The Long Haul
Fishing restrictions have saved the Gulf of Maine shrimp but effectively killed off the fishermen. Rebuilding this once lucrative Maine industry could be critical to saving Maine's working waterfronts.
By By Joshua F. Moore, Photography by David A. Rodgers
It's been twenty-five years since Sam Galli first set out from Hobson's Wharf in Portland to drag the depths of Casco Bay for Pandalus borealis, or Gulf of Maine northern shrimp. During that time he's moved up from being a deckhand to skipper, and, just this past year, purchased his own ship, the forty-four-foot-long Christina & Rebecca. Galli, now 57, has raised a family on a fisherman's uncertain income, balancing an ever-decreasing allotment of summer days where he's allowed to catch haddock, cod, and other groundfish with what has historically been a lucrative winter crop of tiny, tasty shrimp. Although Galli maintains a regular crew, his son, Keith, has fished with him on several occasions, the two men settling into a quiet father-son rhythm on the high seas.But this year when Galli puts to sea he'll leave Keith ashore. A fishing accident last year that claimed the tips of two of Keith's fingers was only the final straw for both father and son, as a combination of what many consider government overregulation, wildly fluctuating shrimp stocks, and changing consumer taste buds has gutted the New England shrimp industry. Where just a decade ago 310 fishing boats dumped nets bursting with shrimp onto the conveyor belts of voracious seafood processors from Boston to ports Down East, barely a third of that number left their wharves last winter. In 1996 some seventeen million pounds of shrimp landed on the Maine coast; just six years later Maine fishermen hauled in a paltry eight hundred thousand pounds. Historically shrimp have sold at the Portland Fish Exchange for upwards of a buck a pound; last year's average price was thirty cents, and tens of thousands of pounds actually went unsold. What was once the Gulf of Maine's cash cow has suddenly gone dry.
"Years ago, shrimp were our bread and butter," says Galli, his whisper of a voice contradicting his weathered exterior. "For my boat shrimping is definitely more lucrative than groundfishing -- it's closer to shore, so I burn less fuel. It's also day fishing, since you don't catch shrimp at night. And last year it only worked out to about thirty days of groundfishing for me -- and it'll probably be about twenty-four this year. So shrimping is certainly make-or-break for us."
The problem facing Galli and the ninety other shrimp fishermen still trying to make a living out of ports like Portland, South Bristol, and Port Clyde is that the shrimp industry has a legendary boom-and-bust track record. The pinnacle of a shrimp boom during the 1960s, for instance, saw more than twenty-four million pounds of the flapping crustacean landed in Maine in 1969, but in fewer than ten years the stock was so depleted that the season had to be closed altogether. Over the next two decades landings rose and fell like an irregular tide: nearly eight million pounds one year, almost half that the next. In 1996, New England fishermen, many of them looking to replace the groundfishing industry that had already begun atrophying under increased federal restrictions, landed some twenty million pounds of shrimp -- nearly as much as the peak almost thirty years earlier. About 85 percent of that bounty was landed by Maine fishermen.
Regional regulators, who had taken a largely hands-off approach since shrimping regulations went into place in 1986, suddenly took notice. A 156-day season in 1997 became 105 days in 1998, 90 days in 1999, and 51 days in 2000. By 2002 shrimp fishermen were allowed just twenty-five days at sea -- hardly enough to warrant switching out their groundfishing gear for shrimp nets. As the shrimp boats' engines were silenced, land-based seafood processors responded by shutting down their machines. By the time regulators extended the season -- last year it was 140 days, and this year it is open a whopping 151 days, from December 1 through April 30 -- Maine had lost its place in the worldwide shrimp market.
"What happened was that in 1996 the scientists adopted a new computer model to estimate what the shrimp stocks were, and that model indicated that there were problems with the stocks," explains John Norton, president of Cozy Harbor Seafood in Portland. For several years Norton sat on an advisory panel of the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, which manages the Gulf of Maine northern shrimp. "Many in the industry suggested what they were seeing in the fishery did not mesh well with what the computer model was saying, but, nevertheless, the regulators cut the season until it finally got to the point where everyone was out of the business. We were the largest processor in the state, and we elected to leave the [shrimp processing] business in 1999."
