Saving Seafood

MASSACHUSETTS: Functional harbor infrastructure vital to industry’s future

October 9, 2020 — Green Harbor in Marshfield is located 14 miles from the tip of Stellwagen Bank’s southwest corner, a trip that take most fishing vessels just a few hours. Provincetown is closer, but a trip over land adds hours.

“That makes Green Harbor ideal for day trippers to go out there, potentially catch a tuna fish, and land it,” Marshfield Harbormaster Mike Dimeo said. “It’s not a big harbor, but it’s the location.”

The geographic location is an advantage for Marshfield, which is home to roughly 100 tuna boats and 50 lobster boats, but maintaining the harbor proves a near constant effort by the town.

Misaligned jetties at the entrance to Green Harbor provide a nearly yearly headache for the town, Dimeo said. The existing design of the rock structures leads to a faster buildup of sediment than in other harbors, which requires frequent dredging.

The entrance is typically 100 feet wide, but sediment can half that and create a dangerously shallow depth at low tide – sometimes preventing fishermen from heading out or coming back in.

Working around the tides, a boat might head out in weather that’s more dangerous than would be advisable or fish more during off hours.

Read the full story at Wicked Local

All shell, no shock: Lobster prices strong as season picks up

July 23, 2018 — New England’s lobster industry faces big new challenges in selling to Europe and China, but the trouble hasn’t caused prices to budge much for American consumers.

The business is in the midst of its busiest part of the year, when tourists flock to coastal states with a beachside lobster dinner in mind. Summer is also when prices tend to fall a bit because it’s when the majority of lobsters are caught.

But the prices haven’t fallen much. Retailers are selling live lobsters in the $7 to $12 per pound range in Maine, where the American lobster industry is based. That’s not too far behind recent summers.

“It’s starting to pick up, so of course the price is dropping. But that’s pretty normal,” said William Adler, a lobsterman out of Green Harbor, Massachusetts. “Now it’s starting to come alive, and prices are still good right now.”

Members of the industry are concerned about heavy new tariffs applied by China to U.S. seafood this month, because that country is a major lobster buyer. Canada also recently brokered a deal with the European Union to remove tariffs on Canadian lobster exports to Europe, while the U.S. has no such agreement.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at the Portland Press Herald

Lobstermen brace for third year of fishing ban

January 9, 2017 — It’s a classic New England scene, colorful lobster traps stacked up along a dock.

But for fishermen in South Shore lobster ports, those grounded traps are a symbol of hard times ahead.

A ban that keeps most of their gear out of the water for the winter is entering its third year, despite arguments that it causes them unfair economic hardship.

“If it made sense, that would be one thing,” Irvine Nash, a lobsterman for 48 years, said as he stood on a dock in Green Harbor. “But it don’t,” he said.

Behind him, fishermen were pulling traps out of the water and loading them on trucks. They will sit empty in yards and garages until May, when the government lifts the ban.

Under a recent rule from the National Marine Fisheries Service, all traps from outer Cape Cod to Cape Cod Bay and parts of Massachusetts Bay must be out of the water by Feb. 1. That’s an area just under 3,000 square nautical miles.

The federal agency first imposed the ban in 2015, to decrease the likelihood of endangered North Atlantic right whales, which come to Cape Cod Bay every winter, from entangling themselves in lobster lines.

There are now only about 520 right whales left, according to the North Atlantic Right Whale Consortium, up from about 300 in the 1990s.

Read the full story at the Marshfield Mariner

MASSACHUSETTS: Lobstermen press pols to ease access to restricted areas

September 23, 2016 — Bay State lobstermen want federal fishing regulators to work with them to ease restrictions on lobstering in Massachusetts Bay and two areas east of the South Shore, proposing new safety measures that would allow boats to continue to operate while also protecting endangered whales.

Local lobstermen and leaders of the South Shore Lobster Fisherman’s Association met Wednesday, Sept. 21 at the State House with legislators and representatives for members of the state’s Congressional delegation to discuss their pitch for preventing whale entanglements without having to remove all traps from February through April.

John Haviland, president of the association who lobsters out of Green Harbor, said lobstermen are proposing to open three sections – representing a fraction of the larger 2,965 square nautical mile restricted area – for parts of the three-month ban as long as traps are retrofitted with sleeves for their vertical lines that would break every 40 feet under 1,575 pounds of pressure.

Haviland said the line-safety improvement proposal is based on research done by the New England Aquarium and Wood’s Hole Oceanographic Institute showing that right whales would be as much as 85 percent less likely to become entangled in lines engineered to break at those specifications.

“The point is not to repeal the closure. It’s to reach a compromise,” said State Sen. Bruce Tarr, R-Gloucester.

Read the full story at the Marshfield Mariner

Bay State lobstermen press pols to ease access to restricted areas

September 22, 2016 — BOSTON — Bay State lobstermen want federal fishing regulators to work with them to ease restrictions on lobstering in Massachusetts Bay and two areas east of the South Shore, proposing new safety measures that would allow boats to continue to operate while also protecting endangered whales.

Local lobstermen and leaders of the South Shore Lobster Fisherman’s Association met Wednesday at the State House with legislators and representatives for members of the state’s Congressional delegation to discuss their pitch for preventing whale entanglements without having to remove all traps from February through April.

“The point is not to repeal the closure. It’s to reach a compromise,” said Sen. Bruce Tarr, R-Gloucester.

John Haviland, president of the association who lobsters out of Green Harbor, said lobstermen are proposing to open three sections — representing a fraction of the larger 2,965 square nautical mile restricted area — for parts of the three-month ban as long as traps are retrofitted with sleeves for their vertical lines that would break every 40 feet under 1,575 pounds of pressure.

Haviland said the line-safety improvement proposal is based on research done by the New England Aquarium and Wood’s Hole Oceanographic Institute showing that right whales would be as much as 85 percent less likely to become entangled in lines engineered to break at those specifications.

Beginning in 2015, the National Marine Fisheries Service implemented a rule designed to protect right and humpback whales that prohibits lobster traps in an area stretching from Cape Cod Bay to Boston between Feb. 1 and April 30.

Read the full story from State House News Service at the Gloucester Times