Saving Seafood

Maine’s future depends on immediate action on climate change

May 3, 2017 — On Saturday, more than 2,000 Mainers marched to the State House in Augusta to demand action on climate change at both the state and federal levels. They made a compelling case that the future of the state is riding on the actions governments at all levels take right now to address the global threat.

“I have been a lobster fisherman out of Friendship Harbor for over 30 years. During that time I’ve seen firsthand the impacts of climate change to not only the Gulf of Maine, but also to our evolving fisheries, and to the coastal communities that depend upon them,” said Richard Nelson, speaking at the rally. “The Gulf of Maine, long battling ocean warming, now also faces off with climate change’s ugly stepsister: ocean acidification. Acidic waters make it more difficult for shellfish to produce their shells, and makes lobsters more vulnerable to prey and have less energies for reproduction. These changes will affect the oceans and the fishing communities that rely on them.”

The event was one of many People’s Climate Marches held across the country over the weekend in protest of the environmental policies of the Trump administration and to demand action to address carbon pollution and climate change.

Read the full story at the Maine Beacon

MAGGIE RAYMOND: ‘Codfather’ should lose all his permits

May 3, 2017 — Carlos Rafael’s environmental crime spree, spanning two decades, will finally come to an end. He pleaded guilty to federal charges of falsifying fish catch reports, conspiracy and tax evasion. He will serve at least four years in jail and will forfeit millions of dollars in fishing assets. For law abiding fishermen, this day is long overdue.

While other fishermen were complying with steep reductions in fishing quotas, Carlos Rafael decided those rules didn’t apply to him. His violations set back groundfish rebuilding requirements, and forced others to compete with his illegal activity on the fishing grounds and in the market. He has harmed the entire groundfish industry, and fishermen from Maine to New York deserve to be compensated.

Read the full letter at the New Bedford Standard-Times

Associated Fisheries of Maine Says Rafael’s Permits Must Go Back into Quota Pool

May 2, 2017 — SEAFOOD NEWS — In a statement today, Maggie Raymond, Executive Director of the Associated Fisheries of Maine, said that NMFS only legal option with Carlos Rafael’s permits is to cancel the permits and return them to the quota share pool.

Raymond says “Carlos Rafael’s environmental crime spree, spanning two decades, will finally come to an end. Rafael pled guilty to federal charges of falsifying fish catch reports, conspiracy and tax evasion. He will serve at least four years in jail and will forfeit millions of dollars in fishing assets.  For law-abiding fishermen, this day is long overdue.”

“While other fishermen were complying with steep reductions in fishing quotas, Rafael decided those rules didn’t apply to him. Rafael’s violations set back groundfish rebuilding requirement and forced others to compete with his illegal activity on the fishing grounds and in the market. Rafael has harmed the entire groundfish industry, and fishermen from Maine to New York deserve to be compensated.”

“Rafael’s history is so egregious that the National Marine Fisheries Service is obliged to cancel all his groundfish permits and fishing privileges. Existing regulations describe a process for re-distributing the fishing privileges from cancelled permits to all other permit holders in the fishery – and this is precisely the process that should be followed in this case.”

The current New England groundfish management plan that established industry sectors and allocated quota based on fishing histories from 1996 to 2006 provides that if a permit is canceled, NMFS must recalculate the quota shares of all remaining fishing permits within that category, as the allocations were made based on a certain level of eligible fishing history.

The Associated Fisheries of Maine is saying that this system should be followed in Rafael’s case, meaning the catch share confiscated from Rafael due to illegal activity would be then redistributed among all remaining valid permit holders.

This is the option that concerns New Bedford because it would mean a re-distribution of some groundfish quota rights to other ports.  However, Raymond argues that all New England fishermen who did abide bycatch limit rules were adversely affected by Rafael’s illegal fishing and that they deserve to be compensated.

This story originally appeared on SeafoodNews.com, a subscription site. It is reprinted with permission. 

JERRY FRASER: Big lobster is watching

April 28, 2017 — It’s been a while since Red Bridges paid me $1 a day to bait lobster traps. Nine years old and not especially tall, I couldn’t reach deep in the bait barrel, so Red would pitchfork the redfish into a bushel basket for me. Between his having to do that and my eating half his lunch — unless he brought cold bean sandwiches — I was probably getting 99 cents more than I was worth.