Norton wasn't the only one to leave. Shrimp lovers who had grown used to buying Maine's delicious, albeit diminutive, winter crustacean at roadside stands, fish markets, and supermarkets found themselves being served shrimp that was caught in countries like Norway, Iceland, and Canada or was actually just small, less flavorful warm-water shrimp that had been farm-raised in places like Thailand and Ecuador. Last year some one billion pounds of cold-water shrimp were produced worldwide. And when it comes to shrimp, apparently size doesn't matter; despite producing a shrimp that is even smaller than Maine's, Newfoundland quickly emerged as a major player in the cooked-and-peeled shrimp market.
Seafood processors, dealers, and fishermen are united in blaming the severe season cutbacks of the late 1990s with effectively destroying Maine's shrimp industry. "The regulators regulated in such a way that they killed the markets," Norton remarks. "In my view there was no need to be as draconian in the management of the shrimp as they were."
But Margaret Hunter, a marine resources scientist with the Maine Department of Marine Resources who helps set the limits on the shrimping season each year, defends those restrictions as vital to allowing the shrimp stocks to rebuild themselves after the pressure put on them during the 1990s. "It'd be easy to pat ourselves on the back and say that we recovered the fishery, and yes, I think the managers should take some credit for that because they did something not popular and difficult, but Mother Nature really played the biggest part," Hunter says.
Indeed, shrimp stocks appear particularly resilient and heavily influenced by environmental cues, with cold winters seeming to produce huge generations of shrimp that allow the fishery to rebound within just a few years. This natural fluctuation, which also dictates when the shrimp move to relatively shallow coastal waters to spawn, explains why certain years -- 1992, 2000, 2001, and 2004 -- have produced such a bumper crop of shrimp. It may also portend at least a blip on Maine shrimp's otherwise positive biological outlook, as Hunter admits that last year's mild winter may have produced a smaller generation of shrimp, though exact statistics won't be fully known until a stock assessment is taken next summer. The length of each shrimping season is set each fall, although regulators try to indicate a year in advance how long they expect the following season to be (2008, for instance, is predicted to be another 151-day season).
Fishermen like Sam Galli, meanwhile, maintain that other methods to preserve the shrimp stocks were already having positive results without the disastrous effects of shortening the fishing season.Net mesh sizes that allow smaller shrimp to slip through have weeded out the tiny juveniles, while a "Nordmore Grate" -- literally a huge door that hangs in front of the shrimper's net -- has succeeded in reducing the number of finfish caught along with the shrimp. Galli says even Mother Nature herself has a way of preventing overfishing. "The weather is the biggest X factor," Galli says. "If it's going to be bad -- really windy and rough -- then I'm probably not going out."
But otherwise Galli sets out from Portland at about 3 a.m. on every day he's allowed, and he says finding shrimp is never as difficult as finding a buyer. Galli is one of the lucky shrimp fishermen, as his relationship with Cozy Harbor Seafood, which has returned to processing Gulf of Maine shrimp and now handles about 85 percent of all shrimp landed in the state, allows him to sell direct to the processor. Still, Galli says, last year he always had more shrimp than Cozy Harbor needed. "Sometimes you'd do one haul back [of the net] and you'd have your fill," he remarks.
Many Maine fishermen, particularly those without preexisting relationships with processors, didn't even opt for that one trip to the fishing grounds last year. In late January, for example, the Portland Fish Exchange might see as much as 18,000 pounds of shrimp landed, yet nary a bid. One fisherman even reportedly tried feeding his supply of shrimp to seagulls at the beach, only to be told he could not do so. Roadside stands became fewer, and those that remained became increasingly desperate to sell their highly perishable product.
