THE SEA: Net Gain Along the Shores

“Gonna take my little girl out to dinner and dancing Saturday night.” sang Captain Barry Boucher last week after tying up his 75-ft. trawler Shanty Girl in New Bedford, Mass. In eleven days on Georges Bank, off the New England coast, Boucher and his crew of five had netted 45,000 Ibs. of fish, including 30,000 lbs. of yellowtail flounder, which they sold for $28,000 in the red brick auction house at the foot of the pier.

The catch was a fluke—only once before this year had Boucher caught any yellowtail flounder—but New England fishermen hope that it was an omen. Reason: Shanty Girl was the first dragger to dock at New Bedford, the region’s largest fishing port, since a new law took effect on March 1, extending U.S. jurisdiction over fishing in coastal waters to 200 miles from the old limit of twelve. The law is intended to save from extinction many species of fish—as well as much of the U.S. fishing industry.

Until the mid-1960s a trawler like Shanty Girl could stay at sea for only five days and return with even more fish than it landed last week. Since then, huge fleets of modern trawlers from foreign countries, most notably the Soviet Union, Japan, Poland and East Germany, have swept the prime U.S. fishing grounds off New England, the Pacific Northwest and Alaska almost clean of Atlantic cod, yellowtail flounder and haddock; stocks of hake, herring, mackerel and pollack were severely depleted.

Under the new law, long urged by the fishing industry and signed last year by President Ford (TIME, April 5), eight regional councils, made up of fishermen and private citizens, set quotas for fish in their areas. U.S. fishermen are allowed to net as much of each quota as they are equipped to take; foreign vessels are being licensed by the State Department to catch the remainder. In practice, this means that foreigners will be prohibited from taking species that are popular with Americans but will still be able to take limited amounts of fish like hake, which is popular in Eastern Europe, and squid, which is prized in Japan and in Mediterranean countries. The foreign take from American waters will be limited to 2 million metric tons, down from an estimated 3.3 million metric tons taken in 1974. U.S. fishermen will be allowed to net 1 million metric tons of fish this year, v. 910,000 metric tons harvested in 1974.

Some fishermen argue that the Government should prohibit foreign fishing altogether in U.S. waters. But most welcome the new law, even though the quotas also limit their catches. Already, the promise of greater return is spurring some new investment. Next year 21 new steel-hulled vessels will be added to New Bedford’s 175-boat fishing fleet.

No Hitch. Washington took care to get foreign fishing nations to sign prior agreements to abide by the 200-mile U.S. limit. They could scarcely object because most had enacted 200-mile limits of their own, much to the discomfort of U.S. fishermen who net shrimp in the Gulf of Mexico and tuna in the Pacific off Ecuador and Peru.

Opening day went off almost without a hitch. Of more than 100 foreign fishing boats sighted in U.S. coastal waters on March 1, only one was nabbed by the Coast Guard—for fishing in an area off New England where lobster pots had been set. (For serious offenses, a captain can be fined up to $700,000.)

To police the 2.2 million sq. mi. added to U.S. fishing waters—a fourfold increase in the area covered by the old law—the Coast Guard plans to add four planes, five helicopters and six ships, at a total cost of $90 million.

Mended Ways. But to enforce the law on the first day the Coast Guard could field only 19 ships and 17 planes—all that were available. TIME Correspondent James Shepherd, aboard one of the first-day flights, saw a Russian fleet fishing as usual—but now with U.S. license—about 80 miles off Long Island. He reported: “With their dingy, rust-splotched hulls, the eleven trawlers, floating Stakhanovites fishing for hake, looked like dungareed boilermakers next to the five pirouetting Coast Guard cutters near by. The first day passed off peaceably, as has generally been the case since the Russians mended their sea manners about two years ago.

“Even with the new law, U.S. fishermen have far to go before catching up with the foreign fleets. We spotted only four U.S. trawlers, all dwarfed in size and efficiency by the Soviet craft. The U.S. industry is made up mostly of small, family-owned trawlers, while foreign vessels are either government-owned or heavily subsidized. Supported by factory ships to process the catch and refrigerated transports to take it home. Soviet trawlers can stay on the fishing grounds for as long as six months, limited only by the new regulations from outfishing any American boats afloat.”