Saving Seafood

Crew member fell asleep while piloting fishing boat wrecked in Cape Elizabeth in Saturday’s storm

January 18, 2024 — The owner of a fishing trawler that ran aground off Cape Elizabeth early Saturday morning says one of the crew members fell asleep after turning on the ship’s autopilot.

“[The crew member piloting the ship] fell asleep at the wheel and then just went straight into the beach,” said David Osier, owner of the Tara Lynn II and Osier’s Seafood in South Bristol. “Operator error is the cause of this accident.”

The Tara Lynn II is one of four ships in Osier’s commercial fishing fleet. On Saturday, the ship was en route to Portland Harbor after a day of trawling for groundfish. He said what happened next was recounted to him by the ship’s captain.

“They didn’t have the bridge alarm on, which is installed onboard to wake you up at certain time intervals,” Osier said. The ship’s autopilot then navigated the Tara Lynn II to the shallow waters.

Osier said the Tara Lynn was only doing four knots when it went up on the beach, but the tide was going out and the vessel got stuck in the sand.

Read the full article at Connecticut Public 

How Luke’s Lobster is Upending the World of Lobstering through a New Kind of Co-Op

March 15, 2017 — While many things can be said about the success of Luke Holden and his multi-million-dollar company, Luke’s Lobster, two things, in particular, stand out. Going into finance post-graduation isn’t the only key to making it big, and nothing is so good that it can’t be made better.

As is the case for many in the industry, Holden comes from a long line of fisherman and began his foray into the lobstering world as a kid. Following in the footsteps of his father and grandfather, Holden spent his summers lobstering in the waters off Cape Elizabeth in Maine. During a stint as an investment banker in Manhattan in 2007, he realized that high-quality, affordable lobster rolls weren’t a thing in the city.

From that moment on, he made it his mission to change the lobster roll scene, and in 2009, the first Luke’s Lobster officially opened its doors in the East Village. With little-to-no business experience and a $15,000 loan from his father, Holden and his Craigslist-found business partner made Luke’s profitable within three weeks of being in business.

Read the full story at Paste Magazine

Annie Tselikis runs the Maine Lobster Dealers’ Association

October 24th, 2016 — Annie Tselikis (it’s pronounced Sill-eek-us) is the executive director of the Maine Lobster Dealers’ Association. That’s her part-time gig; her full-time work is as the marketing director for Maine Coast, a York-based wholesaler of lobster and seafood. We called the Cape Elizabeth native up to talk about Maine’s largest fishery, just as the European Union announced that it would reject Sweden’s request to ban Maine lobster from sale. (Phew.) Our conversation moved swiftly to about a dozen other topics; Tselikis is only 34 but she has packed a great deal into her career already. Starting with her deckhand days.

TALL ORDER: We reached Tselikis by cell phone as she was driving to Boston for a meeting about Tall Ships Boston, scheduled for summer of 2017. What do lobster dealers care about such things? “The tall ships are tying up on the Boston Fish Pier.” That’s where Maine Coast, as well as a lot of other dealers, have offices. “There are trucks on and off that pier from 3 a.m. to 9 p.m. every night.” It’s going to be a shipping nightmare, but obviously, a beautiful spectacle, so Tselikis is plotting a reception for her Maine Coast customers. “This will be the biggest Tall Ships festival ever,” she said. “Then on top of that, I am going to make things worse for our Boston facility. Those guys are going to hate me.”

RESUME: When Tselikis was a student at Connecticut College, she studied photography and documentary and spent the fall of her junior year at Maine’s SALT Institute. Fisheries hadn’t entered her mind. Maine never left it though, and she decided after college to join friends who were working for Casco Bay Lines as deckhands. She ended up staying two years. Her parents might not have been thrilled, but the economy wasn’t great in 2004 and money was steady on the ferry. Also, fun. “There were days in the summer time where it sort of felt like camp for grownups,” she said.

FISH TALK: That’s where she started to get a sense of the complex world of Maine’s fisheries. “I would hear fishermen talking about what was going in the industry,” she said. “Until that point, it just didn’t register with me that natural resource management was a thing.” That’s how most people are, she says. “They just see boats, they go to Harbor Fish and they buy lobster,” without a sense of the many moving parts involved (a partial list: buyers on the wharf, dealers with the trucks, holding tanks, processors, transportation everywhere from Portland to Hong Kong).

Read the full story at the Portland Press Herald 

A Restaurant’s Sales Pitch: Know Your Lobster

August 25, 2016 — It was a steamy summer day in New York in 2009 when Luke Holden, an investment banker, had a craving for a lobster roll. Not just any lobster roll, though. He longed for the “fresh off the docks” taste he enjoyed growing up in Cape Elizabeth, Me.

After an exhaustive search on New York’s streets, he came up dissatisfied and disappointed.

“Every lobster was served over a white tablecloth, extremely expensive, drowning in mayo and diluted with celery,” he said. “I wondered why all the great chefs in this city had screwed this up so badly.”

So that year, Mr. Holden decided to open an authentic Maine lobster shack in Manhattan. To replicate that fresh taste that he remembered, he would need to oversee, track and, where possible, own every step in the process.

Today, he owns 19 Luke’s Lobster restaurants, two food trucks and a lobster tail cart in the United States, and five shacks in Japan.

He holds an ownership stake in a co-op of Maine fishermen, which allows him to track where and how the lobsters are caught, and control the quality, freshness and pricing. He also owns the processing plant, Cape Seafood, that packages and prepares the lobsters for his restaurants.

“We’re able to trace every pound of seafood we serve back to the harbor where it was sustainably caught and to support fishermen we know and trust,” Mr. Holden said. “There’s no middleman in that whole chain.”

This might seem obsessive. But in business, it’s called a vertical integration strategy.

Read the full story at The New York Times