Saving Seafood

FishOn: Cod docufilm features Gloucester cast

March 27, 2017 — So, a cod fish walks into a bar and the bartender says, “Why the long face?”

Perhaps the answer to that endearing question will be divulged in one of the three films on commercial fishing that already have hit the screen or soon will.

(And, according to FishOn’s far-flung film sources, there may be a fourth fishing documentary on the way, but that is yet undocumented. As always, watch this space.)

The one documentary already completed is “Sacred Cod,” which examines the New England cod fishery through the lens of its history and influence, ultimately detailing the collapse that led to the current fishing crisis in the Gulf of Maine.

The film has a decidedly Bay State feel, as much of it is set in Gloucester and the waters around Cape Ann and features a cast of familiar faces from the waterfront and among fishing stakeholders.

It is produced and directed by Steve Liss, a long-time, award-winning photographer at Time magazine who now teaches at Endicott College in Beverly; David Abel, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter at The Boston Globe; and Andy Laub, an accomplished editor and founder of As It Happens Creative.

“Sacred Cod” showed at a few festivals last fall and will receive its greatest exposure on April 13, when it premieres at 9 p.m. on the Discovery Channel and joins the cable network’s revolving spring lineup.

It will be screened twice in Boston — April 4 at Boston’s Park Plaza Hotel as part of the national meeting of the Center for Effective Philanthropy and, in a Conservation Law Foundation-sponsored screening open to the public, April 13, at the Boston Public Library.

Read the full story at The Gloucester Times 

MASSACHUSETTS: Group plans to promote commercial fishing

March 27, 2017 — In many ways, the upcoming year for the Fishing Partnership Support Services organization will be a journey back to its roots in Gloucester, where it all began in 1997.

The Gloucester-based fishing stakeholder, which provides a bevy of financial, medical, safety and other support services to fishermen and fishing families, is planning a yearlong marketing campaign to promote the economic, cultural and health benefits provided U.S. consumers by the commercial fishing industry.

J.J. Bartlett, FPSS executive director, laid out the pillars of the campaign in a quick presentation Thursday night to the Gloucester Fisheries Commission at City Hall.

Bartlett told commission members FPSS envisions the campaign as a vehicle for closing the gap between fishermen and consumers buying their fish, as well as a platform for uniting the industry in the face of the ever-growing appetite for sustainability and accountability.

“The connection between the people that do the work and the people that eat the fish has been lost,” Bartlett said.

The campaign will stretch fully across the state using social media, traditional marketing tools and events, he said.

“It’s really going to be a 12- to 18-month process, starting this spring,” Bartlett said.

He said the schedule includes a large event in Gloucester sometime in August, followed by another in Boston in September.

“We’re going to keep pushing until we change the conversations about what fishermen do and how they’re recognized,” Bartlett said. “Uniting the industry will get us 90 percent of the way there.”

Bartlett also offered some chilling statistics to reinforce the rigors of commercial fishing and the high physical costs that often come from a career on the water.

They include:

Northeast groundfishermen are 37 times more likely to die on the job than police officers. New England waters, according to Bartlett, are the nation’s deadliest.

Read the full story at The Gloucester Times 

Conflict in Gulf of Maine Scallop Fishery

March 23, 2017 — Since the start of the scallop season this month, Jim Wotton has dragged heavy dredges along the seabed off Gloucester, hauling in as much as 200 pounds a day of the valuable clams, the area’s federal limit for small-boat fishermen.

Now, to his dismay, dozens of larger, industrial-sized boats have been steaming into the same gray waters, scooping up as many scallops as they can. Unlike their smaller counterparts, the large vessels have no quota on the amount they can catch; they’re only limited by the number of days they can fish.

It’s a regulatory loophole that small-boat fishermen fear could wipe out the resurgent scallop grounds in the northern Gulf of Maine. This year, officials at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration estimate that the large boats are likely to catch about a million pounds of scallops – roughly half of the area’s estimated stock.

