At Charlie's urging they continued to invest throughout the 1980s in communications systems and better fish-finding and navigation equipment. Most of the purchases seemed to pay off in bigger catches. But a few years ago, when corporate net profits fell suddenly from about $20,000 a year to near zero, Gail called a moratorium on technology purchases. "He'd tell me the fish-finding equipment was important," says Gail, "but I'd look at the numbers, and I just didn't see the payoff." Last April, convinced that they could no longer make money fishing in New England, Charlie sailed their boat to South America, where the government hasn't yet taken action over diminished fish populations; Gail continues to run her end of the business from South Harpswell.
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Return on investment isn't the issue when it comes to technology in the fishing business, says Jerry Knecht. It's survival. "I saw many operations fail because they ignored technology," says Knecht, the owner of two commercial fishing boats in Portland, one of which is captained by Glenn McIntire, the cell-phone talker. Knecht credits his technology investments with keeping him afloat -- and expanding his business horizontally into commodities and trading.
Knecht, who thinks more like a businessman than a fisherman -- in contrast to McIntire, a seaman who would probably fish even if he couldn't make a profit at it -- is known around Portland as someone who understands the state of the art. "Locating fish today is virtually 100% accurate," he says smugly. The old sonar gear would buck and wince at the slightest change in temperature, he explains. And even when it was working, the captain was forced to decipher a squiggly line that looked like the output of a lie-detector test if he wanted to get an idea of the bottom composition or the size of a school of fish. Now when he's aboard his second boat, the Alexander W, even Knecht can interpret the signals, some of which are beamed up from sensors located on the nets themselves and then displayed in full color on a video screen. The images indicate the location, size, and type of fish below. It used to take two weeks to locate a school of herring, haul it in, and transfer it to a Russian refrigerator ship. Now it takes four hours.
McIntire, 43, who began fishing when he was 18 -- he started off working for Charlie Johnson -- is thankful for Knecht's commitment to technology. "To compete you have to have this stuff," he says -- especially now, he adds, with the overfishing crisis having led to ever-tightening government restrictions. McIntire likes to use a software program hooked up to a global-positioning system and LORAN C so that he can keep track of where he's made a good tow. He can then trace his path back to the same spot. And using MapTech Professional (Resolution Mapping, 617-860-0430), he can keep track of shipwrecks and other hazards -- there's no time to stop fishing to fix a torn net, especially when you're on a government-mandated time clock. The National Marine Fisheries Service keeps track of every hour the boat is at sea and counts it as fishing time, whether or not the nets are in the water.
Of course McIntire is aware of the irony of having to use more technology to make up for the effect of government restrictions that have been put in place to protect the future of the industry. "It's a double-edged thing," he says. "We have all this technology, and now we've reached a point where we may have outsmarted the fish. But we're being limited, so we have to use the technology even harder."
Most experts agree that the strict limits on commercial fishing in New England are only part of a long-overdue effort to fix what emerged as an unsustainable equation once high-tech fishing became the rule. As Fisheries Commission Director Calomo puts it: "Man-with-technology versus fish is a whole other thing than man versus fish."
Fishermen admit that the industry must make concessions. But they claim the restrictions have already gone too far. "The government is running us out of business," says McIntire, echoing the anger of thousands of fishermen. As an alternative to more crackdowns, the Clinton administration has already spent $2 million -- and will spend another $25 million this year -- simply buying out struggling groundfish operations. In many cases fishermen take the acquired boats -- often the very "superboats" they built in the '80s with government-subsidized loans -- and simply sink them, letting them serve as artificial reefs that support budding fish populations. It's an expensive way to make up for the excesses of technology, but in a situation that doesn't lend itself to easy solutions, it has a certain elegance.
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Sarah Schafer (sarah.schafer@inc.com) is a reporter at Inc. Technology.
VICIOUS CIRCLES
Commercial fisheries are not the only example of a modern-day tragedy of the commons. Any industry that relies on a shared pool of resources risks a similar fate. Here are two on the front lines:
Oil: No one owns oil until it's extracted from the ground, which throws the oil companies into a frenzy as they race to lease oil-rich land and drill down to the spoils. "It's like kids sticking straws in a milk shake, each trying to suck up more," says Gary Libecap, professor of economics and law at the University of Arizona. The rapid extraction destroys natural pressures in the ground, leaving much of the oil trapped. Extraction costs increase, hiking up the cost of oil and forcing the United States to rely on other countries' supplies.
Internet Bandwidth: Today, as millions rush onto the Net, setting up Web sites spiked with video and audio clips, no one is giving much thought to the issue of bandwidth, the information-carrying capacity of the network. One day the pipeline could become so clogged that traffic will slow to first a crawl and then a virtual standstill.
