Saving Seafood

Seafood exec escapes jail time

July 14, 2017 — A senior sales executive at a Gloucester seafood processing company avoided jail time, but will spend the next six months under home confinement and must pay restitution of $25,879 after his federal sentencing Thursday for tax fraud.

Richard J. Pandolfo, 71, who lives in North Andover and has been an executive vice president at National Fish & Seafood on Parker Street, was sentenced by U.S. District Court Judge Richard Stearns to a year’s probation, with six months to be served in home confinement.

The judge also assessed a fine of $5,000 and ordered Pandolfo to pay restitution to the IRS for the amount he had failed to pay on “supplemental income” he had received from the company and former National Fish executive and part-owner Jack Ventola between 2008 and 2012.

Pandolfo was indicted in June 2016 by a federal grand jury on four counts of filing false tax returns. As part of a plea agreement with federal prosecutors, the charges were reduced to a single count. But he still faced a federal prison term of up to three years and a fine of up to $100,000 in addition to the restitution when he stood for sentencing Thursday.

According to the U.S. Attorney’s office, Pandolfo failed to pay federal tax on about $90,000 of the $95,000 in supplemental income he received from Ventola from 2008 to 2012. According to the original indictment, some of the supplemental pay went directly to Pandolfo, while other payments went to a shell interior design company established in the name of Pandolfo’s wife. Pandolfo’s wife was not charged in the indictment.

Read the full story at the Gloucester Times

Overdose suspected in fisherman’s death

July 6, 2017 — The death of a 26-year-old Maine fisherman, found aboard a vessel moored at the Jodrey State Fish Pier over the holiday weekend, is being categorized by the Essex District Attorney’s office as a suspected drug overdose.

Neither the state medical examiner’s office nor law enforcement authorities would confirm the identity of the man who was found aboard the FV/Titan at the fish pier off Parker Street early Saturday morning. A positive identification and definitive cause of death were, as of Wednesday, pending findings by state medical examiner’s office, said Carrie Kimball Monahan, spokeswoman for the office of Essex District Attorney Jonathan Blodgett.

Massachusetts state police from the DA’s office, following a call from Gloucester police, responded to a report of an unattended death. The troopers and Gloucester police found drug paraphernalia at the scene, indicating a likely overdose, Kimball Monahan said. There were no signs of foul play, and the DA’s office is not actively investigating, she said.

“If there is a presence of drug paraphernalia on or in the vicinity of the deceased, we will categorize that as a suspected drug overdose,” Kimball Monahan said. The DA’s office tracks overdose deaths each year for Essex County.

John McCarthy, Gloucester’s interim police chief, said Wednesday that police and the Fire Department’s rescue squad had responded to a call from an “unknown party” around 5:30 a.m. Saturday reporting an apparent drug overdose on the fishing boat Titan.

He said police and Fire Department paramedics found the 26-year-old man on the boat, and administered nasal naloxone, a drug that temporarily reverses the effects of an opioid overdose often known by its trade name, Narcan. 

Read the full story at the Gloucester Times

NOAA study: Locally caught fish lands on plates locally

June 28, 2017 — It’s like Las Vegas, only colder: Groundfish landed in the Northeast generally stay in the Northeast.

NOAA Fisheries this week released a study tracing the ultimate destination of seafood landed in the Northeast that concluded that most of the groundfish landed in this region is consumed as food by consumers in the region.

According to the study, other species, such as scallops, are processed for wider domestic and international distribution, while some — such as monkfish — are sold in parts or whole in more limited markets.

The study said only a small percentage of the scallops landed in the region remain here. Most are sold to large industrial food companies and transported throughout the country or flash-frozen and transported to Europe or elsewhere.

Groundfish, it said, is one of the few fisheries that is primarily consumed regionally.

Using data from the New England Fishery Management Council and other stakeholders, the study traced the region’s boat-to-consumer supply chain, of which Gloucester plays a pivotal role along with New Bedford, Boston and Portland, Maine.

