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Photo Kaimi Rose Lum
Commercial divers John Baldwin and Mike Welch offload sea clams at MacMillan Pier. |
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Photo Kaimi Rose Lum
These hearty-sized clams were hand-picked from the sea floor. |
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Local fishermen aim to reclaim sea clam fishery
By Kaimi Rose Lum
Banner Staff
It’s been years since a bowl of chowder served in a local restaurant actually contained clams harvested in Provincetown or Truro. The shellfish committees from both towns are hoping to change that.
Last week, the Truro Board of Selectmen received a visit from Provincetown Shellfish Committee member Paul Tasha, Truro Shellfish Committee chair John LaForte and Tony Jackett, shellfish constable for both Truro and Provincetown, regarding a proposal to take back control of the local surf clam, or sea clam, fisheries. The fisheries are currently regulated by the state, which removed them from the towns’ jurisdiction in 1982.
The idea, Tasha said, is to come up with a regional management plan that will allow the towns to set limits on the number of bushels harvested per day, promote methods of harvesting that are “environmentally benign” and create jobs for local fishermen. The ultimate goal? “To create a sustainable fishery with a high-quality product,” Tasha said.
The Provincetown selectmen, at the shellfish committees’ request, have already sent two letters to the director of the Mass. Div. of Marine Fisheries asking that a dialogue be opened regarding the town’s reclaiming of control over the waters from Long Point Light to Race Point Light. Attached to one letter was a paper written by local fisherwoman Molly Benjamin, who described the advent of the out-of-town “factory” boats that began showing up in Provincetown in the early 1980s, towing “rakes slightly bigger than a full-sized Ford pick-up” and landing sea clams at the rate of 121 bushels an hour.
Those draggers may still harvest up to 200 bushels of clams per day from Herring Cove, as per state regulations, turning the Provincetown fishery into a “boom and bust operation,” Benjamin said. “The big boats arrive about every three years, fish the bar heavily for a month or so, and leave.”
So for commercial fishermen like John Baldwin, who dives for sea clams, there are definite advantages to having more localized management of the fishery. For one, he said, the towns would be able to decide where those hydraulic dredge boats from out of town can go. With their powerful, jet-equipped rakes that can bring up jawfuls of clams by the hour, the dredges strike a dramatic contrast to the individual divers who harvest the clams from the bottom one by one.
“It’s the only way to dig ‘em without traumatizing ‘em,” said Baldwin, who unloaded a batch of sea clams from his Boston Whaler at MacMillan Pier Tuesday morning. (The clams were brought in for purely show-and-tell purposes, as the current red tide problem has restricted shellfishing across the Cape.) While not wishing his clamming counterparts any ill will, Baldwin said the dredge boats have the undesirable effect of shooting sand into the clams, which makes them harder to clean and in the end drives down the price. His sea clams go to the Japanese sushi market.
The dredges’ effects are well-known to Tasha, a Provincetown native and commercial fishermen, who pointed out to the Truro selectmen last week that while a local conservation board will subject homeowners who want to build a fence on the dunes to “hours of degrading interrogation,” there is hardly any regulatory scrutiny of potential impacts to the sea floor by fishing methods like dragging. If it’s underwater, he said, it’s out of sight, out of mind.
Because he dives on a regular basis, Tasha is able to observe changes to the underwater environment, the same as someone who routinely drives up and down Route 6 in North Truro is able to see the view change as more and more land gets developed, he said. The marine habitat he is particularly concerned about is the shelf off Herring Cove, which he said once held eelgrass beds and is able to support plants and invertebrates better than the less protected and more dynamic sea floor on the ocean side.
The shelf is not only a sea clam fishery but could potentially be a healthy cod fishery, he said. And with a regional sea clam management plan, the towns could protect that area by diverting the dredging activity to the ocean side, which has less habitat to be disrupted.
The shellfish committees’ petition to the selectmen is just the first step in a process that could be long and complicated. According to Michael Hickey, a chief biologist with the Div. of Marine Fisheries, the towns are within their right to petition the state for control of the sea clams, but that by no means guarantees they will be successful.
“This has been an ongoing issue for a number of years,” Hickey said. He said the reason the state took control of the fisheries in the first place was because the towns could not agree to the state’s own proposed regional management plan, which allowed the bigger, more expensive dredging boats to come in and drag for clams.
To this day, Hickey said, “This agency feels that the surf clam fishery with the current restrictions is not detrimental to the area.” In a fairly recent meeting with representatives from the Cape end’s shellfish boards (he could not recall the specific date), he said, “It was the consensus of this agency that these people were wrong, and we didn’t agree with their point of view.”
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Red tide puts a drain on Wellfleet’s economy
In the News
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Jun 9th, 2005