Saving Seafood

MASSACHUSETTS: Dinner aims to promote Gloucester’s catch

August 18, 2016 — GLOUCESTER, Mass. — The seafood bounty that springs from the Atlantic Ocean waters around Gloucester will be the centerpiece of the “Sea to Supper” community dinner to benefit the Gloucester Fishermen’s Wives Association.

The dinner, with a menu created by Relish Catering and Events of Manchester, is scheduled to run from 6 to 10:30 p.m. on Aug. 25 in the waterfront pavilion tent at the Mile Market One restaurant at Cape Ann’s Marina Resort off Essex Avenue. It will highlight some of the underutilized and plentiful seafood species landed in Gloucester, such as whiting, dabs, redfish and butterfish.

The event is designed beyond solely a culinary experience, according to the organizers that include Fishing Partnership Support Services, the city of Gloucester, Mile Marker One and the Gloucester Arts and Culture Initiative. There will be discussions on how to create markets for the underutilized species and methods for reintegrating them into the commercial fishing industry’s local landings.

Read the full story at the Gloucester Times

Fishing Partnership Named Community Health Worker Program of the Year

Fishing Partnership Support Services has been named “Program of the Year” by the Massachusetts Association of Community Health Workers in recognition of the work performed by the partnership’s patient navigators. Several of the navigators gathered after the award with partnership leaders. From left, are: Angela Sanfilippo, J.J. Bartlett, partnership president; Lori Caron, Shannon Eldredge, Nina Groppo, holding award trophy; Lauren Hakala, partnership director of community health; Morgan Eldredge and Monica DeSousa. Navigators Debra Kelsey and Verna Kendall were not present.

Fishing Partnership Support Services was named “Program of the Year” by the Massachusetts Association of Community Health Workers. Several of the navigators gathered after the award with partnership leaders. From left: Angela Sanfilippo; J.J. Bartlett, partnership president; Lori Caron; Shannon Eldredge; Nina Groppo, holding award trophy; Lauren Hakala, partnership director of community health; Morgan Eldredge and Monica DeSousa. Navigators Debra Kelsey and Verna Kendall not pictured.

June 10, 2016 — The following was released by the Massachusetts Association of Community Health Workers:

The Massachusetts Association of Community Health Workers has presented its 2016 Community Health Worker Program of the Year Award to Fishing Partnership Support Services, an organization serving commercial fishermen and their families.

Presented during the association’s recent annual conference in Norwood, the award honors the partnership for optimizing the work and impact of patient navigators, a category of employees within the field of community health work.

The Fishing Partnership employs patient navigators at four coastal sites in Massachusetts and one in Maine, where they help fishermen obtain affordable health coverage, enroll in free safety trainings, get tested for various health risks, and connect with providers of services that run the gamut from legal aid and financial counseling to substance abuse treatment and family counseling.

All Fishing Partnership navigators reside in the communities where they work; in most cases, they have resided there for years, if not for their entire lifetimes. The navigators also have personal histories that relate directly to the fishing industry. Their ranks include women who are spouses, partners, siblings and children of fishermen. One navigator is a fisher herself.

In designating the Fishing Partnership as its Community Health Worker Program of the Year, the Massachusetts Association of Community Health Workers recognized the deep community roots of the organization’s navigators.

“Fishing Partnership navigators are visible and trusted members of their communities,” said association director Lissette Blondet. “They know their communities well and are well known in their communities. This makes them especially effective and productive.”

Blondet said that her association regards the navigators as “living witnesses to the value and the dignity of their neighborhoods, their towns, and the people they serve.” She added, “We have many good community health workers and community health programs in Massachusetts but very few of them adhere to best practices, across the board, the way the partnership and its navigators do.”

The Massachusetts Association of Community Health Workers is a statewide professional organization for community health workers from all disciplines. It is dedicated to strengthening the profession of community heath work and raising awareness and appreciation of the vital roles community health workers play in society.

It is “extremely gratifying” to be given the Program of the Year Award, said J.J. Bartlett, president of the Fishing Partnership.

“Our navigators have all been with the partnership for years,” he said, “yet their commitment to helping fishermen and the families of fishermen has only gotten stronger. We owe this award to their extraordinary dedication.”

Established in 1997, the Fishing Partnership was originally a provider of health coverage to fishermen. It continued in that role until 2011, when it transitioned to being a provider of a various services to fishermen, acting like a virtual human resources bureau within the industry. “We continue to develop our programming to address the changing needs of this population,” said Bartlett.

