Saving Seafood

NEW JERSEY: Longtime Jersey Shore mayor, commercial scalloping mogul dies at 71

September 5, 2025 — Kirk Larson, a fishing enthusiast who was mayor of Barnegat Light for nearly three decades, died suddenly over Labor Day weekend, according to an obituary and several public officials.

Larson, who died Saturday, was 71. A cause of death was not immediately known.

The mayor was likely best known for co-owning the commercial fishing docks at the Viking Village shops, a staple of Long Beach Island known for its seafood market. Using a fleet of boats, he ran a scallop-catching enterprise out of the docks, which supplied seafood for restaurants, wholesalers, fish markets and supermarkets across the area.

“Kirk Larson was a good friend and it is still hard to believe that he passed away,” Assemblyman Greg Myhre (R-Dist.9) said in a statement. “I got to know him well over the past seven years and my respect for him increased each time we spoke. He was a great conversationalist, always positive and was a tireless advocate for his town, the seafaring community, and the people of Ocean County.”

Read the full article at The Press of Atlantic City

Bidding tops $3.3 billion in New York Bight wind lease sale

February 25, 2022 — The biggest U.S. offshore wind energy lease sale ever will continue Friday, after two days of steadily escalating bids that topped at $3.3 billion with no clear winners at 6 p.m. Thursday.

After 46 rounds of bidding that began at 9 a.m. Feb. 23, the most-sought of six lease tracts – dubbed OCS-0539, east-southeast of Barnegat Light, N.J. – attracted up to five bidders at a time who pushed offers to $900 million.

After running the bids at 20-minute intervals, Bureau of Ocean Energy Management officials said they will resume at 9 a.m. Friday. The agency will announce provisional winners of the online auction.

Covering 488,201 acres, the sale is the largest of the Biden administration and the first wind auction since 2018. Farther east from areas already leased to developers off New Jersey, the new leases roughly double the New York Bight acreage available for building wind turbine arrays.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

 

Ocean City Residents, Officials Air Concerns About Offshore Wind

November 9, 2021 — The proposed offshore wind project along New Jersey’s southern coast drew a mix of support and opposition from residents and officials during an open house in Ocean City on Saturday morning.

The Danish energy company, Ørsted, plans to construct 99 wind turbines about 15 miles off the coast from Atlantic City to Cape May. Ørsted expects the wind farm to be operational by 2024 and capable of powering half a million homes.

The wind project is part of New Jersey’s goal of achieving 7,500 megawatts of offshore wind by 2035 and 100 percent clean energy by 2050.

A panel of Ørsted representatives fielded questions on Saturday about the wind farm’s potential impact on Cape May County’s tourism and the commercial fishing industry during a nearly three-hour forum.

“We believe in coexistence with a wide range of industries. We think that we can all productively exist,” said Maddy Urbish, Ørsted’s head of Government Affairs & Policy for New Jersey. “When it comes to tourism, Ocean Wind, PSEG and Ørsted — we really want to be good community partners.” Urbish noted that in previous projects, Ørsted has not seen an impact on tourism.

Read the full story at Patch.com

 

NEW JERSEY: Historic Viking Village is a hidden haven for shoppers and seafood lovers alike

July 9, 2020 — Founded in the 1920s by first generation Scandinavian fisherman, Long Beach Island’s Viking Village is a place that will take you back to the days of quaint Jersey Shore fishing villages and salty sea captains.

Perched along the bay at the northernmost end of the island in scenic Barnegat Light, the seaside hamlet features a row of tiny fishing shacks that have been transformed into shops and commercial fishing vessels humming in and out of the harbor, which is a major hub for seafood in the state. Visitors can not only shop for treasures at assorted boutiques or grab a cup of coffee or casual meal, but they also have the opportunity to tour the busy docks in the summer and see firsthand where the sea scallops they order at a restaurant come from.

“Most people think seafood just ends up on your plate at a restaurant, they don’t realize what it takes to get it there,” said shop owner Pam Larson, whose husband’s family owns and runs Viking Village.

Almost a century after Norwegian brothers John and Ole Larson founded the Independent Fish Company, which was renamed Viking Village in the 1970s, the commercial docks, shops and eateries remain a family affair. Larson owns The Seawife, an antique store filled with an assortment of collectibles, and is married to Kirk Larson, whose father took over the operation when his own father retired and renamed it Viking Village.

Read the full story at Jersey’s Best

Virus Economic Damage to Commercial Fishing Grows Daily

April 2, 2020 — The pulse of Viking Village’s commercial fishing industry this year will greatly depend on how long the coronavirus extends into the coming spring and summer season, local leaders say. But boats are already tied up at the docks.

Viking Village Inc. Commercial Seafood Producers in Barnegat Light sells a large chunk of its catch right now to wholesalers, who last week were still buying product and freezing it, but with restaurants closed down to all but takeout and delivery, the chain is tightened.

