April 23, 2024 — NOAA Fisheries announced on Friday, April 20, that no scallop vessel fishing under federal scallop regulations may fish for, possess or land scallops in or from the Northern Gulf of Maine Scallop Management Area.
The scallop regulations require that this area be closed once it is projected that 100 percent of the 2024 Northern Gulf of Maine Set-Aside will be taken. The closure will be in effect until the end of the fishing year, March 31, 2025.
April 22, 2024 — The state Legislature unanimously voted April 10 to enact legislation sponsored by Rep. Dan Ankeles, D-Brunswick, that would help protect fishermen’s access to Maine’s working waterfront.
As amended, L.D. 2162 would strengthen the working waterfront section of the current land use tax program, which provides tax relief for owners of land designated as working waterfront. By strengthening the program, Mainers who use their own residence for their commercial fishing business would have a larger incentive to enroll, according to prepared release from the House Democratic Office.
April 18, 2024 — The Maine legislature has taken a significant step by passing the supplemental budget for Fiscal Year 2024-2025. This budget, proposed by Governor Mills, includes a substantial $60 million to aid Maine communities and businesses recover from the devastating storm damage. These funds will be allocated to the working waterfront communities, underlining the importance of their role in the state’s economy as soon as possible under the law.
The House of Representatives approved the budget by a 75-63 vote just after 4 a.m. Thursday. According to the Portland Press Herald, the Senate followed with a 19-14 vote, and the decision came after an all-night debate in the final hours of this year’s legislative session. Gov. Mills issued this statement after the Legislature passed,
April 17, 2024 — Gov. Janet Mills’ storm relief bill appears to be at risk of falling victim to a wide-ranging legislative brawl over the supplemental budget.
A bipartisan group of Senators that now includes Senate President Troy Jackson wants to load the bill with a bevy of costly riders – which is estimated to bring the bill’s total cost to $117 million – that have nothing to do with the $60 million infrastructure repair that Mills asked lawmakers to approve as an emergency measure a month ago. The additions include raises for education techs, new behavioral health programs, and higher, non-lapsing funding for nursing homes and veterans homes.
But House Speaker Rachel Talbot Ross, D-Portland, and Mills want a storm relief bill that isn’t weighed down with all that extra spending. They want to keep the other spending contained within the official supplemental budget bill, which was voted out of the Appropriations and Financial Affairs Committee Monday. And while Mills had wanted infrastructure repair money to go out fast, the House was so intent on adopting a stripped-down storm relief bill that it appeared willing to give up hopes of adopting the bill as an emergency measure.
April 15, 2024 — Baby scallops are easy to miss in a pile of muck or a large netted spat bag. At around one to six months old, they are less than 5 millimeters long – dwarfed by a fingernail.
It takes a discerning eye to find the juvenile scallops. But researchers, fishermen, farmers and students have learned how to spot them.
People from each of these groups are collaborating with the Maine Center for Coastal Fisheries, Hurricane Island Center for Science and Leadership and Colby College in the second year of a study meant to help identify how many young scallops there are off Maine’s coast, and where they’re living. The work is funded by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission.
The tiny, two-shelled juveniles, or spat, are uniquely important to fishermen who scoop wild scallops from the ocean floor and aquaculture farmers who raise them in contained areas.
April 14, 2024 — A group of chefs, seafood professionals, writers, economic development specialists and educators will travel to France from April 14-22 to explore French techniques for handling and preparing scallops in support of the scallop farming and commercial fishing sectors in Maine.
The project is made possible by a grant from the NOAA National Sea Grant Office to the Maine Sea Grant College Program. Among the Maine delegation of culinary professionals and other specialists traveling across France are Dana Morse, senior extension program manager and aquaculture lead at Maine Sea Grant and University of Maine Cooperative Extension, and Rob Dumas, UMaine food science innovation coordinator and manager of the Dr. Matthew Highlands Pilot Plant.
