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Breaking Point

For centuries, the commercial fishermen of Point Judith have worked in one of the most dangerous fishing grounds in the world. 
But now a downward spiral of crushing regulations and bitter feuds over how to protect fish stocks (and livelihoods) has fishermen in the fight of their lives on land.

Photography by Markham Starr

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IN LATE SUMMER ON POINT JUDITH, the port of Galilee is at its most festive, from ferry parking attendants waving flags to Block Island day-trippers lined up for fried seafood. Down by the docks, the scene is less picturesque. Worn-out draggers are in need of paint, barrels of bait stink and draw flies, but the working waterfront stirs a sense of pride for the historic port. Yet in the wake of crippling regulations, commercial fishermen have reached their breaking point — solely blamed for depleted fish stocks, torn apart by feuds and barely breaking even in one of the world’s deadliest jobs. Still, the fishermen are driven by an indomitable passion for their work. They are among the few who will ever know the ocean as intimately as their own homes.

“It’s too hard a job to just break even.” Tony Faciano is the forty-seven-year-old captain of the Shelby Ann, a 
seventy-foot trawler that fishes south of New England and part of the year on notoriously dangerous Georges Bank. We’re at port, standing in the wheelhouse, where his 
view includes two loves: the ocean and photos of his three children. He has been fishing in Rhode Island since he was seventeen years old.

“It’s just endless, endless regulations,” he says. He shuffles a folder of paperwork, where he keeps track of the changing quotas, days-at-sea rules, trip limits, gear restrictions and area closures that the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS, pronounced “nymphs”) uses to control fishing effort. Each species is managed separately, which means 
different rules for different fish, rules that can also vary depending on where you are in the ocean. 

It’s not so much the regulations as the insanity of them. Everyone—environmentalists, scientists, the government and fishermen—agrees on the need to protect fish stocks as well as fishing communities. (Surprisingly, there is no reliable data to show the industry’s economic value to the state, but squid, lobster and groundfish are among its key fisheries.) But in the name of conservation, current regulations instead have done more to create wastefulness at every turn: in fuel, time, money and most shockingly, fish. Though fishermen strive to avoid catching more of a species than they’re permitted, fishing is only so precise. Anything over an 
allowed quota must be thrown back, even dead or dying. The trails of dead “bycatch” can go on for miles. (Fishermen’s pleas to donate their bycatch to charity have been refused.) The huge waste of dead fish has triggered a cycle of tighter regulations that only produce more dead discards, infuriating fishermen as much as environmentalists. “People have a view of a fisherman as this crusty guy who goes out with no regard,” says Faciano. “It’s not productive to our future to kill all that fish, and it’s not ethical.”

The increased pressure to earn a living also means that fishermen take more risks, fishing farther offshore or working in stormy conditions instead of riding them out below deck. “Some guys feel that they have to fish, since they’re burning up a day at sea,” Faciano says. That days-at-sea clock starts when you leave port and never stops; even hours of travel are counted as fishing time. (This surprises me: Fishermen working in Georges Bank must declare a “section” they’ll fish before leaving port. If they arrive to find their pre-selected spot already crowded with other boats or too high in bycatch, they can’t move over to another section unless they first steam the fifteen hours back home and begin a new trip.) Trip limit rules are another nightmare: If a vessel is allowed 1,000 pounds of cod per day and hauls up 4,000 pounds on day one, the crew must dump the catch or wait three more days at sea (“cod jail”) before returning to port. 

Fishermen who want to get out, can’t. With no one new coming into the industry, they have no one to sell their boats to. “You’re working yourself to the bone and can’t turn a profit,” says Faciano. “We don’t want handouts. We just want to work.”

A quick tour of the Shelby Ann reveals a home away from home: whistle-clean galley kitchen, sleeping bunks, separate quarters for the captain. When Faciano opens the door to the engine room, the rush of heat and noise makes me suddenly aware of all that can go wrong on a boat a hundred miles offshore: engine, hydraulics, plumbing, electrical systems. Whatever breaks down, the crew must know how to fix it.

