Saving Seafood

MASSACHUSETTS: Markey visits Cape Ann to help fishing industry

August 21, 2020 — As local fishermen navigate the rocky waves of an economic crisis in their industry, U.S. Sen. Ed Markey made a visit to Cape Ann to assure them and other that he will work hard to help steady the boat.

The senator joined Mayor Sefatia Romeo Theken, City Councilor Jen Holmgren, and a host of other Cape Ann residents at Maritime Gloucester on Sunday during his “Leads and Delivers” Bus Tour to discuss the hardships that fishermen are facing and how local and state aid could help.

Markey is locked in a battle to keep his seat with U.S. Rep. Joseph Kennedy III for the Democratic senate primary election.

Early Friday morning, Kennedy will be on the docks to talk fishermen about his plans to help and why he may be a better choice than Markey to represent them in the Senate.

The 5 a.m. stop will be last the congressman will make in a 24-hour stump across the state, which began with an early Thursday morning meeting with New Bedford fishermen. In between, Kennedy planned to hit Fall River, Taunton, Brockton, Boston, Chelsea, Everett, Peabody, Worcester, Springfield, Richmond and Chelmsford, documenting his visits on social media and making additional stops along the way.

Read the full story at the Gloucester Daily Times

The Last Lobster Supper?

August 17, 2020 — Mark Ring has been fishing the Stanley Thomas for nearly 30 years. With its red hull, the sturdy boat is the watercraft incarnation of Ring himself—a burly guy with permanently ruddy cheeks just above the hairline of his Vandyke beard. It is his second boat. It is also his last. Ring started lobstering when he was a teenager. Back then, he recalls, he didn’t have to go far from shore to set his traps. He’d head out and, barring thick morning fog, he could see the coastline and hundreds of lobster buoys bobbing in the waters before him. “You could drop your cages and hear them hit the bottom,” Ring says in a steep North Shore accent, leaning against the Stanley Thomas’s worn center console while remembering the old days. He’d haul his yellow traps up from the sea floor, the ropes slimy with algae, the cages bursting with lobsters aggressively clawing to get out. After a typical nine-hour day, Ring would return to the marina, hoist his traps onto the wet deck, and offload 2,000 lobsters.

That’s all changed now. The days are longer and the haul is harder won. When Ring motors out predawn from the backshore Gloucester marina where he’s docked the Stanley Thomas for years, he must power out farther to deeper, colder water. “The lobsters are just not settling in 6 feet of water like they did 15 years ago,” he says. “They want to find the optimum temperature. And that temperature is at 20 feet.” When Ring heads back in at the end of a long day, the lobsters in his traps have far too much legroom. He is netting less than half of what he used to.

In the face of climate change, throughout New England, the American lobster is vanishing, and the lobsters that remain are quickly heading farther out to sea in search of colder waters. Rising pH levels in the waters closer to shore have also contributed to weaker shells, which reduce the chances the lobsters will make it to market alive. More often than not, lobstermen are tossing this weak-shelled catch back into the ocean. Such factors help explain why lobstermen across New England are seeing the weight of their landings continue to dip; last year, Maine’s landings dropped by 21 million pounds, to about 100 million, the lowest in more than a decade.

That’s a steep decline, but it’s nothing compared to what will become of the industry if the self-coronated “Prince of Whales,” New Hampshire’s Richard “Max” Strahan, has his way. He has all but made it his mission to end lobster fishing in order to save the endangered North Atlantic right whale—and, as a result, the future of the beloved lobster roll as we know it is looking pretty bleak. His adversaries have a different nickname for him: Mad Max.

A career endangered-species activist, Strahan sports an overgrown mustache, a floppy fisherman’s hat, and a smug grin. He’s filed more lawsuits than he can practically count on behalf of the right whale, and never eats seafood. “I’ve ruined more than a few clambakes,” he says. “Just try to put a lobster in a pot in front of me!” He has been arrested multiple times, and his frequent outbursts have earned him a police escort at most meetings of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries, where he shows up to advocate for whales and also trade insults with lobstermen. For very good reasons, his only listed contact is a post office box.

