“It’s a very poor plan they’ve come up with here,” said Vinalhaven Co-op manager Carol Hamilton of the new sinking rope for lobstermen. “It’s chafing, they’re parting lines off, losing gear. It’s endless. It’s costing them a lot of money.”
Although it’s not a problem to the westward due to gradual depth changes and milder tides, fishermen who trap lobster offshore with trawls (stringing from two to 15 traps to a buoy) from Penobscot Bay and the outer islands east have been losing gear and have had men going overboard.
Matinicus sternman Casey Tolman had to be rescued by Capt. Christopher Young who reported the accident happened because, “You have to make the tailer rope [between traps] shorter [than floating rope].” Unused to the shorter rope, Tolman, “got sinking line caught around his boot, and it hauled him right over – that quick. I put the boat in reverse” Young said, “then ran back and pulled the line by hand. He was under water. I and another fellow, Shawn McLennen, pulled him aboard.”
Tolman is not the only sternman to get hauled over by sinking rope. Stonington captain Brent Oliver reported that he, too, had a sternman overboard as a result of working with sinking line and Tolman reported his younger brother, “Got hauled overboard a couple of weeks ago, too,” due to sinking rope.
The rope became mandatory in April to protect the endangered North Atlantic Right Whale from line entanglement, though Southwest Harbor fisherman Thomas Lawson said that where he fishes, “There’s no whales there, hasn’t been for 40 years. I’ve been doing this 50 years,” he said. “It’s crazy.”
Bruce Fernald, of Islesford, reported, “You have to keep your boat in gear and keep right up on top of the traps all the time. Mess up for a second, you get them hung down (caught).”
Fishermen on the Atlantic Large Whale Take Reduction Team who had experimented with sinking rope knew it would create problems, and one, Leroy Bridges, of Sunshine, Deer Isle, rather than trying to cope with it, chose to fish with the usual floating rope inside the exemption line (where the rope is still allowed). Hard ocean floor or bottom, rocks, and strain on the rope cause sinking rope to chafe, fray, or break.
Oceanville, Deer Isle fisherman Frank Gotwals put sinking line on most of his traps and tried it in different areas. “It just doesn’t work,” he reported. “It begins to chafe immediately on almost any kind of bottom.”
Deer Isle fisherman Robbie Gray experimented with 200 traps last fall and said, “You lose them right at the first trap of a trawl. That’s where it seems to fetch up. The chafing is right between the first one and the second one. I lost probably 30 to 40 traps.” He said he lost count of the rope he’d lost.
With each trap costing $80, losing 30 means losing $2,400. Sinking rope runs from $2.30 to $2.60 per pound, according to Manda Boyce, of Stonington’s Island Fishing Gear. She said 65 pounds, or about 1,200 feet, the average amount purchased, costs from $100 to $150. Each fisherman buying sinking line spent from $7,000 to $15,000. “It’s huge, huge,” she said. Many had to borrow money to buy it, although there is a floating rope buy-back system. No fisherman can afford to replace his more expensive sinking rope after only a month or two.
Cutler fisherman John Drouin turned in six- to eight-year-old floating rope and said, “If I can get two years out of [the sinking rope], I’ll be doing good.”
Drouin has 54 trawls, each set with 15 traps. He started this spring with brand new sinking rope and said, “I have a new rope with lots of knots in it where we’re cutting the spaces out where they’re chafing.” In order to catch any fraying rope before it can cause harm, “We have to watch every inch of the rope,” he said, which slows him down.
All the fishermen mentioned sinking rope “hanging down,” fishing jargon for trap rope getting caught or stuck on the bottom or wrapped around a rock, with no way to free the rope and trap other than by parting off (breaking) the rope. Gray said he had one trap he couldn’t even part off. “I couldn’t budge it,” he said. “That piece would not part. I was using my pot hauler, so I said, I’m not going to leave it out here and have rope just laying here, so I tied it off on my stern and I popped it right at the first trap, right at the becket. We’ve got to protect the whales,” he said, “but we have to protect ourselves, too.”
Corea co-op manager Dwight Rodgers said one of his fishermen came in to the buying station, “So mad he could barely talk.” He had just lost a pair of brand new traps because of sinking rope. A Stonington fisherman lost most of a trawl and had spent around $2,000 having an extra long grappling hook made that would reach the bottom, but after spending the additional $2,000, he had been unable to recover his gear. And fishermen have not yet seen how sinking line will react to a major storm.
In addition to gear lost from storms, some fishermen when bringing their traps ashore for the winter will not bring chafed and broken sinking rope ashore, but will discard it at sea rather than bothering to bring it ashore and paying to discard it at a landfill.