June 21, 2018 — Seventy-two thousand pounds of grey sole.
That’s the amount of fish that NOAA calculates Carlos Rafael misreported in his illegal groundfish scheme.
Multiple people at a Monday meeting of the New Bedford fishing community cited the number. So after months of NOAA saying it could not let Sector IX fishermen back on the water because it didn’t know how much overfishing took place in the sector dominated by Rafael, now the federal agency knows.
We don’t officially know it from NOAA, however, because the oversight group remains silent, even as the ban on the groundfish sector drags on into its eighth month. We know it because the members of the New Bedford fishing community — the fishermen, the fuel depot owners, the gear suppliers, the settlement houses — are all struggling because of the lost fishing. And they cited the number publicly Monday, based on information from NOAA itself.
“Everyone knows (the money in) the account is overdrawn. How do we get the money back in the bank,” asked Sector 9 attorney Andrew Saunders.
That’s the conundrum. The sector is ready to deduct the 72,000 pounds of grey sole from its fishing effort. But it needs NOAA to tell them to go ahead, and the agency remains silent. As it has for months.
The inaction has caused an estimated 240 jobs lost across the Northeast, estimated SMAST professor Dan Georgianna.
Richard Canastra, the co-owner of the New Bedford Seafood Display Auction, estimated it will take a long time to bring the groundfish industry back in New Bedford after so many months without fishing. It was not a very profitable industry to begin with, but it played a key role in keeping many of the New Bedford waterfront support industries active.
Read the full opinion piece at the New Bedford Standard-Times