Regulations

October 1, 2013 — Today NOAA Fisheries announced revisions to the Harbor Porpoise Take Reduction Plan. Amendments include removal of the consequence closure strategy, including the Coastal Gulf of Maine, Eastern Cape Cod, and Cape Cod South Expansion Closure Areas. Therefore the previously triggered Coastal Gulf of Maine Closure Area will NOT go into effect October 1.

September 27, 2013 — The following was released by NOAA Fisheries:

The 2013 commercial summer flounder quota allocated to New York has been harvested. Effective 0001 hours, October 1, 2013, fishing vessels issued a Federal moratorium permit for the summer flounder fishery may no longer land summer flounder in New York for the remainder of the 2013 calendar year. This closure is concurrent with the State of New York’s closure of its commercial summer flounder fishery to state permitted vessels and dealers effective October 1, 2013.

Vessel owners issued Federal permits must continue to complete and submit vessel logbooks for all other species landed. Additionally, dealers issued Federal dealer permits for summer flounder may not purchase summer flounder from federally permitted vessels that land in New York for the remainder of the calendar year. Federally permitted dealers must also continue to report all fish purchases from any vessel.

 

September 27, 2013 — The following was released by NOAA Fisheries: Today NOAA Fisheries announces the availability for public comment of a draft amendment to the standardized bycatch reporting methodology (SBRM) used to assess the amount and type of bycatch occurring in Mid-Atlantic and New England fisheries.

Anyone wishing to submit comments for consideration may do so by October 27, 2013, through nmfs.ner.draftSBRM@noaa.gov . 

For more information including supporting documents, click here.

September 19, 2013 — NOAA announced today that it is proposing revisions to the accountability measures for the Atlantic mackerel, Atlantic bluefish, summer flounder, scup, and black sea bass recreational fisheries, as recommended by the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council.

The proposed measures are intended to improve flexibility in the way accountability measures are set to address catch overages in the recreational fisheries for these species.

Public comments will be accepted on the proposed measures until October 18, 2013. 

For a copy of the Federal Register notice that provides detailed information about this action

 

 

August 8, 2013 — The following was released by NOAA's Northeast Regional Office If you fish under one of the days-at-sea (DAS) programs in the Northeast region (multispecies, monkfish, or sea scallop), NOAA Fisheries wants you to know that, effective immediately, the phone number to call for all DAS services (usage, corrections, etc.) is now 978-281-9234.

Read the full release from NOAA's Northeast Regional Office

Saving Seafood works with industry members and scientists to cover issues important to American fisheries. Please see below to learn more about Saving Seafood's coverage of pressing issues affecting the commercial fishing industry.

Success of the Scallop Fishery

Bob Vanasse, Saving Seafood Director: What the U.S. can learn from a thriving scallop fishery

NOAA's Fisheries Economics of the United States fails to credit cooperative research and industry contributions to the rebuilding of the successful scallop fishery

Groundfish Stocks

Groundfish numbers have "swung wildly" due to deficiencies in stock assessments 

National Research Council study finds rebuilding timelines for fish stocks inflexible and inefficient

Yellowtail Flounder Assessments

Scientists and industry leaders question the validity of yellowtail flounder assessments

Scallop industry writes to NOAA over lack of progress and accuracy in yellowtail flounder assessments

SMAST video technology shows promise to improve groundfish and flat fish stock surveys

Saving Seafood Radio: SMAST scientists discuss innovativations to help fishermen minimize bycatch and maximize scallop yield

NOAA Corruption in New Bedford 

NOAA attorneys still employed after investigator finds them guilty of coercing and intimidating New Bedford fishermen 

Dale Jones, Director of NOAA's Office of Law Enforcement, and Attorney Chuck Juliand removed from positions but still employed by NOAA following investigation

Following the reassignments of Dale Jones and Chuck Juliand, Senator Scott Brown asks NOAA: What does it take to get fired? 

 

Take action now to preserve New England's fishing industry. Sign our petition today:

http://www.blastroots.com/UpdateClosedAreas/petition

 

August 29, 2013 — In an economically depressed Maine county, Bill Sheldon is the kingpin of a $40 million baby-eel industry that may be doomed to extinction. Find out what happens when a community full of armed fishermen and elver dealers stop being polite and start getting real.

High Street in Ellsworth, a busy four-lane road lined with a Denny’s, a McDonald’s, an L.L. Bean outlet, and a Sun360 tanning salon, leads to Mount Desert Island and Acadia National Park. Beyond the strip malls and lobster pounds, further down east, are scarlet-hued blueberry barrens and miles of unbroken fog. Drive from southern Maine in the summer and you’re bound to sit in Ellsworth traffic. Guidebooks claim the regional identity of the city has been stripped away, but at 3 a.m. the morning I arrived, a sign flashed outside the pet store in the cold night air: Cleaner Net & Air Pump For ELVER.

