SEAFOOD.COM NEWS [Seafoodnews.com] — September 24, 2013 — Sea Watch International is the largest clam processor in the U.S. Joyce Rowley from Commercial Fisheries News toured their upgraded New Bedford plant with its state of the art sanitation, and prepared this article which is reprinted from their October issue by permission.
Twenty years ago, when climate change was just beginning to be debated, Sea Watch international recognized that something was making temperature-sensitive Atlantic surf clams and ocean quahogs move northward and into deeper waters. So, Sea Watch decided to expand its business to better follow the clams.
In 1994, the company acquired a 50,000-square-foot faciliy on 1.75 acres on New Bedford's Acushnet River and began processing. The location has ample dockage to handle the company's 121' Sea Watcher I coming in from offshore Southern New England clam beds, was ideal. From its start as a clam cannery in Milford, Delaware in 1978. Sea Watch become the nations largest supplier of name brand clam products.
A merger of Sea Watch management team with the clam fishing and processing firm Truex, Myers, Truex in 1999 allowed the company to secure a guaranteed quality product and provide stable market supply.
Most recently, Sea Watch acquireda plant from Blount Fine Foods of Warren, RI and Fall River, MA, which will house the frozen line of Sea Watch clams.
Now based in Easton, Md. with three active processing plants Sea Watch processes the largest clam allocation of both surf clams and ocean quahogs in the fishery according to company Vice President in Charge of Operations John Miller.
Sea Watch purchases shell stock harvested by the Truex boats at market prices and also leases allocation from several independent parties. Other vessel owners are then contracted to harvest those allocations. The company handles a total surf clam allocation of approximately 1.6 million bushels of surf clams, plus additional ocean quahug allocation.
Processing at the New Bedford plant begins when clams are unloaded from vessels in 32-bushel cages hoisted onto the dock. The cages are forklifted inside where they are unloaded, shucked, desanded, inspected for defects, separated by parts, chilled and rinsed, inspected again, tested, and further separated for specialized product use. Little is wasted.
Clams that don’t make the specialized product cut are ground into minced clams, and the juice is frozen and sent to clam juice plants. Even the shells are used to rebuild oyster beds.
The company built a $3.5 million addition, dubbed “The Palace,” this past year. The state-of-the-art processing area creates and packages frozen condensed clam juice and marinates products in a maintenance-free area.
All utilities in this area, including electrical panels, ventilation, and heating units, are located in a corridor outside of the work area.
Maintenance-free overhead pipes mean the pipes won’t corrode or flake. Miller said that reduction of cross contamination by utilities and from maintenance workers is the latest advance in food processing called “sanitation by design.”
"“The Palace,” Sea Watch’s new state-of-the-art processing area, is based on
the latest advance in food processing called “sanitation by design.” Photo: Joyce Rowley
An onsite laboratory performs inspection and testing using the seafood Hazard Analysis Critical Control Points (HACCP) program regulated by the federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA). HACCP is a time-tested food safety approach that greatly reduces the potential for contamination or product defects before they happen. The laboratory also tracks federal and state product documentation tags required for all shellfish landings. And it is here that the new dockside paralytic shellfish poisoning (PSP) testing occurs.
In 1990, Georges Bank was temporarily closed to some types of shellfish harvest due to cases of PSP. In 1999, the closure became permanent for the clammers when the FDA found it could not control the potential for high toxin levels in clams.
However, at the request of industry, a collaborative effort among the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), the FDA, and the Interstate Shellfish Sanitation Conference, along with members of the mollusk fleet, studied the problem from a new angle. Miller explained that the fishing grounds were tested using a grid system to determine the extent of potential PSP problems.
“We would test the four corners and the middle,” Miller said. “If it tested all rright onboard, we’d harvest in the grid. Then the clams were tested again dockside on return.”
Harvested clams also were tested at an independent laboratory. After five years of testing this method, FDA researchers determined that the levels of the naturally occurring toxin that caused PSP were at low enough levels to allow harvesting from a portion of Georges Bank. The final protocol requires testing of clams both onboard and dockside for PSP toxins.
As a result, NMFS reopened a 6,000-square-nautical-mile area in January under strict onboard at-sea and dockside testing protocols. NMFS also reopened a small area adjacent to the first in August under the same testing requirements.
The opening of a portion of the closed area means that some pressure can be taken off of the southern clam resources, said NMFS Northeast Regional Administrator John Bullard in a recent press release announcing the reopening. Neither surf clam nor ocean quahog stocks are designated as overfished.
Status of the fishery Atlantic surf clams and ocean quahogs were the first fishery to be managed through the use of individual transferable quotas (ITQs) in 1990. Under ITQs, the total allowable catch was allocated among existing permit holders based on who had a history of effort in the fishery. It also allowed the quota allocations to be transferred by sale or lease.
ITQs came about after years of attempting to manage a large fleet by reducing the number of days fishing, which led to safety and economic concerns. The overall effect of the ITQ program was to stabilize the market by providing a consistent supply and to consolidate the fleet.
According to NMFS, the number of boats actively participating in the fishery has declined by 54% since 1990. There also is a significant pool of latent effort since NMFS records show there are over 600 permit holders but only 47 permits are actively being fished. The 2012 quota was 3.4 million bushels of surf clams and 5.3 million bushels of ocean quahogs, according to NMFS. Only 62% of the surf clam and 67% of the ocean quahog quota was landed in 2012.
And it is unclear who, exactly, holds all of that quota. In June, the Mid- Atlantic Fishery Management Council’s Atlantic Surf Clam and Ocean Quahog Fishery Management Advisory Team (FMAT) requested that NMFS begin identifying permit holders so that fishery managers can determine where the allocation is going and how much is held by active permit holders, according to council staffer Jose Montanez.
Also, in August, the Mid-Atlantic council voted to establish new biological reference points to determine optimal yield (OY) for the fisheries. Although the two clam fisheries are not believed to be overfished, the clam industry noted that the overfishing definition established in 2009 had not yet been adopted, and the last stock assessment indicated there were uncertainties in the data.
Part of the uncertainty lies in the lack of data on juveniles and reproduction. These two issues have been referred to the FMAT for further review. And, the newly formed Science Center for Marine Fisheries Science, known as SCeMFiS, recently embarked on a number of cooperative research projects to gather more information on these fisheries
This story originally appeared on Seafood.com, a subscription site. It has been reprinted with permission.