This article was originally featured on Hakai Magazine, an online publication about science and society in coastal ecosystems. Read more stories like this at hakaimagazine.com.
The past decade has not been kind to North Atlantic right whales—or to the fishers who ply the waters where these massive mammals dwell. For the whales that migrate along the North American east coast between Florida and Canada each spring and fall, several perils have caused their population to fall catastrophically, including getting tangled in fishing gear, hit by boats, or afflicted by climate change. From a modern high of 480 individuals in 2010, their numbers have plummeted more than 25 percent to about 350 today.
But fishers have suffered, too. In an attempt to protect the withering whale population, government agencies have restricted fishing gear and closed fisheries along the Eastern Seaboard. For many fishers—including Michael “Chops” Cowdrey Jr., a captain based out of Sneads Ferry, North Carolina—the closures were financially devastating.
Cowdrey is just one of 32 members of the small Atlantic sea bass pot fishery—a community of fishers operating from Florida to North Carolina who use traps on vertical lines to catch the bulldog-sized fish. Cowdrey lost much of his income when, in 2013, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) began imposing a seasonal closure on the pot fishery from November to April—peak sea bass season.
For Cowdrey, losing the winter sea bass fishery meant racking up tens of thousands of dollars in debt and taking on work in other fisheries, requiring long stints away from home. These losses were compounded by the feeling that the sea bass fishery’s closure wasn’t even warranted.
The Atlantic sea bass fishery, says Kim Sawicki, a graduate student at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, has never had a documented entanglement of a North Atlantic right whale. Yet, Sawicki says, NOAA “just didn’t want to take the risk.”
“I had fished my entire career and had never seen a whale in my entire life,” Cowdrey says. But unlike bigger, more lucrative fisheries, the sea bass fishery was small and operating out of a poor region where fishers had neither the time nor the resources to fight the closure. “Everything that’s happened has been total politics, total special interest, total annihilation of our families and our finances,” Cowdrey says.
It was against this backdrop that, in 2018, Sawicki appeared with a proposal that would get Cowdrey and his colleagues back to work. Sawicki was embarking on her doctoral research on the adoption of “ropeless” fishing equipment in pot fisheries, and she had a question: would Cowdrey and his peers be willing to try out ropeless gear?
Within the fishing community, ropeless fishing gear has a bad reputation. The equipment, which is currently only approved on an experimental basis in the sea bass pot fishery, is fishing technology’s experimental edge. It’s more expensive than traditional gear and much slower to deploy. And the mechanisms designed to let the traps work without ropes—such as a remote-controlled trigger system meant to deploy a float—can be fussy and prone to failure.
Already distrustful of fisheries regulators, Cowdrey was wary. Over the years of seasonal closures, Cowdrey and the remaining sea bass pot fishers had struggled to make a living off the scant summer season. If they were willing to give the finicky ropeless gear a test run in the winter, during the seasonal closure, would NOAA then mandate its use year-round?
But he was poor, and he needed the work. And, in the back of his mind, Cowdrey thought, “They’re going to do this anyway; I need to be on the leading edge of it.”
Sawicki understood the sea bass fishers’ reservations. She’d grown up in New England, where lobster buoys are ubiquitous on the water. She knew fishers were distrustful of the new, expensive gear. So when she reached out, Sawicki was sure to emphasize that she wanted to learn—to have fishers tell her what they needed rather than the other way around. She told them they’d be in charge of the direction the project took.
Sawicki convened a group of manufacturers with gear to test. One of them, Bart Chadwick with Sub Sea Sonics, a California developer of on-demand traps, says he’s heard ropeless gear called the worst thing to happen to fishing. Encouraging the sea bass fishers to change and adapt his company’s equipment to meet their own needs was critical to getting them on board, he says.
So in 2020, Sawicki and the sea bass fishermen started experimenting with ropeless gear.
Working together on the pilot project, Sawicki and the fishers have helped refine and test equipment designs, combining a line-handling system from another company with Sub Sea Sonics’s acoustic-release system—a merger that’s now being tested in other fisheries. The fishers’ efforts are helping to work out the kinks in the technology and bring ropeless gear closer to full regulatory approval.
But all the while, the prospect of ropeless gear has prompted sometimes vitriolic comments from workers in other fisheries. At times, says Sawicki, social media posts about the sea bass fishers’ work on ropeless gear have garnered nasty comments, and fishers from other states who’ve received training from sea bass fishers have received intimidating phone calls. The fishers have faced threats of having their gear destroyed, and one even had his vehicle’s tires slashed.
Cowdrey doesn’t begrudge other fishers for their distrust. There is, after all, a well-documented history of fishers being forced well beyond their means trying to cope with the economic burden of new regulations.
“The whole thing is scary for us as fishermen,” Cowdrey says. “If I were in a fishery that was not closed down right now, I would fight this,” he adds.
Still, given the circumstances, Cowdrey would like to see ropeless gear gain regulatory approval. If he could deploy enough ropeless pots to survive the winter—rather than being forced off the water—he’d be happy, he says.
Erica Fuller, senior counsel with the New England–based Conservation Law Foundation, which is working on its own tests to support the adoption of ropeless gear by New England lobster fishers, says widespread use of the technology will require financial support from governments—not only to pay for the equipment but to compensate fishers for testing it.
Fisheries closures “fix the problem for North Atlantic right whales,” Fuller says, “but closures don’t fix the problem for fishermen. And so we are seriously trying to find a way where we can all coexist.”
Fuller says Cowdrey and the other sea bass fishers’ cautious adoption of ropeless gear is an important change in perspective that will happen dock by dock.
Up and down the coast, clashes between regulators and fishers have fueled an atmosphere of mistrust. Having everyone—fishers, scientists, regulators, and, yes, even “those whale people”—working together “has really repaired a lot of relationships,” Sawicki says. “It’s just been a group of people trying to work together to get fishermen back fishing.”
This article first appeared in Hakai Magazine and is republished here with permission.