“This study is a first step in characterizing New England fisheries, including where fish are caught, what they are used for, and where they go once they are landed,” Patricia Pinto da Silva, a social policy specialist at NOAA’s Northeast Fisheries Science Center and one of the study’s author, said in a statement accompanying the release. “We did not include aquaculture or the regional recreational harvest, which is something we would like to do in the future.”

The study showed the seafood species landed in the Northeast “vary widely in where they are sold and how they are used.”

Much of the groundfish landed within the region — including cod, haddock, pollock and several flounders — ends up sold as food fish to local restaurants, fishmongers and domestic supermarkets, the study stated.

Read the full story at the Gloucester Times

MASSACHUSETTS: Chefs, city promote local catch

June 26, 2017 — The city is expanding its Gloucester Fresh seafood campaign with a membership program for local and regional restaurants that will supplement the direct pipeline of fresh, locally harvested species with ideas on how to prepare and promote them.

The Gloucester Fresh Restaurant Membership program will offer its members seasonal seafood promotions, as well as guidelines for seasonal seafood availability, a listing of under-utilized species for “creative and cost-effective recipes” and other benefits.

“By utilizing fresh and local seafood, you are not only providing delicious and healthy food to consumers, but also supporting your community,” said Mayor Sefatia Romeo Theken. “We’re excited to launch this first-of-its-kind restaurant membership program to showcase our heritage while providing the freshest seafood products.”

The campaign already has attracted some of the most prominent restaurants in Gloucester, including The Gloucester House, the Azorean Restaurant and Bar, The Causeway Restaurant, Tonno Restaurant and Passports.

Organizers said most of the member restaurants already served seafood harvested locally and landed in Gloucester and they became members because they believe in the course the city has plotted to promote the area’s fresh seafood, its restaurants and its seafood processors and suppliers.

“Right now, the market favors places that use local ingredients and products,” said Lenny Linquata, owner of The Gloucester House. “The key is to provide people with a means for enjoying the local experience. And there is no better way to do that than by sampling local foods and local cuisine.”

Linquata said his restaurant buys its lobsters, fish and scallops directly off boats landing their catch in Gloucester, as well as purchasing its clams locally.

Read the full story at the Gloucester Times

MASSACHUSETTS: As fleet shrinks, so has blessing ceremony

June 25, 2017 — A fleet of pleasure boats blessed on a sunny Sunday afternoon replaced the fishing vessels that once lined Gloucester’s Outer Harbor during St. Peter’s Fiesta.

“The fleet is a mere shadow of what it was 50, 60 years ago,” Gloucester native Mike Gilardi said. 

The Rev. Jim Achadinha, the pastor of the Catholic community of Gloucester and Rockport, and Bishop Mark O’Connell, the bishop of the North Region of the Archdiocese of Boston, blessed the fleets on Sunday at 3. 

The few remaining authentic fishing vessels of the Gloucester fleet didn’t come to Stacy Boulevard for the blessing and haven’t for years. Achadinha estimated the last time was 15 years ago.

Instead, after the prayer service at the Fisherman’s Monument, the priest and the bishop headed out by boat to the Inner Harbor to bless the fishing boats at their docks.

Gilardi grew up on the Fort, raised in a fishing family surrounded by a tightly knit Sicilian community, and has seen firsthand the drastic changes in both the industry and the Fiesta celebrations.

He pointed to the boats in the Outer Harbor, both those waiting to be blessed and those jockeying for choice spots to view the Greasy Pole contest. 

“It’s a whole different ball game,” Gilardi said. “There were no boats along the Greasy Pole (contest) in those days. No partying. Just fishing boats.”

Read the full story at the Gloucester Times

MASSACHUSETTS: Legislators taste-test green crab in Gloucester

June 15, 2017 — State Senator Bruce Tarr and state Representative Brad Hill were among those who turned out at Tonno in Gloucester June 12 to try owner Anthony Caturano’s best soft-shell green crab dish. The tasting was the latest for the Ipswich-based Green Crab R&D Project , which is addressing the invasive species problem by creating a market for its use. In recent weeks, green crab also has appeared at the Ipswich Ale Brewery and at Woodman’s in Essex. “We’ve been on a full-court press to try to confront the green crab from an environmental perspective and an economic perspective, but if we can find a way to market them, then the market forces will control the population,” Tarr said. Caturano’s creation received high praise all around. “I’m a big seafood person,” Hill said, “and if you’re a fan of seafood, this is something you’re going to like.”

