Saving Seafood

MASSACHUSETTS: Seafood auction plans to reopen Tuesday

September 5, 2018 — The Cape Ann Seafood Exchange expects to resume landing fish Tuesday, almost two weeks after the U.S. Labor Department effectively shuttered the business by seizing its bank accounts because of unpaid court-ordered damages.

Kristian Kristensen, the owner of the fish auction on 27 Harbor Loop, said Thursday night that he had received final paper work from Labor Department officials that unfroze his business and personal bank accounts.

“Now we can start putting things back in order, pay some people and hopefully start landing fish again on Tuesday, the day after the holiday,” Kristensen said. “That’s the plan.”

Kristensen credited the assistance of U.S. Rep Seth Moulton’s office, state Senate Minority Leader Bruce Tarr and state Rep. Ann-Margaret Ferrante in helping mediate a new consent order and payment schedule with the Labor Department.

“I’d have to say they’re at least 70 percent responsible for getting this done,” Kristensen said. “Without their help, this probably wouldn’t have happened.”

The seizure of the bank accounts stemmed from a 2016 lawsuit filed by the Labor Department against Kristensen and his two businesses, Cape Ann Seafood Exchange and Zeus Packing Inc., both at 27 Harbor Loop. The lawsuit sought $407,996 — $203,998 in unpaid back wages owed about 130 employees and an equal amount in liquidated damages.

Read the full story at the Gloucester Daily Times

NOAA issues clarion call as dead seal numbers hit 599

September 5, 2018 — Seals, some sick and others already dead, continue to wash up on New England shores as fishery managers and marine researchers scramble to identify what is causing the largest unusual seal mortality in this region since 2011.

On Tuesday, NOAA Fisheries updated its preliminary numbers to show that, in the period between July 1 and Aug. 29, 599 harbor and gray seals — 462 dead and 137 alive — were stranded on the coastlines of Maine, New Hampshire and Massachusetts.

Since the previous preliminary count was completed on Aug. 25, 55 newly counted dead seals were among the 67 seals that washed ashore in New England, according to the figures supplied by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The strandings have occurred from Down East Maine to Massachusetts’ North Shore — including at least one in Rockport last week and four on Gloucester’s Coffin Beach two weeks ago — and prompted NOAA last Friday to issue an unusual mortality event for Northeast gray and harbor seals.

The issuance of the unusual mortality event, which NOAA Fisheries has used in the past in efforts to protect Gulf of Maine cod and northern right whale populations, is the regulatory equivalent of a clarion call.

Read the full story at the Gloucester Daily Times

MASSACHUSETTS: Recalling ‘an industry that fed the world’

September 4, 2018 — The Morning Glory Coffee Shop was in its glory Sunday morning. As an unofficial grandstand for the Gloucester Schooner Festival Parade of Sail, the line of spectators waiting for a coveted table stretched clear out into the parking lot.

Most were native Gloucesterites, but there were some first-time tourists, too, and for them the 34th annual Gloucester Schooner Festival was a total surprise, beginning with the first big boom! of the water cannon sounding across the Outer Harbor.

“We wondered what was happening,” said Martha Goldberg, in Gloucester from Lowell for the day with her friend Connie Parker. When that first boom sounded, they watched, transfixed, as the great sails gathered. “It looks beautiful,” said Goldberg, “just awesome.”

“Beautiful’ and “awesome” are words heard a lot along Stacy Boulevard as the sails “schoon” by to pay their respects to the Fisherman’s Memorial in this harbor where the very word “schoon” is said to have been born in 1713. They’re words Paul Clancy, waiting for a table with his wife Ellen, used to describe what they think of this, their first schooner festival. Though they’ve lived in Gloucester several years and always wanted to come, this was the first time they actually made it to Stacy Boulevard, and, if truth be known, it was just for breakfast. But then came the boom! “And we were like, ‘Whoa! What’s going on?'”

Read the full story at the Gloucester Daily Times

SEAN HORGAN: Of whale poop and lobster claws

September 4, 2018 — Well, Happy Labor Day. We hope you are celebrating by lying in a hammock, dozing in the sun while listening to a ballgame on the radio, taking a swim and any and all activities completely separated from the concept of work. Take the day. You’ve earned it. Even if you haven’t, we won’t spill.

