November 13, 2024 — Andrew Goode grew up lobstering with his father in Boothbay, Maine, a coastal town whose economy and culture have long been defined by the fishing industry.
Goode: “It’s essentially what built the town.”
Today, as a researcher at the University of Maine Darling Marine Center, Goode studies how the warming climate is affecting lobster in his region.
November 12, 2024 — A coalition of U.S. East Coast states have selected two firms to manage the Offshore Wind Fisheries Compensation Fund, a mitigation program built to compensate commercial and recreation for-hire fishers for revenue lost due to offshore wind developments.
The fund is a collaboration between the governments of 11 East Coast states – Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina – to provide financial compensation for economic loss caused by offshore wind projects along the Atlantic Coast. The states launched a competition earlier this year to select an administrator to run the new fund.
November 6, 2024 — Richmond claims resolution firm BrownGreer PLC and London’s The Carbon Trust have been tapped to design and roll out a regional fisheries mitigation program on the East Coast.
The program is aimed at providing financial compensation to the commercial and recreational for-hire fishing industries related to the impacts of new offshore wind farms.
BrownGreer and The Carbon Trust will work with 11 East Coast states and their respective fishing industry communities on the program. The groups have established a design oversight committee and a for-hire committee to provide advice and guidance from respective parties on the program.
The involved states include Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia and North Carolina.
November 4, 2024 — Bailey Bowden, chair of Penobscot’s alewife committee, just received news he’s been hoping to hear for a decade.
On Oct. 23, the quasi-governmental Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC) approved the management plan for shad and river herring, including alewives, submitted by the Maine Department of Marine Resources (DMR). That state plan includes a proposal to reopen Penobscot’s commercial fishery at Wight’s Pond.
“It’s been over 10 years,” Bowden said of the permitting process. It’s been decades more — since 1974, to be exact — since Penobscot’s last commercial harvest of alewives, Bowden said.
In recent years, volunteers on the town’s alewife committee painstakingly counted alewives each spring as they entered the fresh waters of the pond via Winslow Stream from the salt water of Northern Bay.
November 1, 2024 — Fishermen in Maine say they’re dealing with a new setback: a nearly 90 percent cut in how much herring they can bring in to bait lobster.
Congressman Jared Golden says he’s opposed to the limit, which would reduce the herring catch by 89 percent over three years.
Fishermen in Maine say they question how regulators came to that catch limit, saying the fish are out there.
October 31, 2024 — Two companies have won development rights to construct floating offshore wind turbines off Maine’s coastline, but lackluster interest in the bids highlights the impact of inflation and other economic challenges that have slowed the industry.
On Tuesday, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management announced that the federal government’s “first-ever” wind energy lease sale resulted in nearly $22 million in lease payments for four parcels off the coast of Maine and Massachusetts.
Connecticut-based Avangrid Renewables submitted winning bids of $4.9 million and $6.2 million for two parcels about 30 miles off the coast of Cape Cod in Massachusetts. In comparison, Invenergy NE Offshore Wind won a $4.9 million bid to develop wind energy more than 46 miles off Maine’s coastline and another project off Cape Cod for $5.8 million. Combined, the companies leased nearly 440,000 acres of federal waters.
However, only half of the areas offered for lease by the federal agency were bid on, far less than offshore wind leases in previous rounds. In 2022, developers bid $4.37 billion on six lease parcels off the coast of New York and another $757 million on areas off California’s shores, according to agency data.
October 30, 2024 — A U.S. auction of offshore wind development rights in the Gulf of Maine on Tuesday drew bids for only half of the eight offered leases, for a total of just $21.9 million in high bids, in the latest sign of deep industry malaise.
The sale was a stark display of the lack of industry appetite for new investment after a year of high-profile setbacks that include canceled projects, two shelved lease sales in Oregon and the Gulf of Mexico and a construction accident at the nation’s first major offshore wind project.
It also demonstrated a reluctance to bet big money on projects that will require floating wind turbines, an emerging technology required in very deep waters like those of the Gulf of Maine.
After just one round of bidding, four of eight offered leases sold to developers Avangrid (AGR.N), opens new tab and Invenergy, the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management said. They were among 14 companies that had been qualified to bid at the sale.
October 30, 2024 — There’s a chill in the air on this overcast morning in late September, as Buzz Scott steers his boat, the “Hurry Sundown,” out of a Rockland marina and toward the granite breakwater that protects the harbor.
He points to small specks displayed on the vessel’s navigation system. They’re abandoned fishing traps sitting on the ocean floor. Scientists estimate there are millions of them littering the bottom of the Gulf of Maine.
The plastic-coated wire traps are torn loose from their buoy lines in storms or accidentally cut off by propellers in high-traffic areas and collect at the bottom of Maine’s many coves and harbors.
“I think right in here is going to be a gold mine,” Scott said. “There’s one every ten feet it looks like on the sonar.”
Scott’s nonprofit, OceansWide, has been training scuba divers to recover derelict, or “ghost gear,” from the seafloor. They’ve primarily been diving in Boothbay Harbor but are in Rockland for the first time.
Scott tosses a buoy with a small orange flag into the water to mark their dive spot.
October 30, 2024 — NOAA Fisheries has awarded USD 387,404 (EUR 356,478) to two Maine-based groups to help train the next generation of fishers.
“Maine is known around the world for our proud fishing heritage thanks to the generations of hardworking men and women who have sustained it,” Maine’s congressional delegation said in a joint statement. “These investments in youth workforce development will help ensure that young Mainers entering the commercial fishing sector have the skills and support they need to succeed, preserving the strength of this vital industry now and into the future.”
October 23, 2024 — Fishing regulators are delaying a plan for stricter fishing rules amid concerns about a decline in baby lobsters in the warming waters off New England.
The regulators are looking to institute a new rule that fishermen need to abide by a larger minimum size for the lobsters they trap. The change is only 1/16th of an inch or 1.6 millimeters, but regulators have said it will help preserve the population of the valuable crustaceans, as many small lobsters will need to be tossed back to the ocean.
Some fishermen have argued the change is unnecessary and will be disruptive to one of the country’s most lucrative seafood industries when it is already stressed by warming waters, surging expenses and new rules to protect whales. They’ve argued for the new rules to be delayed or scrapped.
The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission has said the minimum size must be changed because of a recent decline of more than 35% of the young lobster stock in the Gulf of Maine, a key fishing ground. But the commission voted Monday to push back the implementation of the change from Jan. 1 to July 1, 2025.