The group will be in Paris, Normandy and Brittany. The trip will wrap up with a scallop festival in Paimpol April 20-21. The week of travel will be followed by educational programming led by Dumas to share what the group learned from its travels with other chefs and other culinary professionals.
The project is spurred by the unparalleled quality of Maine dayboat scallops, both the traditional product from the fishery and whole live product from Maine sea farmers.
“The quality of dayboat scallops from Maine is finally getting the long overdue recognition it deserves. Scallops from different areas have different flavors (merroirs) and Maine is the only state in the country offering whole cultivated scallops. I look forward to learning from the masters of place-based gastronomy how to get the word out about our amazing scallops,” said delegation member Togue Brawn, owner and founder of Downeast Dayboat.
April 9, 2024 — Scientists claim that Atlantic cod stocks are severely depleted in the Gulf of Maine, but on the other hand, fishermen look at the marine environment and see a thriving species that will be shipped and eaten around the world for years to come.
The question of how fishermen and marine scientists employed by government agencies can view cod stocks so differently has left Micah Dean, a Marine biologist with the Mass. Division of Marine Fisheries (MDMF) puzzled for years. According to Northeastern Global News, Dean believed he discovered the answer when he was a doctoral student at Northeastern University.
He claimed that fishermen and scientists view the ocean depths with such different lenses that they are not viewing the same things.
“We did a telephone survey, and we asked commercial fishermen, over the last 10 years, do you think the cod population in the Gulf of Maine has gone down a lot, gone down a little, stayed the same, gone up a little, or gone up a lot,” Dean shared.
The most common response they received from fishermen was that the population had increased.
According to the article from Northeastern Dean stated, government scientists say that the Gulf of Maine cod stock has declined about 80% from 2005 to 2017 and is less than 5% of its target level, making it “severely depleted.”
April 6, 2024 — Maine fishermen hope to discover if Gulf of Maine shrimp stocks could support a revived fishery. After a precipitous drop in landings in 2013, Maine’s shrimp fishery officially ended with a moratorium imposed by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC) in 2014. A few boats continued fishing in a test fishery until 2021 when the Shrimp Section extended the commercial and recreational fishing moratorium through 2024.
“This three-year moratorium was set in response to the low levels of biomass and recruitment and the fact that should recruitment improve, it would take several years for those shrimp to be commercially harvestable,” reads the ASMFC website. After that, monitoring relied primarily on surveys conducted by the R/V Gloria Michelle, which have now been curtailed.
“Federal money to continue the surveys was cut, so the ASMFC shrimp section asked for ideas,” said Glen Libby, who has been involved in the shrimp fishery for decades and whose brother Gary chairs the Advisory Panel. Libby wrote a draft proposal for a plan to sell licenses to previous license holders, allow them to fish at their own expense, and report their findings.
“It would give you a much better picture of stock status than using Gloria Michelle or the Albatross, which is what they were doing,” said Libby, who questioned the validity of the data collected. They had too much spread on the net and were getting mud half the time. It was like towing a butterfly net with a dump truck.”
March 30, 2024 — Commercial fishers in the U.S. state of Maine earned USD 611 million (EUR 564 million) at the dock in 2023, a 4 percent year-over-year increase, according to preliminary data from the Maine Department of Marine Resources (DMR).
“The Maine seafood industry continues to be a powerful economic engine for our state,” Maine Governor Janet Mills said in a statement. “The dedication to sustainability and premium quality by our fishermen, aquaculturists, and dealers is a source of tremendous pride for everyone who calls Maine home.”
March 30, 2024 — The Maine Lobster Community Alliance, a non-profit organization based in Kennebunk whose mission is to foster thriving coastal communities and preserve Maine’s lobstering heritage, has announced in a press release that it is donating $10,000 to the Working Waterfront Support Fund.
The fund was established following January’s devastating storms and historic flooding that caused widespread destruction and millions of dollars of damage in communities up and down the Maine coast. According to MLCA’s website, the fund “will be utilized to provide resources and support to fishing businesses and working waterfronts that suffered damages due to the storms.”