Saving Seafood

Fish aid 2 weeks away

March 31, 2020 — Specific eligibility criteria and distribution details for the $300 million in federal assistance to the U.S. seafood industry probably won’t be available for at least another two weeks, Gloucester Mayor Sefatia Romeo Theken estimated on Monday.

Romeo Theken, who spent much of last weekend on conference calls discussing the economic and health implications of the novel coronavirus pandemic,  said she urged state and federal officials to move quickly in getting the money into the hands of fishermen, charter operators, aquaculturists, processors and other shoreside businesses financially wounded by health crisis.

“We’re fighting this invisible war and everyone has to work together or no one is going to survive this” Romeo Theken said. “The plan is very complex and very broad because, unlike previous fishery disaster assistance, this touches everybody in the commercial fishing industry from Alaska to Massachusetts.”

The mayor said she anticipates the federal funds will be distributed by the Commerce Department through NOAA Fisheries to individual regions and states, which then would manage the disbursement of funds to seafood industry stakeholders.

Read the full story at the Gloucester Daily Times

New England restaurants to buy 3m lbs of haddock from Blue Harvest

March 27, 2020 — Ninety Nine Restaurant and Pub, a Woburn, Massachusetts-based chain with 105 locations, has upped its commitment to haddock in its summer menu, and that’s good news for Blue Harvest Fisheries, the Gloucester (Massachusetts) Times reports.

The chain will buy 750,000 pounds of fresh haddock landed in Gloucester and another 2.25 million lbs of frozen haddock, according to the article, which reports that the combined 3m lbs is roughly 20% of the haddock caught commercially in New England and the rest of the United States.

Much of the fish is now being caught in the Gulf of Maine by vessels previously owned by harvester Jim Odlin, from Portland, Maine, landed in Gloucester, and then trucked to Blue Harvest’s recently built New Bedford processing facility, according to the article. Previously the fish was provided by Gloucester Seafood Processing, a subsidiary of US seafood importer and wholesaler Mazzetta.

Read the full story at Undercurrent News

Rough week for lobster, fishing industries

March 23, 2020 — We here at FishOn are just as exhausted as everyone else by this otherworldly health crisis that has us tenaciously in its grip. We’re sick of staying indoors. We’re sick of not having any sports to watch. We long to go to the Sawyer Free Library and Pratty’s — which are far more similar than you think. And just once more, we’d like to touch our face. Or somebody’s.

But we are healthy, as are those around us. So we stay the course because we are New Englanders and we give in to nothing.

Still, it was a tough week hereabouts for our fishermen in both the lobster and groundfish fisheries.

As you may have read in the pages of the Gloucester Daily Times and online at gloucestertimes.com, some of the the restrictions enacted to try to halt the spread of the novel coronavirus – principally the shuttering of all in-situ dining at Massachusetts restaurants and travel restrictions that have made it difficult to move product around – have crushed the fishermen.

In the lobster fishery, already high inventory coupled with the loss of the restaurant trade – where the great preponderance of live lobsters are consumed – sent prices down into the root cellar and rocked everyone from harvesters to dealers and processors.

Read the full story at the Gloucester Daily Times

NOAA closes Gloucester office to public, takes meetings to web

March 19, 2020 — NOAA Fisheries is restricting access to its Gloucester office and the New England Fishery Management Council is converting many of its meetings to webinars as precautions against further spread of the novel coronavirus.

NOAA Fisheries said its Greater Atlantic Regional Fisheries Office in the Blackburn Industrial Park continues to operate, but it is limiting access to the building to employees, as well as to visitors and deliveries deemed essential to its mission.

“This measure is taken out of an abundance of caution and our commitment to protecting the health and safety of our employees and constituents during the COVID-19 virus pandemic,” NOAA Fisheries said in a statement. “The majority of our staff are teleworking to the maximum extent possible, and we also have a few staff working in the buildings to keep critical functions and operations moving. Feel free to call or email GARFO staff as you normally would, but please be patient if their response time is delayed.”

NOAA Fisheries said all meetings and events scheduled for March — and several for April — have been canceled or postponed. It said it will continue to provide updates via email, as well as on the events portion of its website.

Read the full story at the Gloucester Daily Times

MASSACHUSETTS: Gloucester landings down 8%, value static in 2018

February 28, 2020 — The Fisheries of the United States 2018 report recently released by NOAA Fisheries highlighted a recurring annual trend nationally of overall commercial landings declining while the overall value of those landings increased.

In 2018, total landings at U.S. ports declined 5.3% to 4.3 million metric tons as compared to 2017. The value of those landings, however, rose 2.8% to $5.6 billion in 2018.

The port of Gloucester didn’t precisely mirror that trend in 2018.

While landings here declined 7.8% to 59 million pounds as compared to 2017, the value of those landings remained at $53 million — the same as 2017 and a $1 million increase from 2016

Massachusetts saw its landings decline 0.3% to 109,442 metric tons in 2018, but the statewide value of those landings — $647.2 million — was second only to Alaska’s catch value of $1.78 billion. The 2018 value of Massachusetts landings represented a 6.9% increase from 2017.