As an homage to the chill, we’re going to abridge the top of the column, providing another piece to your day that doesn’t require much intellectual or emotional heavy lifting. I’m telling you, this Labor Day thing is the cat’s whiskers.

To the items:

Whale of a story

It feels as if any time we write about whales, it’s with a certain hand-wringing about their imperiled status. But there is another side to the coin and that is that the great beasts have been a constant and immensely pleasurable presence near the Cape Ann coastline all summer.

Our waters have been filled with the largest mammals of the sea from mid-spring. There was an early appearance of a dozen or so northern right whales, followed by humpbacks, minke and fin whales. We even heard from one Rockport lobsterman, whose name is being withheld because of his continued ties to the radical Weather Underground, of pilot whales feeding on schools of pogeys in as little as 9 feet of water hereabouts.

Perhaps you saw the story in the pages of the Gloucester Daily Times and online at gloucestertimes.com, where our intrepid correspondent, along with photographer Paul Bilodeau, journeyed out aboard a whale watch boat to check out all the hubbub.

Now comes a different type of whale story: how the scientific community is mustering even more arguments for protecting whales because of the benefits of their, well, poop.

According to the piece in Scientific American, a 2010 study showed whale feces injects about 23,000 metric tons of nitrogen into Gulf of Maine waters each year and conceivably could help with climate change.

Read the full story at the Gloucester Daily Times

In Their Own Words: ‘Dead In The Water’ Lets Fishermen Tell Their Story

August 29, 2018 — What convinced Angela Sanfilippo, president of the Gloucester Fishermen’s Wives Association, that filmmaker David Wittkower could tell the story of the decline of the New England commercial fishing industry was that he wanted to interview fishermen and let them speak in their own voice.

“That never happened,” she said. In most stories in the media about the industry, fishermen’s words “are always twisted,” she said. But she sensed that wouldn’t happen with Wittkower, that he’d let fishermen tell their own stories.

“This documentary tells the story of what people have endured through the years, and what we’re still enduring,” said Sanfilippo, whose organization helped finance “Dead in the Water,” Wittkower’s documentary on the industry, which screens at the Chatham Orpheum Theater on Saturday, Sept. 8 at 10 a.m.

Wittkower, who lives in Los Angeles but spent his middle and high school years in Rockport, where his parents still live, said he became interested in the plight of the commercial fishing industry about four years ago when he noticed fewer and fewer fishing boats docked in Gloucester. He began talking to folks and eventually made his way to Sanfilippo, who gave him the lowdown about how catch limits, days at sea restrictions and other regulations were killing the industry and making it impossible for young people to take up fishing.

Read the full story at The Cape Cod Chronicle 

 

MASSACHUSETTS: Company widens net in seafood secrets case

August 27, 2018 — National Fish & Seafood and Kathleen A. Scanlon, the former employee the seafood processor is suing for allegedly stealing trade secrets for her new employer, had appeared to be heading for a settlement.

Now, not so much.

The Gloucester-based seafood processor last week amended its complaint against Scanlon, its former head of research and development and quality assurance, and her new employer, Tampa Bay Fisheries, by adding more defendants and more details of the alleged conspiracy and corporate theft.

The revised lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Boston, now levies charges against more executives from Tampa Bay Fisheries and its affiliates — including company President Robert Paterson, information technologies director Mark Marsh and Mark Pandolfo. The revised complaint also includes the John Doe named as a defendant in the original lawsuit.

Pandolfo, a vice president of sales at Tampa Bay Fisheries’ Kitchens Seafood affiliate, is a former NFS employee and the son of Richard Pandolfo, a former NFS vice president for sales who was convicted last year of wire fraud and defrauding the Internal Revenue Service in a scheme with other NFS executives.

Read the full story at the Gloucester Daily Times

Fed seizure of accounts closes fish auction

August 27, 2018 — Last Friday night, without any notice, the U.S. Labor Department seized the bank accounts of the Cape Ann Seafood Exchange, leaving the fish auction and seafood processor unable to pay fishermen for landed fish and imperiling even further its ability to profitably operate on the Gloucester waterfront.

