New Bedford's Manley a national All-AmericanJim Keding fishes out of Plymouth on his 55-foot dragger Zachary Nicholas. He has been a year-round commercial fisherman for the past 26 years, but since May 1 and the introduction of a new regulatory system for the groundfishery, known as sectors, he has been out to sea just three times.
"I caught my allocation in two days," he said. To try to stay in business he has had to buy fishing quota from another fisherman.
The new system allocates each commercial fishermen in a sector, or cooperative, a fixed amount of fish for the year. It allowed him a total of just 15,000 pounds for all species. Last year, before sectors, he brought in 74,000 pounds.
"I was always able to make a good living, keep the boat up and buy new gear. Now I'm going out of business. I'm done. I don't sleep at night for more than two or three hours. It's a lot of stress," said Keding, 41, whose wife Judi is a stay-at-home mom. They have two young boys, 10 and 8. "It's not working. And it's not just me. Other guys are leasing their quota out to survive the year," Keding said
"I just borrowed $25,000 to buy more fish. Now I can't pay that loan off because I paid $1 a pound to get cod quota and when I went out fishing last Monday I got $1.40 for cod at the dock. That doesn't even meet expenses. It's not worth it to go fishing. So now, do I pay the mortgage on my house and boat or do I take a chance and pay the penalties on the loan for my fish?" he asked.
Desperate as his situation has become, Keding is still nominally active in the fishery, one of just 12 small boat-owners on the South Shore still trying to make a go of it from among the 23 fishermen who enrolled in Sector 10 when it started out on May 1.
The remainder have already tied up their boats.
Keding was already in debt because, in April 2008, he retired a 57-year-old wooden vessel and borrowed money to buy his current boat in anticipation of the new catch share system. He expected to receive between 40,000 to 50,000 pounds of fish, he said.
"When I bought the boat in New Bedford I bought the catch history that went with the permit. That was right in the bill of sale. The National Marine Fisheries Service researches it and gives you a three-page document with the boat's history. You look at it, the owner looks at it and then he says. 'This is the price of the boat and this is the reason why.'"
Keding paid $235,000 for the dragger but was left in a state of shock when he learned this spring that NMFS was giving him only 15,000 pounds of fish to catch. He immediately contacted the regional headquarters in Gloucester and was told that they would launch an internal investigation. Weeks passed without any result, he said.
"Finally I pressed them hard and they told me there were two MRI's on the boat," he explained. MRI's are a serial number intended to make each fishing permit unique, he said. As the weeks went by with no resolution, Keding's wife contacted Pat Kurkul, the NMFS regional administrator, directly. She agreed to a meeting with the family.
"I met with Pat Kurkul and she basically just sat there and said 'I feel your pain but my hands are tied,'" Keding said.
Nothing had changed by November when The Standard-Times announced it would hold a forum on fishing to address problems associated with the new catch share system, since many of the New Bedford groundfish boats in sectors were tied up as well, no longer able to make fishing pay.
Keding spoke passionately about his situation in front of a large crowd at the forum on Nov. 9. He was approached after the meeting by Eric Schwaab, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Marine Fisheries Service and one of the panelists at the forum.
"He told me he was going to have someone look into it. Later I get a call from some guy who thought I had a problem with a scallop permit. He didn't know anything about me," a clearly frustrated Keding said on Wednesday. "I e-mailed Eric Schwaab and he told me they had confused me with another man. This is what I get from them. Lip service."
In response to a query from The Standard-Times, Monica Allen of NOAA communications e-mailed the following statement from Eric Schwaab: "I have personally responded to Mr. Keding and provided him the fishing history associated with his permit and vessel. I understand that this is a complicated issue. Fishing permit history and vessel history are not always the same. I am sympathetic to Mr. Keding's plight. We remain open to any documentation he would like to provide us that might be different than that currently on record. NOAA Fisheries Northeast Region has also reached out to Mr. Keding to suggest potential collaborations for cooperative research that may assist him."
That has done nothing to reassure the Keding family. "If they are sympathetic to Jim's plight, why are they not accepting any responsibility for their error in providing misinformation?" she said in an e-mail. "If one can't get accurate permit history info from the agency charged with that job (NMFS), where can one get it? I believe they owe Jim some compensation."
However, Pat Kurkul of NMFS, while declining to comment on the specifics of Keding's case, said: "I told them that this is the situation as we see it and we'd have to have information that indicates otherwise to do anything. There is confusion between fishing permit history and landings history. You cannot tell just from looking at the landings of a vessel whether that vessel has any fishing history rights."
On the MRI issue, Kurkul said that, since landing history can be disconnected from a vessel and vessels change hands, each landing history can be assigned its own MRI, or moratorium rights identifier, number. "Someone could potentially have several MRI's on one vessel," she said.
Beyond the difficulty he has with his own quota, Keding says that the small boat fishermen in his sector are simply getting squeezed out.
"The fish they gave us represents just a ridiculously low percentage compared to all the fish we caught in '09," he said. "You don't build a house from the roof down, but sectors is like starting from the roof line and going to the basement."
Asked if the problems experienced by fishermen in Sector 10 were an early indication that sector management was not working as intended, Kurkul maintained that the opposite was, in fact, the case. "People are getting higher prices. They are having to spend less time at sea to catch more, and revenue across the industry is higher than it was last year. But we acknowledge that it's not a system that's going to work for everyone," she said.
Keding believes that despite testimony from fishermen that fish stocks are largely rebuilt, political pressure from well-funded environmental groups is responsible for unduly influencing government policy.
"They threaten to sue the government and then the government puts more restrictions on the fishermen," he said. "I'd like to see one environmentalist come out on a boat to see what we see, instead of relying on information from scientists and biologists. Fishermen are the real biologists because we see the fish. No one wants to take the last fish. One day I'd like to turn this boat over to my boys, but that's not going to happen now. The Magnuson Act says they aren't supposed to introduce new measures that cause economic hardship to fishing communities, but they're doing it. I never thought it would come to this. It's sad."
Captain/Mate at Mass Bay Guides, Marine Technician, Reel Repairman
That sucks! NMFS sucks! seriously, I think the fisherman of new england need to rise up and make the government own up to their mistakes. I mean everyone! TRUE PATRIOTS DISSENT. You may think I am a radical wack job, but its time for a revolution in the fisheries management section of our government, which is supposed to represent us, in case all of you forgot we pay for these lairs and crooks to have their cushy jobs. I've had it.
LinkBack URL
About LinkBacks
Reply With Quote