By Aaron Porter

An endangered northern right whale rests at the surface on the Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary just north of Cape Cod. PHOTO COURTESY OF NATIONAL OCEANIC AND ATMOSPHERIC ADMINISTRATION

If past performance is any guide, they’ll get a boatload. The last time they were here gathering testimony to help draft the latest round of alternatives in 2003, a crowd of fishermen, whale researchers and state fisheries managers packed the room.

They criticized many of the existing rules intended to reduce the frequency of whale entanglements in fishing gear, and they called for, among other things, an exclusion area along the coast where endangered right whales are unlikely to travel and the rules shouldn’t apply.

David Gouveia, a marine mammal coordinator with the fisheries service, recalled that Ellsworth meeting as one of the best when it came to getting public input.

Although the fisheries service was more than a year later than expected coming out with the new alternatives, many of the issues and ideas raised two years ago are recognizable in them.

The April 4 public hearing at 6 p.m. at the Holiday Inn will be the primary opportunity for Downeast fishermen to comment directly to the fisheries service on the details of the proposed alternatives.

Since the rule options were published in early March, fishermen and state fisheries regulators have been digesting the 800-page document. They found a variety of subjects for praise and blame.

Terry Stockwell, coordinator for the Maine Department of Marine Resources, said he’s pleased the fisheries service included the coastal exclusion lines in nearly all the options. He noted that the areas identified by the lines on the chart in the option aren’t in the best place. However, “we need to be supportive of the concept of the lines,” he said.

If fishermen don’t see that the exclusion areas identified by those lines will benefit them individually, they should advise where they should be redrawn, Stockwell advised.

Gouveia echoed Stockwell’s advice on exemption areas.

“If they want more, say so,” he said. That’s what the hearing is for.

David Tarr, chairman of the Zone C Lobster Zone Council, is lucky enough to be in one of the more generous exemption areas. Under most of the proposed alternatives, fishing gear set inside the islands that guard the mouths of Penobscot and Blue Hill bays wouldn’t have to comply with required gear modifications intended to reduce the chance of whale entanglement.

“If you’re an inshore fisherman, you’re happy with whatever comes out of the meeting as long as it doesn’t stay the same,” he said of lobstermen in his zone.

But for lobstermen at the extreme eastern and western ends of the coast, the exemption areas as drawn just don’t seem to offer much.

“It’s Cutler Bay and Little Machias Bay,” said Cutler lobsterman John Drouin, looking at the exemption line. “It doesn’t do anything great for us down here.”

The other ominous proposal, especially for Downeast lobstermen, is the phasing out of floating rope commonly used for the ground lines that attach one trap to another on the bottom.

“To ban float rope for us, we just don’t know how we’re going to fish,” said Drouin, chairman of the Zone A Lobster Zone Council.

With that in mind, Stockwell is advising lobstermen to “cautiously support” alternative five of the six alternatives presented by the federal service.  That’s because nearly all the others call for the phasing out of floating rope by 2008.

Drouin and Stockwell agree that fishing with sinking line on a lot of the rocky Downeast bottom is not practical. Drouin said the only way around it would be to eliminate ground lines altogether by setting single traps on each buoy and end line. So far the end lines, which run from the traps to the buoys, are not required to be made entirely of sinking line.

Stockwell said he’s backing alternative five because it doesn’t close the door on float rope. But at the same time, he is leery of a provision in the alternative that would allow for the expansion of seasonal closure areas. Currently, such regular closed areas are intended to remove gear from areas where right whales congregate during the seasons they tend to gather there. Stockwell observed that a seasonal closed area along the Maine coast could really play havoc with lobstermen.

If alternative five isn’t selected, Stockwell is poised to continue work researching the feasibility of fishing with ground lines formulated to be of specific buoyancy. That would keep the loops of line between traps lower in the water where they would be less likely to snag passing whales, but would also keep the line off the rocky bottom where it is vulnerable to snags and chafe.

Gouveia, who has completed the public hearings in the Southern and Mid-Atlantic states, said he expects the New England component of the hearings to be more active with a group of well-informed fishermen weighing in on the alternatives.

He said the meeting will start with a quick recap of what the alternatives are and how they came into being before moving on to how they might affect fishermen.