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Fifteen fishing vessels left New Bedford Harbor for Martha's Vineyard Thursday morning in order to join a protest of President Barack Obama's vacation.

See the video from The South Coast Today [subscription site]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

NEW BEDFORD — Fifteen fishing vessels from New Bedford will join a fleet of fishing boats from New York, New Jersey, Rhode Island and Connecticut today for a demonstration planned by commercial fishermen at Vineyard Haven.

The noon gathering at the mouth of Vineyard Haven harbor is aimed at gaining media attention for commercial fishermen during President Barack Obama's vacation on the island.

Groundfishermen in the Northeast are unhappy with the Obama administration's oversight of their industry and, in particular, with government regulations that restrict their catch to totals well below annual catch limits.

Regulators routinely reduce annual catch limits by as much as 25 percent to account for scientific uncertainty. Reliance on flawed and outdated fishery science as well as heavy-handed law enforcement policies are other issues fueling the protest, fishermen say.

Read the complete story from The South Coast Today [subscription site]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

"Is it progress to switch from a waterfront that produces food to a waterfront that hosts cocktail parties?" asked Warren Doty, a selectman in Chilmark on Martha's Vineyard, where fishermen are struggling to preserve a working waterfront on Menemsha Harbor.

Groundfishing has historically employed large numbers in good jobs. The romance of the deep-sea pursuit of fin fish is embedded in a region where its most famous cape is named after its most famous fish, the cod. People don't want that way of life to become just a memory.

A recent analysis indicates how densely the Northeast industry has consolidated around the major remaining ports.

The study by Cap Log Group Inc. and funded in part by the Environmental Defense Fund indicates that 31 million pounds of the 38 million pounds of groundfish caught in 2007 in Massachusetts, or 82 percent, were landed by vessels from either New Bedford, Gloucester or Boston.

Meanwhile, federal statistics show groundfishing has withered or vanished in numerous small and mid-sized ports in the last 30 years.

Read the complete story from The Tribune.

 

 

 

 

 

Georges Bank is a very large shallow area in the North Atlantic, roughly the size of a New England state, that serves as a fishing ground and whaling area (these days for watching the whales, not harpooning them) for ports in New England, New York and Eastern Canada. Eighteen thousand years ago, sea levels were globally at a very low point (with vast quantities of the Earth's water busy being ice), and at that time George's Bank would have been a highland region on the very edge of the North American continent, extending via a lower ridge to eastern Massachusetts and Rhode Island, and separated by a low plain (covered in part by glaciers) to the rest of New England.

As sea levels began rising around twelve thousand years ago, George's bank became a narrower peninsula and eventually an island visible from the mainland. We know that people lived on this island because artifacts of early Native American groups have been dredged up here, along with the teeth of Pleistocene elephants and other items.

Eventually, the island would have been too far from the shore to see, although one might expect people living on the island or the mainland would have known about the other lands, and probably about the people on them, as there is good evidence that maritime activity was fairly intensive in this region. Indeed, it may well have been the existence of George's Bank that fueled the maritime activity that was apparently much more intensive between five and seven thousand years ago in this region.

Read the complete story from Greg Laden's Blog.

 

 

 

 

 

 

KENAI, Alaska—Sean Boulay had a grin plastered across his face a couple of hours after donning his waders, wheeling his blue and white cooler onto the sand and sticking a large net into the water.

The unsuspecting sockeye salmon soon were swimming into his net one after another, and Boulay eventually had a string of fish in the cold water of the world-renowned Kenai River.

His catch was the result of a uniquely Alaskan activity called dipnetting. For a few precious weeks in midsummer, residents obtain free permits to dip homemade nets into the water and catch fish that will fill their freezers and pantries for months to come.

Each head of household is entitled to 25 fish, with each additional member allowed 10 each. That adds up to hundreds of dollars worth of some of the best wild salmon on the planet.

Read the complete story from The Boston Globe.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The imposition of catch shares has brought fierce resistance, and helped make New England a test case for the controversial management regimen favored by the Obama administration through its National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Over the first 21 percent of the fishing season — May 1 through July 17 — the part of the fleet organized into sectors had landed only 6.5 percent of what it was allocated to catch for the year in the mixed groundfish stock complex.

"They have created a totally dysfunctional fishery," said Richard Burgess, who heads a Gloucester-based gillnetting sector organized under the umbrella of the Northeast Seafood Coalition, and owns a four-boat groundfishing business.

The landing reports confirm predictions from across the industry and anecdotal reports from Gloucester, New Bedford and Point Judith, R.I., that groundfishermen were either avoiding fishing altogether, or pursuing prey outside the groundfish complex, the primary source of fishing revenues for the fleet since pre-colonial times.

