Blue Highways: A Journey into America

by William Least Heat-Moon

I ask Tom what the future of bottom fishing is for Maine. “Good, bad, so-so. All of that. In ’seventy-six, the government extended the old three-mile territorial limit to two hundred miles to keep foreigners out. Had to do it. Russians and Germans and Japanese were coming in with armadas of trawlers and factory ships that process and freeze the catch. Once they found a good coordinate, they’d sit on it until they cleaned it out. A factory ship can hold six-months’ catch so their draggers don’t have to return to port to refuel or off-load. And they used roller nets so they could drag bottom we couldn’t, and they fished with two-inch mesh nets, whereas we have to use five-inchers to let the little ones escape. The Europeans and Japanese lost all their boats during the war so their governments subsidized new ones in the sixties. Their fleets are newer and more efficient than our Yankee one. We couldn’t compete. But since the two-hundred-mile limit, our catch is way up.” “That’s the good. What’s the bad?” “About the same thing—the government. They watch over everything out here now. That helicopter that passed a while back was observers. We’ve got quotas imposed by marine biologists although nobody has an accurate idea how many fish are below. You can’t count them like elephants. A year ago, we caught the entire East-coast quota for haddock in two days. Some of the regulations are just out of line with reason. This is one of the richest fishing grounds in the world. It’s why N...