Behind Jasper’s Motel and Restaurant, a yellow extension cord snaked through the window of Room 27 and connected to a 110-volt bubbler pumping oxygen into a tank of elvers on the back of a Ford Super Duty, or, as its license plate says, EEL WAGN. This is Bill Sheldon’s truck. He’s an affable, clean-shaven guy, aged 67, with glasses and an LED light clipped to the brim of his hat. In 2012, he paid his fishermen $12 million for elvers (about a third of the estimated $40 million paid out in Maine over the season) and, for a couple weeks this spring, the elver kingpin holed up at Jasper’s Motel with a half million dollars in cash. The best runs and the best money too, he said, arrived on dark, moonless, rainy nights.

The elvers flew out of Logan or JFK international airpors to China and Taiwan in clear plastic bags filled with oxygenated water to feed the fastest-growing animal-feeding operations on the planet: Asian aquaculture. The baby eels, two inches long with glassine bodies, nearly invisible sperm-shaped fauna with a thin black vertebrae and a pair of magnificent black eyes, swim inland on the final stretch of a five-month, several-thousand-mile-long quest to find a freshwater home.

Eel farmers need babies caught in the wild since no one’s reliably bred the species in captivity. They are reared in ponds like seedlings: Plant a farm with elvers and, in six months, a pound of elvers might yield 1,200 pounds of meat that then might, at $10 a pound, fetch $120,000. Seventy percent of eels, unagi, was sold in Japan, according to one estimate by the newspaper The Yomiuri Shimbun. James Prosek’s seminal book on the subject, Eels, reports that some 40% of eel eaten in a Manhattan sushi joint probably flew from Maine to Asia and back again. Scarcity drove the prices up and, stream-side, a pound of elvers sold for around $2,000. Rumor had it some fishermen were clearing nearly $100,000 a night.

Read the full story at Buzzfeed

August 28, 2013 — Today, NOAA Fisheries announced that some groundfish fishery management actions are now finalized. These actions were implemented through Framework 48, Framework 50 and the Sector Operations Plans on May 1, but "interim" management measures to provide more time for public comment are now final.  Read the final rule here

August 28, 2013 — Today at the recommendation of the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council, NOAA is proposing a number of revisions to the Atlantic mackerel, squid, and butterfish fishery management plan to improve the catch monitoring and reduce the bycatch of river herring and shad through Amendment 14.

NOAA Fisheries explained the changes to Congressional offices as follows:

The proposed measures include:

o   Revise fishery management program measures (dealer and vessel reporting requirements, requirements for vessel monitoring systems);

o   Increase observer coverage on mid-water trawl and small-mesh bottom trawl mackerel trips;

o   Revise vessel requirements to improve at-sea sampling by observers;

o   Establish measures to discourage the discarding of catch before it has been sampled by observers;

o   Establish a mortality cap for river herrings and shads in the mackerel fishery, with amounts to be set in a future action.

NOAA Fisheries has concerns about three of these proposed measures and did inform the council of these concerns prior to the council's approval of Amendment 14 in a letter.

The concerns are:

o   Requiring up to 100-percent observer coverage in the mackerel fishery coupled with an industry contribution of $325 per day;

o   Establishing a cap that, if achieved, would require vessels discarding catch before it had been sampled by observers to return to port; and

o   Requiring mackerel/squid/butterfish dealers to accurately weigh all fish and, if catch is not sorted by species, also requiring dealers to document how they estimated relative species composition.

Public comments on the Amendment 14 proposed measures will be accepted through October 11, 2013.

Visit the NOAA Fisheries page with related links  

View the full amendment 

 

August 22, 2013 — NOAA Fisheries is proposing to revise the Harbor Porpoise Take Reduction Plan to eliminate the consequence closure strategy due to changes in fishing practices that have resulted in lower harbor porpoise bycatch in the gillnet fishery. The following is how the proposal was explained to Congressional offices.

NOAA filed with the Federal Register a proposal to amend its Harbor Porpoise Take Reduction Plan and eliminate the plan to close areas to gillnet fishing during certain times of the year to reduce unintended catch or bycatch of harbor porpoises in commercial gillnet fisheries.

NOAA Fisheries will be accepting public comments on these proposed measures through Tuesday, September 10, 2013. I've attached the proposal.

Since the implementation of this measure in 2010, a new sector management scheme has been implemented in the groundfish fishery, resulting in a significant shift in areas where fishing has typically occurred.

The harbor porpoise population appears to be increasing and the current overall bycatch of harbor porpoises is now below federal limits that are established under the Marine Mammal Protection Act.

NOAA Fisheries, in consultation with the Harbor Porpoise Take Reduction Team, which is comprised of fishermen, scientists, environmentalists, state managers and gear specialists, determined that these changes in fishing practices have rendered the closures, which are triggered by high bycatch, to be obsolete.

We don't anticipate that eliminating the closures will pose any risk to harbor porpoise.

The closures had been done when bycatch rates exceeded the target rates in Coastal Gulf of Maine, Eastern Cape Cod, and Cape Cod South Expansion Consequence Closure Areas. They were done as an incentive for fishermen to use pingers, acoustic devices designed to scare porpoises away from nets.

Read the notice from NOAA