# Why no 21st-century 'sustainable' Fishing-Craft in New England or all coasts of the US ?



## Bilge-Rat (Apr 18, 2021)

One reason seems to be Federal Code - FEDERAL REGISTER March 1, '94 50 CFR 651 - which has for now 27 years de facto (since de jure) prohibited the ongoing natural evolution of our oldest industry in the US (Commercial Fishing !). 

These rules/dictates have frozen the Fleet in 'best thinking/worst thinking' of the late '80s/early '90s. 
Meaning we have a largely short-&-fat Fleet, in so many ways unprecedented in its unfavorable hull-geometries and thus operational parameter - distinctly under-evolved by comparison to the rate of progress of earlier stages of vessel-evolution and drive-train advances.

You add the dark consequences of (then) over-fishing, continuing odd scientific assumptions, and not even a first 'sustainable' Fisheries-Research Vessel - and you have a really ugly mess, an unsustainable industry. Of nearly 400 years of reasonable success with a lot of learning, setbacks and progress, the last 27+ years have triggered an unprecedented technological stagnation. And any industry that stagnates will begin to decay. Today the Working Waterfront is even more under threat when its oldest industry has been led into decline not seen through wars, natural catastrophes, Depressions.

So, in 2021 we find a lot of ugly lumpy un-hydrodynamic types with wet bows, thus poor winter-suitability (in New England !!), and with (predictably so) fuel-burn cost and drive-train maintenance- and replacement costs that have not been able to match what the resource can actually sustain.

And then there is the growing awareness by consumers - wholesale- and retail-buyers - about 'carbon-footprint' of food-supplies, with a lot of wild-caught (let's not even touch the liabilities in certain aqua-cultures) and then the seafood is implausible to be sold as 'sustainably-caught'. Consumers are only learning more.


Why would we accept 

this much damage to our Oldest Industry,
dark consequences for the viability of our infrastructure of our Working Waterfront,
those losses of jobs- and tax-base to port-communities,
the ever-shrinking opportunities for our Next Generations to pursue an inshore/offshore professional life in an agile ever-evolving myriad-players industry that used to support a lot a tiny-to-good-sized fishing-ports ?


Yep I'm hopping up and down, as the current prevailing 'spirit' in both industry-leadership, regulators, and even robust sectors of our fisheries-science establishment have laid down an unambiguously tragic regulatory and political track-record. 

And if you think that 'the best-&-brightest' (and '$$$s-well-endowed') such as the National Science Foundation (NSF) would see the bigger picture with impressive clarity, then do study their brand-new 'Regional Class' Research Vessel type. According to tech-head design-process insiders it will feature at best a ridiculously-tiny percentage of 'sustainability'-attributes. For $100m (!) that 200-foot 1000-tons 21st-century vessel will show us all for the next 40-50 years how indifferent the project-deciders appear to have been to the rare opportunity to indeed show 'all' how a 'cutting-edge' matrix of technically-obvious and fiscally-plausible vessel- and thus operations-attributes can look like.

So, individual Fishers and they community leaders have been abandoned, with mounting damage to many fishing-communities - in good measure because federal-, industry- and science-leaders have across some 29-30 years not been able to formulate thinking that would indeed CONTINUE the natural evolution of our Fleets and our Working Waterfront - and that across both 'D'- and 'R'-Whitehouses and Congresses...

The Chinese, for instance, do not worry me too much due to their own mounting liabilities on too many levels for them to manage successfully. 

It is this _domestic _conceptual-, and thus policy-failure that have already been doing unarguable damage to resource and jobs- and tax-base, never mind fishing-families, the culture of daily innovation, looking forward with a reasonably plausible vision.


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## Bilge-Rat (Apr 18, 2021)

Just to feed any sentiments of either 'alarm' or growing incredulity of this THREAD, do examine the National SEAGRANT-posture on the topic 21st-century Sustainable Fishing-Fleet'.

Lots of well-distributed research-projects pursued across and along our shorelines - and very well presented in their annual Summary - all following (presumably) the older LAND-GRANT university task to connect academia with 'grass-roots' Small Businesses towards sharing high-end conceptual/technological/scientific advances in the interest of better business-viability in affected communities. 

Just not much (if any ?) interest in the Fleet, the boats, typically the biggest tool in this industry's toolbox.
Quite unexpected. And yet well-funded routines... more or less ignoring those serious and growing travails. 

So, you would have a hard time finding, for instance, any robust engagement by Massachusetts' designated SEAGRANT agent - M.I.T.
It seems impossible to detect any academic or just low-brow technical interest in examining both the unarguable challenges of industrial stagnation and thus soon decay, and all of our advancing Literacy on matters Sustainability.
Thus we may not any time soon find any actionable proposals out of that universe to address this growing calamity in our Oldest Industry.

You'd figure that such potent folks would quickly whip out convincing concepts, designs, if not outright prototyping prowess to 'establish' a new industrial baseline via stunning boat- and ship-design alacrity, superior integration of competing unavoidable demands, all this while making this Working Fleet significantly safer at sea as well - and, of course, all to a plausible Small Business correct budget, towards an approach that could be multiplied thousands-fold to match the New England- and then the national Commercial Fishing-Fleet challenges.

However, with SEAGRANT alerted to this for over a decade+, by 2021 we find no productive institutional self-definition via unassailable ideas and pursuits towards addressing these multi-layered problems. Nothing by the Gulf Of Maine Research Institute it seems. Woods Hole - not so much either. NOAA and NMFS of course did co-sign these odd anti-innovation rules of March 1, '94.

All and unexpected very odd spectacle.
And all these players have budgets to leverage ...

Meanwhile fishing-ports tax- and job-bases are shrinking.


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