Read the full story at Boston Magazine

Second coronavirus wave would be ‘catastrophic,’ Massachusetts fishermen say

August 4, 2020 — Commercial fishermen and lobstermen in Massachusetts already “crippled” by the coronavirus pandemic say they fear a second wave in the fall would sink the industry.

“If there’s a shutdown then, it could be catastrophic,” said Joey Ciaramitaro, co-owner of Gloucester-based Captain Joe & Sons wholesale lobsters.

The state’s spring lockdown hurt local fishermen on two fronts: seafood-selling restaurants closed, and air travel nearly ground to a halt. Contrary to popular belief, most local fishermen and lobstermen don’t just sell their catch to tourist-flocked seafood restaurants and markets in New England.

Read the full story at The Boston Herald

MASSACHUSETTS: How COVID-19 Has Changed Business for Gloucester Fishermen

August 3, 2020 — For the past few years, second–generation Gloucester fisherman B.G. Brown has been selling much of his catch to a major food retailer, earning higher-than-average prices because of his commitment to sustainable fishing techniques. Then the coronavirus hit.

With shoppers staying home, Brown’s main customer had to lower the prices it paid and eventually cut back on how much fish it could take. Now he has to sell his catch at regular market prices, which have dropped so low that every fishing trip requires a careful calculation, Brown says.

“You have to weigh it out: Is it worth going out for these super-low prices, or do you just tie the boat up?” he muses. “It’s a hard call right now.”

Gloucester has been a fishing town since its founding in the early 1620s, and the industry was the backbone of the local economy well into the 20th century. In recent decades, however, the industry has struggled as it grapples with regulations designed to prevent over-fishing and limit environmental damages. Many fishermen with long family histories in the business have had to turn to new professions, and the city’s fishing fleet has declined significantly since its peak.

Read the full story at the North Shore Magazine

Fish council seeking input on monitor rule

July 6, 2020 — The New England Fishery Management Council has been toiling for two years on the amendment that would set monitoring levels for vessels in the Northeast groundfish fishery and now appears to be hitting the home stretch.

Final action on the measure — known as Amendment 23 — now is expected at the council’s September meeting. The meeting, Sept. 29 to Oct. 1,  currently is set for the Beauport Hotel Gloucester on Commercial Street, but could be shifted to a webinar depending on the state of the COVID-19 virus and its associated restrictions.

The council, which extended the public comment period to Aug. 31, already has held three public hearings via webinar on Amendment 23 and plans more in July and August. The next is scheduled for July 16 at 4 p.m. and interested participants can access all related documents in the Amendment 23 library on the council website, nefmc.org.

The council also is reaching out to commercial fishermen and other stakeholders, offering a variety of platforms to help them understand the complexities of the amendment and ease their participation in the online public hearings.

Read the full story at the Gloucester Daily Times

Can New England’s cod fishing industry survive?

July 6, 2020 — It’s said cod were once so plentiful in New England they would throw themselves into a boat. It’s said you could walk across their backs to shore.

Gloucester, Massachusetts, grew up around cod. The waterfront teemed with boats and fishermen, heaps of fish thrashing in wire baskets. Boats were inherited from fathers and shipyards boasted of operating since 1684. As late as the 1980s, the cod were so abundant and large (30-50lb each) that the fishermen still brought in big hauls. Cod remains the state fish of Massachusetts.

Today, you’re unlikely to find fresh Atlantic cod in any American food shop. The vast majority of the cod for sale is frozen, shipped in from Norway or Iceland. New England’s cod population has been diminished by new fishing technology, too many boats and foreign vessels, and poor management decisions. Both major stocks of North Atlantic cod in US waters – the Gulf of Maine and Georges Bank cod – are overfished. With the climate crisis warming waters and disrupting cod spawning behaviour and food sources, many scientists wonder if the stocks will survive at all.

In Gloucester, that has meant regulation to protect the stocks – including catch limits, monitoring and no-fishing zones. These have placed a burden on fishermen, many of whom dispute the scientific data, creating tension between some scientists and fishermen and threatening the identity of person and place in a town where culture and economy were, for centuries, intertwined around cod.