The dilemma of a fisherman whose wife lost her job in 2013, and with it the family’s health insurance, is typical of those solved by navigators.

“Due to the nature of my business, my wife being close to retirement, and having some family assets, we did not ‘fit’ into the application scenarios envisioned by the Massachusetts Health Connector,” this fisherman recently recalled. “We ended up in a seemingly unending nightmare of red tape…Without your help, I would never have been able to find my way through this process – and I am a well-educated person. Words cannot express my gratitude and appreciation for your work and dedication in helping my family over the past 15 months.”

There are many instances when a partnership navigator, due to her knowledge, contacts and high local profile, is asked to help a person or a family from her community who is not a fisherman or a member of fisherman’s household. They always respond affirmatively.

A case like this, cited in the Community Health Worker Program of the Year award documents, involved a navigator who donated six hours to helping a homeless family of six enroll in MassHealth, the state and federally supported health coverage program.

“Our community health workers, our navigators, see their role as more of a calling than a job,” said Bartlett, the Fishing Partnership president. “They don’t stop helping at 5 o’clock. If someone is badly in need of assistance, they’ll see them on a Saturday or a Sunday. They always go the extra mile.”

The Fishing Partnership has its administrative office in Burlington and its patient navigator offices in Gloucester, Plymouth, New Bedford and Chatham, Massachusetts, and in Kennebunk, Maine. Its Massachusetts navigators are:

Angela Sanfilippo and Nina Groppo of Gloucester; Lori Caron of Plymouth; Debra Kelsey, Verna Kendal and Monica DeSousa of New Bedford; Morgan Eldredge and Shannon Eldredge of Chatham.

Support groups tout new safety manual at New Bedford Fishing Heritage Center

May 16, 2016 — NEW BEDFORD — J.J. Bartlett, president of Fishing Partnership Support Services, said the most dangerous job in America isn’t firefighting or police work.

It’s commercial fishing, Bartlett claimed Tuesday at the new Fishing Heritage Center downtown. Bartlett said groundfishermen in the northeastern U.S. work in the most dangerous waters in the country — more hazardous than Alaska — and, from 2000 to 2009, were 37 times more likely to die on the job than police officers.

He said that figure came from a report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and workforce data from the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Bartlett’s comments came at an event announcing the release of RESCUES — Responding to Emergencies at Sea and Communities Under Extreme Stress — a new safety and resources manual created by Fishing Partnership Support Services, the Massachusetts Fishermen’s Partnership and other collaborators.

Madeleine Hall-Arber, an anthropologist with MIT’s Sea Grant College Program, is one of the manual’s authors. The MIT program funded the manual’s printing. Hall-Arber said at the Heritage Center that collaborators’ intent is to distribute the free manual to fishing boats and fishermen’s families across the region.

Read the full story at the New Bedford Standard-Times

Water rescue needed during at-sea training

May 13, 2016 — Almost 40 fishermen and others who work on the water participated in safety and survival training Thursday at the Coast Guard’s Station Gloucester. Little did they know that session would provide a real-life safety incident.

According to Nina Groppo of the Fishing Partnership and Support Services, one of the participants encountered a problem during an in-water drill when his survival suit inadvertently opened as he was trying to get into a life raft and instructors had to fetch him out of the water.

Read the full story at the Gloucester Times

Connecticut’s Commercial Fishermen Prepare for Dangers of the High Sea

May 11, 2016 — From floods to fires —  burst pipes to a man overboard, when something goes wrong on a commercial fishing vessel — crew members at sea need to act fast. But how do they prepare?

I recently visited an emergency training session to learn more.

As I stood on a dock in Groton with Alex Taylor, the captain of a fishing boat out of New London, he took a drag off a cigarette, looked out at the ocean, and recalled how his boat’s engine caught fire a few months back.

“I couldn’t get to the fire to put it out,” he said. “So I got everybody on the back deck. Got the life raft down. Tried to go back in to get our immersion suits, but the fire was too much. [I] couldn’t get to the radio to call a Mayday — so we used a cell phone, luckily we were close enough to shore.”

As the fire burned, Taylor said he tossed a life raft in the water, and had his two crew mates jump in. He did a few more things to secure the boat, then hopped into the life raft. All he could do then, he said, was wait.

Read the full story at WNPR

Former mariner Luis Catala teaches fishermen safety on the water

April 5, 2016 — Being a commercial fisherman is one of the most dangerous jobs in the world, and the ocean off New England is the deadliest in the country. The fatality rate in its groundfishing and scalloping fisheries surpasses even Alaska’s “Deadliest Catch” crab fishery.

