Clean Catch!

By Rachel Feeney
Northeast Consortium Fisheries Specialist

Photos by Ellen Goethel

Innovation and creativity. Those are two key qualities of a commercial fisherman who can make a living through the natural and regulatory highs and lows that typify Gulf of Maine fisheries.

For eons, fishermen have been tinkering with their gear to target the most desirable fish. Captain David Goethel of Hampton, New Hampshire is one modern-day fisherman whose innovation and creativity have repeatedly helped his fishing business not only survive, but thrive.

Goethel has found a way to buoy his business through the ups and downs of the Gulf of Maine shrimp fishery by tapping into the results of collaborative research. His trick? He is combining the best of two projects, a sorting grid that sifts juvenile shrimp out of the catch and a “topless” trawl that releases finfish. This combination is resulting in an amazingly clean, higher volume catch.

These photos speak for themselves. This is what the F/V Ellen Diane brought back to the dock after a 5-hour trip this past February, 5,000 pounds of shrimp with scant bycatch (the catch in the bins have not been sorted).

By lowering the amount of juvenile shrimp and bycatch of other species, Goethel could get a better price at the dock for his catch, which would make a big difference in his bottom line, given that today's world markets are keeping Gulf of Maine shrimp prices pretty low even though there's a fairly healthy amount of shrimp to be caught.

Dr. Pingguo He from the University of New Hampshire is one of the scientists who have been helping Gulf of Maine shrimp fishermen improve the quality of their catch. The Northeast Consortium funded a project development award in 2004 for He and Captains Vincent Balzano and Tim Eddy of Portland , Maine to begin work on a grid that would keep juvenile shrimp out of the catch. Their design showed good prospects for success, and the team received funding in 2005 for a much larger project to see if the grid would work in the fishery. Even though the project is not quite complete, several fishermen are already starting to use the grid in their gear and seeing catches dominated by market-size shrimp.

Goethel and He teamed up in 2005, and with funding from the NOAA Fisheries Cooperative Research Partners Program, have been working on a topless shrimp trawl that avoids finfish.

For almost a decade, the Northeast Consortium and the Northeast Cooperative Research Partners Program have been helping fishermen and scientists work in cooperation to go beyond gear tinkering to gear research.

Seeing the potential of both the new trawl design and the sorting grid, Goethel's curiosity led him to try the two together on his commercial trips within the past few months. “I expected to lose [shrimp] volume when I put the two gears together, but we're actually catching more than with my regular net,” reports Goethel. “A good test will be in April when the rolling [groundfish] closures push us farther offshore to areas with smaller shrimp.”