Saving Seafood

With abundant biomass, US fishermen look to expand post-pandemic market for scup

February 12, 2021 — U.S. commercial scup, or porgy, landings peaked in 1981 at 21.73 million pounds, but dipped to 2.66 million pounds by 2000. In recent years, commercial fishermen have not landed the commercial quota, but there have been industry-wide efforts focused on closing the gap.

The commercial fishery runs year-round, and mostly in U.S. federal waters during the winter and state waters during the summer. A coastwide commercial quota is allocated between three quota periods: winter I, summer, and winter II. Total ex-vessel value in 2018 was USD 9.7 million (EUR 8 million), resulting in an average price per pound of USD 0.73 (EUR 0.60). NOAA data shows landings from October to the end of December 2020 are below last year’s landings.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Northeast scup: With abundant biomass, fishermen look to expand market post-pandemic

February 8, 2021 — Commercial scup, or porgy, landings peaked in 1981 at 21.73 million pounds but dipped to 2.66 million pounds by 2000. In recent years, commercial fishermen have not landed the commercial quota, and there have been industry-wide efforts focused on closing the gap.

The commercial fishery is year-round, and mostly in federal waters during the winter and state waters during the summer. A coastwide commercial quota is allocated between three quota periods: winter I, summer and winter II. Total ex-vessel value in 2018 was $9.70 million, resulting in an average price per pound of $0.73. NOAA data shows landings from October to the end of December 2020 are below last year’s landings.

Despite being highly abundant, and not considered overfished, the industry has grappled with achieving a harvest of the full quota every year, in part because commercial fishermen often do not fish for scup when the dock price is depressed. If market demand were increased, prices and opportunities for fleets to harvest the fish would follow. 

Dave Aripotch, a commercial scup commercial fisherman in Montauk, N.Y., says 2020 was decent, but that he pulled in less volume than previous years.

“A lot of times with scup, if you catch them, you catch a lot of them. This year, there were a lot of small and mediums around, and this means the market gets plugged even for jumbo.”

Read the full story at National Fisherman

She’s got the scoop: Bonnie Brady of Montauk, New York

October 2, 2020 — “I picked up the chalk,” says Bonnie Brady. “That was the end of my life.” Twenty years later, Brady, 57, recalls the meeting that changed the course of her life and put a scrappy journalist on her path as a doggedly determined advocate for fishermen and ocean habitat.

“I had never really paid attention to the fishing thing,” Brady adds. She came to fishing through marriage after landing in Montauk, N.Y., an iconic Long Island fishing town.

Like many community fisheries advocates, she recalls that time of her life via council proceedings: “It was around 2000, Amendment 13” to the Northeast Multispecies Fishery Management Plan.

“Dave was out fishing, and he said, ‘Can you go to this meeting and find out what happens?’” Brady adds that once she got to the fishermen’s forum hosted by the Cornell Cooperative Extension, the room was awash with a range of complaints from a crowd of fishermen. She stood up, grabbed the chalk and started to ask questions. “If you were to list the top five problems, what are they? I put myself in the middle. Being a reporter, I wanted to see what the main points were. It was obvious these guys had real issues. I had never paid attention to any of that before I met Dave.”

Brady married Montauk fisherman Dave Aripotch in 1998. “He’s a trawler — fluke, scup, black sea bass, squid, whiting. He used to groundfish, but he leases his quota now,” Brady says. “He started going offshore gillnetting when he was 15. He would sneak off unbeknownst to his parents. He would take off for a couple of weeks!”

Read the full story at National Fisherman