“That would be devastating,” said Wotton, 48, who fishes out of Friendship, Maine. “They’re taking our future. There won’t be anything for us next year.”

Read the full story at the Boston Globe

MASSACHUSETTS: City hosts Scottish, Indonesian industry groups for day

March 22, 2017 — The third and final day of the international Seafood Expo North America was unfolding in Boston on Tuesday. But as far as the city of Gloucester was concerned, the real action was here.

For the second consecutive year, the city supplemented its presence at the massive seafood show by playing host to groups of foreign fishermen and seafood processors willing to trek to end of Route 128 to see Gloucester for themselves.

The groups, which featured fishermen and seafood executives from Scotland and Indonesia, were treated to lunch at Cruiseport Gloucester —baked stuffed haddock, sauteed green beans and Sicilian cookies from the Gloucester Fishermen’s Wives Association — and tours of the Cape Ann Seafood Exchange on Harbor Loop and Intershell in the Blackburn Industrial Park.

It was yet another element in the city’s campaign to promote its Gloucester Fresh brand and its strategy of stockpiling international seafood contacts that just might blossom into tangible business assets in the future.

The two groups had met individually with Gloucester officials during the first two days of the seafood show at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center and didn’t finalize the plans for their visit until Tuesday morning.

“We’re so pleased that you decided to come visit us,” said Mayor Sefatia Romeo Theken. “There is so much that we share culturally as harvesters of seafood from the ocean.”

The visit came one day after the city hosted a reception and cooking demonstration at the seafood expo to further promote the Gloucester Fresh brand. The reception drew more than 75 show participants, as well as state and local officials.

Read the full story from The Gloucester Times here 

MASSACHUSETTS: Gloucester’s presence at seafood expo leading to fish sales far afield

March 21, 2017 — The city of Gloucester announced its presence with authority Monday at the massive Seafood Expo North America by hosting an international reception that drew seafood executives from around the globe.

The Gloucester Fresh reception at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center, hosted by Mayor Sefatia Romeo Theken and featuring state Assistant Secretary for Domestic and International Business Development Nam Pham, continued the city’s marketing drumbeat on the sustainability and culinary benefits of the region’s fresh seafood.

“If you are looking for fresh seafood, the quality that comes off our boats is 100 percent,” Romeo Theken told seafood processors and buyers from Malaysia, Indonesia, the United Kingdom, Mexico, Iceland, Ireland and other seafood producing and consuming countries.

City organizers said the city’s presence at the gigantic show this year has provided more than 100 business leads and 20 meetings between Gloucester seafood companies and international seafood executives.

The Seafood Expo is one of the largest seafood trade shows in the world, drawing thousands of industry executives to the three-day event to buy, sell and network.

This marked the third appearance by the city at the show and the second year that Gloucester has ramped up its game to spread the word internationally on the Gloucester Fresh brand and the bounty of seafood still being harvested from the waters off Cape Ann.

Read the full story at the Gloucester Times

MASSACHUSETTS: Channel Fish plants up for grabs after deal for US Foods facility

March 14, 2017 — Channel Fish Processing Co. plans to sell its plants in Boston and Gloucester, Massachusetts.

The family-owned US company aims to transfer all capacity to the facility it acquired from US Foods on Monday, which is located 13 miles outside its Boston headquarters in Braintree, Massachusetts.

“We were getting close to capacity at our other facilities, so we needed somewhere to expand into,” national sales manager Steve Atkinson told Undercurrent News.

Founded in 1964, Channel Fish buys from New England boats and imports from Canada, Iceland, Norway and Chile. It freezes certain items like haddock, cod, pollock and scallops but also sells fresh and farmed products. It processes for a variety of preparations, including breaded products and fillets.

Read the full story at Undercurrent News

Rafael scheduled to plead guilty to evading fish quotas, smuggling money

March 9, 2017 — Carlos Rafael, who was labeled by the Department of Justice as the owner of the largest commercial fishing business in New England, will plead guilty to federal charges as part of a settlement he reached with the government, the U.S. Attorney’s office in Massachusetts said Wednesday.

