He believes that trawling gear is severely altering the flora and structure that are important to the recruitment of groundfish and other marine organisms. We accompanied him aboard one of the Center's research vessels and documented the use of an ROV to videotape the seafloor. While in Maine we also taped a lively interview with Dr. Vaughan Anthony, former senior scientist with the National Marine Fisheries Service in Woods Hole. Vaughan chronicled the steady decline of the New England groundfishery and described the failure of the New England Fisheries Management Council to curb an excessive fishing effort despite repeated assessments indicating the stocks were endangered. We revisited some of the people and places we documented last year in order to observe potential changes in the health of groundfish stocks and the commercial fishery.
Some fishermen start early.
Instead, they ran into lots of dogfish' which all had to be discarded because the total allowable catch for this small shark species had been reached. Before leaving Gloucester we taped a weekly meeting of the Gloucester Fishermen's Wives Association. Nearly all spoke passionately about their own concerns regarding management issues and what they see as a rich, but very endangered way of life. We then traveled south to Cape Cod, this time determined to go out fishing with some of the cod fishermen we first met in 1999. In Chatham we met trawl fisherman Bill Amaru and his son Jason who took us out for a couple days of dragging for gray sole.