Saving Seafood

Push for wind farm off Wilmington’s coast continues despite local concerns

December 20, 2021 — Bill Franks squinted his eyes on a sunny and unusually warm mid-December day and looked out into the Atlantic from the sandy shore of Caswell Beach.

“I support clean energy, so they would be good to have,” said the Michigan resident, visiting family in Brunswick County for the holidays, when asked if having wind turbines in the near-shore waters off the North Carolina coast would alter his view of vacationing here. “But I just don’t know. I guess it depends on what they’d look like from here.”

That’s the rub for many coastal officials in this pocket of Southeastern North Carolina. While most have said they openly support the push to a carbon-free energy future, they also don’t want to kill the golden goose of their economies — namely the oceanfront views that draw tourists and an increasing number of full-time residents to their beach towns.

A new supplemental environmental assessment is likely to do little to alleviate concerns of coastal officials and residents worried the development of the Wilmington East Wind Energy Area, roughly 17 miles south of Bald Head Island, could ruin views from their oceanfront communities.

Read the full story at StarNews Online

 

$14.7 Million NOAA Marine Debris Grant Includes Mid-Atlantic Projects

September 13, 2021 — The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is tackling the growing issue of marine debris, funding cleanup and research projects nationwide. A $7.3 million grant is matched to a total of $14.7 million—which will make 25 different projects possible, including some in the Bay region.

Of the funding, about $1.4 million will support five marine debris research projects, including one in Maryland and one in Delaware. The grantees will “investigate and identify the critical input pathways for marine debris introduction into the coastal zone,” NOAA says.

Read the full story at Chesapeake Bay Magazine

 

eVTR Instructional Webinar Next Tuesday Afternoon

August 2, 2021 — The following was released by NOAA Fisheries:

The second in a series of instructional webinars to provide vessel operators and others with a walkthrough of GARFO’s two electronic vessel trip reporting applications- the Fish Online Web app, and the Fish Online iOS app- will be held Tuesday, August 3 from 4:00 to 6:00 PM.

This webinar is focused on operators in Port Agent Josh O’Connor’s area of Southern New Jersey, Delaware and Maryland.

Future instructional webinars will include demonstrations of the Atlantic Coastal Cooperative Statistics Program’s (ACCSP) eTrips/mobile v2 and eTrips online applications. Other eVTR applications may also be included in these webinars. Anyone is welcome to join any webinar.

How Do I Join?

More information can be found on our webpage for this series: How to Use Electronic Vessel Trip Reporting Apps. This page includes webinar login information.

Questions?

Contact your local Port Agent.

DELAWARE: A much bigger wind farm could be coming to the Delmarva coast

July 21, 2021 — The company developing a wind farm off the coast of southern Delaware and Maryland is hoping to start a second one. It could be several times the size of the first.

Ørsted’s 120-megawatt Skipjack wind farm under development off the Delmarva coast is not expected to come online for another 5 years. But the Danish renewable energy company has already submitted a bid to the Maryland Public Service Commission to build Skipjack Wind 2. At 760 megawatts, more than six times the size of Skipjack 1, the proposed Skipjack Wind 2 could power up to 250,000 homes on the peninsula.

The renewable energy credits from both projects would go to Maryland. But Ørsted’s Mid-Atlantic Market Manager Brady Walker said at a virtual open house Monday Delaware will still benefit—from things like a “supplier day” the company hosted in Bethany beach.

“That’s a great example of, whether it’s a small business or someone that wants to be employed or get otherwise involved in the industry, where you can come and meet our prime contractors and find out how you can bid for business and become part of the industry,” he said.

At this point, Skipjack 2 is just a proposal. Walker told members of the public that its size is not set in stone.

Read the full story at DPM

Crab Supply Pricing Out Delaware Restaurants as Some Crabbers Find Success Another Way

June 17, 2021 — For many Delaware families, summer means picnic tables full of steamed blue claw crabs or crab cake dinners at a favorite restaurant. But this summer, those same crabs will cost much higher prices, if you can find them at all while dining out.

Mrs. Robino’s, an Italian restaurant in Wilmington, for example, has temporarily cancelled their popular Thursday crab nights because of problems getting enough crab meat and the cost with the crab they can get their hands on.

“Now, it’s to the point where it’s just so expensive, it’s like tripled in price just about,” Andrea Wakefield of Mrs. Robino’s said.

Two issues are playing havoc with blue crab in Delaware: supply chain disruptions still upending shipping of crabs from places like Louisiana and North Carolina, where the crabs are caught in the winter months; and more locally, an inability to find crabbing manpower in the Chesapeake Bay region of Maryland and Delaware. The Chesapeake Bay crabbing industry also got off to a slow start this year due to lower numbers of adult crabs, but experts say that it isn’t a dire situation longterm.

The problems have combined to create a shortage and high prices for restaurants.

Read the full story at NBC 10

THE VIRGINIAN PILOT: Congress must ban drilling off Virginia coast

March 16, 2021 — For a state heavily dependent on Navy operations and tourism to drive its economy, particularly in Hampton Roads, Virginia should welcome efforts to permanently ban oil and gas exploration off the coast.

