Saving Seafood

MAINE: Maritime Shorts

May 3, 2021 — The Maine Fishermen’s Forum is hosting a safety seminar on May 4. The seminar will be 90 minutes long and include several guest speakers.  

“In the last fifteen months, Maine’s fishing community lost eight men to several fishing related tragedies. Commercial fishing is one of the most dangerous occupations in America,” the forum wrote on the event posting. “There are several simple precautions which dramatically improve your chances of surviving an accident at sea and coming home safely to your family.”  

This roundtable discussion will be hosted by Maggie Raymond of Associated Fisheries of Maine and panelists include U.S. Coast Guard Commander Jason Boyer, Brian Smith, a commercial fishing vessel examiner and Mike Russo, a fishing accident survivor.   

Read the full story at the Mount Desert Islander

Floating wind farms a hot topic at forum

March 20, 2020 — If a changing climate, whale protection regulations and, now, the as yet immeasurable threat arising from the emergence of the coronavirus aren’t enough to keep fishermen awake at night, the potential development of offshore power generation facilities in the Gulf of Maine should do the trick.

Earlier this month, the Maine Fishermen’s Forum opened with a day-long seminar on the state of wind energy development in the Northeast in general and the Gulf of Maine in particular. So far, there are no wind generators in the Gulf of Maine or pretty much anywhere else in New England. The exception is off Block Island, in Rhode Island, where five, 600-foot-tall wind turbines anchored by piles driven into the seabed about 4 miles offshore are anticipated to generate 125,000 megawatt hours of electricity annually.

Plans for a giant windfarm sited in the waters of Nantucket Sound south of Cape Cod were abandoned in 2017. The proposed project known as Cape Wind was to cover some 24 square miles and was expected to generate 454 megawatts of electricity when complete. Plans for the wind farm called for 130 wind turbines with hubs 285 feet above the water and a total height of 440 feet. After years of controversy and litigation, the developer received all the permits needed to build the windfarm, but ultimately lost its contracts for the sale of the electricity and gave up on the project.

Currently, the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) is responsible for oversight of proposed offshore wind power projects. Fishermen at the forum heard from representatives of the New England Fishery Management Council that there is increasing interest in the possibility of developing floating windfarms in the Gulf of Maine. That, according to Michelle Bachman of the NEFMC, could make fishing “much stickier” than in fixed windfarms such as the roughly 60 large farms already in operation in off the coasts of Holland, Germany, Belgium and the United Kingdom.

Read the full story at The Ellsworth American

Top 10 Takes from the 2020 Maine Fishermen’s Forum

March 11, 2020 — Industry innovations abound, from the Deckhand, a new product that makes it easier to log vessel trip data to Rugged Seas, a new bib-recycling venture that incorporates discarded bib scraps into a variety of rugged and well designed bags that work just as well on the trail as they do in your bunk belowdecks.

Simon Dick of Deckhand gets the farthest-traveled award for coming to Rockport from Australia, no doubt washing his hands all the way.

Fight the power: Fishing and offshore wind

Representatives from across the industry attended and hosted a full-day session on proposed offshore wind-power projects that are creeping both north and south from Southern New England.

Annie Hawkins, executive director of the Responsible Offshore Development Alliance, and her board of directors advocate for the fishing industry on East Coast developments. They hope to offer their expertise in negotiating new federal permits that preserve access to fishing grounds.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

Right Whales Rules a Hot Topic at Maine Fishermen’s Forum

March 10, 2020 — The Maine Fishermen’s Forum took place in Rockport, Maine, last week. The hot topic of the event? The National Marine Fisheries Service’s pending North Atlantic right whale policy.

State and federal regulators are calling for the Maine lobster industry to change up their gear in order to protect the endangered right whale. These measures include reducing the number of vertical ropes in offshore waters and using weak or breakaway ropes. But lobstermen disagree with the actions, arguing that Canadian fishermen and ships are the ones killing the whales —not them.

Read the full story at Seafood News

Fleet monitoring: New England groundfish fleet cooperates with little return

March 10, 2020 — Despite years of ever-increasing monitoring, cooperation from the fleet, and catch-shares-induced consolidation, the New England groundfish industry is still on shaky ground.

A Maine Fishermen’s Forum presentation by Melissa Errand of the New England Fishery Management Council illustrated the council-considered options for monitoring the groundfish fleet (Amendment 23). This presentation focused on the effects on the Maine-based fleet, which is Portland-based.

With projected costs of each alternative ranging from about $1 million to more than $5 million across the fleet, the council expects the changes to force groundfish boats with the fewest at-sea days to lease out their quota rather than go fishing.

The council’s preferred alternative is a blended model that allows boat owners to choose between traditional at-sea monitoring and electronic monitoring.

One Portland-based boat is using the experimental full-retention model that incorporates a combination of full-time cameras on the boat, landing all fish that would qualify as discards, and dockside monitoring and sampling of those retained discards.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

Maine caught fewer lobsters in ’19, but haul still strong

March 9, 2020 — Maine’s lobster catch dipped in volume in 2019, but remained above historic levels as the industry dealt with numerous challenges and a slow start to the season.

