The closure will allow the fish to spawn.
October 30, 2017 — Part of the New England herring fishery will be shut down for two weeks to allow the fish to spawn.
The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission says samples from Massachusetts and New Hampshire show a high number of spawning herring in the area. That means a stretch of coast and ocean from Cape Cod to southern Maine will close from Oct. 29 to Nov. 11.
Read the full story from the Associated Press at the Portland Press Herald
October 25, 2017 — CHATHAM, Mass. — The concept of fish habitat is pretty simple. Fish, like people, need a place where they can find food and shelter to thrive.
Part of managing fisheries is identifying and protecting that habitat. But the ocean is a big place and a difficult environment to do analysis. Politically, it’s also fractious terrain as fishermen worry about the balance between conservation and being shut out of traditional and productive fishing grounds.
And so, it took 14 years for the New England Fishery Management to craft regulations protecting fish habitat, passing Omnibus Habitat Amendment 2 in June of 2015. But after over two years of review by the council and the National Marine Fisheries Service, it still hasn’t been implemented, and Cape scallop fishermen are worried they may lose hundreds of millions of dollars worth of scallops that will perish before they get permission, under the habitat amendment, to enter closed areas and get them.
“It’s a desert with scallops,” said Seth Rolbein, director of the Cape Cod Fisheries Trust, describing what he said is sandy bottom 50 miles east of Cape Cod in an area closed to fishing since 1994. Bottom surveys, including video surveying, have shown it is loaded with scallops that should be harvested before they die within the next year or two.
“These are older, mature scallops,” Rolbein said. “If we let them go moribund we will have destroyed an important economic resource.”
The New England council estimated fishermen would gain $218 million in income in 2018 and $313 million in the first three years, largely from access to this mother lode of scallops.
Provincetown fisherman Beau Gribbin said many of these scallops are 8 years old, they die off at 10, and the meat becomes less desirable after eight years.
Gribbin employs six people to run two boats out of Provincetown. He scallops from December to July and then goes lobstering for the rest of the year. He owns a portion of the overall scallop quota and has to stop scalloping when it is caught. Although it would take him 12-14 hours each way to travel 84 miles to the closed area, he could catch his daily quota of 600 pounds in just a couple of hours because they are so plentiful. It can take 12 hours to do that in other areas and cause more damage to the bottom habitat used by fish and other species.
Plus, it helps him market and plan his fishing year if he knows he will be able to catch his daily quota each day.
“The time is now to harvest them,” said Andrew Minkiewicz, an attorney for the Fisheries Survival Fund, which represents many of the large New Bedford scallop vessels. These large vessels, known as limited access scallopers, have much higher catch limits, in the tens of thousands of pounds per trip, while the smaller boats in the 40- to 50-foot range and known as general category scallop vessels are limited to 600 pounds per day.
Read the full story at the Cape Cod Times
October 24, 2017 — CAPE COD, Mass. — The discovery Monday of another dead North Atlantic right whale off Cape Cod escalated the already fevered concern among Canadian and U.S. marine scientists and fishery managers on the imperiled state of the highly endangered species.
The discovery of the severely decomposed whale brings the 2017 death count to at least 16, with the majority of the mortalities — attributed exclusively by researchers to ship strikes and gear entanglements — occurring in Canadian waters.
Four of the right whale deaths have occurred off the coast of Massachusetts.
“Our research and data have shown us that ship-strike or entanglement are the only definitive cause of death,” said Mike Asaro, NOAA Fisheries’ Gloucester-based marine mammal and sea turtle branch chief for the Atlantic region. “There’s nothing else we’re aware of.”
October 20, 2017 — BOSTON — More than 14 years after a barge spilled 98,000 gallons of oil into Buzzards Bay, state and federal officials have announced a proposed settlement that would require the transportation company in charge of the vessel to pay more than $13 million for the damage done to migratory birds and their habitats.
In April 2003, a Bouchard Transportation Co. barge traveling to the power plant on the Cape Cod Canal in Sandwich struck rocks south of Westport. The crash ruptured the barge’s hull and spilled thousands of gallons of oil into the bay, damaging salt marshes, beaches, and hundreds of birds such as loons, sea ducks, terns and shorebirds.
The settlement proposal by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the states of Massachusetts and Rhode Island was filed in U.S. District Court, where it must be approved before being finalized.
If the settlement is approved, it would bring the total amount of money paid to resolve claims filed by the Natural Resource Damages Trustee Council, a group composed of several state and federal agencies, up to $19 million. Bouchard previously paid $6 million for claims on shoreline resources, piping plovers, and other damage recovery efforts.
