III. Primary Ports: Community Studies
A. Portland, Maine Go to map of ports
A1.
Overview of Maine Groundfishing
A2. The Portland Fish Exchange and Other Port Infrastructure
A3. Demographic Information on the MGF
A4. Fishing Associations and Organizations
A5. Social Dimensions of Portland's MGF
A6. Adaptations and Adjustments to Crisis
Natives of Maine draw much of their identity and
trace their ancestry to traditions based on coastal and marine resources
and other interactions with the natural environment (Duncan 1995).
Maine fisheries are best known for lobstering, which has emerged as a highly
specialized and lucrative fishery but which, currently, is grappling with
territoriality and crowding issues that may become more pronounced as continued
restrictions on groundfishing force ground fishers into alternative summer
fisheries (Acheson 1987; Ellsworth News 1996). Although they are quite
distinct in terms of gears and parts of annual rounds, groundfishing and
lobstering overlap seasonally, both being primarily summer fisheries yet
both containing the possibility to employ fishers through the year. Winter
lobstering may lead to conflicts with scallop draggers and winter groundfishing
is more haphazard than summer groundfishing due to weather conditions,
but both continue through the winter months on a limited basis.
Regionally, the groundfishing fleet in Maine is
far more concentrated than the lobstering fleet. Virtually every
Maine port--from Kittery to those distant, rural, and isolated ports north
and east of Machiasport--is home to several, often hundreds, of lobster
fishing vessels and lobstermen, with even small ports having thirty to
forty of the distinctive 35' to 50' crafts that sell to three or four lobster
cooperatives or dealers. Thousands of wooden and wire traps, either square
or aircraft-hangar shaped, crowd yards and docks throughout every sheltered
port along Maine's coast. A lobster adorns the Maine license plate and
lobster pounds, restaurants, and other benchmarks of the industry's place
as a centerpiece of the coastal economy--the single most important mainstay
of thousands of coastal Maine families--clutter the roadways in and around
any coastal access point.
The same cannot be said of groundfishing. Since
1987, when the Portland Fish Exchange opened, since stock declines of the
early 1990s and associated closures of nursery grounds, and since several
regulatory moves restricted gillnetting activities (principally marine
mammal protection legislation), the industry has become concentrated in
and around Casco Bay, Portland. Investigators visited ports from Machaisport
south and west to Kittery, finding one or two gillnetters or draggers per
port north and east of Stonington and one or two south of Saco, a community
near Portland.
The declines in groundfishing activities north
and east of Stonington reflect the problems associated with marine mammal
protection and the growth of two alternative fisheries: sea urchins and
eels. In addition, a principal dealer in Rockland, formerly a major
groundfish port, curtailed interest in groundfishing shortly after the
opening of the Portland Fish Exchange. The declines in groundfishing activities
south and west of Portland reflect the increasing growth and entrenchment
of summer recreational uses of the coast, where tourist hotels and other
activities--including sportfishing, whale-watching, and recreational boating
infrastructures--have reduced access points for groundfishing vessels and
fish landing facilities. This does not imply that most of Maine's coast,
from Portsmouth, NH on the border to Bath, Rockland, and Acadia National
Park, is immune to these pressures of recreational coastal development.
A comparison of 1985 and 1995 aerial photographs of Portland's waterfront,
for example, reveals that the principal growth has been condominium and
other non-fishing development.
Despite competition from other industries for
space, the Maine groundfishing fleet remains active, geographically dispersed
across several communities (mostly between Saco and Rockland), and internally
diverse with regard to gears, vessels sizes, and involvement in other fisheries.
Maine ground fishers, their families, the associations they have formed,
and those processing and harvesting businesses who buy, pack, and ship
their catch have constructed and maintain a complex, interconnected physical
and social infrastructure around the pursuit and capture of groundfish.
Maine's groundfishing fleet has three principal
components:
- Vessels ranging from 80' to 100' in length that fish, usually, for 10 days at a time. These vessels rarely fish in Maine state waters, usually traveling as far as Georges Bank and beyond and fishing primarily with dragger nets. Crews on these vessels usually consist of a captain and two to three other individuals.
