 Fishing has been a way of life in Gloucester, Massachusetts for more than 400 years, but many local fishermen may soon find themselves like fish out of water. On May 1st, catch limits for cod and other ground fish off the coast of New England will be slashed by more than 70 percent. This comes after the New England Fishery Management Council voted in late January for drastically reduced new quotas. Quotas that the fishermen say just aren't sustainable. I think pretty much all the fishermen are in shock. We got stonewalled. We had no idea that this harsh reductions were going to come to fruition here and no one knows what to do. Boat owner Richard Burgess has dedicated his life to fishing for more than 40 years. However, these cuts could force him and Captain Don Smith to hang up their lines for good. I never wanted to stop. It's only the idea that it wouldn't be economically feasible to keep doing it. It's about the only thing that could stop it for me. Right now, the amount of fish that we have available to us for 2013 is not enough to sustain the industry, it's not enough to sustain all segments of the fleet. Environmentalists pursued these new regulations after an assessment from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA for short, showed severe depletion of cod populations in the Gulf of Maine and the Georges Bank. Well we recently asked the federal managers to actually close the directed fishery on cod in New England. We think the situation has deteriorated to a point where even the scientists are now saying there's not a single positive good sign that they can see out there in the water. So the question begs to be asked. Where did the fish go? One thing you hear a lot is that the stocks are overfished. Well the U.S. in the northeast region, the brownfish fishermen haven't exceeded a total or a hard tax, which is a total allowable catch in a decade. So they're fishing under their limits, yet you hear in the media that it's overfishing just because of the terminology that's used. We have not met our total allowable catch, they call it a tax. We have not met the tax on any species in 10 years. So we're not overfishing, we're not overfishing at all. Bottom line, if the legislation as written goes into effect May 1st, it can potentially mean the end for one of New England's oldest industries. But are these proposed changes based on fishy science? They're cutting them back because the research vessel that the taxpayers want, they can't catch any fish with it. It's too big to catch fish. The science of fisheries management is inherently complex. Fishery science is uncertain. You have to measure what's in a population using tools that have a lot of variability in them. By the best available science that we have, stocks, the stocks of cod, certainly in the numbers of other ground fish species, are thought to be at very low levels. While the fishery council now says the cod population is at that serious risk, just three years ago their projection showed stocks were actually recovering. However, they say there's an explanation. The stock assessments that we have received from the Northeast Fishery Science Center have been, for the last numbers of years, overly optimistic. They have come up with estimates of stock abundance, or how many fish are out there in a particular population, and their estimates have been overly, because they're overly optimistic, the council has set quotas high, inappropriately high. So fishermen were never, because there's not that much fish out there to begin with, fishermen were never able to reach their quotas, but overfishing was still occurring because we thought there was more fish than there actually is. The uncertainty of fishery science means not everyone is putting their faith in NOAA's assessments. We certainly, as industry members, participate in the scientific process. We've hired external scientists to participate in the process with stock assessments. Their results have not always aligned with the NOAA scientists. It is skeptical that a lot of stocks have collapsed at the same time. I think NOAA, which is the agency that's been dealing with this, has been incredibly hard to deal with on a practical basis. Despite the doubts, the Fishery Management Council stands confidently behind their proposed regulations. We have problems with the ground fish assessments that the fishermen have problems with. There's no question that there are some revisions that have to be made, perhaps to the analytical methods. Overall, we think that the Northeast Fisheries Science Center, science, is sound. Does it need to be improved? Yes. Are there things that they could do better? Absolutely, yes. And so, with the May 1st deadline rapidly approaching, fishermen are swimming against the tide, doing whatever it takes to keep themselves off the endangered list. We're looking at the need for disaster funding. Well, we're trying to get the congressman to petition the president to try to put an emergency action in to stop this nonsense about no fish being in this region. There's plenty of fish for everybody to catch. The ultimate decisions will be made in Washington, D.C. So, however it goes there will be the bottom line. That said, we are not an agency that is funded to fund fishermen. Congress can do that. Congress can, but if they will, still remains to be seen. Just days ago, the Senate passed a bill co-sponsored by Elizabeth Warren for fishermen relief funding. However, a similar bill failed in January when it was struck down in the House of Representatives. I believe that there are, without a doubt, numbers of fishermen that look a lot of business. And I, you know, I just don't know what to say about that other than that, you know, we certainly understand, but again, it's not in our power to do much about it. I'm not going to throw it in yet. We're hoping, we're praying something's going to happen. You know, we've been supplying protein for this country all our lives. You know, it'd be a shame just to throw that away right now. You know, I hate to dwell on negativity, first of all. It's not the way I've made it to this point in my life. I mean, sure, it could be an economic disaster and I have to find other work and earn less, or maybe we'll find a way out of it. I'm going to look on the bright side for now. In Gloucester, Victoria Price, BuTV 10.