Life On The Line: 

In the Wake of a Radical NMFS Closure and and Ill-Fated Buyout Plan, Near-Shore Longliners Could Disappear From the East-Coast

Longliners are facing near-shore closures resulting from the National Marine Fisheries Services (NMFS) Final Closed Area Rule aimed at protecting billfish interaction in estuarial waters. Unless the four lawsuits pending against NMFS can impress upon federal judges that this ruling unfairly impacts small longlining operations those small business will likely disappear from the fishery.

Recreational trophy fishermen, who target a variety of billfish, have worked toward eliminating longline fishing for years. Although longliners use the same hooks and bait as recreational fishermen, trophy-fishing interests charge that the longline industry is detrimental to fishing stocks. Longliners affected by the closure almost unanimously insist that recreational fishermen have too great an influence on the NMFS closure.

Vince Pyle owns three small longliners and a processing house in Dania, Fla. The area will be among the hardest hit by closures. We spoke with Pyle on Jan. 8, amidst a marathon day of meetings with Florida elected officials and phone calls. "It's a fairly stressful situation down here," Pyle says. "Somewhere around 300 families will lose their livelihood in less than 18 days. Nothing could be any worse and I've lived through swordfish boycotts and years of regulations. There are 68 day-boats and three processors that will be catastrophically impacted. I've had fishermen's wives calling me all week asking 'How are we going to make our boat payment?'"

Billfish interaction regulation started internationally with ICCAT in the1990s. According to Hammer Beideman, Executive Director of Blue Water Fishermen's Association (BWFA), a trade organization representing pelagic longline fishermen, American fishermen rolled up their sleeves and went to work to conform to ICCAT regulations, ultimately reducing their bycatch in 1990 by 38 percent.

In 2000 BWFA anticipated devastating closures and sat down with an alliance of recreational fishing interests to create the Bro Bill. The legislation would have allowed for the closure of some near-shore pelagic fishing areas while compensating fishermen impacted by those closures-BWFA was brokering a buyout.

Most commercial fishermen felt that sitting down at the table with the recreational crowd was a grave mistake. As 2000 came to an end the Bro Bill was defeated and the National Marine Fisheries Services (NMFS) had ordered more near-shore areas closed than anyone had anticipated, leaving thousands of longline fishermen out in the cold. Beideman and his organization had gambled but it hadn't paid off.

"This is unbelievable to us," says Beideman. "NMFS put through broad closures with no stipulation for a buyout in a final rule last summer," Beideman says. "That 's what remains. We got closed out of the areas but the fishermen who were put out of business got nothing."

"We saw closures coming and said 'This is going to happen so let's deal with it in a positive way.' There were four groups that got together to make this plan, the Blue Water Fisherman's Association, the Billfish Foundation, the CCA and the American Sportfishing Association. We formed an alliance to develop the Bro Bill in an attempt to come together to focus on the real problem-95 percent of overfishing and bycatch is perpetrated by international foreign fleets."

"The Bro Bill was very narrowly focused on bycatch reduction in high billfish interaction areas until New Jersey legislators started messing with it. Basically because Senator Robert Torricelli (D) and Congressman Jim Saxton (R-3rd District) of New Jersey, who are heavily influenced by New Jerseys recreational fishing lobby, fought the inclusion of the bill into the appropriation packages in this congressional session," Beideman says. "They instilled an arbitrary closure on the Mid Atlantic Bight that would save an average of 38 white marlin a year but would cost the fishery tens of thousands in targeted catch. They didn't understand or care that other closure areas were based on science. Their recreational constituencies wanted an arbitrary closure so they were giving it to them. Ultimately we agreed to it but they still killed the bill."

Among the longliners who feel that recreational interests heavily influenced NMFS' decision, many also say that BWFA signed their own death warrant by legitimizing recreational fishing groups, helping them gain a political foothold with NMFS.

Perhaps in the minority, Vince Pyle believes BWFA acted for the greater good but he speaks less highly of NMFS. "They're bending to the radical sport-fishing crowd," Pyle says. "NMFS found that this was the easiest way to achieve the national goal of bycatch reduction. There could have been a thousand ways from Sunday to do that. But I think NMFS took the easy way out by attacking a group that didn't have the means to protect themselves."
Butch Midgett, owner of Etheridge Fishing Supply in Wanchese, North Carolina sells gear to longliners. Midgett says that by sitting down with the CCA and other sport-fishing groups BWFA gave the sport-fishing crowd fodder for their lobby.

"The legislation this alliance proposed went to congress and spurred NMFS to enact these massive closures of near-shore pelagic fishing areas," Midgett says. "This NMFS ruling is obviously a case where the science followed the legislation. Before the legislation had been introduced, NMFS had never indicated any plan to make such broad closures. Now we're facing vast closures that include areas where billfish bycatch isn't even an issue. Those closures were heavily influenced by the sport-fishing crowd. NMFS will insist that these closures are to protect billfish stocks based on science. But if you look at the closure areas it's clearly about real estate."

That "real estate" includes near-coastal waters on the eastern shore of Florida and Texas. Areas, according to Midgett, where elite sport fishermen live and keep million-dollar fishing boats.

Willie Etheridge, of Wanchese, NC, who owns three longliners as well as Etheridge Seafood Company, feels that the sport-fishing interests that supported the buyout were pursuing a long-term agenda. Etheridge also says that the attempt to broker a buyout with "radical sport fishermen" was a mistake. "The buyout proposal was as much a slap in the face of the commercial fishing industry as anything could ever be," Etheridge says. "When you look at the groups that backed the plan, the CCA, the Billfish Foundation and the others, their members are wealthy recreational fishermen that are using the political process to get what they want."

Etheridge shares Midgett's sentiments that the NMFS closure was based more on politics than science. "It's supposed to be a conservation move but it's not. It just shows that wealthy people get what they want in this country," he says. "This decision essentially turns the waters controlled by the United States of America over to the one-hundredth of 1 percent of the population that owns million-dollar recreational fishing boats.

"Before long, for someone to buy a piece of tuna it will have to fly into Miami airport from the waters of some other nation," Etheridge says. "At one point that fish would have been in American waters; it could have been caught by American fishermen, packed by American processors, shipped by American trucking companies and sold to the American people."