The perfect storm… of fishing regulations

A minor key in the movie (and perhaps the book — I haven’t read it) The Perfect Storm is that one reason the Andrea Gail was lost at sea is that its evil greedhead owner didn’t want to save some money and not pay for upkeep on the boat. Certainly, this is a classic theme in fiction — the poor working slobs are made to suffer because of the greed of capitalist pig-dogs. I dredge this up because Kirsten Scharnberg has a story in today’s Chicago Tribune about a more recent fishing boat accident that claimed five lives. This time, however, the villain appears to be…. excessive regulaions:

Just days before Christmas, five sailors died off the shores of this fabled New England fishing community. Seas were violent; the ship Northern Edge took on water; the sailors were lost even as wives and mothers lit the traditional candles in the windows back home for them. Because so many fishermen have died on rough seas in this region over the years, funerals have become as much a ritual as candle-lighting. But what has been different in the case of the Northern Edge is the public outcry that has followed. Even as federal investigators try to piece together the events that led to the region’s worst fishing disaster since the 1991 sinking of the ship that inspired the book and movie “The Perfect Storm,” fishermen up and down the Eastern Seaboard have speculated that they already know why the men died. Many pin the blame squarely on a new government regulation that penalizes scalloping vessels and costs them potentially tens of thousands of dollars for breaking a trip and returning to shore before catching their limit–even if they are coming back to find safe harbor from inclement weather. “Regulations have become so rigid for our fishermen that there is no discretion left to them anymore,” said Matt Thomas, the city attorney for New Bedford. “They’ve started to look at fishing like a science, like something they can study in a lab and a beaker, but that’s not the way it works with something as volatile as the Atlantic Ocean.” In the midst of this debate, the body that oversees fishing in the region, the New England Fishery Management Council, met Tuesday in New Hampshire. In response to the uproar, the council voted to temporarily reverse the controversial rule pending a review by regulators at the National Marine Fisheries Service. For now, no penalty will be levied against fishermen who leave before catching their limit for any reason. Regulations like the one for scallopers have become increasingly common in recent decades. Dubbed the “broken trip” rule, it was put in place to limit the number of trips scallopers make into waters that also contained high numbers of endangered ground fish, which live at the sea bottom, such as cod and haddock that inadvertently get caught in scalloping nets.

Read the whole thing — regulation is not the only culprit, but it’s a biggie. [C’mon, how bad could it be?–ed. Barney Frank thinks the regulations are excessive.]