Saving Seafood

Saving Seafood Executive Director Talks Lost NOAA HabCam

 

WASHINGTON (Saving Seafood) – May 25, 2016 — A $450,000 camera used to survey scallops on the ocean floor was lost Friday when a NOAA-chartered vessel towed it too close to a known ship wreck, as reported yesterday by the New Bedford Standard-Times.

This morning, Saving Seafood Executive Director Bob Vanasse spoke with New Bedford 1420 WBSM morning host Phil Paleologos about the accident, saying it proves the need for changes to the Atlantic scallop survey.

“The Fisheries Survival Fund [which represents members of the Atlantic scallop fleet] has been arguing for some time that the Federal scallop survey should not be done just by one single piece of equipment on one single vessel, but that there should be backups,” Mr. Vanasse said.

Compounding the problem the lost camera will have on this year’s Federal scallop survey is the fact that respected scientist Kevin Stokesbury, from UMass Dartmouth’s School for Marine Science and Technology, did not receive government funding for his own survey. Dr. Stokesbury’s surveys, which use cameras dropped into the ocean to take pictures of the seafloor, had previously been funded every year since 1999.

Mr. Vanasse called the loss of NOAA’s HabCam habitat camera last week “a combination of really bad circumstances.” He raised concerns about researchers aboard the R/V Hugh R. Sharp piloting the expensive HabCam so close to the well-known and charted wreckage of the Bow Mariner, where a cable apparently snagged the sunken ship and detached the camera. He also pointed out that many industry leaders raised concerns that a volunteer worker was piloting the HabCam at the time of the accident.

NOAA researchers are beginning efforts to find the HabCam today, nearly a week after it was lost, and say they will be able to make up for lost time. But scallop industry experts are unconvinced, according to Mr. Vanasse.

“That doesn’t really make sense,” Mr. Vanasse said of the industry perspective. “If they plan to go out for a certain time, they do that because they need it.”

The timing issue is further complicated because NOAA leases the Sharp from the University of Delaware for a limited period of time at high expense. Even if NOAA is able to salvage the HabCam, it will likely take more than a week of valuable time, Mr. Vanasse said.

The lost HabCam is not the first issue NOAA has had a with a research vessel in recent weeks. Earlier this month the R/V Henry B. Bigelow, the ship that surveys for groundfish and many other species on the East Coast, was delayed due to mechanical issues with its generators. The Bigelow was already running more than a month behind before its generator problems. Mr. Vanasse pointed out that Dr. Bill Karp, director of the Northeast Fisheries Science Center, has been pushing for NOAA to charter commercial fishing boats as backups, including at April’s NEFMC meeting (skip to 31:51 to listen to Dr. Karp).

“We need higher ups at NOAA to listen to what Dr. Karp has been saying about needing backups on the groundfish survey,” Mr. Vanasse said. “And we need everybody at NOAA to pay attention to what the [Fisheries] Survival Fund has been saying about having backups on the scallop survey.”

Listen to the full segment here

$450K NOAA scallop camera snared by sunken ship; loss could affect scallop catch limits

May 25, 2016 — The following is an excerpt from a story published in the New Bedford Standard-Times today:

NEW BEDFORD, Mass. — Researchers on a NOAA-chartered vessel lost a $450,000 camera that was being towed underwater Friday when a cable apparently snagged on a sunken ship near Delaware Bay, delaying vital scallop surveys and frustrating representatives of scallopers in the northeastern U.S.

Government surveys affect future catch limits for scallops, which is the highest-value species, by far, in New Bedford’s $330 million fishing industry.

Teri Frady, spokesperson for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), said the Hugh R. Sharp research vessel was conducting scallop surveys about 75 miles southeast of Delaware Bay, which separates New Jersey from Delaware, when underwater equipment known as a HabCam “separated from the tow cable and the vessel” in about 80 meters of water.

“The surveying was occurring around a known wreck, that of the Bow Mariner, and it appears likely the tow cable snagged on it,” a NOAA statement said.

Frady said efforts to find the HabCam — short for “habitat camera” — will begin Wednesday, with NOAA crews using an underwater rover to search near the shipwreck.

She said NOAA expects to complete most of its planned scallop survey despite the costly mishap, by relying on dredge surveys — which scoop up portions of the sea floor — and resuming photo surveys after the lost HabCam is found and repaired, or replaced.