“People often don’t realize that, and even if they do, they might not understand the scope,” said J.J. Bartlett, the president and CEO of a nonprofit group called Fishing Partnership Support Services. “An example that I use is that if public schoolteachers in Massachusetts died at the same rate as our Northeast ground fisherman, over 400 schoolteachers would die on the job every year.”

The nonprofit group has trained nearly 3,000 fishermen since it started safety training for fishermen in 2005. It offers about 10 sessions a year across New England, recruiting instructors from various companies and organizations involved in fishing safety and equipment.

The sesssions cover a wide variety of safety lessons and skills, including plugging leaks, putting out fires, wearing inflatable immersion suits and shooting flares.

“You don’t want to be doing this stuff for the first time when you’re out on the water,” said safety instructor Luis Catala at a training in Hyannis in October. “This is a great chance for them to practice and learn.”

Read the full story at The Cape Cod Times

Drug testing a touchy issue on New Bedford’s waterfront

April 4, 2016 — NEW BEDFORD, Mass. — The thrum of the boat’s engine was audible last fall as local scalloper Rick Lynch, 44, talked frankly about his personal experiences and observations of drug use on New Bedford’s waterfront, now and nearly 30 years ago.

A New Bedford native who lives in Dartmouth, Lynch has been around long enough to fall into a few bottles, or needles, and climb back out again. He said he’s been sober for about 15 years, and a captain of scallop boats for about 14. Lynch supports mandatory drug testing in the fishing industry, but the idea might gain little traction on the regulation-wary waterfront — even after drug arrests on outbound fishing boats last month.

Understanding Lynch’s views about the present, though, means hearing about his past. He said he was 16 when he started working on local fishing boats, in the late ‘80s.

“Back then, Union Street was crazy,” Lynch said. “There was cocaine running around, there was heroin everywhere. There used to be bags of cocaine on the galley table on the boat, because we were working crazy hours back then, you know. Everything was illegal, in what we did fishin’. I mean, we brought in illegal small scallops because there was a scallop count back then. We were jumping over the Canadian line and staying up for days because we’d loaded the boat so much. Guys were eating No-Doz like they were going crazy — or eating Dexedrine, diet pills.

“And then when we came home, we drank,” Lynch continued. “All weopi did was drink. For years, I didn’t make it one block up Union Street, you know? I wasn’t even of age to drink and I had a tab at the National club, you know? I was 17 years old and I had a tab in a bar. Because that was acceptable if you were a fisherman back then — the police didn’t even go into those bars back then. If they did, they were drinking with us.”

In the wake of those times, and amid what could be a rising wave of drug use on New Bedford’s waterfront — where federal and local law enforcement raided 11 boats and made four opiate arrests over two days in March, in the second such raid this year — Lynch floated the idea of mandatory drug tests on commercial fishing boats, for crew members as well as captains and mates.

“I mean, there is no mandatory drug testing in this industry, you know, where there is in every other maritime industry,” Lynch said. “You get on a tugboat, you gotta have drug tests. You get on a ship, you gotta have drug tests.”

New drug-testing policies are just one idea of many that could rise to the surface as groups including Fishing Partnership Support Services, the Massachusetts Fishermen’s Partnership and others work to provide resources and support for fishermen amid the nationwide opioid epidemic, which is devastating entire communities and knows no borders.

Several longtime fishermen and industry leaders told The Standard-Times, though, that despite last month’s arrests and a drug-related death on the water in February, mandatory testing could be a tough sell.

Retired fisherman Rodney Avila, for example, said imposing mandatory drug tests on crew members would be one more regulation for fishermen and boat owners who already feel beset by them.

“There’s enough mandates on the fishing industry as it is,” said Avila, who owned three New Bedford-based groundfish boats, or “draggers,” between 1968 and 2013. “How much can these guys take?”

Avila is a former marine superintendent for New Bedford’s Harbor Development Commission and a former SouthCoast member of the New England Fishery Management Council. He emphasized — as have numerous fishermen, industry leaders and city officials in recent weeks — that the drug arrests unjustly stain the scores of clean, hard-working fishermen in New Bedford.

Read the full story at The New Bedford Standard-Times

New tool to help industry deal with fishing disasters

March 21, 2016 — The Fishing Partnership Support Services has developed a new manual to help fishermen prepare for potential crises on the water and to serve as a blueprint for communities dealing with fishing tragedies.

The manual, which the fishing advocacy organization assembled with help from researchers from Harvard University’s School of Public Health and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will be unveiled Thursday afternoon at an event scheduled at the U.S. Coast Guard’s Station Gloucester.