The prospect of drilling rigs perched in the Atlantic — with their perpetual threat of environmental calamity — should send shivers across the commonwealth, and a new push to enact a ban deserves Virginia’s enthusiastic endorsement.

Rep. Donald McEachin, a Democrat representing Virginia’s 4th Congressional District, introduced a bill barring the Interior Department from issuing leases for exploration or production of oil or gas off Virginia, North Carolina, Maryland and Delaware. McEachin has introduced similar legislation in the past, but it got nowhere.

In recent years, the fate of drilling off Virginia’s coast has been swinging in the partisan political winds.

Read the full story at The Virginian Pilot

More delays for wind farm off Delaware coast

March 15, 2021 — For the second time in less than a year, and this time for much longer, Ørsted is pushing back the expected commissioning date for its Skipjack Wind Farm off the coast of Delaware.

In an announcement Feb. 26, Brady Walker, Mid-Atlantic market manager for Ørsted, said the Danish company had notified the Maryland Public Service Commission that it now expects Skipjack to achieve commercial operations by the end of the second quarter of 2026.

In April 2020, Ørsted announced it was pushing the anticipated completion date for the 120-megawatt-producing wind farm back one year, from 2022 to 2023. At the time, company officials said the reasons for that delay were because of COVID and the federal government taking longer to analyze the impacts from the build-out of U.S. offshore wind projects.

Read the full story at the Cape Gazette

As Ørsted seeks interconnection site, Skipjack delayed until 2026

March 3, 2021 — Ørsted, the Danish multinational green energy company developing the Skipjack Wind Farm off Delaware’s coast, has delayed plans to bring its wind turbines online until the second quarter of 2026, four years after what it originally proposed.

The delay comes as Ørsted is continuing to search for sites for Skipjack’s transmission cable to make landfall and to build an interconnection site. Ørsted originally planned to do so at Fenwick Island State Park under a memorandum of understanding with the Delaware Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control.

Those plans were ultimately dropped last July, after it became clear that construction would disturb wetlands at the state park.

“Ørsted is using the additional time created to further investigate, evaluate, and optimize critical components of the project like cable landfall and interconnection,” said Brady Walker, Ørsted’s Mid-Atlantic market manager. “We are committed to a transparent process in making this important decision and will engage stakeholders at all levels before any final decisions are made.”

Read the full story at the Delaware Business Times

Delaware’s estuaries getting help from Congress

February 10, 2021 — Congress recently moved to invest in the nation’s estuaries, including two in the First State.

The Protect and Restore America’s Estuaries Act was signed into law last month – doubling funding for the National Estuary Program.

It can now receive up to $50 million for use across 28 estuary programs nationwide.

“This is great news for Delaware because it means that there will be more support for two of our estuaries – the Delaware River and Bay and the Inland Bays,” said Chris Bason, the executive director for the Delaware Center for the Inland Bays. “The support will be for the National Estuary Program (NEP), which works collaboratively with communities to protect and restore the fish and wildlife habitat and the water quality of our estuaries.”

Bason says the most Congress could send Delaware’s way is $1 million per estuary program in the state.

Bason says that would be a significant increase and bolster work to educate residents and visitors about Delaware’s estuaries.

Read the full story at DPM

KRISTEN MINOGUE: Shark tags reveal an endangered species returning to natural refuge

December 28, 2020 — In the coastal waters of the mid-Atlantic, an endangered shark is making a comeback. Led by former Smithsonian postdoc Chuck Bangley, scientists at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC) tagged and tracked nearly two dozen dusky sharks over the course of a year as part of the Smithsonian’s Movement of Life Initiative. They discovered that a protected zone put in place 15 years ago is paying off — but with climate change, it may need some tweaking.

Dusky sharks are what Bangley calls “the archetypal big, gray shark.” Born 3 feet long, as babies, they’re already big enough to prey on some other shark species. But they’re slow-growing. It can take 16 to 29 years for them to mature. If their populations take a hit, recovery can take decades.

An endangered species, duskies aren’t very common in Delaware waters. When they do surface, they’re easily mistaken for sandbar sharks. But in this new study, the Smithsonian tracked dusky sharks swimming past the southern tip of Delaware on their migrations up and down the Atlantic. For conservationists, it’s a sign that protections put in place are slowly starting to pay off.

The sharks’ numbers plummeted in the 1980s and 1990s, when well-intentioned managers offered sharks as an “alternative fishery,” while other stocks, like cod, were collapsing. The overfishing that followed wiped out anywhere from 65% to 90% of the Chesapeake’s duskies, said Bangley, now a postdoc at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia. Managers banned all intentional dusky shark fishing in 2000. Five years later, they created the Mid-Atlantic Shark Closed Area along the North Carolina coast. The zone prohibits bottom longline fishing, which can ensnare dusky sharks, for seven months of the year.

Read the full story at Delaware State News