For decades, two groups of Maine fishermen, its trawler captains and its lobstermen, harvested the ocean floor in relative harmony.
The trawlers netted cod, haddock and other so-called groundfish. Lobster boats trapped Maine's best-known delicacy.
But the days of friendly fishing may be over. Trawler captains and lobstermen are preparing for a battle next week before the Maine Legislature, which is set to take up a bill to let the beleaguered groundfishermen sell some of the lobsters accidentally caught in their nets.
Maine is the only state where it is illegal to land lobster not caught in traps. And the powerful lobster industry here is adamant that no one encroach on its turf.
"They ruined their fishery totally," David Cousens, president of the Maine Lobstermen's Association, said of the groundfishermen.
"Now they're looking to us to bail them out, and it's just not going to happen. No way. There are 6,400 lobstermen that will go nuts if they even consider it," he said.
Officials in the groundfish industry say they are asking for a small share, no more than 6 percent, of the state's lobster bounty.
Unless Maine aligns its statute with laws in other states, they say, the industry will be gone in a decade.
"Bug pickers," Lendall Alexander, 47, a third-generation fisherman from Harpswell, said of the lobstermen. "They've got all that lobster to themselves."
The battle follows a free fall in Maine's fishing economy.
The state's fleet of deep-sea trawlers has shrunk to about 100 boats, from more than 300 in the early 1980s, because of sharp federal limits intended to restore imperiled stocks of groundfish, so named because they are bottom dwellers.
Dozens of fish plants and boat shops have folded. And from 1999 to 2004, the last years for which figures are available, Maine lost more seafood wholesaling and processing jobs than all the rest of New England.
Hank Soule, the executive director of the Portland Fish Exchange, an auction house where 90 percent of Maine's groundfish are sold, said the plight of fishermen and shoreline businesses was so dire that other rescue efforts, like a proposal to end the tax on boat fuel, were not enough.
"The groundfishermen have traditionally grit their teeth and said, `We'll deal with it,"' Soule said. "They can't anymore."
Under current law, "bycatch" lobsters, those that wind up in the large nets dragged by trawlers, must be tossed back.
The proposed bill would allow fishermen 100 bycatch lobsters a day, the limit under federal law, and restrict the activity to offshore waters, where few Maine lobstermen trap.
In an era of looser regulations, fishermen weathered lean years by moonlighting as trap lobstermen. But getting a state lobster license can now take up to a decade, and few can afford the wait.
The chance to sell a few hundred lobsters per trip would increase incomes by a sorely needed 15 percent to 20 percent, and keep the struggling fish exchange, a nonprofit, in business, Soule said.
But the lobstermen's association says that trawl nets damage lobster shells and would taint the image of "the world-class product Maine is famous for."
"A drag is like harvesting your potato field with a bulldozer. You can get some potatoes, but you sure as heck would wreck most of them," Cousens said:
Maine's trawler captains disagree. They say they have sold plenty of bycatch lobsters in Massachusetts, where the lobsters are legal and a growing number of local vessels now unload to sidestep Maine's law.
Maine Governor John Baldacci has taken the fishermen's woes seriously, convening a task force that warned in 2004 that the state's "fishing communities are facing one of the greatest threats in their 300-year history."
About 7.25 million kilograms of groundfish were landed in Maine in 2005, down from nearly 35.4 million in 1982. But the state is siding with the lobstermen on the bill. Though lobsters are flourishing, state officials say, a report last year by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission expressed "concern if not alarm" over signs of a possible collapse.
David Etnier, deputy commissioner of the Maine Department of Marine Resources, said the state's trap-only law had helped sustain record-setting lobster harvests in recent years. Any rollback, Etnier said, would undercut Maine's history of lobster conservation.
Opposition to the bill from the lobster industry has been so fierce that a hearing for Monday has been moved from the State House to the Augusta Civic Center in anticipation of large crowds.
In the meantime, Maine's trawlers are increasingly bypassing local piers for Massachusetts. The number of trips to out-of-state ports more than tripled from 2000 to 2005, to 160 a year, depriving Maine dealers of US$9.6 million in seafood, according to a federal analysis.
As his crew hoisted buckets of gray sole and monkfish onto the docks at the Portland Fish Exchange on a recent morning, Alexander said he never thought he would sell his catch outside the state where his father and grandfather had fished. But next month, he will join the fishermen unloading in Massachusetts.
"I do want to do business in Maine and land my fish in Maine because these are my friends, my neighbors and in some cases my family," he said in his trawler's wheelhouse after two frigid days at sea. "But I've also got to pay the bills on this thing."
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