Dogfish catch regulations eased

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Dogfish are plentiful and easy to catch, but they fetch just 19 cents a pound. Now, at least, catch regulations on them have been eased.

CHATHAM — Fishermen have long complained that a resurgent dogfish population was keeping them from catching more cod and other commercially valuable species and hampering efforts to bring those depleted stocks back to healthy levels. Still, fishermen from this port are used to catching and selling what is at hand, and these small coastal sharks prove themselves valuable, despite their low value, because they are relatively easy to catch and plentiful.

On Friday, the National Marine Fisheries Service made it more profitable for local fishermen to target dogfish by proposing a relatively simple change to fishing regulations that they estimate might bring in an average of $24,000 more per vessel in revenue.

"It's been a long time coming," said Eric Brazer, manager of the Georges Bank Fixed Gear Sector, a group of around 40 fishermen who collectively manage their portion of the annual fish quota. In December the sector asked the fisheries service to exempt its dogfish fishery from much stricter regulations governing depleted groundfish stocks such as cod, haddock and flounder.

Under groundfish regulations, fishermen targeting dogfish were sometimes required to carry federal fishery observers. While the fisheries service has been covering their cost, estimated at $1,000 per day, the agency is not sure it will have the money to do that in the future. Groundfish such as cod can pay as much as $4 per pound, but with dogfish at 19 cents per pound and the daily catch limited to 3,000 pounds, dogfish boats make less than $600 a trip, and all that money and more would have gone toward paying the observer.

Also, under groundfish regulations the fisheries service assumes that all vessels not carrying observers are catching at least as much in nontargeted species as those with observers onboard. That calculation also included vessels that were targeting groundfish species and had much higher bycatch of unwanted species. What that meant to dogfish fishermen was much higher amounts of fish such as cod and pollock were subtracted from their quota than they were actually catching.

In its appeal to the fisheries service, the Georges Bank sector submitted observer data from almost 650 trips that showed it caught less than 1 percent of groundfish species as bycatch while targeting dogfish. That translated to a little over a pound of cod per trip.

The exemption, when it is finally granted and is in effect, will ease the requirement to carry observers and use real bycatch numbers to account for the groundfish dogfishermen do catch.

Fisheries service spokeswoman Allison McHale said the comment period would end Nov. 5 and new regulations wouldn't be in place until at least June.

Brazer said while he believed such an adjustment demonstrates the fisheries service's willingness to address bureaucratic roadblocks to help fishermen survive in trying times, waiting for almost a year to get relief was still a long time. He also said the exempted area in the newly proposed regulations is smaller than what the sector requested, Brazer said.

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