Hank Soule, the general manager of the Portland Fish Exchange, has perhaps felt the shrimp fishermen's pinch and their migration directly to processors most acutely. In just the past three years the exchange estimates its share of the Maine shrimp business has dropped from 30 percent to 3 percent. In 2004 it saw 1.4 million pounds landed, compared with just 150,000 pounds last year. Soule, however, barely bats an eye at such dismal statistics. "Our shrimp fishery is very cyclical -- in five to seven years you see this general sine wave pattern of supply," he says, adding that he expects volume to increase this winter. "There was a lot of frozen shrimp in cold storage that people used last year, and so now you don't have this backlog of product. I think it's a better market situation, but I thoroughly expect that in four or five years we'll go into a trough again."
That uncertainty, of course, is what makes investing in the Maine shrimp industry, either in the form of new processing equipment or through some sort of state-sponsored marketing campaign, such a difficult sell. "I wouldn't go out and buy the shrimp processing equipment when I know it's going to go back down," says Soule. But some processors, including Cozy Harbor's John Norton, are banking on Maine shrimp returning to tables worldwide. Before the collapse of the shrimp industry Cozy Harbor saw its business split evenly between the processing of groundfish, shrimp, and lobster. As the shrimp supply rebounds, the company is investing in new equipment -- four hundred thousand dollars worth of it last year alone -- and expects shrimp to be increasingly important to its bottom line. "We structured our business to maximize whatever the ocean is offering us at any point in time," Norton says. "We're now coming into a time when shrimp is going to become the bigger part of our business." Norton says he realizes that winning back the portion of the market that Maine previously dominated will be a challenge, but he believes Maine shrimp still have a competitive edge. "This is considered the finest northern shrimp in the world, with the biggest size, the sweetest taste, the best texture. The marketplace is set to respond to that, and I think you're going to see that Maine shrimp is again going to find a place in the supermarkets here in the United States."
Such entrepreneurial visions are only a portion of the recipe to rebuild Maine's shrimp industry, according to John Dennison, a former chef and urchin diver who has studied the Maine shrimp industry for several years. Dennison says that a state-sponsored marketing campaign similar to the Maine Lobster Promotion Council could help boost the tiny crustacean's culinary status, but local chefs might play an even bigger role in popularizing Maine shrimp. "There has to be a leader in the local culinary world who will take these shrimp and just show the world, whether it's on television or some other venue, what you can do with them," Dennison says. "I see this culinary jewel, and we just need to create an industry for our growing culinary notoriety."
Maine's culinary notoriety is far more impressive than its fisheries-management track record, at least according to shrimp processors, dealers, and fishermen. "I think the big message that should come out is that to a great extent, it is kind of arrogant for us to think that we can manage to the nth degree what goes on in the ocean," remarks Cozy Harbor's Norton. "What goes on in the ocean follows its own rhythms. We have somewhat of an impact on that with our fisheries, but what we do in the short term doesn't have nearly the impact of what we do in the long term. This knee-jerking from one season to another doesn't really do anything [to the shrimp stock], but what it does to the market has a tremendous impact." That means balancing environmental and biological factors with economic considerations when deciding how to manage a particular resource. "In fishery management in general there is a lot of emphasis on biology, which of course there has to be, but there has to be an emphasis on economics, as well," says the Portland Fish Exchange's Soule.
Even Margaret Hunter, the Department of Marine Resources scientist who helped set the short seasons that contributed to the market downturn, admits that while shrimp fishing will always be a difficult business, regulators can probably do more to help fishermen. "I think the fishermen have to take some credit for taking a hard hit -- I wouldn't want to be in that business," Hunter remarks. "But if we can avoid the mistakes we made in the late 1990s, we can get things back on a more stable plane." She also believes that Maine should be doing more to market Gulf of Maine northern shrimp as the delicacy Mainers know it to be.
But one fisherman who isn't waiting around for regulators like Hunter to improve their methods is Sam Galli. While Galli says he'll continue fishing for shrimp as long as he's able, he is pleased that his son has decided not to follow him in the financially unpredictable life of a fisherman. "We need some young blood, but you need to have a passion for it. It's not something you can do for a job," Galli says. "You can't go out at 1 a.m., haul yourself back in at 9 p.m., and then get up and do it all again the next day if you don't love what you're doing."