Another benefit was cussing. Red was by no means vile in his use of language but he could cuss with the best of them and if, for example, our gear wound up with another fisherman’s, he would let loose with a stream I would later reprise for my friends. Of course, on the rare occasions his wife came along for the day, sitting in her lawn chair on the back deck, you’d have thought we were a couple of altar boys.

This was the 1960s. Lobstermen at Perkins Cove in Ogunquit, Maine, fished a couple hundred wooden traps, if that, from wooden boats. They built their own traps and knitted their own heads. Bait was $5 a barrel and the bait man delivered twice a week. Electronics typically consisted of a flasher, and not everyone had a radio.

Some things haven’t changed. Lobstering has always had pirates who harvest shorts and v-tails or regard buoy color as a notion whose significance varies with the visibility. In years past the state of Maine was seldom called in to adjudicate disputes. Fishermen sorted things out on their own in accordance with local tradition. In some cases, a word to the wise was enough, particularly if delivered by someone who might have been described as an “elder statesman.” Sometimes more assertive remedies were necessary. Occasionally, a dispute could result in an all-out trap war.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

MAINE: Decline in Prized Worms Threatens Way of Life

April 27, 2017 — Dan Harrington makes his living unearthing marine worms by hacking away at mudflats with a tool that resembles the business end of an old steel rake.

He’s fine with the freezing weather, the pungent aromas and the occasional nip from an angry crab, but his latest problem is the big one — the worms just aren’t there like they used to be.

“A bad day is zero worms,” said Harrington, a second-generation worm raker. “A bad day is when you try out five, six different spots and don’t even make enough money to replenish the gas that you put in your tank.”

Harrington’s struggle, and that of his fellow wormers, has reverberations around the world. A mysterious drop in the harvest of two of the most popular worms for sport fishermen is proving expensive for anglers, perilous for bait shop owners and a threat to a way of life in Maine.

Maine harvesters are by far the U.S.’s largest suppliers of sandworms and bloodworms, twisty, fat critters that can grow longer than a foot and have teeth that inflict a painful bite. Wormers dig the wriggling creatures out of coastal muck so they can be sold to fishermen worldwide.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at the New York Times

Environmentalists vow to fight Trump on Maine monument

April 26, 2017 — President Trump on Wednesday will issue a sweeping executive order to review as many as 40 national monument designations made by his three predecessors, an unprecedented move that could curtail or rescind their protected status.

It was unclear which areas would come under review, but the list could include monuments designated last year by President Barack Obama, including thousands of acres of pristine woods in northern Maine and sensitive marine habitats in the submerged canyons and mountains off Cape Cod.

Environmental groups immediately questioned the president’s legal authority to reverse a previous president’s designation, but the Trump administration has suggested that some of the restrictions on mining, logging, and other commercial and recreational activities have gone too far.

“The review is long overdue,” US Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke said at a White House news conference.

“No one can say definitely one way or another whether a president can undo an earlier president’s designation, because the issue has never been litigated,” said New Bedford Mayor Jon Mitchell, who has opposed Obama’s closing of 5,000 square miles of seabed to fishing by designating the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument, about 130 miles off Cape Cod.

Mitchell said there is precedent for presidents to change the boundaries and activities within a national monument. President Woodrow Wilson reduced by half the size of the Mount Olympus National Monument in Washington, created by President Theodore Roosevelt.

“Intuitively, one would assume that if the president can establish a monument, the president can undo an earlier establishment,” he said.

Andrew Minkiewicz, an attorney at the Fisheries Survival Fund in Washington, D.C., said the president wouldn’t have to rescind Obama’s designation to address the concerns of the fishing industry.

“With the stroke of a pen, he could just say there’s no longer a ban on commercial fishing,” he said.

Read the full story at the Boston Globe

Developer outbids Cook’s Lobster owner to buy historic Maine island wharf

April 26, 2017 — A Portland real estate developer outbid the owners of Cook’s Lobster & Ale House on Tuesday to purchase the Bailey Island wharf adjacent to the restaurant for $510,000.

Arthur Girard, who in 2015 donated Ram Island in Saco Bay to the University of New England, said he’s not sure what he’ll do with the property, which for decades has operated as a commercial fishing wharf for local lobstermen.

