Program helps clean up Long Island Sound's floor

Fifty old traps smeared with mud and sea moss lay stacked on the Northport docks in front of Tor Vincent's boat, a day's bounty from a new program to remove the debris from decades of fishing in the waters off the coast of the historic village.

Hundreds of thousands more traps could still lie on the Long Island Sound floor near Northport.

"Some of these are in 100 feet of water," Vincent said from the bow of his 40-foot vessel, Lucky Strike. "Dragging a grapple down there can be like flying a kite and trying to land it in a bird's nest."

The traps were the centerpiece Monday morning when a small crowd of fishermen, environmentalists and company representatives gathered in Northport to announce a $52,785 grant from Covanta Energy to the Cornell Cooperative Extension of Suffolk County. The cooperative extension will send researchers out with local fishermen to find and remove derelict gear, and the traps will be recycled with help from the scrap company Schnitzer Steel.

The grant is the latest in the "Fishing For Energy" program, which has already removed 410 tons of commercial fishing gear from 18 ports along the East Coast. New York has contributed 32 tons so far.

Long Island Sound, at one time a thriving commercial fishing ground, has become a gigantic dump, experts say. Wrecked boats, rigging, miles of fishing line and derelict lobster traps clutter its bottom so thickly in places that a dropped line is virtually guaranteed to snag.

A snagged line can snap and remove the skin from a fisherman's hands or the flesh from his face. Even untouched debris can disrupt marine ecology on the Sound's floor. And the traps, big wire mesh boxes that will last forever unless somebody picks them up, are some of the worst culprits.

Traps are lost every year to weather, currents and barges. Some are just abandoned. In 1999, considered a peak year for Long Island lobster trapping, fishermen dropped as many as 500,000 traps to land 5 million pounds of lobster worth $22 million, said John Scotti, fisheries specialist with the Cornell program. Many of those traps were never retrieved, officials said.

The Fishing For Energy project is the start of an organized cleanup effort using the experience of fisherman familiar with the waters off Northport, said village Mayor George Doll.

"We recognize this as a community problem," said Doll, himself a fisherman.