OCEAN
OF TROUBLE
HUFFINGTON
06.23.13
PHOTO
TOM
ZELLER,
OR ILLUSTRATION
JR.
CREDIT TK
“It’s a beautiful boat,”
says Frank Mirarchi,
referring to his
groundfish trawler. “It
just doesn’t have any
fish to catch.”
year, and with official catch allocations
for some crucial species down by nearly
80 percent for the season that opened
May 1, he expects that he will be forced
to put the Barbara L. Peters — only eight
years old — up for sale. “What else am
I going to do? My entire life’s résumé
is running boats, and they aren’t hiring
these days.
“It’s a beautiful boat,” Mirarchi adds.
“It just doesn’t have any fish to catch.”
Why that should be so is a matter of
heated and sometimes rancorous debate. Nature being what it is, after all,
good years and bad years on the high
seas are par for the course. And while
federal regulators have been on a long
and difficult quest for balance, managing
the nation’s historically over-harvested
commercial fishing grounds remains an
exceedingly difficult task, not least because determining just how many fish
are out there at any given time still requires a bit of groping in the darkness.
As one marine expert famously quipped,