Frady said the lost HabCam is insured, and its $450,000 value would be roughly the cost of building a replacement.

The Washington, D.C.-based Fisheries Survival Fund, which represents more than 250 scallop vessels in the northeastern fishery, said the incident has broad implications.

“The loss of a key piece of scallop survey equipment demonstrates the need for an overhaul of how the federal government assesses the species,” said a Survival Fund statement released Tuesday.

Survival Fund attorney Drew Minkiewicz said he was “frustrated, to say the least,” by the HabCam’s loss.

“It’s an accident that shouldn’t have happened — the wreck is well-known and its location is well known, so the captain shouldn’t have been towing in that area,” Minkiewicz said. “It’s going to take them over a week, of the very limited time on the research vessel Sharp, to get back on the survey. …We’re going to lose data.”

Read the full story at the New Bedford Standard-Times

Lost NOAA Camera Proves Federal Scallop Surveys Should Not Rely on Just One Vessel or Piece of Equipment

May 24, 2016 — The following was released by the Fisheries Survival Fund:

WASHINGTON — The loss of a key piece of scallop survey equipment demonstrates the need for an overhaul of how the federal government assesses the species. The Fisheries Survival Fund (FSF), which represents the majority of the limited access scallop fleet, calls for reforms to how scallop surveys are conducted to prevent such an incident from derailing surveys in the future.

For the past several years, the New England Fisheries Science Center (NEFSC) has chartered the Research Vessel (R/V) Hugh R. Sharp to conduct the Federal scallop survey. NEFSC employees work with the crew of the vessel to conduct dredge surveys and tow the HabCam IV habitat camera to take photos of the ocean bottom. Because the R/V Hugh R. Sharp is part of a university consortium, it must be chartered at significant expense and is only available for a limited number of days.

Last Thursday, May 19, 2016, while on the current scallop survey, the NEFSC crew lost the HabCam when it separated from the vessel. According to initial reports, it was inadvertently driven into the side of a known and charted shipwreck while being operated by a volunteer, losing at least a week of valuable sea time. Several knowledgeable sources have suggested that there could be as much as $100,000 in damage. Accordingly, the researchers must return to port to acquire a remote operated vehicle, which they will use to attempt to find the lost HabCam.

FSF has argued for years that the R/V Hugh R. Sharp is too expensive, and the federal survey should not rely on just one vessel or piece of equipment. FSF has urged the NEFSC to charter commercial fishing vessels at a fraction of the cost of the R/V Hugh R. Sharp. It would thus be able to survey more locations at the same cost, and no longer be reliant on one vessel and one piece of equipment.

The HabCam is an expensive piece of equipment. If the researchers do not find the HabCam, the cost of replacement and an incomplete Federal scallop survey will significantly impact the scallop fishery. Even if the researchers do find the HabCam, valuable days at sea will be wasted, leading to a reduction in the amount of seabed that the survey will be able to sample. This is likely to produce less accurate assessments of the scallop population.

Read the release here

Cape scallop fishermen cash in on grounds closer to home

May 23, 2016 — HARWICH PORT, Mass. — The scalloping was pretty poor north of Provincetown last month for the crew of Aidan’s Pride; they towed their dredge for hours just to get a hundred pounds.

So the Wellfleet scallop vessel, owned by Aidan Lapierre and captained by Sean Gray, was heading south to Maryland about three weeks ago, hoping for a more bountiful harvest, when it broke an outrigger in rough water transiting the Cape Cod Canal.

It turned out to be a fortunate break, as the delay lasted just long enough that they were still around when the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s fisheries office in Gloucester approved a plan May 3 to open a scallop-rich spot around 70 miles southeast of Saquatucket Harbor where Aidan’s Pride was tied up Thursday.

Catches in near-shore areas petered out over the past few years for members of what is known as the general category scallop fleet, smaller vessels around 40 feet in length that are only allowed to land 600 pounds of scallop meats a day. They were not able to harvest their allotted quota and petitioned NOAA and the New England Fishery Management Council to open a portion of the so-called Nantucket Lightship closed area exclusively to them because their vessels are not suited to the long trip to prime scalloping grounds on Georges Bank. In addition, the profits from the relatively small amount of scallops they were allowed to catch would quickly be eaten up by fuel costs.

Their only alternative: head south to the Mid-Atlantic.