- Vessels ranging from 45' to 79' in length that fish for 4 to 5 days at a time, also using dragger nets. Crews usually consist of a captain and one to two other individuals.
- Boats under 45' who fish for a single day at a time, usually with gillnets. Crews usually consist of a captain and one other individual.
Most medium and large vessels land their groundfish
at the Portland auction, as well as many of the gillnetters, yet we confine
most of our discussion of the small vessel gillnetters to our discussion
of Stonington, highlighted in the secondary port section. Larger
vessels, clearly, dominate the activity at the exchange and along the Portland
waterfront, and medium-sized vessels tie up at harbors all around Casco
Bay. In addition to Portland, the Casco Bay area includes the following
ports, each of which can be considered an extension of a diverse and widely
distributed groundfishing fleet (Greater Portland Council of Governments
1991b:5):
Scarborough Freeport
Cape Elizabeth Brunswick
Falmouth Harpswell
Cumberland Phippsburg
Yarmouth West
Bath
Portland itself is a diversified community with
a complex economy, the center of a county that boasts the second lowest
unemployment rate (between 4% and 7%) in the state (Maine Department
of Labor 1994). The civilian labor force in the Portland Metropolitan Area
averages 132,290 for the year, reaching lows of 126,050 during the month
of September and reaching a high of 138,100 during December, when the unemployment
rate drops to 4.3%, largely, of course, because of increases in retail
trade around Christmas. Generally, however, the summer months suffer lower
unemployment rates than the winter months. Seasonal fluctuations such as
these are common throughout the state of Maine, if more exaggerated in
smaller, isolated communities that are more heavily dependent on fishing.
Stonington's unemployment rate, for example, fluctuates between a low of
3.1 percent in August to a high of 10.5 percent in February. Portland's
economy, by comparison, is much more stable seasonally.
Table
6 shows the distribution of jobs by industrial sector in Portland.
These distributions indicate an economy with a
strong (but no longer central) manufacturing base and a growing service
sector, reflecting national economic restructuring trends. Average
wages in the Portland MSA are around $10.00/hour, or around half of what
crew on groundfishing vessels can make (or were used to making prior to
the current crisis), and as little as a fifth of what captains were making.
Median family incomes in the city were $25,600 in 1983 and $38,511 in 1990,
or an increase of 6.5 percent, indicating a relatively robust economy.
Commercial fishing, of course, is but one of several
industries and cannot be said to be the leading industry in the city, although
the port itself occupies a central place in the city's economy and its
quality of life. Two waterfront surveys compiled by the Council
of Governments in Portland reported that during the recession of the late
1980s and early 1990s, Portland's waterfront businesses expanded and hired
more employees, indicating the port's overall importance in the city's
economic health (Portland Council of Governments 1992a, 1992b).
The MGF is no small part of the port's profile and character, for "good
fishing harvests" were mentioned by the Council as primary in keeping
waterfront businesses active during these years of economic downturn.
Casco Bay is a deep water port, extremely sheltered
and located only three and one half miles from open ocean. Through
the year it remains free of ice, which makes for easy navigation not only
for the commercial fishing fleet but also for growing marine traffic related
to imports, transportation, and recreation. Much of the development of
the harbor in the past ten years has been the growth of condominiums and
other real estate development that often competes with commercial fishing
for space and aesthetics. Despite these changes, commercial fishing in
Portland remains a core industrial segment, important in the city's identity
and history. Indeed, those responsible for monitoring waterfront development
see non-marine related uses of space along the waterfront as directly tied
to marine related uses in positive ways:
"Land owners are clearly a small number of the actual 'firms' which are located on the waterfront, yet they have some specific concerns about the amount of underutilized space along the waterfront. There continues to be a strong call for reviewing the current zoning restrictions from such owners and from some of the renters. Some renters have suggested that the waterfront users could be paying less in rent if the buildings were occupied more fully. In other wors, nonmarine related uses could subsidize marine related uses."
--Portland Council of Governments 1991a
Official publications of Portland's city government
often highlight the central role of commercial fishing, and clearly the
Portland Fish Exchange is among the city's proud accomplishments, being
unique in the Northeast*
and attracting the attention of seafood dealers and brokers in ports such
as Gloucester and New Bedford.
