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I don't think that the purse seiner quota nor the general category quota will be met this year. I may be wrong on that. Many of the purse seiners have been tied to the dock for most of the year. They cannot make a set around a school, unless the school is composed of fish larger than 81 inches (?) I think that's about a 320-pound fish. The schools that have been sighted in the Gulf of Maine have been running smaller than that. There are a lot of small fish around but the giants have been scarce. Scarce and the ones that are caught tend to be lean, the oil and fat content much lower than what it should be for this time of the year. A bad year on the giant grounds. Few fish and if a giant is landed chances are real good the fish is going to stay domestic and fetch jack for a price. The whole situation is tricky--the stocks, the forage, the Gulf of Maine. Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island are not much better. Who knows what is really going on in the Mediterranean--other than a complete fiasco of multi-national mismanagement.
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