Retrenchment or renewal: which way does the wind blow for New England's fishermen?Fish trade - New England

Terry Farish

English

Research Papers in Economics

photographs by sadie dayton Q2/Q3 2004  REGIONAL REVIEW  31 
Retrenchment or renewal: Which way does the wind blow 
for New England’s fishermen? By Terry Farish
the wind is what determines Peter Kendall’s days. It can turn a ﬂat 
calm into dangerous seas. Peter ﬁshes year-round on the good days,  
getting up at 3 a.m.; it doesn’t matter what the season.
At 36, Peter is one of the youngest ﬁshermen on the New Hampshire 
Seacoast ﬁshermen’s ﬂeet—but not that young. There aren’t many new 
people wanting to get into ﬁshing these days. The industry is precarious. 
When Peter gets up, he checks the weather station and the National 
Weather Service’s marine forecast. He calls “the government”— the National 
Marine Fisheries Service—to get his sailing number, which will track his
letter from 
portsmouth, new hampshire
“We’re getting 
good at trying to 
avoid ﬁsh,” says 
Peter Kendall, a 
ﬁsherman based in 
Portsmouth.
A FISH STORY32 REGIONAL REVIEW Q2/Q3 2004
days and hours at sea. On the way to the 
pier, he checks the sway of the ﬂag in front 
of Sanders Restaurant on Route 1. He steams 
out of Rye past Boone Island in the Gulf of 
Maine and sets out his net.
Pete, as his wife Beth calls him, is a ﬁrst-
generation fisherman. He graduated from 
Portsmouth High and went on to study re-
source economics at the University of New 
Hampshire. While he was still in high school 
he began as a lumper at the Portsmouth Fish-
ermen’s Co-op—the guy who does the un-
loading, culling, weighing, and icing when 
the fishing boats land with their catch. He 
kept the job through summers in college and 
later became the Co-op’s manager, working 
80-hour weeks to ﬁnd out what markets were 
paying for a given catch. But he always wanted 
to ﬁsh, and he could make more money ﬁshing 
with fewer hours. 
The day he asked Beth to marry him, he also 
bought an old wooden boat, a 50-foot trawler, 
along with a ﬁshing permit. He bought the 
boat and the permit for $35,000 ,and he told 
Beth he was going to name it for her—the 
Elizabeth Ann. 
on a shore day with a cool wind, Peter is 
standing out on the wharf at the Co-op, look-
ing down on the Elizabeth Ann who lies low 
with the tide. Peter looks at her and says, part 
with irony and part with pride in the skill it 
takes, “We’re getting good at trying to avoid 
ﬁsh.” He can catch 5,000 pounds of cod in 20 
minutes, so he’s learned how long a tow he 
needs to restrict his catch to the limit of 800 
pounds. “We’re also getting good at keep-
ing ﬁsh alive,” he says, referring to the ones 
caught over the limit. “Cod don’t die from 
trawling now.” He can toss them back to the 
sea alive. 
 Peter and other ﬁshermen have developed 
these tactics after concern about over-ﬁshing 
led regulators to severely restrict the catch of 
many species and limit the number of days 
fishermen can spend at sea. From North 
Carolina to Maine, only 1,400 groundﬁsh-
ing permits are issued—the permit required 
to catch cod, flounder, monkfish, pollock, 
hake. The ﬁshermen holding these permits 
are allowed approximately 70 days at sea in a Q2/Q3 2004  REGIONAL REVIEW  33 
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REGIONAL REVIEW
year; the latest proposals would decrease this 
to 53. As a result, many Seacoast ﬁshermen 
diversify and also ﬁsh for shrimp, scallops, 
tuna, and lobster—each with distinct catch 
restrictions—to make up for the days when 
they can’t go groundﬁshing. 
About 26 draggers, gillnetters, and lobster 
boats—small boats ranging from 40 to 55 
feet—ﬁsh out of the Portsmouth Co-op. About 
as many boats are at the Co-op as there were 
