A conservation advocacy group hopes to persuade many more of Maine's groundfishermen to join a program which it says is designed to help secure sustainable fish populations and fishing communities. And, as Tom Porter reports, it hopes to do this be offering them more fish to catch.

The Nature Conservancy in Maine, which is based in Brunswick, began the week by announcing the purchase of a new federal groundfish permit to be made available to fishermen in the Port Clyde Sector: This stretches from mid-coast Maine down to Biddeford and includes about 25 boats. That's about 40 percent of all Maine groundfishing activity.

The non-profit first got into the business of permit-buying more than two years ago, when the new system of sector management was adopted, and already works with about 10 fishermen in Down East and Midcoast Maine.

It offers them access to more fish, while at the same time encouraging them to engage in what Geoffrey Smith calls collaborative research projects, to help develop new fishing methods. Smith is marine program director at the Nature Conservancy in Maine.

"Wwhat we've doing over the course of the past couple of years is using the quota associated with our permits to support collaborative research and to provide incentives for fishermen to use the gear that's being developed through the research projects and their normal fishing activities," Smith says. "We've been working with more than 10 fishermen over the last few years and we're hoping that by having some additional permits we can work with even more fishermen."

Smith declined to say how many more fishermen he hopes will sign on to the scheme, or how much the new permit cost, but he says it gives participating harvesters access to half-a-million pounds of quota, including cod, hake and grey sole, more than five times what was previously available.

In return, Smith says the fishermen will be encouraged to experiment with new types of fishing gear

Geoffrey Smith: "The first project we looked at was making the some modifications to the 'cod-end', or the part of the net that actually catches the fish. And what we did there was just made some adjustments to the shape and to the size of the holes in that cod-end to try and reduce the bycatch--or unwanted catch--of juvenile fish, but still allow the fishermen to catch the adult-sized fish that they're able to land themselves."

Tom Porter: "In the two years since you started doing it, what results have you seen? How have the experiments borne fruits so far?"

Geoffrey Smith: "They've gone quite well. We've had a good partnership also with the Gulf of Maine Research Institute, which has helped us on this gear design, and what we've seen is some pretty good reductions in the bycatch of the juvenile fish, and the opportunity to catch good amounts of the legal-sized fish. So we've seen fishermen still be able to make a good day's pay and also some of them have seen better prices at the dock for the fish that they've been catching."

The sector management system, under which fishermen can join co-op type groups and divide up the fish quota among themselves, was introduced in May 2009. Opinion in the industry is divided as to how well the system is working.