Technology buoys fishermen devastated by cod's collapse

摘要

The fisherman attaches two giant nets to a metal frame, loads up his 52-foot trawler and glides out of the dark harbor here into the Gulf of Maine for a 14-hour shift. The routine once earned Ford as much as $15,000 a day catching cod. But in the past five years, federal regulators have slashed the catch limit for cod by 95 percent and imposed a near-moratorium on harvesting the iconic species. Ford now avoids cod, worried that a few good hauls could shut him down for the season. On a recent trip, he was targeting flounder, scraping the gulf's muddy bottom in four-hour trawls and bringing up everything from skates and monkfish to crabs and seaweed.