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WCAI

Truro lobsterman says rules to protect right whales costly to his business

By Mary Ann Bragg
Posted Sep 29, 2019

NORTH TRURO — The phone in William “Billy” Souza’s living room rang and rang Tuesday afternoon.

“That’s somebody calling for lobsters,” Souza said from his easy chair. “I’ll let the machine get it.”

He’d just returned home after replacing a windshield and the VHF radio on his 36-foot Harris lobster boat docked at the town pier in Provincetown, one of among the 40 commercial lobster boats docked there.

The caller needed four 2-pound lobsters for a Saturday pickup.

At nearly the same time, a car pulled into the driveway, and the driver sat without looking around. He, too, was waiting for lobsters, which Cheryl Souza, Billy’s wife, typically sells out of the garage starting at 1:30 p.m., but was delayed Tuesday until 5 p.m..

Cheryl Souza is ending her lobster sales after October.

But third-generation lobsterman Billy Souza, as it turns out, is considering quitting as well.

“It’s all the whale issues,” Souza said. Unlike the lobstering in the days of Souza’s grandfather, Frank Souza, and his father, William Souza, the current generation fishing off Cape Cod is under an intense and unique scrutiny. That scrutiny is directly linked to the increasing focus by federal and state regulators on imperiled North Atlantic right whales, which are dying or suffering debilitating injuries due to entanglement in fishing rope.

“We have the whale watch boats here, and we have the Division of Marine Fisheries that does flyovers all the time,” said Souza, 66. “The whales could get entangled anywhere in the world, but there’s so many eyes on them here it looks like we’re the bad guys and we’re not.” On any given early spring day, at least two to three right whale research vessels can be found in Cape Cod Bay, where the whales feed through May and then migrate northward to Canadian waters.

Without a doubt, lobster fishermen and fisherwomen are under intense scrutiny.

The National Marine Fisheries Service currently is preparing a draft environmental impact statement on additional rules for trap and pot fisheries in the Northeast to reduce further harm to right whales. The rules, generally, call for fewer vertical buoy lines in the water and weaker rope that would allow whales to break free more easily.

Massachusetts is a key player, with $81 million in lobster landings in 2017. But the state of Maine is king with $434 million in landings. In August, though, Maine’s lobster industry representatives pulled out of a regional agreement that is the underpinning of the rule-making that the fisheries service is undertaking to protect the whales.

Further, 18 scientists who work in North Atlantic right whale research and rescue have said the Maine lobster industry is “significantly underestimating” the harm its equipment causes to right whales. With a decline in population since 2010, right whales number around 400, with rope entanglement and ship strikes seen as primary causes of deaths, according to the scientists.

“They need more research in Maine, and then to come up with something,” Souza said. “They have to do something. There’s no doubt about it. They can’t just sit there and thumb their noses at it.”

Commercial lobstermen are banned from fishing from February through April in Cape Cod Bay to protect right whales, based on Massachusetts regulations. With a larger scope, federal regulations also ban lobster fishing east of Cape Cod from February through April, and in the Great South Channel, southeast of Cape Cod, from April 1 through June 30.

New regulations on the lobster fishermen who fish in and around Cape Cod are “stupid,” Souza said. He’s one of the few commercial lobstermen in Massachusetts who fish with single traps rather than several traps on one line, as a trawl. He maintains 600 single traps from Race Point in Provincetown south to around Cahoon Hollow in Wellfleet, and typically visits each one in a week.

Apart from area closures, lobster fishermen in Massachusetts already have adopted requirements to protect whales, such as sinking ground lines on trawls and lines with breakable sections. “If they make me reduce my buoy lines by 30% and go to trawls, and Maine does nothing, I’m not going to be a happy camper,” Souza said.

But Souza said a single-trap, single-line method is more protective of whales and more lucrative. A right whale can still swim, and possibly be rescued, if entangled with one 100-pound lobster trap, he said. But an entanglement in a 10- to 20-trap trawl means the whale would likely be anchored and facing death, he said. Also, the 5/16-inch line he uses on the single traps is thinner and well below what federal regulators want to prohibit, Souza said. The 5/16-inch line also is among the easiest to cut if an entanglement does occur, he said. While the demand for and price of lobster is “pretty good” right now, being required to start using trawls would require money to modify the boat, modify the gear and put another man on board to safely handle and haul the trawls. Also, trawls don’t catch as many lobsters as singles, Souza said, based on what other fishermen say.

“I just hope the powers that be use some common sense and don’t make it harder on us than it already is,” Souza said.