* Note by Clay: The Portland
exchange has been unique in being a display auction. Other Northeast
display auctions are being planned, however.
At the heart of the Portland MGF stands the Portland
Fish Exchange (PFE), a display auction founded in 1987 on the Portland
waterfront. The auction has acquired a reputation for fairness and
accuracy of weighing in a region long known for difficulties between seafood
dealers and fishers. Some fishers we interviewed while landing fish in
Portland had recently moved from selling their fish in Boston and New York
markets, saying that those markets were far too prone to rounding weights
downward, arguing over quality and other characteristics of the catch,
and sometimes taking days or weeks to pay for fish. The Portland Exchange,
by contrast, provides a setting where fishers or their representatives
(brokers) come together with buyers, every Sunday through Thursday noon,
to bid on various lots of fish.
Another fisher we interviewed suggested that the
auction's reputation for accuracy has been responsible for fewer disputes
between fishers and buyers that have led to marketing boycotts or protests
over what seemed to fishers to be price-fixing:
"We had a few minor tie-ups because the price wasn't any good;
those didn't last very long. Well, the dealer will come down and talk about
it, and then they settled it, and then we'd go out That was years ago when
it used to work that way. And now with the auction, it doesn't work that
way. This auction has been the best thing that ever happened to us. We
used to give--if we caught a hundred pounds of fish, we got paid for 100,
but there was 112 or so in the box. Now we auction, and there's about 112
in there."
Typically, fish are landed at the auction early
in the morning, between four and six, separated and weighed, and auctioned
off at noon. During the shrimp season, shrimp auctions also take
place in the evening.
The
Exchange employs between 35 and 55 individuals, fluctuating through the
year based on weather conditions and the availability of groundfish.
With the exception of shrimp, most of the species they land are groundfish
species. The Exchange also assembles daily price reports and lists of species
landed by vessel, pounds, sizes, and other information, serving as an excellent
data source for National Marine Fisheries Service's efforts to monitor
the conditions of the resource on a daily, weekly, or annual basis* (see
Table 7).
*Note by Clay: The NMFS does, in fact, receive these and
other dealer reports daily, and uses them in its analyses.
The Exchange is the center of the northern shore
of Casco Bay, sitting among several seafood brokering establishments and
the Marine Trade Center, a building that is conspicuously businesslike
in appearance, reflecting the self-professed entrepreneurial spirit of
the Portland fleet. In an interview with a group consisting of a
fisher's wife, a well-known broker and boat owner, and a past political
appointee within the state's marine political apparatus, the point was
made that, after Amendment 5 was passed and fishers in Gloucester and New
Bedford began burning boats and turning over cars, journalists came to
Portland believing they were not negatively impacted by the regulations,
because they were not destroying property. Their response to the journalists
was as reasoned as their response to Amendment 5: they said that they were
businessmen and they were responding like businessmen. Simply, they challenged
the new regulations in a court of law.
The square brick structure with bold silver letters
that read Marine Trade Center symbolizes this stoic and stubborn resistance
to what the fishers of Portland consider onerous regulations. The
Center houses the National Marine Fisheries Service offices, the Maine
Department of Labor's Fishing Family Assistance Center, Maine Fishermen's
Wives Association, and several other marine related businesses or assistance
organizations. Dock space along the waterfront, like most heavily commercialized
ports, is at a premium. The city of Portland rents space to 22 boats and
maintains a transient pier where boats may tie up for three days at a time;
this is 100' long and boats can tie up three deep, similar to the vessel
stacking in New Bedford. They will have eight more slips in May of 1996,
and rarely does a permanent slip tenant relinquish his right to harbor
space. This indication of a high demand for slip space is another indication
of the tenacity of the Portland fleet and its resilience in the face of
proposed restrictions and probable economic declines.
In addition to the complex that includes the Fish
Exchange, seafood dealers, and the Marine Trade Center, the active space
of commerce between Commercial Boulevard and the waterfront, as well as
the waterfront across the bay, includes several seafood dealers, gear manufacturers,
and other businesses that service the fleet and its personnel in a variety
of capacities. Several small eating and drinking establishments
depend heavily on ground fishers, both as patrons and suppliers of the
raw materials for their seafood chowders and fresh fish steaks.
