Fish buyer not impressed with DFO's management of swordfish harpoon fishery

By Tina Comeau

SOU’WESTER

A seafood buyer in Yarmouth County, N.S. thinks DFO is badly mismanaging the harpoon swordfishery and he blames the department for causing a crash in the marketplace this year that he says cost fishermen anywhere from $2 to $3 a pound for their catch.

“DFO is supposed to be in fishery management, they’re in fishery destruction,” contends Wade Nickerson of SeaKist Lobster Limited. For one thing, he says the department shouldn’t allow the longline and harpoon fisheries to occur at the same time.

“For the harpoon industry, they should say alright, for two or three weeks of the season, every year, we’re going to allow these little small boats to go out and go fishing and we’re going to allow them to catch their quota before the longline quota comes in,” Nickerson says, suggesting even letting each harpoon boat to catch up to 25 fish.

That way the fishermen who are looking to make a bit more money after the lobster season ends, for instance, would benefit from a better price.

“But these guys fish five days. Fisheries tells them the day to go and the day to land, so every boat landed at the same time. It caused us to have I don’t know how many fish on hand that all got dumped into the Boston market and it absolutely destroyed the price of what these guys were depending on getting,” Nickerson says. “They, DFO, probably took a $6.50/pound fish and reduced it to $4 or less.”

Nickerson feels instead the harpoon guys should be given a set amount of fish to catch, say 25 fish, and let them have two or three weeks to do it.

He also thinks DFO is wrong to let swordfish quota from the longline fishery be transferred to the harpoon industry because of the impact on bycatch fisheries.

“We had a longline industry that provided us with yellow fin, with big eye, with mahi mahi, albacore, and marlin. It provided us with a lot of other fishes that we don’t normally get during the year,” he says. “When these guys go out fishing, they go out and catch harpoon swordfish and that’s it, we’re not creating any bycatch for Canada and we’re losing our historical data.”