10/1/12
Heading toward his fifth hour of filleting, his thick rubber boots squeaking on the wet concrete floor, Glen Libby, a fisherman by trade, looks more like a beleaguered line cook than the hero of a seafood revolution.
Five years ago this month in this unspoiled fishing port immortalized by three generations of Wyeths, Mr. Libby and a half-dozen cohorts banded together to try to rescue their depleted fish stock and their profession.
The result (“after trial and error with a lot of error” in Mr. Libby’s words) was Port Clyde Fresh Catch, the country’s first community-supported fishery, now part of a burgeoning movement that tries to do for small-scale local fishermen what community-supported agriculture has done for farmers.
In the kitchen, community-supported fisheries require cooks to agree in advance to buy whatever fish or shellfish local fishermen catch. Fishermen are asked to embrace plentiful species like skate or redfish, once routinely tossed overboard. With about 80 percent of the seafood on the American plate imported and “traceability” the mandate du jour, community-supported fisheries of varying sizes and ambition are springing up around the country, from Cape Ann in Massachusetts to Santa Barbara in California. There are about 30 nationwide, including two in New York.
Port Clyde Fresh Catch was born in crisis. Fishing is woven into the warp and woof of daily life here, a place where the water seems more dominant than the land. The village’s working waterfront still resembles a Wyeth, alive with aging trawlers, lobster traps and weatherworn shacks dwarfed by evergreens.
But looks can be deceiving: Until recently, the picturesque occupation beloved by “people from away,” as summer residents are called, was on the verge of collapse. Of Maine’s 5,300 miles of coast, only 20 miles are working waterfront, with tiny Port Clyde, originally named Herring Gut, home of the last surviving ground-fishing fleet between Portland and the Canadian border.
At the time Mr. Libby and colleagues joined forces, they faced the decimation of signature New England species like cod and flounder, largely because of overfishing and nets that damaged the seabeds, including those from an increasing number of “big box” industrial trawlers that can catch up to a million pounds of herring a day.
Overfishing continues to be a major issue; the allowable catch for cod is projected to be cut up to 70 percent for next year, said Peter Baker, the director of Northeast Fisheries programs for the Pew Environment Group. The steady decline of fish resulted in increased federal regulations, including limits on the number of days at sea.
Overfishing was one factor limiting fishermen’s profits. Another was the traditional way they sold their catch: through auction houses, which set wholesale prices. “You never knew what the price was going to be,” said Mr. Libby, who caught the fishing bug digging for soft-shell clams as a child. “My best season, I made $1 an hour.”
He and his colleagues had a choice: They could “give up and work at McDonald’s,” he said, or get together and try something radical.
Joining forces was hardly an easy sell. “Fishermen are independent,” Mr. Libby said, juggling a cellphone in one hand and a pick for plucking 30 pounds of redfish from an iced bin in the other. “Maybe you don’t like people, so you want to sit out in a boat by yourself. But the whole ‘I want to be the Lone Ranger’ stuff doesn’t work when things get tight, when people are in a lot of financial pain. Then you either have to look for alternatives, or you quit.”
They eliminated the middleman, processing their fish and shellfish themselves and then selling or shipping directly to consumers. The idea came about after Mr. Libby and his family heard a farmer give a talk about community-supported agriculture. The group started with orders for sweet winter Maine shrimp from members of the Unitarian church in nearby Rockland. That eventually led to tailgate filleting demonstrations on the back of the Libbys’ pickup truck. “Nobody got rich,” said Kim Libby, Mr. Libby’s sister-in-law. “But it was a good shot in the arm for paying the fuel bill that week.”
The Port Clyde group was environmentally proactive, redesigninging their nets to allow more juvenile fish to escape. Instead of catching a high volume of a single species, the group sought a more diverse catch and received a price closer to the cost of production. That in turn allowed them to fish at a smaller scale.