But a window of opportunity opened after scientific surveys of the Nantucket Lightship area showed there weren’t enough mature scallops available to open it this year. Members of what is known as the limited access fleet — vessels 80 to more than 100 feet long which harvest as much as 17,000 pounds a day and are responsible for 95 percent of the scallop catch — wanted it kept closed to everyone.

“We chose not to go in there because the science said it wasn’t ready,” said Drew Minkiewicz, an attorney representing the Fisheries Survival Fund, which has many of the limited access fleet as members.

“We wanted the scallops to be larger, to get the maximum yield,” he said.

Since 2001, scallops have been managed under a rotational scheme much like letting a field lie fallow. Sampling is done to determine whether an area has enough large scallops to be opened to fishing. Areas with a lot of seed or immature scallops remain closed until they grow large enough for harvest.

It’s an approach that works but allowing someone into an area before it’s ready violates that management principle, Minkiewicz said. Scallopers faced with only being able to land 600 pounds would likely sort through the catch, discarding smaller animals in favor of the large ones that fetched higher prices, he said.

“They’re human,” he said. “We don’t blame them for it, but they will kill a lot more scallops than 300,000 pounds.”

Kevin Stokesbury, principal investigator at University of Massachusetts Dartmouth’s sea scallop research program, is also opposed to letting general category boats into the Lightship area, saying the dredge would likely kill a lot of small scallops. Surveys and studies by UMass Dartmouth’s School of Marine Science and Technology showed a small amount of growth actually doubled the amount of meat available. He agreed with Minkiewicz’s argument that killing off large numbers of young scallops, even if limited by a relatively small quota, could significantly affect future harvests in the area.

“While 300,000 pounds of harvest is not a lot compared to the biomass there, how many small scallops will you have to sort through to get to the few large ones?” he said.

Read the full story at the Cape Cod Times

Scallopers to White House: Marine monument a bad idea

May 6, 2016 — A fishing trade group that represents scallopers from Maine to Virginia has joined Northeast groundfishermen in opposing the designation of any marine national monuments in New England waters.

The Fisheries Survival Fund (FSF) penned a May 4 letter to Obama administration officials stating its opposition to the establishment of the monuments while also criticizing the unilateral process — presidential decree through the Antiquities Act — being considered for designating them.

“A monument designation, with its unilateral implementation and opaque process, is the exact opposite of the fisheries management process in which we participate,” FSF legal counsels David Frulla and Andrew Minkiewicz wrote to Christy Goldfuss and Whitley Saumwebber, executives in the White House Council on Environmental Quality. “Public areas and public resources should be managed in an open and transparent manner, not an imperial stroke of the pen.”

The FSF letter comes almost two months after Goldfuss, the managing director of the White House environmental council, told fishing stakeholders at a March 24 meeting in Boston the White House has shelved the proposal pushed by environmental and conservation groups to establish a marine national monument about 80 miles east of Cape Ann in the area around Cashes Ledge.

Read the full story at the Gloucester Times

Atlantic Sea Scallop group opposes an Atlantic Marine Monument; says it contradicts the President’s own order

WASHINGTON – May 4, 2016 – The organization representing the Atlantic sea scallop industry, one of the most economically valuable fisheries in the nation, has written to the White House opposing the creation of an Atlantic Marine Monument, noting that such an action subverts public processes, and contradicts the President’s own executive order on public participation in the regulatory process.

The Fisheries Survival Fund (FSF), an organization that comprises the majority of the Limited Access Atlantic sea scallop fleet, is one of the many stakeholders that frequently participates in the public fisheries management process. FSF opposes any attempts to circumvent this process, as noted in the letter.

“We strongly urge the President to not designate any marine monuments in New England, but rather to allow the public process to continue moving forward,” states the letter, which was sent to the White House Council on Environmental Quality. “Let the President’s legacy be that he allowed the public to have a voice in how we manage our shared resources.”

The White House has been considering designating an offshore monument in the Northeast Atlantic at the behest of several environmental groups, an authority granted by the Antiquities Act. President Bush previously used this authority to create two expansive monuments in the Pacific Ocean around Hawaii and the Northern Mariana Islands.

As argued in the letter, “Public areas and public resources should be managed in an open and transparent manner, not an imperial stroke of the pen.” In fact, several regulations have already been developed through the Council process that ensure fisheries are properly conserving and managing marine resources.

