N.B. seiners return to P.E.I. shores

New Brunswick herring seiners are once again fishing off P.E.I.'s north shore, but this time they have sophisticated equipment aboard to make sure they obey the rules.

'Hopefully DFO will do the right thing, keep an eye on them ' - Peter Boertien, P.E.I. lobster fisherman

Three years earlier, hundreds of Island fishermen blockaded New Brunswick herring seiners at the Souris wharf, leading to the arrest of 15 people. The protesters believed the seiners were fishing too close to shore, depletingthe herring stock and damaging thelucrative lobster fishery.

This year, every seiner is carrying a black box installed by thefederal Department of Fisheries and Oceans to monitor their activities and make sure they stay in waters 25 fathoms or deeper.

"I can go back two days, three days, a month, and track where the vessel's at and their activity," Sheldon Bryan of DFO's fisheries conservation and preservation branch, told CBC News.

The vessel's activities are all available on his computer screen.

"There are times when you see the vessels sail inside the line, but through experience and being able to monitor the tracks of the vessels and the closeness of the dots that show up on the screen, you can tell that they are just sailing through."

At the time of the 2003 protest, seiners were allowed to fish in 17 fathoms of water.

Since then,the line has beenmoved out to 25 fathoms, but lobster fishermen are still worried about the herring, which they need for bait— and they say it's been inshort supply in 2006.

"It's unprecedented. This fall we had to freeze bait— herring, freeze the few mackerel that we caught— to have bait in the spring, because this past spring there was no bait, and what fresh bait there is there is costing us a buck a pound," said fisherman Peter Boertien.

"It's costing us so much money on fuel and that, it's hard on the nerves to see them come back and think we've got to go through all this again."

There are five herring seiners in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, trying to catch 15,000 tons of herring to fill their quotas.

"We have to have faith in DFO to look after it," said Boertien.

"I know they sent a boat down from Alberton to try and keep an eye out on them, but the boat that they did send is kind of small if we get rough weather. So hopefully DFO will do the right thing, keep an eye on them and see what happens."

The seiners' activity is also being tracked byairplane surveillance. As of Wednesday, DFO staff said they wereconfident there had beenno fishing over the 25-fathom line.