July 26, 2022 — Last Call! The New Bedford Port Authority (NBPA) is interested in understanding the current usage of the Port and its facilities and the need for additional services and space as the NBPA makes decisions about future expansion of facilities and services. We want to hear from you! Please complete a short survey, it should take less than 5 minutes to complete, to help NBPA understand the different ways the Port is being used, your needs for services and space, and your thoughts about the future. The survey can be accessed by clicking the button below. The survey will be open through July 29.
HAWAII: Day without ahi affects Honolulu restaurants and customers
July 25, 2022 — A Manoa Poke Shop is back in business after an Ahi shortage forced them to close for a day earlier this week. Restaurants and wholesalers tell KITV4 no Ahi ships came in on Thursday.
Off the Hook Poke Market was deliciously busy Saturday. The same cannot be said for their Thursday.
The President of the Hawaii Longline Fishing Association, which represents commercial fishermen, is quick to dispel rumors Hurricane Darby had anything to do with the drought. Ahi fishing has been having a down year, but he thinks something else may be at work.
Still the fisherman, Off the Hook, and it’s customers are all optimistic. “By nature fishermen are positive thinking when it comes to fishing. the next fish is always going to be on the next hook,” said Martin.
ALASKA: Tale of two salmon fisheries: Bristol Bay breaks record, but Yukon River collapses
July 25, 2022 — In the Bristol Bay region, the sockeye salmon run and harvest amounts set new records, as was predicted in the preseason forecast. As of Monday, the run had totaled over 73.7 million, with a harvest of over 56.3 million. The previous record was set just last year, with a 67.7 million run of sockeyes and a third-biggest-ever harvest of nearly 42 million of the fish.
But along the Yukon River, a prized salmon run is heading toward a worst-ever season.
The number of Chinook counted by sonar while swimming up the river at Pilot Station, a village near the Bering Sea coast, was the lowest on record for this time of the year, the department said. Things are looking grim for the rest of the summer, Fish and Game said in its most recent update; “the drainage-wide run may be under 50,000 fish, which is so small that escapement goals may not be met in any tributaries,” the update said. Chinook fishing has been closed all along the river and its drainages.
Opponents of the controversial Pebble Mine say two consecutive years of record sockeye runs demonstrate the value of protecting the Bristol Bay watershed, site of the world’s biggest sockeye runs, from that proposed development. They are urging the Environmental Protection Agency to invoke a rarely used provision of the Clean Water Act to preclude any wetlands-fill permit for the mine.
NEW JERSEY: Fishermen fear Hudson Canyon sanctuary will mean more restrictions: ‘Why do we need this?’
July 25, 2022 — Of great concern to the fishermen that showed up to a public scoping meeting is a guarantee that no extra regulations would be placed on their industry if the Hudson Canyon was designated a National Marine Sanctuary.
They didn’t walk away with one after the meeting with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s sanctuary’s staff at Monmouth University’s Urban Coast Institute on Thursday. NOAA, however, was not there to make promises or make any management decisions. At this point it’s just looking for public comments, the first part of a multi-year designation process.
NOAA’s sanctuary staff will use the public comments then to put together a management plan for the Hudson Canyon, such as the boundaries for the sanctuary, its permitted uses and protections. If it gets to the point of a sanctuary, an advisory committee would be created where fishermen would have a seat at the table, the staff said.
The canyon is a prolific fishing ground that starts about 90 miles offshore from Manasquan Inlet and is in the crosshairs of a public debate over the sanctuary designation, which would give NOAA more leverage managing the resources of the largest submarine canyon off the Atlantic Coast.
The canyon, which draws warm-water eddies that spin off from the Gulf Stream, is an ecological wonder, supporting large schools of tuna and squids; it’s a foraging ground for whales and porpoises and home to many bottom fish and curious sea creatures such as anemones, crabs, octopi, deep water corals and is dotted with shipwrecks, some dating to the 19th century.
Several federal and international regulatory bodies and acts already manage the fish species that traverse the canyon or reside there, including the Magnuson-Stevens Act, Atlantic Highly Migratory Species, the National Marine Fisheries Service, Mid-Atlantic Marine Fisheries Council and the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas, or ICCAT.
Officials from Jenkinson’s Aquarium in Point Pleasant Beach attended the meeting and put their support for the sanctuary designation on the public record.
ALASKA: Fish for Families aims to bring Bristol Bay sockeye to Alaska communities facing low salmon runs
July 21, 2022 — Bristol Bay’s sockeye run is the largest on record this season. It has been an astounding summer: More than 70 million sockeye have returned, and fleets have pulled in record harvests of more than 53 million fish.
Fish for Families is a new program that aims to share that catch. The program is an extension of the Alaska Longline Fishermen’s Association and the Alaska Sustainable Fisheries Trust. Since 2020, these groups have helped coordinate sockeye salmon donations from Bristol Bay to Alaska Native communities in southwest Alaska.
At the end of June, it sent out its first shipment of the season — 1,000 pounds of salmon to Chignik communities on the Alaska Peninsula. The program plans to send a total of 8,000 pounds of salmon there this month.
The group also wants to send salmon to communities on the Yukon and Kuskokwim Rivers that are facing record low chum salmon returns. That will require more funds. They’re asking the Alaska Department of Fish and Game for help shipping the salmon there.