“It’s something that we’ve been working on for a while,” said J.J. Bartlett, executive director of the Fishing Partnership Support Services. “The fishing communities, such as Gloucester, have developed incredible networks of support for people performing these most dangerous jobs and we wanted to come up with a standard operating procedure manual that everyone involved can use.”

Bartlett said the five-chapter manual will be available via free download from the Fishing Partnership Support Services website, as well as by hand-outs.

Read the full story at The Gloucester Times

MASSACHUSETTS: Intro Planned for First-Ever RESCUES Manual for Commercial Fishing Industry

March 21, 2016 — GLOUCESTER, Mass. — The following was released by Fishing Partnership Support Services:

Two organizations serving commercial fishermen in Massachusetts will hold an event in Gloucester this week to introduce a comprehensive guidebook on dealing with a crisis in a fishing community.

The new RESCUES manual will be presented publicly for the first time by the Massachusetts Fishermen’s Partnership and Fishing Partnership Support Services during a press conference at the Gloucester Coast Guard Station, 17 Harbor Loop, on Thursday, March 24, at 2:00 P.M. On-site parking will be available.

RESCUES is an acronym for the title of the manual: Responding to Emergencies at Sea and to
Communities Under Extreme Stress.

A wealth of information has been consolidated within RESCUES to help prepare individuals, groups and entire communities for a crisis affecting members of the commercial fishing industry, such as the sinking of a boat or the search for crew members lost overboard at sea.

“The idea is that, when a crisis occurs, folks in our fishing ports will be able to consult the manual and know right away how the Coast Guard and other authorities are responding — and where they can turn for reliable information and support,” said J.J. Bartlett, President of Fishing Partnership Support Services.

Also, Bartlett said, the manual describes “how families may access services and resources that exist to help them during these terrible situations and for long afterwards.”

Madeleine Hall-Arber, an anthropologist at the Sea Grant College program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Ann Backus, of the Harvard University School of Public Health, served as principal investigators and researchers on the lengthy project that produced RESCUES. The MIT Sea Grant College program also provided financing for the printing of the manual.

“By gathering information and knowledge that had never before been assembled in this fashion, and by tying so many disparate but important elements together, RESCUES will make a unique contribution to the well-being of fishing families and to the cohesiveness of fishing communities,” said Ms. Hall-Arber. “It fills a big gap, and it serves a function much needed in an industry experiencing stress on multiple fronts.”

In addition to Ms. Hall-Arber, Ms. Backus and Mr. Bartlett, press conference speakers will include:

  • Gloucester Mayor Sefatia Romeo Theken
  • Captain Robert Lepere, commanding officer of the Gloucester Coast Guard Station
  • Captain Claudia C. Gelzer, commanding officer of the Boston Coast Guard Station and Captain of the Port of Boston.
  • Angela Sanfilippo, President of both the Gloucester Fishermen’s Wives Association and the Massachusetts Fishermen’s Partnership, who will also serve as master of ceremonies.
  • Gloucester State Rep. Ann Margaret Ferrante of the 5th Essex District

“To me, RESCUES is about peace of mind,” said Ms. Sanfilippo. “Many of us who have been involved for years in helping fishermen and their families are in the last years of our working lives and it is good to know that the knowledge and insights we have gained are now gathered in one place for the benefit of future generations.”

On a reflective note, she added, “Working on this manual brought back painful memories of when a fisherman or an entire crew died at sea. That was very hard for us. At the same time, we relived those moments when a fisherman was saved from death because of a smart and courageous rescue. We were heartened by the realization that more lives were saved in the past 40 years than were lost.”

Copies of RESCUES will be provided at the March 24 event and all speakers will be available to answer questions from the media.

View a PDF of the release

MASSACHUSETTS: Governor, delegation appeal to Obama for fishing safety money

December 21, 2015 — NEW BEDFORD — The entire Massachusetts congressional delegation has co-signed a letter to President Barack Obama by Gov. Charlie Baker, appealing for the fishing safety money promised in legislation two years ago but never released.

The Fishing Safety Training Grants Program and Fishing Safety Research Grant Program were supposed to get $3 million each to target the safety issues that make commercial fishing the most dangerous job in the nation.

“Every day in Massachusetts, our fishermen perform the harrowing tasks at sea that have made their industry a vital part of our heritage as well as our economy,” said Baker in a statement. “These modest investments by the federal government would not only equip them with new life-saving technologies, but also make good fiscal sense through the reduction of costly search-and-rescue missions.”

Read the full story at the New Bedford Standard-Times