before the tough regulations started in the mid 
1990s, but their income 
has become more tenu-
ous. Some Portsmouth 
crewmen  have  seen 
their income decline by 
half over the past year. 
But this hasn’t stopped 
these fishermen from 
checking the wind in 
the trees and taking 
advantage  of  every 
day they can have at 
sea. For his part, Peter 
plans to run two boats, 
each of which will have 
her own allotment of 
days at sea so that Peter 
can ﬁsh more. And he 
continues to diversify 
with shrimping.
The Co-op that Peter 
used to manage is also 
suffering. Its revenue 
comes from unloading fees, roughly 10 cents 
per pound, that ﬁshermen pay into the Co-
op. But the regulations limiting ﬁshermen’s 
days at sea, the regional closures (the region 
off Portsmouth is closed from April through 
June), and the limits on species have all cut 
into the Co-op’s business. In 1998, 6 to 7 mil-
lion pounds were unloaded. In 2004, it will 
be 3 to 3.5 million pounds—dropped by half 
in six years. 
Peter and others will watch and plan care-
fully for the Co-op’s future as the impact of the 
new regulations becomes clear. Peter’s been 
the one at the Co-op who has broken through 
some of the distrust between ﬁshermen and 
scientists as they sort out the rules to protect 
ﬁsh stock. He tells the other ﬁshermen, “You 
can’t just tell the researchers there’s plenty of 
cod. You have to document it.” And he works 
with researchers on his boat to collect data, 
something not a lot of ﬁshermen want to do. 
Peter is committed to building new relation-
ships and making it by the new rules.
beth, too, has learned to pay atten-
tion to the sway of the trees. Often Pete’s cell 
phone is out of range when he’s offshore, but 
some mornings it works and he calls Beth to 
tell her what it’s like at sea. Flat calm, he’ll 
tell her. Fifteen miles visibility. He wishes she 
could see the sunrise. The sky is oranges and 
purples and blues. The sun looks like a burn-
ing ball in the sky. 
But not every day is like that. One time 
when the phone did work, Beth almost wished 
it hadn’t. Pete called, trying to spare her from 
hearing about him from the media. “He said 
he was taking on water,” she remembers. She 
started to cry sitting at her dining room table. 
It was blowing 40 knots. The seas were 8 foot. 
“He said, ‘Honey, I don’t know if I’m going 
to make it.’” 
A seam in the wooden hull had split, and 
the Elizabeth Ann had water in her fo’c’s’le 
(forward bow), the engine room, the fish 
hold. A boat can go down in minutes. But 
that day, other ﬁshing boats stayed by until 
a Coast Guard vessel arrived and gave him a 
tow home. This week he’s closing on a new 
ﬁberglass Elizabeth Ann.
Pete doesn’t want his son to ﬁsh. Out on 
the pier, overlooking the battered Elizabeth 
Ann, he shakes his head. “He wants to come 
out with me. I want to take him out. He’s real 
interested. But I don’t want this life for my 
son.” 
Sometimes, if it gets to be suppertime and 
Pete’s not home yet and the trees out back 
show a strong gust of wind, Beth pops the 
kids in the car. They drive toward the pier, 
Beth’s eyes on the ﬂag out front of Sanders 
Restaurant. She pulls out the binoculars and 
they wait, taking turns watching for the ﬁrst 
sight of Pete steaming in. S 
Terry Farish is the author of 
House in Earnest and If the Tiger. 
She lives on the Seacoast and is 
writing a book about growing up  
in a fisherman’s family.
Catch limits 
and rules on 
days at sea 
have cut into
ﬁshermen’s 
earnings. 
Some have 
lost as much 
as half their 
income in 
just one year.

Letter from Portsmouth, New Hampshire

http://www.bostonfed.org/economic/nerr/rr2004/q23/q2304letterfrom.pdf

Letter from Portsmouth, New Hampshire

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