CASE owner Kristian Kristensen first knew there was trouble afoot when he started receiving text messages from his bank that his business balance had dipped below $25.

“I didn’t put the pieces together until Saturday,” Kristensen said Thursday. “That’s when I knew it was the Department of Labor.”

What followed was a business nightmare, as Kristensen tried to contact fishermen and other vendors about his inability to access his bank accounts for payments.

“Obviously at that point, checks were bouncing all over the place,” Kristensen said.

On Thursday afternoon, following two frantic days, Kristensen was still immersed in negotiations with Labor Department officials to regain control of his bank accounts and establish a plan to repay the balance owed in a manner that will allow him to remain in business.

“We’re about halfway there, but not all the way,” Kristensen said late Thursday afternoon. “We’re not quite there yet, but almost. It’s not like I don’t want to pay this.”

Read the full story at the Gloucester Daily Times

MASSACHUSETTS: Mazzetta offers reason for Gloucester Seafood Processing shutdown

August 23, 2018 — Actions by the U.S. Department of Commerce prompted the Mazzetta Company to close its Gloucester Seafood Processing plant in the Blackburn Industrial Park in December 2016, according to an opinion piece the company’s founder penned for a fishing industry website.

Tom Mazzetta, founder and president of the Illinois-based seafood company that bears his family’s name, criticized the Commerce Department for forcing shrimp importers such as Mazzetta to pay additional duties on seafood imports years after the initial import duty was paid.

“The result is that three years after importing shrimp into the U.S. and paying an initial duty on that product, the Commerce Department will often come back years later and announce that importers owe millions of dollars more in duties than they originally anticipated,” Mazzetta wrote in the piece that appeared online Tuesday.

Mazzetta then tied the Commerce Department policy directly to his company’s decision to shutter Gloucester Seafood Processing and jettison about 200 full-time jobs.

“Mazzetta Company can speak first hand (sic) about the impact of the Commerce Department coming back three years after the fact and unexpectedly asking for millions,” Mazzetta wrote. “As many of you know, we were forced to close a processing facility in Gloucester, MA, and eliminate 200 American jobs as a result of this ‘gotcha’ game.”

Read the full story at the Gloucester Daily Times

MASSACHUSETTS: Gloucester hopes catch can claw its way to top

August 20, 2018 — Building on the success of its Gloucester Fresh seafood branding campaign, the city of Gloucester plans to apply the same formula to help brand and market Massachusetts lobsters to lobster lovers the world over.

Couldn’t happen in a better place.

If you go by the numbers, there is no better Bay State lobster port to take up the banner for distinguishing Massachusetts lobsters from those hauled from the waters of neighboring states.

Gloucester has dominated the lobster trade in Massachusetts and the industry’s high profile here has helped mitigate some of the misery foisted upon the community by the continuing groundfish crisis.

It is the state’s No. 1 port in both number of active lobstermen — an average of 136 annually during the past five years — and amount of lobster annually landed. Gloucester has averaged 2.94 million pounds per year over the past five years, according to the state Division of Marine Fisheries.

During that period, no other Massachusetts lobster port ever claimed more than 60 active lobstermen in any given year, and none but Gloucester ever cracked double-digits in the percentage of statewide landings.

Read the full story at the Gloucester Daily Times

MASSACHUSETTS: ‘We all wondered what happened’

August 20, 2018 — Around 70 people who attended the annual Fishermen’s Memorial Service were held rapt by the words of local author and filmmaker Ron Gilson as he shared the stories of friends he has lost, fishermen who were taken by the sea.

Gilson was the keynote speaker at the service Saturday, which was held on the second floor of the Capt. Lester S. Wass American Legion Post 3 hall because of inclement weather. Painted oars that would have been carried to the Man at the Wheel statue and its accompanying cenotaphs at Stacy Boulevard had it not rained were propped up against either side of tall windows in the hall.

Family, friends, and community members drove down to the statue to place floral arrangements and toss flowers into the harbor in memory of those they lost after the service.

“When an accident happens and you loose someone, you’re hurt, but you put them to rest,” Mayor Sefatia Romeo Theken said after the service. “For those who have not returned, there is no closure. I feel every year, it’s a little closer to that closure. It’s just hard.”

Read the full story at the Gloucester Daily Times