Read the full story at the Boston Globe

MASSACHUSETTS: Seafood supplier tries to make inroads with local eateries for Gloucester-landed fish

June 7, 2017 — Frank Ragusa is making a point, leaning forward in his chair and punctuating each sentence by banging his hand on the conference table, producing thumps so loud they later sound like explosions on the recording of the conversation.

In between bursts of percussion, the chief executive officer and partner in Gloucester’s Finest Seafood makes the same impassioned point he has been making since he returned to Cape Ann two years ago from Seattle as the director of fresh seafood at Gloucester Seafood Processing.

The point is this: The Gloucester story still plays in the farthest reaches of the nation. The saga of America’s oldest commercial fishing port, of slicker-clad, fishermen wrestling fresh marine life out of the cold waters of the Atlantic, still strikes a chord.

Out there.

“Most of our biggest customers right now are outside New England,” Ragusa said while sitting in the conference room of the seafood processing company he founded last year as a tenant within the confines of the Cape Ann Seafood Exchange on Harbor Loop.

Rising from the ashes of GSP’s surreal closure last year by the Mazzetta Company, Gloucester’s Finest Seafood is at the heart of Ragusa’s crusade to help breathe new life into America’s oldest fishing community by promoting its bounty of freshly harvested seafood.

Read the full story at the Gloucester Times

MASSACHUSETTS: The oldest surviving Grand Banks fishing schooner is rising once again

June 5, 2017 — Forty-eight pairs of wooden ribs curve upward in a small shipyard on this pine-fringed harbor. Bearded men work with saws, trim oak pieces smooth, and run their fingers along the oiled frame taking shape before them.

The Ernestina-Morrissey, the oldest surviving Grand Banks fishing schooner, is rising once again.

The restoration of the 19th-century vessel, the flagship of Massachusetts since 1983, resurrects a seaworthy ambassador for the state and a floating classroom that can teach students ranging from kindergartners to cadets at the Massachusetts Maritime Academy.

The $6.3 million project also represents a victory for historical preservation, one that could keep the schooner sailing well past 150 years since its launching in 1894 at the James and Tarr Shipyard in Essex, Mass.

“Something like this doesn’t come around too often in one’s lifetime,” said Eric Graves, president of the Boothbay Harbor Shipyard, a waterfront workplace even older than the two-masted schooner being rebuilt from the keel up.

The schooner is undergoing a carefully crafted, labor-intensive overhaul that began in 2015 and might not be completed until early 2019, said David Short, the lead shipwright on the project.

Old frames and planks are being removed and new ones installed, including Danish white oak from a royal forest that long served Denmark’s navy. When Short and his crew are finished, nothing will remain of the original 114-foot schooner except “her name and her history,” he said.

But the ship that returns to the sea will be an exacting replica of the sleek and sturdy schooner that fished the Grand Banks out of Gloucester and Newfoundland, later explored the Arctic, and finally was used to bring Cape Verde immigrants to the United States as late as 1965.

That trans-Atlantic legacy is one that Licy Do Canto, a Roxbury native whose grandmother emigrated aboard the schooner in the early 1950s, wants preserved as a testament to the dreams and struggles of all generations who have traveled to the United States in search of a better life.

The homes of many Cape Verdean immigrants in Massachusetts contained two photographs, Do Canto said: one of President John F. Kennedy and one of this schooner. Do Canto envisions a future where the schooner is able to cross the Atlantic once again and revisit Cape Verde.

Read the full story at the Boston Globe

Feds want to cut sport fishermen’s haddock catch, prohibit cod

May 31, 2017 — Tom Orrell was under the impression he’d entered the charter fishing business with his Gloucester-based Yankee Fleet. He didn’t know it came with such a large roller-coaster.

