since they no longer encumbered by trip limits they’re spending more time fishing inshore, where the small boats used to thrive. One New Bedford fisherman, The CodFather, had as many as 20 boats before the overall cod quota was cut by 77-percent in the Gulf of Maine in December.
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