May 12, 2016 — AUGUSTA, Maine — The Maine Department of Marine Resources announced an emergency rule change for the recreational cod and haddock fisheries effective May 7.
In accordance with the New England Fisheries Management Council and for consistency with the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) federal regulations effective May 1, the department is enacting emergency rulemaking for charter, party and recreational fishing vessels operating in state waters regarding cod and haddock.
May 10, 2016 — The following was released by the New England Fishery Management Council:
New England Fishery Management Council to Host Atlantic Herring Workshop
May 16-17, 2016
Holiday Inn by the Bay
Portland, ME
The New England Council will hold a public workshop to gather input on the development of Amendment 8 to the Atlantic Herring Fishery Management Plan.
Through Amendment 8, the Council is considering catch strategies that more explicitly account for herring’s role in the ecosystem. Three types of input are sought: 1.) desired strategy objectives; 2.) possible strategies; and 3.) how the to measure whether the strategies achieve the objectives.
All interested parties are invited to attend the workshop. More detailed information and an online registration form can be found here Atlantic Herring Workshop, May 16-17.
May 10, 2016 — There was excitement last year on North Haven when fisherman Matt Luck arrived with fresh sockeye salmon. Caught far away in the chilly waters of Alaska’s Bristol Bay, why were islanders cheering?
“If you are going to buy salmon from Maine, it’s farmed salmon. This is very different. Everyone got to meet Matt, which is why people wanted to buy in the first place,” said Cecily Pingree, owner of Calderwood Hall restaurant and market on the island. She purchased enough sockeye to last her all year.
It’s a funny scenario. Fish from Alaska arriving by skiff to a tiny island in Maine by a bearded commercial fisherman from away. In Brunswick, 40 people welcomed Luck in the same fashion.
This year shares of Luck’s catch can be reserved beginning May 18 from his company Pride of Bristol Bay. Buying a 20-pound case of vacuum-packed fillets may sound excessive, but it’s a more sustainable way to shop. You lock in freshness and price, and “it encourages people not to get in their car when they think, ‘What’s for dinner tonight?’” Luck said. “The technology [for flash-freezing fresh fish] allows us to preserve this product.”
May 10, 2016 — As the struggling New England groundfish industry takes up the cost of federally required, on-board fishing monitors, federal regulators are considering allowing 14 boats from Maine to Cape Cod to use cameras to record their catches instead. It’s part of a pilot program to test out if cameras can replace humans and do it for less money.
Watching For When They Discard Fish
Located near fishing vessels moored in Portland’s harbor, the Gulf of Maine Research Institute is a nonprofit that’s trying to modernize the oversight of commercial fishing for cod, haddock and other groundfish.
In the “gear lab,” Mark Hager demonstrates the equipment used to set up an electronic monitoring system: a computer, a GPS tracker, a hydraulic sensor and four weatherproof cameras.
“If you’ve ever been to McDonald’s and you go to the drive-through and you pull up? They are actually using almost the same cameras we’re using,” Hager says.
Hager plays footage of an actual fishing trip from a vessel that’s already been equipped with cameras. The captain and crew divide the haul into the adult groundfish they keep, and the juveniles they’re required to put back into the ocean.
May 9, 2016 — PORTLAND, Maine — Maine’s rebuilt scallop fishery is enjoying high demand from the culinary world for its prized meaty mollusks, and the 2016 season that ended last month is likely to go down as another strong year.
All sea scallops have been growing in value over the past 15 years, and while Maine’s catch is a small fraction of the national total, they are a premium product for which restaurants and consumers pay top dollar.
The Maine scallop fishery dwindled to just about 666,000 pounds in 2009 before rebuilding to more than 3 million pounds in each of the last three years. State fishing managers credit new regulations, including a rotational management system that protects localized areas from being too heavily fished.
Read the full story from the Associated Press at the Providence Journal
May 9, 2016 — PORTLAND, Maine — It might not be time yet to rechristen Cape Cod as Cape Pollock, but the humble fish is staking its claim.
The Atlantic pollock has long played a role in New England’s fishing industry as a cheaper alternative to cod and haddock, but the fish’s place in America’s oldest fishing industry is expanding as stocks like cod fade.
