"This isn't working"

By Tina Comeau

SOU’WESTER

Harpoon swordfish fishermen in Nova Scotia weren’t thrilled with how the season played itself out this year. And even the Department of Fisheries and Oceans admits the system is far from perfect and in need of a change.

Fishermen got out for two trips in late June/early July. In both cases the fishery was closed at a specific time while the boats were on the water and everyone was ordered back to the wharf for the catch to be added up.

It was days before fishermen knew if they’d get out for another trip.

In the end, the fishery was shut down for good after the second trip because the quota had been used up. Not only used up, says Linda Hunt, DFO’s senior advisor for large pelagics, but overrun too.

“We have an arrangement whereby they can override their quota by 40 per cent, which they’ve already done now, so they are shut down for the rest of the year,” Hunt said about the fishery that ended in mid-July.

Asked whether it was unusual to send the boats in and out, Hunt says this year was “kind of an anomaly.” She says normally what happens in the harpoon fishery is licence holders will have a good year, followed by a year or two of not so good years where they might not even catch all of the quota.

But that’s not what’s been happening in the past few years. Instead the boats have been overrunning the quota, which is taken off the top of the following year’s quota.

“So this year they should have started out with 136 tons, but because they had overran last year they only got around 88 tons,” says Hunt. Next year the quota will be closer to 100 tons, she predicts.

With more boats going after less quota, it’s making for shorter, and confusing, seasons.

“The problem has been that normally 100 tons was plenty for the harpoon fleet. But what’s happened as a result of the groundfish fishery not doing so well, even the lobster fishery…is that more of the harpoon licence holders are participating,” Hunt says. “Normally there would be 20 or 30 of them, now it’s up to 50 or 60. And when you’ve got only 100 tons to work with, that gets picked up pretty quickly.”

One complaint that was made this year is that by shutting down the fishery and ordering all of the boats back to the wharf at the same time it created a glut on the marketplace, which drove down prices. But Hunt says there were no other available options.

“The trouble is what are they going to do out there? Are they just going to sit out there? You can’t have them fishing because we’ve shut them down.”

Still, Hunt says DFO knows the situation wasn’t ideal this year, and hasn’t been for the past few years. And she also says that DFO appreciates the expense being paid in time, money and uncertainty by the fishermen.

“We’re going to have to come up with something else next year, this just isn’t working,” she says, adding DFO will be sitting down with the association and the membership in the fall to look at possibilities.

Patrick Gray, president of the Harpoon Swordfish Association, welcomes any opportunity to sit down and discuss the harpoon fishery. In fact, he says, these types of discussions have been ongoing for a while.

“We’ve made several proposals to DFO to sit down and review the sharing formulas and talk about new quotas,” he says, adding they’re also talking with the longline industry. “The talks are ongoing and not in an argument sense. We’re trying as managers and gear sectors to work together to get more fish.”

Of the overall Canadian swordfish quota, the harpoon fleet only gets 10 per cent. The other 90 per cent goes to the longline industry, which operates on individual quotas per licence.

“Nobody has any idea how frustrating it is to release 200 fishermen one day, bring them back in, let them go out again. It causes havoc in small communities, especially where we stretch from Cape St. Mary’s to Cape North, in Cape Breton,” says Gray. “With an abundance of swordfish on the grounds, fishermen get frustrated.”

Gray says what’s needed is more flexibility between the harpoon and longline sectors.

Most of all, he says, the harpoon fleet needs more access to more fish.

“I think there should be more flexibility between the two sectors, the longline and the harpoon, and I think the harpooners should have access to new fish,” Gray says. “They’ve got us in a 90-10 split, which was struck back 10 years ago, it’s hard for us to maneuver around it.

“We’ve been working with DFO and working with the longline industry too, trying to open some new doors and get access to more quota but it’s very hard.”

As for another concern within the industry, Gray says, it has to do with how long it often takes to get a price for the swordfish that’s been caught.