March 12, 2019 — The following was released by NOAA Fisheries:
The common pool possession and trip limits for Gulf of Maine (GOM) cod and witch flounder are increased, as summarized in the table below, for the remainder of the 2018 fishing year, through April 30, 2019.
The Small Vessel Category trip limit of 300 lb of cod, yellowtail flounder, and haddock combined remains in place.
For more information read the rule as filed in the Federal Register or the bulletin as posted on our website.
February 7, 2019 — New research completed at the University of Guelph in Guelph, Ontario, Canada, has found mislabeing is prevalent throughout the supply chain.
Researchers found that 32 percent of fish overall were mislabeled. The highest rate of mislabeling was at retailers (38.1 percent), followed by processing plants (27.3 percent) and importers (17.6 percent).
Conducted in collaboration with the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA), the study was published in the journal Food Research International.
“We’ve been doing seafood fraud studies for a decade,” Robert Hanner, the lead author of the study and associate professor at the University of Guelph, said in a press release. “We know there are problems. But this is the first study to move beyond that and look at where the problems are happening throughout the food supply chain.”
“If you can see the name is changing across the supply system, that’s a red flag,” Hanner told SeafoodSource.
Hanner said he could not definitively prove whether some of the mislabeling is intentional, but found a “pretty significant price differential” in certain substitutions, such as farmed salmon labeled as wild salmon, tilapia labeled as red snapper, and basa labeled as haddock and cod.
January 23, 2019 — Haddock, a species that for decades has largely been popular in New England and the Middle Atlantic, is starting to proliferate down the U.S. East Coast, according to the latest data.
Broadline sales of haddock increased in nearly every U.S. market between 2016 and 2018. At the low end, sales in the “East North Central” area stayed relatively flat, while sales in the West South Central region of the U.S. (Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Louisiana) increased by 92 percent.
Broadline sales everywhere else increased too: Middle Atlantic by seven percent, South Atlantic by 21 percent, Mountain-Pacific by 44 percent, West North Central by 49 percent, and East South Central by 48 percent.
January 7, 2019 — When it comes to fishery management controversy never seems to be too far away. Last month you may have read about the dubious nature of a decision by the New England Fishery Management Council to close a large area of Nantucket Shoals to fishermen who harvest surf clams there, ostensibly to protect fish habitat. Questionable actions such as these undermine industry confidence in fishery regulators and serve only to alienate, and embitter, fishermen and the many others on the waterfront whose livelihoods are threatened by such draconian measures. With respect to protecting fish habitat allow me to quote from NOAA Fisheries’ own web site (fishwatch.gov) which bills itself as ‘U.S. Seafood Facts.’ The salient quote, with respect to the Atlantic surfclam, spissula solidissima, is this: “Fishing gear used to harvest surfclams has minimal impacts on habitat.” In spite of this fact these traditional grounds have now been designated as essential fish habitat and clamming is banned there indefinitely. NOAA also tells us that surfclams support a valuable fishery. Well, come April 9 it will not be nearly as valuable for those who participate in the harvest and that includes fishermen and shore workers in New Bedford, Gloucester and Bristol, Rhode Island where Galilean Seafood employs around 120 people in this fishery.
“There were five areas out there where we harvested our clams and the two areas with the most historical tows are the ones they closed,” Alan Rencurrel told me. Alan knows surf calms. He owns Nantucket Sound Seafood in New Bedford where the clams he catches are hand shucked. “If you steam ’em open they get chewy,” he said. He’s been fishing on the Shoals since 1992. “And there were boats out there before me.”
He also played me some high-resolution video, taken from a dredge-mounted camera, showing the sea bed in the area known as the Rose and Crown, the largest of the areas to be closed. There were no fish, rocks or cobble to be seen, just a solitary skate, on a sandy bottom littered with old mussel shells. “We can’t tow over rocky bottom like a scallop dredge,” he told me. It’s too hard on the gear and anyway clams prefer sand bottom, he said. Conversely, groundfish such as cod and haddock are found on hard bottom.
December 10, 2018 — Commercial fishermen will be able to catch a little bit more cod and haddock off New England next year.
Fishermen seek the valuable groundfish species and others off the East Coast, with most coming to land in New England states. The New England Fishery Management Council has approved new catch limits for several species for the fishing year that begins May 1.
The largest catch limit will be for Georges Bank haddock. It’ll increase by almost 20 percent to more than 117 million pounds (53 million kilograms).
December 5, 2018 — Although the biomass for pollock in the US eastern Bering Sea fishery is coming down, the total allowable catch (TAC) for 2019 could actually be increased, due to the outlook for further cuts to Pacific cod.
The TACs for pollock and cod, especially in light of the gloomy outlook for the latter, will be a major focus of the North Pacific Fishery Management Council (NPFMC) meeting in Anchorage, Alaska, this week, which will go ahead, after an earthquake hit the city last Friday. With whitefish prices set high, the Barents Sea cod and haddock fisheries coming down for 2019 and the Russians only increasing their pollock quota for next year marginally, industry players globally are looking to what happens at the meeting.
First, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) scientists present their views on the outlook for 2019, then the council will decide on TAC levels for pollock, cod, yellowfin sole and other fish. There is uncertainty around pollock and cod moving further north, as previously reported by Undercurrent News.