“There’s no place to sell them in the restaurants,” said scallop fleet owner Kirk Larson, whose family co-owns Viking Village with the Puskas family. Larson was speaking about metropolitan markets beyond New Jersey as well. Prices paid had also dropped. “We’re selling a few in New York markets, but not as many as we’re catching.

“If it doesn’t get sold at a seafood market, it doesn’t go anywhere, because restaurants are closed. They can sell takeout, but that’s not like when restaurants are full-bore. In summer, I don’t know what’s going to happen,” Larson said last week. “There are plenty of stocks to catch; it’s whether we will have a place to sell them.”

Read the full story at The Sand Paper

Shell, EDF Offshore Wind Venture Teams With Rutgers

June 10, 2019 — Atlantic Shores Offshore Wind LLC – a 50/50 joint venture between Shell New Energies US LLC and EDF Renewables North America – has signed a memorandum of understanding with New Jersey-based Rutgers University to advance ocean research and monitoring in support of offshore wind development.

The five-year cooperative agreement, which will initiate this summer, will help bolster ongoing efforts at the Rutgers Center for Ocean Observing Leadership (RUCOOL). Together, Atlantic Shores and RUCOOL will focus on advancing approaches to collecting and analyzing meteorological, oceanographic and marine bioacoustic data. The work will build upon efforts RUCOOL is already undertaking in partnership with the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities (NJBPU).

The Atlantic Shorts joint venture formed in December 2018 to co-develop a 183,353-acre lease area located approximately 8-20 miles off the New Jersey coast between Atlantic City and Barnegat Light.

Data collected from both inside and outside the Atlantic Shores lease area will support Atlantic Shores’ commitment to ground its development decisions upon sound scientific research, as well as contribute to the broader regional knowledge of the Mid-Atlantic marine environment, the company says.

Read the full story at North American Wind Power

East Coast Fishing Coalition Continues Legal Challenge to Planned Wind Farm Off New York

WASHINGTON — December 1, 2017 — The following was released by the Fisheries Survival Fund:

A coalition of East Coast fishing businesses, organizations, and communities, led by the Fisheries Survival Fund (FSF), has taken the next step in its legal challenge to a planned wind farm off the coast of New York. FSF and its co-plaintiffs argue that the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) awarded the lease for the New York Wind Energy Area (NY WEA) to Norwegian energy company Statoil without fully considering the impact on fishermen and other stakeholders, in neglect of its responsibilities as stewards of ocean resources.

The plaintiffs outlined their arguments in a brief filed Tuesday in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia. In the brief, FSF criticizes BOEM’s claim that it is not the agency’s job to resolve conflicts among new and pre-existing ocean users in the NY WEA. In an October filing, BOEM wrote that it is “not the ‘government steward of the ‘ocean commons,’’” a claim that FSF calls “unbecoming.” In fact, BOEM’s own website states: “The bureau is responsible for stewardship of U.S. [Outer Continental Shelf] energy and mineral resources, as well as protecting the environment that development of those resources may impact.”

FSF also writes that the NY WEA, an expanse of ocean nearly twice the size of Washington, D.C., is a poor location for a wind farm, and that BOEM and Statoil have alternately claimed that it is both too early and too late to raise objections to the lease. Statoil previously stated that vacating the lease would “squander the resources and the five years that BOEM has expended to date in the leasing process,” even as BOEM promises it will consider measures to mitigate the impacts of a wind farm later in the process. By then, after more time and resources have been expended, a wind farm “will be all but a foregone conclusion,” FSF writes.

Additionally, FSF argues that evaluating alternatives and considering conflicting ocean uses from the start would ultimately benefit BOEM and energy developers, ensuring they do not expend vast resources developing poorly located wind farms. The brief cites the ongoing debacle over the Cape Wind energy project, an approved wind farm off Cape Cod, Massachusetts, as an example of what can go wrong when BOEM and a developer ram through an agreement and become too invested to turn back. After the project “slogged through state and federal courts and agencies for more than a decade,” delays and uncertainty have jeopardized, if not eliminated, Cape Wind’s financing and power purchase agreements, according to the brief.

The plaintiffs in this case are the Fisheries Survival Fund; the Borough of Barnegat Light, New Jersey; The Town Dock; Seafreeze Shoreside; Sea Fresh USA; Rhode Island Fishermen’s Alliance; Garden State Seafood Association; Long Island Commercial Fishing Association; the Town of Narragansett, Rhode Island; the Narragansett Chamber of Commerce; the City of New Bedford, Massachusetts; and the Fishermen’s Dock Co-Operative of Point Pleasant, New Jersey.

While the fishing groups hold wide-ranging views about offshore wind energy development, they all agree that the siting process for massive wind energy projects “should not be a land rush, but rather reasoned, fully informed, intelligent, and cognizant of the human environment,” according to the brief.

About the Fisheries Survival Fund
The Fisheries Survival Fund (FSF) was established in 1998 to ensure the long-term sustainability of the Atlantic sea scallop fishery. FSF participants include the vast majority of full-time Atlantic scallop fishermen from Maine to Virginia. FSF works with academic institutions and independent scientific experts to foster cooperative research and to help sustain this fully rebuilt fishery. FSF also works with the federal government to ensure that the fishery is responsibly managed.