But the fish has an image problem.
While considered a whitefish, its uncooked gray-pinkish color looks drab compared to the snow-white cod fillets consumers are used to seeing on seafood counters. And many confuse it with the very different Alaska pollock, which is the subject of a much larger industrial fishery that provides fish for processed food products such as the McDonald’s Filet-O-Fish.
A loose consortium of fishermen, processors, restaurateurs and sustainable seafood advocates wants to change all that. They’re trying to rebrand Atlantic pollock as New England’s fish, and the push is catching on in places like food-crazy Portland, where food trucks offer pollock tacos to eager crowds.
May 9, 2016 — Maine lobster suppliers met behind closed doors with dealers from some of Europe’s biggest lobster importing countries in Brussels last week to discuss a pending ban on importing live North American lobsters into Europe.
The six Maine companies joined their Massachusetts and Canadian peers, as well as national trade officials, to discuss the proposed ban with buyers and trade officials from eight European countries, including the three biggest importers of Homarus americanus: France, Italy and Spain. The meeting occurred at the world’s largest seafood industry trade show, said spokesman Gavin Gibbons of the National Fisheries Institute, an American seafood industry trade group.
About 75 people met for 90 minutes to talk about how to avoid the all-out ban that Sweden asked the European Union to adopt in March after finding North American lobsters in European waters.
“Brussels was productive,” Gibbons said. “Unnecessarily excluding live North American lobsters from that market would have real impacts on both sides of the Atlantic, sales and jobs. So, no one is taking this lightly.”
In March, Sweden petitioned the European Union to declare the North American lobster an invasive species, which would ban live imports to the EU’s 28 member states. It based its petition on an 85-page risk assessment that claims the discovery of a small number of North American lobsters in the waters off Great Britain, Norway and Sweden over the last 30 years, including one female lobster carrying hybrid eggs, proved cross-breeding had taken place. The Swedish scientists say a ban would protect the European lobster from cross-breeding and diseases carried by the North American lobster.
May 6, 2016 — A fishing trade group that represents scallopers from Maine to Virginia has joined Northeast groundfishermen in opposing the designation of any marine national monuments in New England waters.
The Fisheries Survival Fund (FSF) penned a May 4 letter to Obama administration officials stating its opposition to the establishment of the monuments while also criticizing the unilateral process — presidential decree through the Antiquities Act — being considered for designating them.
“A monument designation, with its unilateral implementation and opaque process, is the exact opposite of the fisheries management process in which we participate,” FSF legal counsels David Frulla and Andrew Minkiewicz wrote to Christy Goldfuss and Whitley Saumwebber, executives in the White House Council on Environmental Quality. “Public areas and public resources should be managed in an open and transparent manner, not an imperial stroke of the pen.”
The FSF letter comes almost two months after Goldfuss, the managing director of the White House environmental council, told fishing stakeholders at a March 24 meeting in Boston the White House has shelved the proposal pushed by environmental and conservation groups to establish a marine national monument about 80 miles east of Cape Ann in the area around Cashes Ledge.
May 6, 2016 — Maine’s rebuilt scallop fishery is enjoying high demand from the culinary world for its prized meaty mollusks, and the 2016 season that ended last month is likely to go down as another strong year.
All sea scallops have been growing in value over the past 15 years, and while Maine’s catch is a small fraction of the national total, they are a premium product for which restaurants and consumers pay top dollar.
The Maine scallop fishery dwindled to just about 666,000 pounds in 2009 before rebuilding to more than 3 million pounds in each of the last three years. State fishing managers credit new regulations, including a rotational management system that protects localized areas from being too heavily fished.
May 5, 2016 — PORTLAND, Maine — Fishing regulators say there will be a new limit on how many Jonah crabs fishermen will be allowed to harvest.
East Coast fishermen’s catch of Jonah crabs has been growing in recent years as the crustacean grows in popularity.
They are used in processed products and as an alternative to the more expensive Dungeness and stone crabs.
Read the full story from the Associated Press at the San Francisco Chronicle