According to Maine Department of Marine Resources
licensing data, the opening of the Exchange was followed by an increase
in commercial fishing licenses for the first five years of its operation.
Between 1986 and 1991, licenses increased from 1132 to 2048, dropping back
to 1493 in 1994. From field research on the 1995 license list, however,
we know that many fishers who hold licenses do not fish for groundfish;
some purchase and retain licenses either for tax purposes or in the hopes
that they will become desirable as commodities under limited entry programs
or future moratoria.
That growth in commercial fishing occurred in
Portland following the founding of the PFE is further supported by the
waterfront surveys mentioned earlier, conducted in 1992 and covering the
years between 1989 and 1991. The survey found that water dependent
uses of Portland's waterfront grew from 31% to 36% during these years.
Among the reasons for success of waterfront businesses
were three that relate directly to commercial fishing (Portland
Council of Governments 1991a: 8): "For the increases [in business
activity, including hiring additional personnel], business responding to
the survey were very articulate this year. The reasons given include:
- a particularly large volume of lobsters and fish for the harvesters;
- better prices for fish and lobsters; and
- Portland Fish Exchange attracting large scale buyers.
A much better estimate of the numbers of ground
fishers comes from data available at the PFE: their records indicate that
they handle the catch of 384 clients. Of these, between 30 and 40
are brokers or seafood markets/organizations, between 80 and 90 are based
in ports in and around the Portland area, and the remainder (around 250)
are based in more distant ports. Those based in Portland are likely to
be the larger vessels, with crews of a captain and three to four mates,
as are most of the others, given declines in gillnetting and associated
declines in smaller boats.
We can use these figures to estimate, roughly,
the size of Portland's groundfishing fleet. A rough lower
estimate of the number of families directly dependent on groundfishing
in and around the Portland area could be derived by multiplying 80 to 90
vessels by 4, or the number of people who generally crew a vessel, with
a result of between 320 and 360 families. Seafood firms in the Portland
MSA report total employment levels of between 240 and 390, and another
110 to 150 workers occupy the sector of the economy known as boat building
and repairing (Maine Department of Labor 1994: 141-42), bringing the total
to between 700 and 900 families.
This is, of course, a low estimate, and an upper
estimate would include all but between 5 and 10 of the 344 who are not
obviously seafood dealers or companies. At this end of the range,
we derive figures of between 1,670 and 1,880 families. Thus, those directly
involved in Portland the groundfishing industry number from between 700
to 1,900 individuals. The actual numbers of individuals who depend on groundfishing
for part or all of their income, of course, are much higher, because these
estimates do not include those who provide services besides building and
repair services (e.g., ice, fuel), those who monitor the commercial fishing
industry (e.g., Maine Department of Marine Resources personnel, NMFS Port
Agents and workers, Harbor Masters), and those who provide a range of other
services (e.g., banking, insurance, slip rental).
Based on salary data provided in the interviews
with fishers and owners of fishing vessels, those directly involved in
harvesting groundfish--captains and crew--contribute, in the aggregate,
between $12 million and $70 million to the Portland economy annually.
These figures are based on fairly conservative income estimates, with crews
of the larger vessels making around $40,000 per year and captains making
$100,000 per year and captains of smaller vessels making between $30,000
to $50,000 per year.
To protect incomes of this size, and to preserve
the groundfishing heritage of Portland, ground fishers have not accepted
regulatory changes quietly. In addition to marshaling legal actions
in response to recent fishery regulations, ground fishers and other fishers
in Maine have formed several organizations, many of which are organized,
staffed, and operated primarily by fishers' wives.
Because of different fishing territories and practices
associated with each of the three groups of vessels (small, medium, and
large), they have been differentially affected by regulations, incidents
of environmental degradation and ecological change, and issues stemming
from conflicts with conservationists, other types of commercial fishers
(e.g., shrimpers and scallopers), and recreational and tourist interests
(e.g., recreational fishers, whale-watching groups). Reflecting
these differences, the groups are represented by different fishing organizations:
larger vessels are represented by the Groundfishing Group of the Associated
Fisheries of Maine; mid-sized vessels are represented by the Maine Fishermen's
Cooperative Association; and smaller vessels are represented by the Maine
Gillnetter's Association. The current spokespersons for these organizations
live in South Berwick, Cundy's Harbor, and Stonington, respectively.