Trump Plan to Open Up Monuments Draws Industry Praise, Environmentalists’ Ire

Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke is also moving to expand fishing, hunting at national monuments

September 21, 2017 — More than 100 miles off Cape Cod, a patch of the Atlantic Ocean conceals four undersea mountains, three canyons deeper than the Grand Canyon, and serves as a refuge for the world’s most endangered sea turtle.

It also supports a buffet of tuna and swordfish vital to the livelihood of New Jersey fisherman Dan Mears, whose lines have been banned from the zone since former President Barack Obama designated the area as the Atlantic’s first federal marine preserve last year.

But the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts could reopen to commercial fishing if President Donald Trump enacts the recent recommendations of his Interior Secretary to reduce protections of land and sea preserves known as national monuments.

“I couldn’t believe it when they cut that off,” said Mr. Mears, 58, of Barnegat Light, N.J., who owns the 70-foot fishing vessel Monica, and estimates he lost about one third of his catch after the area was closed to him and other types of commercial fishing last year. “It’s going to be huge if we can get that back.”

Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, whose department manages federal lands, is making major moves to open up protected swaths of land and ocean to industry, recreational hunting, shooting and fishing.

In Hawaii, Mr. Zinke’s recommendation to allow fishing in the Remote Pacific islands about 300 miles south of the Hawaiian Islands could increase the catch there by about 4%, said Sean Martin, president of the Hawaii Longline Association.

“That may not sound like much, but if you cut your salary by 3% or 4% it’s a big deal to you,” Mr. Martin said. “Certainly this will have economic importance to us.”

Read the full story at the Wall Street Journal

Barnegat Light Scalloper ‘Apparently Fell Overboard’ and Dies in Massachusetts

May 24, 2017 — The Fishermen’s Story Memorial at the tip of Barnegat Light will have another name engraved in memory of commercial fishermen who died in their line of work, this one Pete Benya.

“Barnegat Light is again mourning the loss of one of our own,” says the Facebook page of the Fishermen’s Story Memorial Fund.

Capt. Pete Benya, 59, died the weekend of Sunday, May 14, when his body was found floating in Saquatucket Harbor, Mass., and later identified, according to the Cape and Islands district attorney’s office.

Benya owned the Resolute and had been scalloping out of Barnegat Light for several years.

“Pete was making a few trips out of Harwich, Mass., and apparently fell overboard while at the dock,” said representatives from Lighthouse Marina, his home port in Barnegat Light.

“He will be sorely missed.”

Beth Mears, on behalf of the marina and the Fisherman’s Story Memorial, said having Benya’s name engraved on the monument  is “in the works.” She said she hopes to have it done in time for the Blessing of the Fleet on June 19 but is not sure if the work will be completed by then. The monument was erected in 2013 after Mears’ brother, Jimmy, was lost at sea.

Read the full story at The Sandpaper

Fishing groups seek Atlantic wind farm delay

December 8, 2016 — MINEOLA, N.Y. — Commercial fishing companies, trade groups and three fishing-based municipalities are seeking to delay the lease sale of an Atlantic Ocean site between New York and New Jersey that federal officials envision as the home of a massive offshore wind energy project.

The Associated Press obtained a copy of a 45-page motion ahead of its filing Thursday in federal court in Washington, D.C. It seeks a temporary restraining order halting the Dec. 15 lease sale. Those seeking a delay include groups representing scallop and squid fishermen, the Long Island Commercial Fishing Association and the city of New Bedford, Massachusetts.

The motion seeks to delay the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management’s plans for developers to build a 127-square-mile, 194-turbine offshore wind farm. The United States still has no offshore wind projects online, though BOEM has awarded 11 commercial offshore wind leases for sites in the Atlantic. Some major projects have been delayed by political opposition.

A BOEM spokeswoman said the agency doesn’t comment on pending litigation.

The country’s first offshore wind farm, a tiny project off Rhode Island with just a few turbines, is expected to debut this month.

The court motion argues that BOEM failed to consider alternative sites and contends that besides negative impacts on scallop and squid fishing, others who harvest fish species including summer flounder, mackerel, black sea bass and monkfish also would be negatively affected. When it announced final plans for the lease sale earlier this fall, BOEM said it had removed about 1,780 acres from the initial proposal because of environmental concerns.

The plaintiffs referred to that as a “diminutive change” in their motion. The fishing groups said they aren’t opposed to wind farms. But they argue that site alternatives weren’t considered and that conducting site analysis after a lease sale is completed will be too late.

“BOEM must carry out the proper analysis prior to officially leasing out areas to companies for construction, due to the importance of this fishery area,” said James Gutowski, president of the Fisheries Survival Fund, who is a scallop fisherman from Barnegat Light, New Jersey; the group is the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit.

“It must adequately and accurately characterize the potential impacts to the industry from construction on this site,” Gutowski said.

Read the full story at the Associated Press