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“Portland is done. Portland is out of business right now,” says Sam Viola, a Portland-based draggerman who has been working out of Gloucester this winter.

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“It was our family’s way of life, and it kind of stinks we had to leave,” says Allyson Jordan, a third-generation fisherman from Scarborough who moved her family’s two draggers to Gloucester, Mass.

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Groundfishing trawlers from Maine are now working out of Gloucester, Mass., in part because of a ban in Maine on selling lobsters scooped up in their nets.

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The Cap’n Mark, a Maine trawler, unloads its catch in Gloucester, Mass. Maine draggers are going to Massachusetts ports more often and staying longer.

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A crew member on the Cap’n Mark helps unload monkfish at the Gloucester auction facility. Maine fishermen are developing business relationships with processors, pier owners and suppliers in Massachusetts.

Groundfishing trawlers, which have vanished from their historic home ports of Rockland, Eastport and Boothbay, now appear to be abandoning Portland, Maine's last remaining groundfishing hub.

Portland's fleet of medium and large draggers left the harbor for Massachusetts before Christmas, and most boats have yet to return. On a recent day, at least 13 Portland-based or formerly Portland-based draggers were in Gloucester Harbor. In Portland, there were two.

The migration has cut the supply of local fish for Portland processors and is costing area businesses that serve the fleet millions of dollars in lost revenue.

Cash-strapped boats are landing fish in Gloucester primarily because they can earn extra money selling lobsters they catch in their nets, a practice allowed in every coastal state but Maine. At least five draggers have left Portland permanently for Gloucester and Boston.

Some of the boat owners interviewed in Gloucester say they left last summer after Maine Marine Patrol wardens -- at the urging of the lobster industry -- began enforcing a long- standing but rarely enforced law that bans Maine-licensed groundfish boats from possessing lobsters in state or federal waters.

Meanwhile, other Maine fishermen are simply selling off their boats and licenses because they say it's impossible to make a living during this era of stringent regulatory measures aimed at rebuilding depleted fish stocks.

This winter the Portland Fish Exchange -- now staffed by a skeleton crew -- cut the number of auctions from five a week to just two. It has been selling about 60,000 pounds of fish a week -- just 12 percent of its volume in the early 1990s.

The city-owned auction -- which also sells fish trucked in from Port Clyde and New Hampshire -- is now trying to lease out a portion of its largely empty refrigerated warehouse to help pay the bills.

The exodus of boats also means fewer customers for Vessel Services, Portland Harbor's only remaining company selling ice and fuel to commercial boats, and fewer customers for Gowen Marine, which repairs the boats and gear and sells gear and supplies.

Gowen, which employed as many as 24 people in the early 1990s, now has fewer than 10 workers. It is shifting its focus to serving the recreational-boat market to survive, said owner Joe Schmader.

Cozy Harbor Seafood, one of the four larger processors in the city, now imports more than 95 percent of its groundfish from Canada or Massachusetts, president and code enforcement officer John S. Norton said.

Additional shipping costs and delays make it harder for Maine processors to compete with companies that have access to local fish, said Angelo Ciocca of Nova Seafood in Portland. He said his company and other processors and shore businesses will close after their owners retire.

"We are living the end of the groundfish-harvesting side of the industry in the state of Maine," Ciocca said. "It's done. It's finished."

SHRINKING INDUSTRY

Just a generation ago, more than 300 boats fished for groundfish in Maine and supplied dozens of processing plants up and down the coast. It's an industry that has been critical to the survival of Maine's coastal communities for more than four centuries.

The migration of boats to Massachusetts today comes at time when the groundfishing industry in New England is contracting overall. The region is in the middle of a 10-year plan that seeks to rebuild some fish stocks, mainly by reducing the number of days fishermen can fish and closing some areas to fishing.

During the past year, 20 percent of the active boats in New England have quit groundfishing, said Stephen Ouellette, a maritime lawyer who specializes in fisheries issues.

Portland has been particularly hard hit. The volume of fish landed in Portland declined by nearly 50 percent from 2004 to 2007,...