Not only are these different groups of ground
fishers represented by different organizations, but interviews with representatives
from each of the groups suggest that attitudinal differences between them,
along with gear and space conflicts, have made forming a unified fishing
association difficult. Small and medium-sized vessel owners, for
example, often characterize the larger vessels as corporate entities, seeing
them as less grounded in family ties and less bound to home mortgages than
fishers who fish from smaller boats. Captains who use draggers view gillnets
as more ecologically disruptive than draggers, stating that gillnets, too
selective, remove species from the biomass unevenly and thereby create
populations imbalances. Gillnetters, in turn, complain that draggers threaten
spawning grounds and damage substrates.
These internal sources of conflict are somewhat
more pronounced across the Northeast Region as a whole. Maine fishers
from all three groups, nearly unanimously, point to fishers from New Bedford
and Gloucester as being responsible for the problems caused by overfishing;
like commercial fishers nearly everywhere, however, they also claim that
overfishing is only one of many causes of declines in cod and other stocks
(particularly citing pollution and habitat destruction) and routinely disagree
with scientists from NOAA and universities regarding the conditions of
different stocks.
Interestingly, each group seems to believe the
others are better prepared than fishers like themselves to deal with regulatory
and ecological crises: the larger operators view the smaller as more flexible,
while the smaller operators view the larger enterprises as having more
capital to invest in gear modification and exploring alternative fishing
strategies. Both groups point to investment capital as a problem,
but from different perspectives: the larger vessel-owners say they have
too much capital invested to stop fishing and the smaller vessel-owners
say that gear modifications and alternative fishing strategies would require
capital investments beyond their means.
Despite internal divisions, the Maine Fishermen's
Wives Association represents all fishers and fishing families in the state,
and the other groups come together from time to time around certain issues
related to stock assessments and new regulations. In addition, several
other public, private, and quasi-public organization act as informal and
formal lobbyists for all Maine fishers and fishing families, ranging from
the Island Institute in Rockland to the Maine Fisheries Commission to the
Maine Sea Grant College Program. It is difficult to say, however, that
any agency, organization, association, or group speaks for all fishers
in Maine all of the time, yet at least once per year they are able to come
together in the Maine Fishermen's Forum.
Like fishers throughout much of the United States,
many of those we interviewed in Portland either descend from long time
fishing families or have worked in fishing or fishing-related work since
they were in their teens. Interviewing a father-son team of ground
fishers, for example, elicited the following statement in response to our
inquiries about how they got into fishing:
"Well, my father fished and my aunt fished
and my sons fish, and my brothers fish, my uncle fished, my cousins fished--the
whole family fished--because there wasn't a very wide selection when they
came to the country in 1920. It was either work in the mills--which
Portland didn't have any but very few--or longshoremen. And this wasn't
a real good farm area, so we took to fishing."
Commonly, fishers took up fishing practices primarily
because, compared to other occupations, fishing paid relatively well and
required no extensive education beyond the day-to-day apprenticeship of
fishing. Those born into fishing households typically grew up around
boats and fishing and learned the industry at a young age, although some
fishers claimed that their children either loved or hated fishing, and
simply being born into a fishing household does not seal one's fate into
a life of fishing. This is especially true today, with the negative publicity
surrounding the future of fishing, particularly groundfishing. Despite
the pleas of some fishers, who now desperately need crew who are willing
to stay with fishing for years to come, fishing households are having trouble
reproducing themselves. A thoughtful account of the difficulties captains
have recruiting crew links crew recruitment problems to credit and capital
development issues as well:
Interviewer: "Is it tough to find
good crew?"
Fisher: "Yeah, now it is; it's
getting hard because young people aren't interested in getting into it
because of all the publicity and all the rules. So I can't say as I blame
them, it's hard work. The guys get paid pretty well out of it."
Interviewer: "And they earn their
money."
Fisher: "Oh yeah. But a lot of
people don't want to be going away from home. If you're gone for four or
five days, and then they're in for two or three, and then they're gone
again. Like the bigger boats are gone for 10 days or 12 days, and then
they are in for 4, and then they're gone again. Especially if you're married
and got kids, it's not much of a life. I can't say as I blame them, but
it's, you know, it's not the opportunity there for the young person to
come and say, 'I'd like to go fishing with you and learn the business.'