Rafael of Dartmouth was scheduled to appear in federal court on March 20. Instead he’s scheduled to plead guilty to evading fishing quotas and smuggling profits to Portugal in U.S. District Court in Boston at 2 p.m. on March 16. The U.S. Attorney’s office provided no further details regarding the plea deal.

Rafael’s attorney, William Kettlwell, did not return requests asking for comment.

Often referred to as the “Codfather” as the owner of more than 40 boats ported in New Bedford and Gloucester, Rafael faced one count of conspiracy, 25 counts of lying to federal fishing regulators and one count of bulk cash smuggling.

The indictment filed by the U.S. Attorney last May listed 22 examples of Rafael falsely claiming his vessels caught either haddock or pollock from June 2012 through January 2016. According to the indictment, in those circumstances Rafael actually caught fish that were subject to stricter quotas than haddock or pollock like American plaice, yellowtail or gray sole.

Read the full story at the New Bedford Standard-Times

MASSACHUSETTS: Shrimp lovers lining up for local catch

March 2, 2017 — Joe Jurek knew his catch would be popular. He just didn’t know how popular.

Jurek, a Gloucester-based groundfisherman who specializes in yellow-tail flounder on most fishing days, now holds the rarified position as the only Massachusetts fisherman allowed to fish for northern shrimp in the Gulf of Maine.

His tenure as shrimper-in-residence will last only two more weeks, much to the dismay of local northern shrimp lovers — including Mayor Sefatia Romeo Theken — who literally have trooped down to the dock with buckets to try to buy the cold-water delicacies. The local shrimp have disappeared from seafood retail shops in the last four years the shrimp fishery has been closed.

“Once people found out about it, it was like a bunch of seagulls,” said Romeo Theken, who along with a couple other dozen friends put in an order for about 230 pounds of the small, sweet shrimp. “Now people know the process, that they have to sign in at the auction and buy it through a seafood dealer.”

Jurek said he’s averaging 350 to 400 pounds of the shrimp per fishing day, which he lands at the Cape Ann Seafood Exchange at an average off-the-boat price of about $6.50 a pound.

Jurek, owner and skipper of the 42-foot FV Mystique Lady, is the lone Massachusetts participant in the eight-week Gulf of Maine winter shrimp sampling program. The study also includes eight trawlers from Maine and one from New Hampshire.

Read the full story at the Gloucester Times

$3M to ‘enhance’ marine research

February 17, 2017 — Gov. Charlie Baker traveled to Gloucester on Thursday to bestow nearly $3 million in Massachusetts Life Sciences Center state grants to the Gloucester Genomics Institute and four North Shore schools — including two in Gloucester.

Moments into his remarks, while discussing the $109,154 going to Gloucester High School and the $56,933 headed to the O’Maley Innovation Middle School, Baker hit a particularly dense passage about “providing the O’Maley students the unique opportunity to study disease processes through aquaponic systems.”

The governor leaned his towering frame toward the audience.

“Now I have absolutely no idea what that means,” he said to great laughter from the approximately 70 people gathered in the GMGI conference room. “But it sounds wicked good.”

Read the full story at the Gloucester Times

MASSACHUSETTS: Gorton’s brings back its fisherman

February 2, 2017 — The Gorton’s fisherman, on sabbatical since about 2010, is back and the iconic marketing figure now will be at the center of a social media-centric campaign by the Gloucester-based frozen seafood company.

The new campaign kicked of this week with the release of “Coach,” a video vignette directed by “Saturday Night Live” director Mike Bernstein that projects a humorous side to the slicker-clad Gloucester fisherman while still reinforcing — Gorton’s hopes — the coveted image of ruggedness and serious custodianship of the ocean.

The video spots, according to Gorton’s Vice President of Marketing Chris Hussey, have been tailored for presentation on a variety of different social media platforms and not as traditional television advertising spots.

Read the full story at The Gloucester Times