November 9, 2018 — The European Commission has proposed new 2019 quotas for 89 separate stocks in the east Atlantic and North Sea.
The new quotas will see total allowable catch (TAC) increased or maintained for 62 stocks, while 22 stocks have seen a decrease in TAC — five of which have a proposed TAC of zero, indicating that the reduced stocks should no longer be targeted at all.
Some of the biggest quota gains belonged to North Atlantic haddock, which had a proposed TAC of 10,469 metric tons, up 103% from 2018; horse mackerel off the west coast of Spain, with a proposed quota of 94,017t, up 69%; and Norwegian lobster west of Sweden, up 65% to a new TAC of 19,424t.
October 29, 2018 — The European Parliament has voted to approve the multiannual plan for management of north-east Atlantic waters, despite the plan’s allowance for unsustainable fishing, said Oceana, ClientEarth and Seas at Risk.
The Western Waters, an area that stretches from Portugal to France, Ireland and the UK, is a heavily-used fishery for cod, haddock, plaice, sole and Norway lobster. In 2017, the area yielded 368,000 metric tons of produce, with a combined first sale value of roughly €1.4 billion.
However, current estimates suggest that as much as 41% of the region’s stocks are overfished. Environmental NGOs have been putting pressure on the EU Parliament to reduce catch quotas in the region as part of the 2013 commitment in the common fisheries policy (CFP) to end overfishing in European waters by 2020 at the latest.
The latest vote has agreed to allow fishing at levels above the scientifically-advised maximum sustainable yield, a move that many NGOs have condemned as being adverse to the objectives laid out in the CFP.
“The Parliament has agreed fishing mortality ranges that, at their upper limit, can exceed the fishing rates above scientifically advised sustainable levels,” said Andrea Ripol, fisheries policy offer at Seas At Risk. “This means that stocks will not be restored to healthy levels, bringing negative socioeconomic impacts in the longer term.”
September 12, 2018 — Corey Harris wasn’t concerned about the storm. The captain of Rhonda Denise, a 77-foot commercial trawler, he’d been stuck in port all week, as two nor’easters, in early March, slammed the New England coast back-to-back. Now a third brewed offshore. But Harris saw an opportunity. “We’ll thread the needle between the storms,” he told me over the phone. We’d catch as much squid as possible, then haul ass back to port before the next system hit. Bring seasickness. medicine, he added. “It’ll be rough—but worth it.”
On the Thursday of our departure, the Port of Galilee, in Point Judith, Rhode Island, was full of boats but empty of people. If you’ve eaten calamari at a seafood shack or a little red-sauce joint, odds are it crossed the dock here in Point Judith. In 2016, the village’s 119 vessels landed 22.6 million pounds of squid, valued at $28.6 million—its best haul to date. It’s the 15th-highest-earning seaport in the country and first in squid on the Atlantic seaboard. By all measures, it’s the calamari capital of the East Coast. And with ongoing downturns in cod, flounder, and haddock, scores of commercial fishermen, not only here but also up and down the New England shore, now depend on squid to stay afloat in a notoriously unpredictable industry.
Harris met me in the parking lot. Among the local fishermen, he’s one of “the few young guys worth a shit,” a longtime captain told me. He’s also something of an anomaly. The salutatorian of his high school, in Babylon, New York, he dropped out of his university’s pre-dental program, in 2007, to work on trawlers, drawn to fishing for reasons that he can’t quite explain. Soft-spoken and ambitious, with a tight red beard, he started as a deckhand on Rhonda Denise, made captain by age 22, and became a co-owner a few years later. Now, at 31, he’s still 20 years younger than the majority of guys on the dock. “The storms have kept most boats in,” he told me. “There’s no fish on the market. Prices will be high.” There was no need to worry about the weather, he added—as long as we made it back by Monday.
Read the full story at Men’s Journal
August 6, 2018 –By 4 a.m. every morning the Finlander is out in the ocean, sometimes traveling as far as 50 to 70 miles into the Gulf of Maine, to catch fish to be sold directly to restaurants and customers at local farmers’ markets.
The Finlander is a 36-foot Northern Bay and one of two vessels operated by New England Fishmongers. On a good day, Finlander’s crew will haul in 1,000 to 2,000 pounds of fish, according to Capt. Tim Rider.
The reason the Finlander usually travels so far out, even beyond the reception of the vessel’s VHF radio, is to increase the odds of catching Atlantic pollock and haddock, instead of a large haul of cod, which has a much higher fishing quota lease price per pound. But out at sea, when the 24-ounce jig is in the water, it’s anyone’s guess what may bite.
“If there’s a problem that far out, we’re out of VHF radio reception in a 36-foot boat and we’re likely dead,” Rider, also the owner of New England Fishmongers, said. “Best case, we’d be stuck out there a long time by ourselves before there is any chance we could be rescued.”
Despite the risks of fishing on the high seas, Rider’s crew feels a sense of heightened purpose to reconnect local restaurants directly to the fishermen.
“This is the only job I could see myself doing seven days a week,” Finlander crew member Chris Roberts said after only his second week as a member of the Finlander’s crew on Monday. “With us, our fish, you’re eating what was caught yesterday. Nothing beats being out on the boat; casting out and catching fish with your hands.”