New Hampshire’s relatively small coast of 18 miles has supported an active marine fishery industry for the past 400 years. From its very beginning in the early 1600s, New Hampshire differed from its neighboring colonies, in that its primary reason for establishment was for commercial enterprise, with the dominant industry being fishing. Both in colonial times and modern day, the New Hampshire fishing industry relies on groundfish, with the Atlantic codfish being the dominant economic groundfish species, but many other fish species were and are of great economic importance as well.