Saving Seafood

MASSACHUSETTS: JACK SPILLANE: A fishing family sees opportunity at the old Revere Copper site

July 29, 2019 — It’s hard to say whether the old Revere Copper and Brass site is more ghost town or field of dreams.

Michael and Charlie Quinn, a son and father who recently purchased the 14-acre lot fronting on the northern part of New Bedford harbor, are going with the latter.

So will I.

The Quinns plan to make the old metal factory into a shipbuilding yard for their related Shoreline Resources businesses — which over three decades have included commercial fishing vessels, Standard Marine Outfitters and East Coast Fabrication, a ship repair shop.

So a family that fishes, outfits the boats for voyage and rehabs them is going to take a crack at building them. It’s a vertically integrated business that has been successful, and as New Bedford has become a hub of East Coast fishing, maybe it will work for them.

Read the full story at the New Bedford Standard-Times

MASSACHUSETTS: Aging New Bedford fleet helped drive purchase of former copper mill property

July 24, 2019 — The logic behind the decision by Charlie and Michael Quinn, the father and son owners of Quinn Fisheries, to buy the former Revere Copper and Brass property in New Bedford, Massachusetts, was not unlike that of a physician specializing in geriatric care setting up an office somewhere in the state of Florida.

New Bedford has an aging population, too, though it’s the commercial fishing vessels in this case that are elderly.

Undercurrent News confirmed Monday that the Quinns, who have been in the scallop harvesting business since at least 1986, purchased the 14-acre property at 24 North Front Street after it sat idle for about a decade. They plan to convert it into a shipyard, both repairing existing commercial fishing vessels and barges and also building new ones, Michael Quinn, operations manager for the six-vessel commercial scallop harvesting company, told Undercurrent.

The Quinns should have plenty of ships to work with, confirms a review by Undercurrent of the port’s roster of 338 commercial vessels maintained on a database. More than half — 180 scallop and groundfish vessels (53%) — were built before 1980 and another 38 were built between 1980 and 1985.

“We’ve been trying to grow our business here for a while and we see a need so we did our due diligence and everything seems to make sense for us,” Michael Quinn told Undercurrent.

Read the full story at Undercurrent News