Finding a Better Way to Fish

By Glen Libby
Commercial Fisherman, Chairman Midcoast Fishermen's Association

Glen Libby President of the Midcoast Fishermen's Association talks about a collaborative research project to improve the selectivity of the group's fishing gear.

I’ve got a 13-year-old grandson who loves to be around the docks. He told me, "Grampy, I plan on going fishing when I’m older."

The long-term vision is to have an opportunity for people like that. There is the goal of maintaining the fishing community along with the fish, so you can’t really just stop fishing. So we need to find a better way to do it than what has been done.

We’ve been studying the escapement of juvenile fish through the cod ends and trying to see if there’s a better cod end configuration that would reduce bycatch. We needed to have an outfit that had scientists on board and it happened to be GMRI. This research is the first real collaboration that we’ve had, as far as a project that we had thought of and they helped to make it happen.

We had the net set up so we could change different cod ends. So everything that passes through the net ends up in this cover net. You haul back you count everything in the cod end itself and then you count everything in the cover net. Then you switch cod ends and do it again and compare the data between the two to see which one is more effective. That’s the idea, to help speed the recovery of theses depleted fisheries by not killing fish needlessly.

It’s taken on a lot broader meaning since Amendment 16 resulted in sectors. If you don’t have any proof or any at sea monitoring you’re going to be stuck with what they call an assumed discard rate based on the overall weight of your trip, alright. If I went out and got 10,000 pounds, they are going to say I threw back 2,000 pounds of yellow-tails… even if I didn’t catch one. So if we keep making gear improvements throughout the season, years, whatever, we’ll have the opportunity to lower that quota and recover that quota as usable quota.

We certainly don’t have a team of scientists here in Port Clyde to make any of this happen. It’s made it really convenient for us having a local organization like that that specializes in these types of things to help make basically our ideas into reality.