FSF’s position mirrors that of Executive Order 13563, authored by President Obama himself, which states in part that regulations must be based on the best available science, involve public participation, and include greater coordination across agencies. The current management system is more consistent with these standards than a monument designation, which could be abused by a few select insiders. Through regional councils, the government is already protecting Cashes Ledge and deep-water corals.

If the Administration insists on the designation of a monument, the President should accept recommendations made by members of the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC) Rhode Island Delegation, in consultation with other regional fisheries organizations, and approved unanimously by the ASMFC. Their proposal would ensure the protection of deep-water corals and ocean canyon substrates while allowing for fishing that would not affect the protected areas.

Read the full FSF letter to the White House here

Scallop fishermen poised for fight over shellfish

April 19, 2016 — PORTLAND, Maine — Scallop fishing has increased dramatically off some parts of New England recently, and fishermen and regulators will soon meet to discuss how to avoid overexploiting the valuable shellfish.

The concern over scallop fishing centers on the northern Gulf of Maine, a management area that stretches roughly from the waters off of Boston to the Canadian border. Scallop grounds off of northern Massachusetts have been especially fertile, prompting increased fishing in that area.

The New England Fishery Management Council, a regulatory arm of the federal government, will hold a public meeting about the issue Wednesday and decide how to proceed.

Part of the concern arises from the fact that different classes of fishing boats harvest scallops in the area, and not all of them are restricted by a quota system. Alex Todd, a Maine-based fisherman who fishes off of Gloucester, Massachusetts, said he and others feel the rules are not equal.

“We’re playing by two different sets of rules,” Todd said, adding that fishermen who follow the quota system could reach quota as soon as next month.

But Drew Minkiewicz, an attorney for Fisheries Survival Fund who represents many fishermen who don’t have to abide by the quota system, said he thinks the boats can coexist.

Read the full story at The Salt Lake Tribune

New York Times spotlights perils faced by Atlantic scallop fleet

April 18, 2016 – In an April 15 story, the New York Times described in detail the challenges faced at sea by members of the limited access scallop fleet. The story covered the rescue of the Carolina Queen III, which ran aground off the Rockaways Feb. 25, during a storm with waves cresting as high as 14 feet. The following is an excerpt from the story:

Scallop fishing may not conjure up the derring-do of those catching crabs in the icy waters of the Bering Strait or the exploits of long-line tuna fisherman chronicled on shows like “The Deadliest Catch.” But the most dangerous fishing grounds in America remain those off the Northeast Coast — more dangerous than the Bering Sea, according to data collected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

From 2000 to 2009, the years covered by the agency’s data, 504 people died while fishing at sea and 124 of them were in the Northeast.

The scallop industry had the second-highest rate of fatalities: 425 deaths per 100,000 workers. Among all workers in the United States over the same period, according to the C.D.C., there were four deaths per 100,000 workers. The size of the crew and the time at sea contribute to the dangers.

Drew Minkiewicz, a lawyer who represents the Fisheries Survival Fund, said that since 2010, the number of vessels permitted to fish for scallops has been limited, and with fewer unregistered ships at sea, there have been fewer accidents.

The Atlantic sea scallop — Placopecten magellanicus — has been popular since the 1950s, when Norwegian immigrants first scoured the seas south of New Bedford, Mass. The supply could swing between scarcity and plenty, but in the 1980s huge algae blooms known as brown tides appeared several years in a row and threatened to destroy the scallops’ ecosystem on the East Coast. Even after those tides passed, the industry almost did itself in by overfishing. Only after regulations were passed in the 1990s and the industry banded together with the scientific community to improve fishing techniques did the fisheries rebound.

Now, scalloping along the Atlantic Coast from Maine to North Carolina is among the most lucrative fishing in the world. In 2014, the catch was estimated to be worth more than $424 million.

The industry operates under strict guidelines, many aimed at ensuring sustainability of the fisheries. To fish some areas with known scallop beds, a permit is needed, and the haul is capped. Open-sea fishing, on the other hand, is restricted only by the annual 32-days-at-sea limit.

The clock is always ticking.

“We get so few days to go out, we have to find every efficiency to maximize our days at sea,” said Joe Gilbert, who owns Empire Fisheries and, as captain of a boat called the Rigulus, is part of the tight-knit scalloping community.

In preparation for the Carolina Queen’s voyage, the crew would have spent days getting ready, buying $3,000 in groceries, loading more than 20,000 pounds of ice and prepping the equipment on the twin-dredge vessel.

