STONINGTON, Maine — Days after a federal appeals court reinstated a seasonal closure of nearly 1,000 square miles of offshore lobstering grounds, fishermen in the state’s busiest lobster fishing port are in a holding pattern.
“Everybody’s idling right now,” Bill Damon, owner of Damon Family Lobster Co., said Friday. “They are trying to figure out what they have to do.”
Stonington has been Maine’s top lobstering port for years and last year hauled in more than $43 million worth of the lucrative catch.
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Damon and others in the industry sued the federal government earlier this year when the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration decided to close a 967-square-mile area to lobstering every year between October and January in order to protect endangered right whales in the area from getting tangled in trap lines.
Lobstermen, who say they are not to blame for the decline in whales, were optimistic last month when a federal judge ruled in Bangor that lobstering could continue in the area, a rectangular plot roughly a dozen miles wide and nearly 100 miles long that runs parallel to shore about 30 miles off the middle of Maine’s long coast.
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But that ruling was overturned by an appeals court in Boston. Lobstermen will now have to move their gear out, a process that is expected to take two weeks.
The ruling will hit Stonington’s offshore fleet, industry members said, and reverberate through town.
There aren’t exact figures on how many local lobstermen fish in the affected area, but officials with Maine Center of Coastal Fisheries, which is based in Stonington estimate there are 30 or more local lobstermen who fish there.
- Bangor Daily News
