Landings across Hancock County fell again this season, the fourth consecutive annual decline, while the boat price climbed to a level that has kept gross receipts roughly flat and masked a squeeze on the men and women hauling the traps.
Interviews with fourteen sternmen and captains across Bar Harbor, Southwest Harbor and Winter Harbour describe the same arithmetic: longer steams to colder water, more fuel burned per trap hauled, and bait costs that have not eased.
“You are running two hours to fish where your father ran twenty minutes,” said one captain who has fished out of the harbour for three decades. “The price looks fine on paper. The paper does not buy diesel.”
State regulators say the shift is consistent with a broader northward and offshore movement of the stock as the Gulf of Maine continues to warm faster than most of the world’s ocean.