September 23, 2013 — The port of Point Judith, which has seen a steady reduction in the size of its local fishing fleet since the 1990s, received a much-needed economic boost this year from out-of-town vessels.
Hailing from mid-Atlantic ports from Wanchese, N.C., to Cape May, N.J., these vessels began coming in the spring and used the Narragansett port through the summer in many cases to offload their squid or scallops and to take on fuel, ice and supplies.
They came for one simple reason, they were following the fish. Fishermen from North Carolina to Newfoundland this year noticed a significant change in the distribution and movements of fish in the northwest Atlantic.
“It seems the fish are heading to the north,” said Beaufort, N.C., fisherman Joe Rose, who’s been chasing fish since 1965. “That seems to be what’s happening lately. Fluke, croaker, squid, spot – all moving up.” Joe is owner-operator of the trawler Susan Rose, a boat he’s owned since 1979. He was offloading his trips of squid all summer at the Town Dock, a large Narragansett fish wholesaler.
“But we’re also up here, squidding, because the fishery managers won’t allow us to work on anything else down South,” he said, referring to tightened restrictions on fish quotas in some of those fishing areas.
This past summer, Rose sent many thousands of pounds of squid up the Point Judith dock and into the Rhode Island economy. It’s been easy for him to do so because Point Judith is set up to handle squid in volume. The processors, the inventory managers, are there. There’s pride in the port when it comes to squid – enough pride to get the attention of some Rhode Island legislators, who failed in a bid this year to make calamari the state appetizer.
Read the full story at the Providence Business Journal