“I have no plans for it,” he said. “That’s how I get inspired.”

Girard, who does business as AMG Holdings in Portland and Miami, Florida, was one of a handful of registered bidders who had provided a $50,000 deposit before Tuesday’s auction, held inside a building on the dock. In the end, only he and Cook’s Lobster owner Nick Charboneau volleyed to win the property.

Auctioneer Michael Carey of Tranzon Auction House in Portland started the bidding at $800,000 but with no takers quickly came down to $500,000 and then $400,000 — and within minutes was asking for a bid to best another at $300,000.

Among the three dozen people seeking shelter from the rain inside amid the lobster tanks, Carey paused the bidding twice, once for nearly 20 minutes, after which Charboneau increased his bid to $400,000.

Girard went to $475,000, and the two volleyed until Girard offered $510,000, at which point Charboneau was done.

Read the full story at the Bangor Daily News

Conservation group boosts alewife restoration efforts

April 25, 2017 — If Maine’s once enormous population of alewives is ever to be restored, it will take the continuing efforts of a dedicated group of volunteers.

That was the message last week to more than a dozen people concerned with the health of the alewife runs in Surry, Penobscot and Orland from Brett Ciccotelli, a fisheries biologist with the Downeast Salmon Federation.

Ciccotelli spoke at a meeting at The Gatherings in Surry aimed at increasing the number of volunteer monitors who will count alewives as they return to Downeast streams in the coming week.

Ciccotelli talked about the importance of the alewife to the Maine ecosystem and briefly reviewed how Maine has managed the alewife resource in recent years.

He also explained how the Downeast Salmon Federation was collecting data with an eye to increasing the number of the small river herring that make a successful journey from the sea to their freshwater spawning grounds each spring and then return to the sea again in fall.

Anadromous alewives return from the ocean each spring to travel up Maine’s rivers and streams to lay their eggs in lakes and ponds. Schools of tiny young fish migrate out at summer’s end, to spend some time in the estuary and the ocean maturing, before returning three to four years later to the river they were born in to start the cycle again.

Alewives play an important role in the food web, serving as a forage species that feeds small mammals, birds and larger fish. The decline in the alewife population, Ciccotelli said, “probably contributes to the loss of groundfish” such as cod and haddock in the Gulf of Maine.

Read the full story at the Ellsworth American

Maine fishermen could feel impact of proposed undersea cable

April 25, 2017 — A Canadian company is proposing a 350-mile, sub-sea power transmission cable that could interfere with commercial fishing along the coast of Maine.

If the project is approved, the Atlantic Link cable would be buried about 25 miles offshore of Harpswell, running between New Brunswick, Canada, and Plymouth, Massachusetts. It would affect about 400 lobstermen from Cape Elizabeth to Phippsburg, according to spokesman Gerald Weseen of the Nova Scotia-based energy services company Emera.

Weseen and other project representatives, and staff from the Maine Coast Fishermen’s Association, conducted a meeting about the project April 21 that drew only two area lobstermen.

“Most of the (interference) is pretty workable,” Glenn Rogers, a Mackerel Cove fisherman from Orr’s Island, said Friday.

Late last month, a collection of Massachusetts utility companies sent out a request for proposals targeting clean energy services in response to a clean energy procurement mandate from that state’s Legislature, Weseen explained.

He said Emera’s plan to channel 900 megawatts of hydro and wind power is the only sub-sea option competing against about a half dozen other proposals.

Read the full story at The Forecaster

Trump to review Maine monument designation, may expand offshore drilling

April 24, 2017 — President Trump will sign executive orders this week aimed at expanding offshore oil drilling and reviewing national monument designations made by his predecessors, continuing the Republican’s assault on President Obama’s environmental legacy.

The orders could expand oil drilling in the Arctic and Atlantic oceans and upend public lands protections put in place in Utah, Maine, and other states. The Antiquities Act of 1906 authorizes the president to declare federal lands of historic or scientific value to be ‘‘national monuments’’ and restrict how the lands can be used.

Administration officials on Monday confirmed the expected moves. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity to freely discuss the president’s upcoming actions.

Obama used his power under the Antiquities Act to permanently preserve more land and water using national monument designations than any other president. The land is generally off limits to timber harvesting, mining and pipelines, and commercial development.

Read the full story at the Boston Globe