I've taken guys. You can tell right away if they're gonna' be any good
or not. And I've had a couple of them that I had to advise that, 'You'd
be better off going back and working on shore. You're never gonna make
it.'"
Interviewer: "Why is that?"
Fisher: "Oh, they don't have any
idea in the world what they're doing out there; they really don't. They're
lost. And then you'll get some guy that comes along and think, 'This guy's
gonna' be good.' And you keep him and after a while, he knows this and
he knows that, and then you can teach them, but it just takes experience
to learn where to go to catch the fish, and how to tow along the bottom
and do this and do that. There's an opportunity there for people, but the
government didn't leave many windows for these young people to save their
money and buy a boat and start like I did. You know, I started with a lobster
boat, then I went to a bigger lobster boat, then I bought another small
dragger, then I worked on big draggers and saved my money. And then I bought
another dragger that was a little bit bigger."
Within the Portland fishing community, it is not
uncommon for fishers born into fishing families or those who eventually
become crew to try out nonfishing jobs during their younger years, usually
in and around the water. This would include operating ferries, building
or maintaining boats, or performing other shore side tasks. A few fishers
we interviewed, especially those operating smaller vessels, moved between
fishing and shore-based employment on and off over the course of their
professional careers; we may think of this as yet another extension of
moving between fisheries through the course of several seasons or from
year to year, adapting vessels, modifying gears, and targeting different
species based on stocks, regulations, and crowding problems. We will discuss
methods of adapting to crises in more detail below.
In the process of moving between shore, water-related
occupations and fishing, either as crew or as part-time fishers/captains
themselves, fishers gradually gain the trust of the established fishing
community and slowly become accepted into its ranks. Because there
is a history of regulatory pressure, persistent perceptions that the fishing
way of life is being criminalized, untrustworthy marketing relationships,
and the necessities of interdependence between captains and crew at sea,
developing trusting relationships is a slow and often painstaking process
that permeates the fishing community. By the same token, the difficulties
of forming long-term and trusting relationships make those that have been
formed all the more important as components of the overall social infrastructure
of groundfishing.
Considered as part of the economic health of groundfishing,
working in and around the water, moving between fishing and shore-based
employment, and occupying different positions on different kinds of fishing
vessels has been important to the ways in which the social capital of groundfishing
develops and becomes available for investment in a productive fishing enterprise.
By social capital we refer to those network relationships--between
captains and crew, captains and suppliers, among crew or among captains,
and between captains, owners, and creditors, and so forth--that enable
partnerships designed to generate incomes. In fishing, the development
of fishing skills and knowledge about fishing grounds, the willingness
to adhere to captains' safety standards, the ability to remain at sea for
extended periods, etc. are all attributes we normally consider human capital.
Yet human capital in fishing is useless without the weblike partnerships
that link fishing vessels to credit systems for financing, fuel, ice, trip
food, etc.--without, that is, social capital, and the trust upon which
the mobilization and investment of social capital depend. Comments from
one of our respondents show how extensively entrenched are relationships
based on trust and credit and how they may be negatively impacted by negative
publicity about the fishery:
"Well, you have to see ramifications of
this whole publicity thing. Like I've had an account with Shaw Supermarket,
a charge account, for a long time. And when I got the second boat,
I called them up and I asked them for another charge account for the other
boat, and they wouldn't give me one. I said, 'Why?' and they said they
were phasing out their fishing boats because their credit and liability
wasn't too good. I says, 'Have I ever missed a payment?,' and they said,
'No, your credit's very good.' As a matter of fact, they asked me to stop
paying like I was paying, wanted me to go on paying them every 30 days.
