Saving Seafood

DELAWARE: Hudson, Freeman and menhaden industry will be Lunch and Learn topic Sept. 9

August 30, 2016 — The Lewes Historical Society’s Lewes Lunch and Learn for noon, Friday, Sept. 9, will feature Joanne Guilfoil with “Joe Hudson, Ted Freeman, and the Menhaden Fishing Industry” at Hotel Rodney. This is the first Lunch and Learn of the new season.

As best friends in high school, local boys Joe Hudson and Ted Freeman played football on the first team in the area and were “really hurt by those Rehoboth boys,” as Joe Hudson recalled. As 10th-graders in the late 1940s they traded work for flying lessons, and then began flying out of the Rehoboth Airport.

During this presentation, learn how these two best friends became pioneer fish spotters flying for Otis Smith, before graduating from high school, the Lewes School, in 1948. Attendees may be surprised by the significant impact their influence had on changing the developing menhaden industry, which by 1956 recorded the haul of fish at over 2 billion pounds.

Read the full story at the Cape Gazette

Delaware might scuttle ferry for artificial fishing reef

LOWER TOWNSHIP, N.J. — A Cape May-Lewes Ferry boat that has been for sale for four years likely will be scuttled as a new artificial reef after failing to draw interest on the commercial market.

The MV Twin Capes has been moored at the Delaware River & Bay Authority’s docks in Lower Township since it was gradually taken out of service about two years ago.

The ferryboat is bigger, heavier and more nicely appointed than the other three in the fleet. It has a full restaurant, a food court and two plush bars that were added as part of a $27 million renovation in 1996.

But the bigger boat costs more to operate, DRBA spokesman James Salmon said. It requires a bigger crew (17 people instead of 12) and uses more fuel than the other three ferries with every 17-mile crossing over the Delaware Bay.

The DRBA has a tentative agreement to sell the ferry for $250,000 to Delaware’s Department of Natural Resources for use as an artificial ocean reef.

Delaware is partnering with the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, which has decades of experience sinking barges, boats and construction material to create offshore habitat for fish.

Read the full story at Press of Atlantic City

The Menhaden Fish – A Staple of Lewes’ Colonial Economy

June 27, 2016 — Little did we know that one fish – not even edible fed generations of Lewes Delaware seamen and their families.

The menhaden fish is a fisherman’s fish, meaning schools of 1,000 to 100,000 provide the universal food of larger fishes and attract them to their spawning grounds.

In Delaware Bay and the shallow reaches of the Atlantic Ocean, these small fishes – under fifteen inches tops – attract larger fish which made their way to many a dinner table.

More importantly, the menhaden fish, scaly, oily and fleshy, provided the oil for the colonial streetlamps and most of the colonial economy prior to the whale oil industry taking off out of New Bedford, Mass.

This kept tiny Lewes, first town in the first state, well-employed and well-off. The shipbuilding industry took off in Lewes as early as the seventeenth century, to provide small boats that launched many a fisherman’s career.

Read the full story at NPR Delaware