Commercial fisherman Bill Blount fighting to keep fishing

PHOTO BY ROB BENCHLEY Bill Blount, the captain of the island's last commercial dragger, is fighting not the sea, but federal bureaucracy. Bay scallops may be out of reach for recreational scallopers this season, but commercial fisherman Bill Blount cannot wait to get in his boat and drop his dredges for whatever is out there.

Blount, 62, one of a handful of true, yearround fishermen on the island and the captain of Nantucket's lone commercial dragger, the Ruthie B., revels in the comparatively lightly regulated bay scallop fishery in Nantucket's harbors, enjoying the simplicity of fishing pretty much where he wants to in island waters, getting back to the dock, opening his scallops and going home each night after selling his catch locally.

"I can just get up and fish the way it used to be," said Blount.

That particular way for Blount was steam anywhere, fish any way he wanted and for as much of whatever he wanted including groundfish - haddock, flounders and cod - and sea scallops. At the height of his 55 years of commercial fishing in 1980, Blount recalls landing a million pounds and getting paid 5¢ to 10¢ pound, but lately, his annual catch probably runs between 100,000 to 150,000 pounds.

"When I first started, you could do anything you wanted, use any size mesh, go anywhere you wanted. Now we're the most regulated fishery in the world, but, we do have more fish here," said Blount.

Blount is currently struggling to hold on to his 400-pounds-and-under sea scalloping permit, which he is using to augment his groundfishing permit that the National Marine Fisheries Service now says is valid for just over six weeks a year. So far this year, he has not had to use any of his groundfishing days, relying solely on his sea scallop permit.

Originally, the National Marine Fisheries Service had issued 3,800 such sea scalloping permits called a Limited Access General Category Scallop permit, but the NMFS, an arm of the National Oceanographic & Atmospheric Administration, inadvertently cut back to 800 permits when, in 2004, it began requiring that all fishermen install vessel monitoring system units so the fisheries service could track all fishing vessels from dock to fishing grounds and back. Monitored by computers, each VMS box enables the NMFS to keep tabs on commercial fishing vessels to ensure that they do not stray into restricted fishing zones. Such infractions, logged by the system as individual violations, carry a stiff fine of $130,000 per violation, said Blount.

The cost of this black box alone, as Blount called it - $1,200 to $3,000 - proved too much for 3,000 of these fishermen, who consequently got out of the sea scalloping fishery, said Blount.

"I've always primarily done ground fishing, but they've been winding that down, so I'm down to about 49 days for groundfishing and I really can't do that, so I've been doing what lots of other fishermen have been doing," said Blount. "There's a general scallop permit that's like an incidental (bycatch) permit. A lot of guys would do it if they had not enough days to make it groundfishing."

As if the pricey VMS boxes were not enough to contend with, political pressure from owners of the bigger limited access boats out of New Bedford, Mass. that catch 30,000 to 50,000 pounds of sea scallops per year, who were adamant about not giving up 15 percent of their catch to the smaller fishermen like Blount, and from representatives of these larger boats on the New England Fisheries Management Council, which consists of members from all over New England, but not Nantucket, have made it even tougher for Blount to stay on the water because they want the number of permits further reduced to just 300.

Additional pressure came in 2007 when the council chose a quota of 1,000 pounds from 5,000-, 1,000- and 500- pound minimum annual sea scallop quota options. To qualify for their 400-pound sea scallop permit, smaller commercial fishermen like Blount had to have caught 1,000 pounds of sea scallops in one of the years from 2000 through 2004. When the council chose 1,000 pounds, National Marine Fisheries said that amount was too restrictive, that it should be 500, but the council won out with 1,000 pounds, said Blount.

As Blount laments, had the council agreed with the NMFS and gone with the less restrictive 500-pound quota for sea scallops, only five other of the smaller commercial fishing boats, including his, would have qualified for this open-ended permit. As it was, his highest landing year for sea scallops was 680 pounds and at the end of June this year after reaffirming the 1,000- pound minimum quota, the NMFS told Blount that he had lost his permit.

"They took it away from me on June 30, 2008; that was a whole year early," said Blount. "I had to make a decision on whether to fish or not. Insurance was costing me $50,000 a year. I bought the insurance, then a month later they let me know I would lose the permit, so what I did was I appealed it and when you appeal, they let you go fishing under a letter of authorization."

On Aug. 12, Blount got a letter from National Marine Fisheries informing him he would lose his permit in 30 days if he did not produce more information on any additional landings from the qualifying period of 2000- 2004 supporting his appeal. Checking back in his vessel trip reports, which he has to file with the government after each fishing trip, Blount found 450 pounds of sea scallops that he did not include in his VTR to the government because they were catch that he used to barter with islanders for other goods and services, and not product that he sold.

That year, 2004, produced a particularly tough winter. A frozen Nantucket Harbor kept Blount and the Ruthie B. at the town pier for two weeks. As a result, he only got 680 pounds. And then a fire on his boat kept Blount from fishing for two years.

So Blount, aware that the NMFS is now requiring the counting of everything caught no matter what fishermen do with it when they land, sent in his revised VTRs now totaling 1,130 pounds, which could qualify him for his sea-scalloping permit.

"It was a daring thing to do, but it was a desperate attempt to keep my permit, so I'm on my second appeal to keep my permit," said Blount. "What it's done is it's allowed me to keep fishing and between that and bay scalloping I should be able to make it to the end of the year."

But, maybe not. Last Thursday night, National Marine Fisheries emailed Blount through his VMS that sea scallop fishing would cease at midnight - by which time he had to have his catch landed - on Oct. 4 until Dec. 1. Until then, he will expend some of his groundfishing days, go for bay scallops when Nantucket's season opens on Nov. 1 and wait to hear if he can keep his sea-scalloping permit. I