Basically what I do is when a boat comes in and I do a settlement sheet
and I pay them and then I get all the bills and I pay all the bills and
I put it in the mail and send it to them. So if I had a bill from Shaw's
for $257, I sent them a check for $257 with the account number on it. Well,
they didn't want me to do that anymore. They wanted me to wait til they
sent me a statement and then pay the statement, because it was confusing
the bookkeepers, I guess. But they wouldn't give me another charge account,
because they felt the fishing industry was going down. There are a few
places like that. A year ago I put a new winch engine into one boat, and
I really had to get a great recommendation from the Caterpillar Company
to the guy who would come down and wrap the exhaust pipe with insulation,
because he said, 'I've been stiffed by fishermen. I don't even want to
touch you guys.'"
If credit relations in the fishing industry are
enhanced by trust, so too are they particularly susceptible to pieces of
information that chip away at that trust. This occurs, moreover,
within an industry whose participants have been prone to considering attacks
on their ways of life as stemming from a conspiracy of environmentalists,
government personnel, and recreational fishing and tourist interests. While
these sentiments are widespread throughout the fishing industry of the
United States (see Fritchey 1993), the ways fishers act on them, responding
to what they perceive as crises and to very real restrictions of their
fishing activity, vary from port to port.
Maine fishers and fishing families are adjusting
to negative publicity in fairly predictable ways, based on their past adaptive
responses to various political, economic, and ecological crises: specifically,
they respond with a combinations of experimenting with alternative survival
strategies, protest, and resistance. Maine fishers consider themselves
innovative and entrepreneurial, as noted above in the discussion of the
Marine Trade Center and the measured response to Amendment # 5, and their
responses to new fishing regulations have been fashioned along typical
business lines, including challenging the state on legal grounds and investing
time and income in alternative uses for their vessels.
Like fishers in the Gulf States and up and down
the eastern seaboard, Maine fishers perceive their way of life being criminalized,
largely unjustly, due to either environmentalists' interests or to fisheries
biologists who regulate fishing based on inaccurate data. Holding
such viewpoints, they consider regulations with suspicion and often view
them as illegitimate or even morally reprehensible. This justifies, in
their own minds, protest and resistance by legal and illegal means.
At the same time, Maine fishers adjust to crises--whether
politically instigated or not--by experimenting with options within and
outside of fishing. Within fishing, this involves moving into new,
similar fisheries with the same gears, making modifications to gears and
vessels for compliance purposes (or sometimes to circumvent regulations),
making modifications to enter qualitatively different fisheries (moving
from net-based fisheries to trap-based fisheries, for example), or exploring
new fishing territories. When switching from fishing to shore-based employment,
many fishers remain tied to the industry in an altered capacity, engaging
in work in seafood establishments, vessel repair operations, and so forth.
Consider the comments of a long-time crew member who, in the current climate,
has had little difficulty finding work because labor recruiting pools for
crew have deteriorated in the wake of negative publicity about the groundfishing
stocks and the industry's future:
"Last year I groundfished the entire year;
I was on a different boat than I'm on now. And I swap around; I
go where I want to go. That's one of the appeals of this business, particularly
at my level of it. I've run boats; I've been shore engineer--that was the
third thing that I did when I quit actually fishing--was maintain boats
for the outfit that I'm working for now. When boats came in, I took care
of any problems that they had. I knew the boats around the harbor, take
out fish and so forth, and fuel them and ice them, and get them ready to
go out again so that the gangs could go home.
Because of the economic importance of lobster
in Maine, one of the most devastating potential problems to emerge in the
wake of a deteriorating groundfish industry is the movement of smaller
vessels into lobstering and the practice of larger vessels illegally dragging
for lobster. While it is illegal in the state of Maine for ground
fishers to land lobster they have caught with nets, fishers in the southern
portion of the state can relatively easily travel to Boston markets to
sell lobster they have captured in their nets and we can expect such practices
to increase under more restrictive fishing regulations.
Maine fishers are adapting to new developments in fishing regulations in ways that are in line with their historical participation in the fisheries: by resisting regulations through legal and illegal means while experimenting with new gears, new species, and new on-shore economic opportunities. The concentration of the fleet around the PFE has meant that those fishers based in and around Portland are likely to be more heavily impacted by further groundfishing restrictions than those in other, smaller ports, where lobster fishing prevails. Although the Greater Portland economy has a broad and diverse base, ground fisher in this area will be unlikely to find comparable work with comparable incomes outside groundfishing; in addition, of course, they face the loss of large investments in fishing vessels and gears with the collapse of the industry.