Larry Ciulla, president of the Gloucester Seafood Display Auction — the No. 1 sales platform for fish taken in the Gulf of Maine — said "dayboat landings are down between one-half and two-thirds so far this year.

Thirty percent of the boats aren't fishing due to the quotas established by NMFS, he said in an interview Thursday.

Prices for groundfish have been higher than last year, because supply has dropped, Ciulla added.

"The behavior right now of fishermen isn't to go fishing," said Nina Jarvis, the auction office manager. "They're trying not to go fishing."

Read the complete story from The Gloucester Daily Times.

 

 

 

 

 

 

July 29, 2010 – Whenever Paul Greenberg, a lifelong angler and writer about seafood, mentioned that he was working on a "fish-in-danger book," the question most often asked was which fish people should eat. Farmed salmon or wild? Is swordfish OK now? Is tuna sushi a bad habit? You'll find answers — though perhaps not the ones you're expecting or hoping for — in Four Fish, his excellent, wide-ranging exploration of humankind's relationship with fish — the flesh that even many vegetarians consume.

You'll also find deeper questions about our need "to reevaluate whether fish are at their root expendable seafood or wildlife desperately in need of our compassion." In this passionate study, part investigative journalism, part travelogue, part personal memoir about fishing for wide-mouth bass as a boy in Connecticut, Greenberg asks, "Must we eliminate all wildness from the sea and replace it with some kind of controlled system, or can wildness be understood and managed well enough to keep humanity and the marine world in balance?"

Four Fish builds on Mark Kurlansky's pioneering 1998 microhistory Cod, but it's more than simply Cod-plus-three. Greenberg notes that, just as human consumption of mammals and birds has narrowed to four sources each — cows, pigs, sheep and goats in the meat department; and chickens, turkeys, ducks and geese for poultry — "four archetypes of fish flesh" have come to dominate our fish counters: salmon, bass, cod and tuna.

Read and listen to the complete story from NPR.

 

 

 

 

 

GMRI’s Community Department seeks a full-time temporary intern from June to December, 2010, to conduct research supporting two projects:

1) GMRI provides technical assistance to 14 of the 17 groundfish sectors operating in New England’s waters. The intern will assist staff with background research for the sectors’ annual submission of operations plans and environmental assessments as required to get approval from the National Marine Fisheries Service. In addition, the intern may help staff with ongoing training of sector managers and members.

2) GMRI is developing a program to enable and promote innovation in marine diversification in the Gulf of Maine. The initial phase of this project will be a comprehensive analysis of innovative uses of marine resources from around the world in an effort to identify key opportunities of the Gulf of Maine. The intern will assist the Director of Community Initiatives by collecting and analyzing data on marine innovation and its applicability to our region. The program’s goal is to facilitate the development of new niche marine markets in renewable energy, bio-environmental monitoring, water management, marine biotech/pharma and functional foods.

Read all about the position from About Marine Biology.

 

 

 

 

 

 

A confirmed sighting of a great white shark off the coast of Chatham could only be the beginning of aggressive sharks in the area, Dr. Gregory Skomal, an aquatic biologist with the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries, said today.

On Sunday afternoon, spotter Pilot George Breen saw the shark in the area of Nauset Beach, approximately 2 miles north of an inlet, said Chatham Harbormaster Stuart Smith.

“It was an aggressive shark that chased some seals inland,” Smith said.

The sighting occurred at around 4 p.m., according to Bill Chaprales, a fisherman who works with Breen on scientific research and spoke with him after the sighting.

Read the complete story from The Boston Globe.

 

 

 

 

 

Profiles of women in the fishing industry: Terri Farscone. Bonnie Brady, Amanda Odlin, Mary Beth de Poutiloff, Tina Jackson.

Most women involved in commercial fishing attend to the shoreside duties of the family business, although they will rig a line when they have to.

But many women are at the forefront of the movement against what fishermen view as government over-regulation and inflexibility.

In 1977, 18-year-old Terri Farscone showed up at the Coast Guard station in Boston to apply for a 100-ton boat captain's license.

The officers on duty laughed and told her to go home. She was not amused.

So after being turned away in Boston, she tried again to apply for a license, this time at the Portland, Maine, Coast Guard station. There, she recounts, they gave her an application that said "Mr." on the line for her name. She crossed that out.

Today, of course, no such shenanigans would be likely, although women at that level of the industry remain rare.

In the past, they were nonexistent. Of the 5,368 names inscribed on Gloucester's cenotaph memorial to fishermen lost at sea, not one is female.

But that is not to say there aren't fierce female fishermen out there — the best known being Linda Greenlaw of "Perfect Storm" fame, who stopped captaining a Gloucester sword boat in 1997; she now lobsters and swordfishes periodically in Maine.

Read the complete story from the Gloucester Daily Times.