The donations build off other efforts to bring salmon to communities in need in the past. In 2020, the fishermen’s association helped coordinate tribes, fishermen, local governments and Native organizations and nonprofits to donate fish from areas around the state, including from Bristol Bay and southeast Alaska. To date, the association said it has deployed $2.5 million to buy salmon and donate more than half a million meals.
MASSACHUSETTS: Biden visits Somerset, pledges $2.3 billion to combat climate change
July 21, 2022 — Amid a heat wave scorching Massachusetts and breaking records in much of Europe, President Joe Biden on Wednesday announced forthcoming executive actions and a $2.3 billion infrastructure investment to tackle climate change, stating it’s “code red for humanity.”
Biden said shuttered fossil fuel plants are becoming the sites for clean energy construction and technologies, adding Brayton Point is on the frontier of clean energy.
The symbolism of the Somerset site as a shift toward renewable energy has been used by other elected officials, like U.S. Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey, who, standing before the Port of New Bedford last year, said the city would reclaim the title of being the city that lit the world — this time with renewable wind energy instead of whale oil.
The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, which oversees and regulates this development, has also discussed streamlining the process after the first projects, such as Vineyard Wind, got final approval.
As the process speeds up following a slow down during the Trump administration, fishermen and fishing industry representatives have expressed concern that not enough is being done to look into the potential negative impacts the wind farms might have on the fishing industry.
Read the full article at The New Bedford Light
MAINE: Volunteers recover nearly 5,000 pounds of trash from Gulf of Maine
July 20, 2022 — A nonprofit conservation group that works to help remove trash and plastic debris from the world’s oceans along with volunteers from Maine’s coastal communities recently recovered nearly 5,000 pounds of what is known as “ghost gear” from the Gulf of Maine.
The group of local volunteers in collaboration with Ocean Conservancy and the Rozalia Project were able to collect a total of 4,723 pounds of discarded gear and other marine debris from remote islands in the Gulf of Maine during an expedition at the end of June.
ALASKA: A Banner Year for Bristol Bay’s Sockeye Salmon Harvest
July 19, 2022 — The sockeye salmon harvest in the Bristol Bay area of Alaska is expected to be among the largest on record. State officials are reporting a run of 74 million fish, mostly from Bristol Bay, during a season that started on June 1 and continues until early August.
CALIFORNIA: Endangered salmon will swim in California river for first time in 80 years
July 19, 2022 –California’s Chinook salmon haven’t been able to reach the McCloud River since 1942, when the construction of Shasta Dam blocked the fish from swimming upstream and sealed off their spawning areas in the cold mountain waters near Mount Shasta.
After 80 years, endangered winter-run chinook are about to swim in the river once again.
State and federal wildlife officials collected about 20,000 winter-run salmon eggs from the Livingston Stone National Fish Hatchery near Redding and drove them for three hours to a campground on the banks of the McCloud River.
Members of the Winnemem Wintu Tribe, who have long sought to return salmon to the river where their ancestors lived, held a ceremony as the eggs arrived in a cooler.
During the ceremony, Sisk and others sang as two women carried the cooler with the salmon eggs, leading a procession around a fire as children followed.
Taylor Lipscomb, the hatchery’s manager, reached into the cooler and lifted out a cup filled with orange salmon eggs, then handed it to one of the children.
Each child participated, lowering a cupful into the water and tipping it until the eggs tumbled out and settled on a metal screen.
Last year, the water flowing from Shasta Dam got so warm that the Sacramento River turned lethal for winter-run salmon eggs. Most of the eggs and young fish died. State biologists estimated that only 2.56 percent of the eggs hatched and survived to swim downriver, one of the lowest estimates of “egg-to-fry” survival yet.
Public reaction to New Bedford fishing industry investigation: ‘This is a disgrace’
July 18, 2022 — New Bedford Light reporter Will Sennott’s deep investigation into how foreign private equity is taking over New Bedford’s lucrative waterfront sparked passionate and often angry responses from ordinary citizens.
The article, written in partnership with ProPublica, uncovers a business model that undercuts fishermen and shifts control of the waterfront out of New Bedford.
Following is a collection of email and social media reaction:
“I always learn so much reading The New Bedford Light. The title really lives up to the name, as it truly sheds a light on issues of importance to our community.
Will Sennott’s article on the fishing industry’s rapid takeover by private equity firms was most informative. This is a development that should concern all of us.
New Bedford’s hard-working, devoted fishermen have been the backbone of our economy for generations. What hurts them and their families, hurts me.
Folks are complaining now about the high price of fish and scallops, but it will only get worse. And, personally, I think putting the squeeze on the very people who do the backbreaking work is unconscionable.
Corporate greed at its best.
The question is, ‘Who has the power to stop this practice, and can it realistically be stopped?’”
— Dawn Blake Souza, retired educator and New Bedford Public Schools principal, via email
“This @willsennott and @NewBedfordLight piece on how private equity firms and foreign investors like the Brenninkmeijer family, living in moated castles in Germany, have taken over much of New England’s fishing industry for @propublica, is something else #fishing.”
— Aleksander @aleksanderrr_, via Twitter
“Private equity owns everything with very little regulatory oversight and extremely generous tax treatment. #TaxWealth.”
— JO @JO_loves_coffee, via Twitter
Read the full article at The New Bedford Light
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