Up one incline, down the next, riding the rails of ever-changing regulation while plying the Atlantic in search of the fin fish and fishing experience his recreational fishing customers seek.

It doesn’t appear that 2017 is going to provide much solace.

Orrell and the rest of the Cape Ann for-hire charter fleet are bracing for a mid-season audible by NOAA Fisheries that could change the rules of the game right at the height of the season.

“It’s unreal,” Orrell said Wednesday. “It makes it very difficult to run a business.”

Citing recreational catch excesses in haddock and cod in the 2016 season, NOAA Fisheries seeks to enact measures to produce a 20 percent reduction in daily bag limits for haddock while taking away the solitary cod recreational anglers currently are allowed to catch and keep each day.

But the most significant impact on the recreational segment of the fishing industry could come in the fall, when charter owners have the Hobson’s choice of a four-week closure that includes the bountiful Labor Day weekend or a six-week closure that wipes out the last half of September and all of October.   

 “It’s not much of a choice,” Orrell said. “It’s like picking out your cleanest dirty shirt to go to work.”

Still, Orrell said, his preference would be to suffer through the later, longer closure rather than lose his Labor Day trips.

“Later on, the weather changes and it becomes more unpredictable and the pollock start moving in,” Orrell said. “And once you take the people off the boat, they don’t just turn around in the fall and come back fishing.”

NOAA Fisheries, which also is proposing a spring closing from March 1 through April 14, is seeking public comment on the proposed changes. An agency spokeswoman said they could be enacted as soon a late June or early July.

At its January meeting, the New England Fishery Management Council voted to ask NOAA Fisheries to enact new measures on cod and haddock because preliminary 2016 data showed recreational anglers substantially exceeded the annual catch limit (ACL) for Gulf of Maine cod and haddock.

Read the full story at the Gloucester Times

MASSACHUSETTS: $185K in state Senate budget for industry-based cod survey

May 31, 2017 — The state Senate’s amended 2018 budget includes $185,000 to continue the industry-based cod survey that could help close the divide between commercial fishermen and regulatory scientists on the true state of the Gulf of Maine’s cod stock.

The survey funds now must survive the legislative conference committee formed to reconcile the differing budgets produced by the state Senate and House of Representatives before the final budget goes to Gov. Charlie Baker.

“This is really one of the rays of hope, that we can produce science that is credible and also acceptable to the people that have to live with it,” said Senate Minority Leader Bruce Tarr of Gloucester, who, along with Assistant Majority Leader Mark Montigny, a Democrat from New Bedford, pushed to include the money in the Senate budget.

Tarr said the House budget contains only $125,000 to continue the industry-based survey.

“We’re significantly higher, but obviously we’re hoping to get the larger amount,” Tarr said. “The governor is a strong proponent of collaborative research, so I would say the likelihood is very strong that he will continue to support this program.”

Researchers from the state Division of Marine Fisheries, working on commercial fishing boats, recently completed the first year of the random-area survey that was funded with federal fishery disaster funds.

The goal of the survey, begun last year at the behest of Baker following his meetings with fishing stakeholders, was to produce “credible scientific information that could be accepted by fishermen, scientists and fisheries managers” and used in future NOAA Fisheries cod stock assessments.

As with many elements of commercial fisheries management, agreement between fishermen and regulatory scientists on the data used to generate cod assessments has been hard to come by.

The release in April of the preliminary results of the survey — appearing in a Boston Globe story — set off a firestorm among commercial fishermen and prompted some backtracking by the Baker administration.

The initial results, according to the Globe story, were in direct line with the dire assessments of NOAA Fisheries scientists about the imperiled state of the Gulf of Maine cod stock.

Fishing stakeholders were incensed.

“We’re appreciative and supportive of the state’s work and very much want the work to continue,” Vito Giacalone, policy director for the Gloucester-based Northeast Seafood Coalition, said at the time. “We’re not appreciative of the premature conclusions publicized by the scientists. It is this kind of scientific double standard that drives the loss of credibility of the science community in the eyes of industry.”

Read the full story at the Gloucester Times