Read the full story at The Guardian

Monitors to return; fishermen critical

June 25, 2020 — NOAA Fisheries’s plan to reinstate at-sea monitoring aboard commercial fishing vessels on July 1 despite the ongoing pandemic prompted withering criticism Tuesday from the region’s fishing industry.

Fishermen and other stakeholders flocked onto the webinar of the New England Fishery Management Council’s June meeting Tuesday morning to voice their displeasure — and perplexity — at the decision by NOAA Fisheries to resume placing monitors aboard vessels despite obvious health risks.

“They’ve offered us no guidelines and protocols for keeping observers and the industry safe,” Gloucester Fisheries Director Al Cottone, a longtime Gloucester fisherman, said in an interview following the webinar. “Basically, NOAA Fisheries has just passed the buck, placing the burden on the industry and (monitoring) providers on how to be safe on a 40-foot boat.”

He said the agency has not provided provisions for mandatory testing of observers, nor will it provide medical exemptions for at-sea monitoring to fishermen who have a pre-existing condition or are at extreme risk because of age.

“We have an elderly working fleet here,” Cottone said.

Read the full story at the Gloucester Daily Times

MONIQUE COOMBS: Why We Should Insist on U.S.-Caught Seafood

May 27, 2020 — You know Dave Marciano from National Geographic’s Wicked Tuna. (And I’ve written about him before): To most of us in New England, he’s just a decent guy who goes tuna fishing and happens to be on TV.

TV is just a thing that happened for him, and he sees it as an opportunity to both help his business and do what he can to promote the importance of commercial fishing, American fishermen, and delicious seafood in the U.S.

Marciano is worried about the future of his business, regardless of the TV show. He depends on people visiting and traveling to Gloucester for his charter boat business. “I was a smoker for 40 years so that probably puts me in the high-risk category,” he says. And, despite being outside, being on a fishing vessel is pretty close quarters.

Many of us who work in the fishing industry are worried about a couple of months from now when the fishing season picks up, the weather warms, and visitors flock to the coast. Are the restaurants going to be able to open? Are people going to want to travel? Will people be spending money? Restaurants and tourism are outlets for products like Maine lobster and other seafood in the U.S. What is going to happen when all of the fishermen need to get back to work but there’s no place for the product to go and no mechanism to get it to where it needs to be?

Read the full opinion piece at Heated

MASSACHUSETTS: Mazzetta sells fish plant for $9.3M

April 29, 2020 — llinois-based Mazzetta Company has finally sold the Gloucester facility that housed its Gloucester Seafood Processing operations. It was sold to The Grossman Companies for $9.3 million, according to records obtained from the Essex County Register of Deeds.

The Grossman Companies, based in Quincy, is a family-run real estate investment and management firm that owns about 2.5 million square feet of commercial and residential properties throughout New England and specializes in acquisitions, private lending, property management and brokerage.

Jacob M. Grossman, president of The Grossman Companies, said Tuesday the company is looking to lease the 65,000 square-foot property at 21-29 Great Republic Drive to a single tenant. The facility, Grossman said, is proving especially attractive among a range of food-related businesses.

“There’s been really, really good interest already,” said Grossman, the fifth generation of his family in the business whose Eastern Massachusetts roots date back 120 years, starting with Grossman Lumber. “We hope to have news on a tenant in a relatively short time.”

He said the facility in the Blackburn Industrial Park, which originally housed the Good Harbor Filet company, is emblematic of the types of properties The Grossman Companies seek for its real estate portfolio.

Read the full story at the Gloucester Daily Times

Gloucester fisherman dies after fall overboard en route home

April 22, 2020 — Nicolo Vitale, a fisherman from Gloucester, Mass., died on Monday, April 20, after falling overboard from the dragger Miss Sandy.

The incident occurred as the boat was returning to port Monday afternoon. Vince Taormina, the Miss Sandy’s captain, made a distress call, reportedly about a mile outside the breakwater.

“He said he turned around and his crew member wasn’t there,” Roberts said, according to the Gloucester Times. “He said he didn’t even know how long he was missing. He said it could have been up to two miles.”

Read the full story at National Fisherman