The vessel steamed north from the Chesapeake Bay, traveling 15 hours to reach the coast off New Jersey, where the crew would probably have started fishing. Then the work would begin.

It is pretty standard for a crew to work eight hours on and take four hours off, but in reality it often is more like nine hours on and three off. If you are a good sleeper, you are lucky to get two hours’ shut-eye before heading back on deck.

The huge tows scouring the ocean bed for scallops dredge for about 50 minutes and are then hauled up, their catch dumped on deck before the tows are reset and plunged back into the water, a process that can be done in as little as 10 minutes.

While the dredge did its work, the crew on duty on the Carolina Queen sorted through the muddy mix of rocks and sand and other flotsam on the ship’s deck, looking for the wavy round shells of the scallops.

“The biggest danger is handling the gear on deck,” Mr. Gilbert said. “It is very heavy gear on a pitching deck, and you get a lot of injured feet, injured hands.”

Once the scallops are sorted, according to industry regulations, they must be shucked by hand.

The crew spends hours opening the shells and slicing out the abductor muscle of the mollusks — the fat, tasty morsel that winds up on plates at a restaurants like Oceana in Midtown Manhattan, where a plate of sea scallops à la plancha costs as much as $33.

A single boat can haul 4,000 pounds in a day.

Read the full story at the New York Times

New England Ocean Monument Debate Resurfaces

April 1, 2016 — President Obama’s Council on Environmental Quality has said they won’t create a marine national monument in the Cashes Ledge portion of the Gulf of Maine. The announcement revives a months-old debate about how best to protect some of New England’s richest and rarest ocean resources.

At issue are two dramatic – and dramatically different – areas off the coast of New England. The first is Cashes Ledge. Actually, the Ledge is just one feature of a larger area about eighty miles east of Cape Ann, sometimes called the Cashes Ledge complex. It is home to deep, lush kelp forests that have been compared to jungles for both their density and their ability to support a diversity of life, from sponges and lobsters, to fish and whales.

The second area lies some one hundred south-south-east of Cashes Ledge. Here, the seafloor that has been gently sloping away from the coast abruptly plunges into steep-walled canyons, some deeper than the Grand Canyon. Their sides are dotted with rare deep-sea corals that, like scaled-down versions of their tropical reef-building cousins, provide habitat for sea stars, snails, and crab.s Farther offshore are seamounts of similar scale, and cracks in the seafloor leak methane and heat that allows rich ecosystems to thrive in the cold, dark deep ocean.

Read the full story at WGBH

NEW YORK: Feds identify offshore wind farm site

March 24, 2016 — Nearly a decade after plans for an offshore wind farm several miles off Jones Beach were scuttled, federal officials announced last week that an area off the coast of Long Beach has been identified for potential wind energy development — and called it a major step toward creating clean energy for the region.

The announcement by the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management — naming an 81,000-acre site in federal waters 11 miles south of the barrier island that would be suitable for wind turbines — was welcome news to environmental groups that have been calling for renewable energy sources and ways to reduce the region’s dependence on fossil fuels.

“This wind farm will be at least 11 miles offshore, if not more, and that’s important, because a decade ago, the first proposal was for 3.6 miles offshore,” said Adrienne Esposito, executive director of the Citizens Campaign for the Environment. “This will now be very far offshore and not be a visual concern. It’s important because we are in critical need of making the transition from dirty fossil fuels to clean, renewable energy.”

But the proposal has sparked the ire of those who claim that wind turbines in that area, known as the New York Bite, would negatively impact the commercial fishing industry. “The problem … is that it was an unsolicited bid — the power companies are coming out and saying we want this area without having talked to anyone prior to the selection,” said Drew Minkiewicz, a spokesman for the Fisheries Survival Fund, which opposes the construction of turbines in that area. “It’s a highly productive fishing area, including scallops. … We harvest over $5 million [worth] every year, on average.”

The announcement by the BOEM comes after Gov. Andrew Cuomo vetoed plans for a liquefied natural gas terminal roughly 16 nautical miles off Jones Beach in December, citing environmental concerns and saying that the terminal would conflict with the potential site of a wind farm. Officials said that an offshore wind power source is in keeping with Cuomo’s goal of generating 50 percent of New York’s energy from renewable sources by 2030.

Read the full story at the Long Island Herald