October 13, 2017 — NEW BEDFORD, Mass. — Judge William Young’s judgment filed Wednesday appeared to be the finish line to Carlos Rafael’s case. Young, though, by ordering the forfeiture of four vessels and every permit associated with the Bull Dog, the Olivia and Rafaela, the Lady Patricia and the Southern Crusader II began a new ripple effect throughout the commercial fishing industry revealing some questions but very little answers.
It’s likely NOAA will take center stage now that the Department of Justice has closed its case. NOAA can bring civil penalties to Rafael.
The Environmental Defense Fund released a statement after Young’s ruling calling for NOAA to “pursue civil remedies to further aid the victims of Carlos Rafael’s crimes.”
They can range from fines to indefinite bans within commercial fishing.
NOAA issued indefinite bans to James G. Spalt and Peter Spalt, former Cape Cod scallopers, in 1996 to go with a more than $4 million fine. More than 20 years later, they remain outside the industry with no way to return.
The allegations levied toward the Spalt brothers included some of the same offenses Rafael pleaded guilty to, but also expanded beyond falsifying fishing quotas.
Trump administration may reverse Obama decision creating monument
October 5, 2017 — BOSTON — In the course of the past year, a Connecticut-sized marine area off the coast of Cape Cod has been officially designated a national monument by one president and targeted for potential changes by the next.
It became subject to a new ban on commercial fishing, and now might have that ban removed.
Throughout the ping-ponging presidential decisions that have left the future of the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument somewhat murky, the same concerns Gov. Charlie Baker first raised almost two years ago remain on the mind of his top environmental official.
“I think we’ve always pointed to the process, and making sure there was enough of a process that we know the right decisions have been made,” Energy and Environmental Affairs Secretary Matthew Beaton said. “We weren’t definitely saying the right or wrong decision was made. We definitely think there is value in conservation of those resources, but it’s just is the management plan that’s put out as part of it the right one, and I think we would know that answer through a more robust process, and that’s what we’ve always pointed to as having not occurred.”
In September 2016, President Barack Obama declared the canyons and seamounts area, about 130 miles southeast of Massachusetts, the Atlantic Ocean’s first marine monument. When the White House changed hands this year, it was one of 27 monuments the President Donald Trump charged his interior secretary with reviewing.
Trump’s executive order called on Secretary Ryan Zinke to study certain monuments designated under the Antiquities Act, including those where the Interior Department determined the decision “was made without adequate public outreach and coordination with relevant stakeholders.”
September 27, 2017 — PORTSMOUTH, N.H. — Fishing regulators are shutting down a chunk of the New England coast to herring fishing for most of the month of October.
The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission says vessels in the Atlantic herring fishery cannot catch or possess the fish in the shuttered area from Oct. 1 to Oct. 28. The closed area stretches along a coastal area that runs from southern Maine to Cape Cod.
The fisheries commission says the decision is based on an analysis of samples of female herring in the area.
Read the full story from the Associated Press at the Greenwich Time
September 25, 2017 — The unexpected re-examination of the status of the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument under President Trump is a welcome development for New Bedford’s commercial fisherman.
The nearly 5,000 square miles of protected waters that lie about 130 miles southeast of Cape Cod was closed off to commercial fishing last year when President Obama designated the area the first Atlantic marine national monument. The decision came despite fishing industry outcries about both the lack of public input during the process and the harm to the fishing way of life.
Several industry organizations, including the New England Fishery Management Council, rightly pointed out, at the time, that fisheries have worked with government, scientific, and environmental communities for years to create regulations and oversight procedures to protect marine resources. And that important regional stakeholders were working on an ocean management plan to preserve resources.
Most notably, fisheries have been managed for more than 40 years under the federal Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act, put in place to protect marine environments, prevent overfishing, and promote biological sustainability of marine life.
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.”
New system confirms population decline as another death is reported in Canada.
September 21, 2017 — NEW BRUNSWICK, Canada — Another North Atlantic right whale death in Canadian waters has brought further attention to the threat of fishing gear to the endangered marine mammals.
“It’s considered a severe entanglement,” New England Aquarium spokesman Tony LaCasse said of the dead female, believed to be around 3 years old. Fishing rope and gear, including a snow crab pot, entangled the pale, deeply cut carcass, estimated to be 36 feet long.
The right whales, which frequent Cape Cod waters in late winter and early spring, are among the rarest whales in the world, with 524 estimated in 2015 in a report by the North Atlantic Right Whale Consortium. The death brought the total fatalities this year to 14, representing about 3 percent of the population.
The carcass was spotted by airplane surveyors Friday off Miscou Island, New Brunswick. The dead whale was towed to the island Monday, and a necropsy was performed Tuesday.
“The key thing is that the animal was entangled,” said Tonya Wimmer of the Marine Animal Response Society in Halifax, Nova Scotia.