Saving Seafood

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 

New video system may hold promise for cod surveys

February 1, 2017 — Researchers at UMass-Dartmouth continue to refine a new video survey system they believe holds promise for providing more accurate assessments of the beleaguered Gulf of Maine cod stock.

The developers of the system, which employs high-resolution video cameras in an open-ended commercial trawl net to count the number of fish and identify their species as they enter the net, put it through another rigorous test last week and came away pleased with the results.

“This was definitely the best trip yet,” said Travis Lowery, chief scientist and technician on the project along with UMass-Dartmouth professor Kevin Stokesbury and graduate student Nick Calabrese. “We’ve been moving more toward using Go-Pro cameras and the images were crystal clear. It all worked really, really well.”

For six days, the researchers performed 31 survey tows on Stellwagen Bank, about 15 miles southeast of Gloucester, and said they found Atlantic cod aggregating over much of the open fishing grounds.

The test also included a number of closed tows so researchers could collect biological samples to measure the length and weight of the captured fish. In the biggest closed-trawl haul, researchers collected 345 cod in a half-hour, with the largest measuring up to about 33 inches.

Read the full story at the Gloucester Times

In boon for Gloucester fleet, flounder limits doubled

January 26, 2017 — In a victory for the local inshore dayboat fleet, fishing regulators on Wednesday approved new specifications for witch flounder that will nearly double the annual catch limit for the species in 2017.

Meeting in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, the New England Fishery Management Council approved an acceptable biological catch of 878 metric tons of witch flounder, also known as grey sole, for 2017. When adjusted for management uncertainty, the move will result in a 2017 annual catch limit of 839 metric tons — nearly twice the 2016 annual catch limit of 441 metric tons.

“I think the council was compelled by the industry’s own observation that we have a pretty strong witch flounder stock,” said Vito Giacalone, policy director for the Gloucester-based Northeast Seafood Coalition.

The council action on witch flounder should provide a significant boost to the local dayboat fleet and the fortunes of the fishermen that are immutably tied to the stock.

“It’s huge,” Giacalone said. “Everybody who is left fishes for it. The inshore dayboat fleet is almost entirely dependent on this stock.”

The spike in the 2017 annual catch limit should provide a double-edged benefit, according to Giacalone.

Read the full story at the Gloucester Times