Read the full story at the Gloucester Daily Times

MASSACHUSETTS: Gloucester to host hearing on herring rules

February 18, 2020 — Cape Ann fishermen and other stakeholders will have a chance to weigh in on a plan to better manage the New England fishery for Atlantic herring next month.

Interstate fishing regulators are holding a hearing at 6 p.m. March 2 at the state Division of Marine Fisheries’ Annisquam River Station, 30 Emerson Ave. in Gloucester. Other hearings will be held March 3 in Wakefield and Portsmouth, New Hampshire; March 9 in Augusta, Maine, and by webinar on March 12.

Herring are important economically because they serve as key bait for the lobster and tuna industries. They’re also used as food for human consumption. But perhaps most important, the fish is a critical part of the marine ecosystem because it serves as food for whales, seals and larger fish.

The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission said in a statement that a recent assessment of the herring stock found downward trends in the health of the population.

Read the full story at the Gloucester Daily Times

Brouhaha brewing over fish monitoring

January 27, 2020 — The New England Fishery Management Council is set to resume action on the contentious groundfish monitoring amendment next week, but the Gloucester-based Northeast Seafood Coalition is questioning whether the council is rushing its own process and operating with incomplete information.

The council, scheduled to meet for three days next week in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, will return Wednesday to the arduous task of completing Amendment 23, which will set monitoring levels for vessels operating within the Northeast multispecies groundfish fishery.

Those monitoring levels ultimately will dictate the magnitude of monitoring costs the industry will bear in future fishing seasons. The current draft of the amendment includes four alternatives that call for groundfish monitoring coverage levels of 25%, 50%, 75% and 100%.

The council, which has been working on the amendment for nearly three years, faces two pivotal tasks on Wednesday: It must approve a full range of monitoring coverage alternatives and it must approve a draft environmental impact statement (DEIS) and accompanying analyses in advance of sending both out for public comment.

Read the full story at the Gloucester Daily Times

Fishermen get scant mention in ‘Blue New Deal’

December 16, 2019 — We here at FishOn are simple folk and we live by some pretty simple rules. Rule No. 1 is why stand when you can sit. Rule No. 2 is that any meeting that lasts more than 15 minutes and involves more than three people generally is a colossal waste of time for everyone.

The same principle, of course, can be applied to the various pledges, promises and plans issued by anyone running for elective office. And that brings us to our own Sen. Elizabeth Warren and her seemingly bottomless capacity, in her quest for the presidency, for issuing plans to cure everything but the common cold.

Warren’s campaign last week released its most recent plan — a Blue New Deal for Our Oceans — and let’s just say this is not the most fishing-friendly document on the shelf.

The 15-page document touches on many issues. It addresses expanding offshore renewable energy and building climate-ready fisheries. It talks about expanding community-based seafood markets and investing in regenerative ocean farming and building climate-smart ports.

It urges the protection of ocean habitats and the restoration of marine ecosystems. It calls for the end of offshore drilling and makes the case for that old environmental crowd-pleaser, expanding protected marine areas that would be closed to commercial fishing.

And on and on and on. It’s a Utah lake. About a mile wide and an inch deep.

But nowhere in those thousands of words spread across 15 pages does the plan directly address the plight of the commercial fishing industry and the fishermen who have as much at stake in the blue economy as anyone.

Read the full story at the Gloucester Daily Times

Pivotal week for groundfish ahead

December 2, 2019 — The term groundfish has always struck us with the ring of the improbable. Fish? Living on the ground? How can this be? We picture fish with feet, running in formation along the ocean bottom like the Ohio State band. No wonder we can’t find any cod. They’ve all run away.

This will be a pivotal week for groundfishermen, and by extension we suppose, groundfish themselves. As you may have read last week in the pages of this newspaper, and online at gloucestertimes.com, the New England Fishery Management Council is expected on Wednesday to set catch quotas for the next three fishing seasons for 15 of the 20 groundfish stocks covered in the Northeast Multispecies groundfish management plan.

So, Wednesday will be an important day for the local fleet. The council is meeting in Newport, Rhode Island, from Tuesday through Thursday and we’ll get the news you can use as quickly as we’re able.

Read the full story at the Gloucester Daily Times

Council to set quota for groundfish stocks

November 27, 2019 — The nadir for fishing for Gulf of Maine cod arrived in 2014, when NOAA Fisheries slashed quota by 77% and implemented emergency area closures that particularly singed the Gloucester small-boat, day fleet.

Nine days later, the New England Fishery Management Council cut cod quota by another 75 percent for the 2015 fishing season and the decline and fall of Gulf of Maine cod was on.

The closures and withering cuts added fuel to the debate over the precision of the science federal fishery regulators use to count fish and highlighted the cavernous divide between what National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries scientists say their science reflects and what fishermen say they see on the water.

In some ways, those battles still are being fought. Groundfishermen continue to say they see far more cod in their time on the water than is remotely represented in NOAA Fisheries’ science and modeling — both of which they still find suspect.

And, said longtime fisherman Joe Orlando, cod remains the most important linchpin stock in the groundfishery.

Read the full story at the Gloucester Daily Times