Fishermen from the state caught 100.7 million pounds of lobster last year, the Maine Department of Marine Resources announced Friday at the annual Maine Fishermen’s Forum in Rockport. The catch was worth more than $485 million, the fourth highest in history.

The previous year’s catch was slightly more than 121 million pounds. The catch has been more than 100 million pounds every year since 2011 after having never topped that number previously, though the 2019 total was the lowest since 2010. The fishery is still soaring above where it was in the 2000s, when it typically trapped 50 to 80 million pounds of lobsters, said Kristan Porter, a lobsterman and president of the Maine Lobstermen’s Association.

“When we were getting to 90 to 100 million pounds, we were celebrating. Now if we’re in that range, people are going to think it’s bad,” Porter said. “But it’s still really high for the average of the fishery.”

Read the full story at the Associated Press

‘It’s All Going To Suck’ – Lobstermen Criticize Pending Federal Regulations At Maine Fishermen’s Forum

March 9, 2020 — The annual Maine Fishermen’s Forum is underway in Rockport, where the intertwined fates of lobstermen and endangered North Atlantic right whales are a hot topic.

The executive director of the Maine Lobstermen’s Association, Patrice McCarron, had a blunt message for members at its annual meeting, held during the forum Friday at the Samoset Inn: “It’s all going to suck.”

McCarron has spent more than a year trying to fend off threats of pending federal action to protect endangered North Atlantic right whales from entanglement with the lobster fleet’s trap and buoy ropes. She told hundreds of fishermen that the MLA continues to oppose the gear restrictions being floated by state and federal regulators. And she pushed back against calls by some to walk away from the process altogether.

Read the full story at Maine Public

Though Maine’s lobster harvest was smallest in 9 years, value remained steady

March 9, 2020 — Despite a cold, late spring that took a toll on the state lobster catch in 2019, driving landings down 17 percent, record-high prices kept the catch’s overall value steady from the previous year.

Maine fishermen hauled 100.7 million pounds of lobster in 2019, according to figures released Friday by the state Department of Marine Resources at the Maine Fishermen’s Forum. That was the smallest catch since 2010, but it was the ninth year in a row that Maine broke the 100-million-pound mark.

Despite the slow start, Maine fishermen eked out a good year. A 20 percent increase in the per-pound boat price of lobster meant the overall value of Maine’s haul remained pretty stable, coming in at $485.4 million, despite the double-digit decrease in 2019 total landings.

Kristan Porter’s end-of-the-year bottom line looked about the same as it did in 2018. The lobsterman from Cutler, who is president of the Maine Lobstermen’s Association, hauled less lobster, but he sold that smaller catch for a higher price, embodying the association’s motto, “Fish smarter, not harder.”

“We don’t fish for pounds, we fish for dollars,” Porter said. “Yeah, we got started late, and that was scary, but most guys finished strong. Overall, landings were down, but we’re still leaps and bounds ahead of our historical average. So I don’t think there is cause for alarm, at least not yet.”

Read the full story at the Portland Press Herald

Winds of change: Maine Fishermen’s Forum highlights offshore wind power

March 6, 2020 — Today kicks off the 45th annual Maine Fishermen’s Forum at the Samoset Resort in Rockport, Maine. This year’s conference program includes all the usual updates on marketing Maine lobster, racing lobster boats, management of a range of New England fisheries — groundfish, herring, eels, scallops — data collection and safety.

New this year is a full day of seminars on offshore wind (taking place all day today, March 5) that will be packed with information fishermen and other working waterfront stakeholders can use: What projects are underway, how they are permitted and what NOAA’s role is and will be. Stay tuned for an update here.

The Responsible Offshore Development Alliance, led by Annie Hawkins, has a board of directors that represents fishing communities up and down the East Coast. The group also recently launched a West Coast coalition that will serve as advocates and watchdogs on the left coast.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

How eating sea bass and crab can help Maine lobstermen

April 8, 2019 — A group of Rhode Island fishermen who witnessed southern New England’s near-shore lobster fishery evaporate and its offshore fishery diminish dramatically in their time on the water came to last month’s Maine Fishermen’s Forum in Rockland to give lobstermen here a bit of seasoned advice: Embrace ecosystem change while you’re in a good position to do so.

These southerly neighbors acknowledge the Maine lobster fishery is currently rockin’. Preliminary numbers released by the Maine Department of Marine Resources set the value of last year’s 119 million-pound lobster haul at $484.5 million, up from $438 million generated by 112 million pounds of lobster harvested in 2017. Both years are down, though, from the all-time high lobster landings of 132 million pounds (worth $541 million) set in 2016.

The two-species Rhode Island fishermen told their Maine counterparts they should be targeting are Jonah crab and black sea bass. The former have long lived in offshore waters in the Gulf of Maine and the latter, a tasty fish historically found in the mid-Atlantic region, are showing up farther north because of warming waters.

Read the full story at the Portland Press Herald