“There’s so much stuff to worry about once you get out there, but nothing else would make us happy,” says Faciano. “We all love working on the water. There’s a peacefulness, when you throw off the lines and the cell phones get shut off and you’re offshore. It’s an honest living.”

IT'S LIKE THIS: YOU NEED MILK, you need bread, you need eggs.” Eric Reid, owner of Deep Sea Fish, a wholesale fish supplier and exporter on the waterfront, is explaining how the current system of quota management crushes fishermen’s ability to manage their small businesses. “Well, imagine you can only buy milk on Mondays, and you can only buy eggs on Wednesdays. Friday, you’ve got to get whatever’s left over. So you’ve tripled your time and expense to get what you need.” He doesn’t extend the metaphor to trip limits, which might go like this: You can only keep one egg per trip, so when you purchase a carton, you have to throw eleven away. It will take twelve trips and 132 wasted eggs to bring home a dozen. “This is where the anger comes in,” says Reid. “It’s totally frustrating and tremendously wasteful.”

In the Deep Sea warehouse, we’re watching three workers carve into a 500-pound tuna laid out on the wet floor. (One gives me a lesson in tuna color: “Think of cranberry juice. That’s your sushi-grade tuna. Tomato juice, that’s your mid-grade tuna.” When he gets to the color of grill-grade tuna, he laughs and says, “Now pick any juice.”) Nearby, an office is crowded with paperwork. “I’ve got two people who do nothing but government reporting,” says Reid.

The businesses that support the fishing industry feel the pressure. “I’m running into a situation where we can get fish shipped to L.A. live from Korea cheaper than we can get dead fish shipped from here,” Reid says. “It’s a struggle when these guys can’t get the access to the resource that they need. But that’s a very contentious issue: How do you measure how much we can catch so that we can keep catching for generations? It’s not like growing corn. You can’t just look out and see what you have.”

Part of the industry’s troubles stem from an eroded faith in whether scientists’ numbers reflect what’s really in the ocean. Few examples incite disgust like the mention of dogfish, as I discover in the office of Fred Mattera, a semi-retired commercial fisherman who serves as president of the fleet’s marine insurance group and conducts safety drills and training. “They’re like rats in a city!” he exclaims in his gravelly voice, throwing up his hands. “We can’t catch dogfish? We can’t get away from dogfish! They eat everything. They’re voracious. They’re like Hoover vacuums.” Like many species, dogfish are heavily protected (data shows there are not enough females), while fishermen claim to be knee-deep in the wild-eyed little sharks, which destroy everything in their paths. I hear many analogies for them: gypsy moths, locusts, Biblical plagues.

Tom and Aaron Williams are two of the youngest dragger captains in the fleet. Thirty-eight-year-old Tom owns the Heritage; Aaron, twenty-nine, owns the Tradition. They, like others, question why they’re seeing record amounts of certain fish alongside stubbornly low stock assessments. “Sometimes you spend more time on a trip trying to avoid fish,” says Aaron. “It’s frustrating when you’re seeing all this stuff that’s supposedly ‘not there.’ ” Science offers possible answers — the view from the wheelhouse doesn’t give a complete picture, and species cluster together on the verge of extinction —
but many fishermen wonder why their “anecdotal” input seems to go ignored. They also raise questions about the methods scientists use to sample the fishery; almost every fisherman I meet cites examples of research vessels using outdated nets, sometimes improperly rigged, to take samples in areas that don’t seem to make any sense. Scientists’ failure to explain their methods has only fueled the breakdown in communication.

The brothers are third-generation fishermen who started fishing when they were kids. Tom has a degree in international finance, while Aaron has never wanted to do anything else. “Since I was five years old, I wanted to grow up and do what my dad did,” he says. “I’m twenty-nine years old and 
I want to have a future. I don’t want to catch every last fish. I want to be able to maintain a living.” (CONTINUED)