Saving Seafood

‘Past point of no return’: Lone fisherman who survived shipwreck off Martha’s Vineyard recalls harrowing ordeal

November 29, 2019 — A fisherman who survived a shipwreck off Martha’s Vineyard spoke Tuesday from his hospital bed about the harrowing ordeal, one day after the United States Coast Guard suspended its search for three of his fellow crewmates.

Ernesto Garcia, 50, was aboard the Leonardo — a 56-foot scallop boat — that capsized and sank on Sunday afternoon as nine-foot swells and gusty winds battered the area. He was later rescued by a helicopter crew.

“We caught a rogue sea,” Garcia told 7’s Jonathan Hall. “A wave came across in the opposite direction in which the waves were running.”

Garcia says the boat was equipped with a device that automatically sends an emergency distress signal when it strikes the water but that three survival suits onboard sunk with the boat.

“We had no time. Half the port side of the boat was down in the water,” Garcia recalled. “We were past the point of no return.”

Crewmate Mark Cormier, 35, was with Garcia when the wave hit.

“The boat took a nice roll and flipped,” Garcia said. “He [Cormier] broke away from me and I ended up in some kind of air pocket.”

Read the full story at WHDH

Coast Guard ends search for three missing fishermen from capsized boat off Martha’s Vineyard

November 26, 2019 — Scalloper Samuel Pereira was headed back to State Pier on Saturday morning when his boat passed the Leonardo heading out to sea. Over the radio, he said, the two skippers chatted briefly about the forecast, which was predicting fierce conditions.

“The weather was no good for me, because I have a small boat,” Pereira recalled Monday. “He knew it was going to be [sloppy]. But he said he was going to fish slow.”

It was the last Pereira would hear from the boat, a scalloper, or its captain. On Monday, the Coast Guard suspended its search off Martha’s Vineyard for three fishermen missing from the 56-foot Leonardo, which apparently capsized 24 nautical miles from the Vineyard and sank Sunday, with four aboard.

“We will no longer be searching unless a new development happens . . . meaning something is reported that would necessitate reasonable efforts to continue,” said Petty Officer Zachary Hupp, a Coast Guard spokesman.

Read the full story at The Boston Globe

MASSACHUSETTES: Cape fishermen celebrate new trawling restrictions

November 26, 2019 — In 2002, when Peter Baker first voiced his opposition to the large herring trawlers towing even larger nets off the beaches of Cape Cod, he didn’t think it would take 17 years to get a ban on what he and others saw as a return to the industrialized fishing that had wiped out New England herring, mackerel and menhaden in the 1970s before the U.S. pushed the foreign fleet 200 miles offshore in 1976.

Last week, the efforts of local fishermen, boards of selectmen, voters, environmental groups and state legislators who spoke out against the midwater trawl herring fishery finally paid off with a federal restriction on large herring vessels fishing within 12 miles of the coast from the Canadian border to Connecticut, and within 20 miles of shore along the Outer Cape coastline south to the waters off Martha’s Vineyard.

“This is the culmination of a decade and a half of hard work,” said Baker, who is the director of marine conservation work in New England and Atlantic Canada for the Pew Charitable Trusts.

Read the full story at the Cape Cod Times

Owner of New Bedford vessel capsized off Martha’s Vineyard fears 3 crew members perished

November 25, 2019 — The owner of a scalloping vessel that capsized and sank in choppy seas southwest of Martha’s Vineyard on Sunday afternoon said the single fisherman found in a lifeboat a few hours after a distress signal was sent is in the hospital.

“The other three fishermen are presumed lost,” Luis Martins, owner of the fishing vessel Leonardo, said Monday morning. “That’s all I can say.”

He declined to provide any names of the crew members.

Coast Guard crews from Air Station Cape Cod were continuing the search for the three missing fishermen Monday morning, with the 87-foot cutter Cobia and 270-foot cutter Escanaba scouring the waters off Martha’s Vineyard while a Jayhawk helicopter searched from the air.

Read the full story at the New Bedford Standard-Times

Turbine spacing unites offshore wind executives

November 21, 2019 — Executives representing the offshore leaseholders off Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket announced their joint support for a one-nautical-mile width between all their proposed wind turbines.

The executives also announced agreement on an east-west orientation of the wind turbine rows. Orsted North America president Thomas Brostrom, Equinor Wind US president Christer af Geijerstam, Eversource Energy-enterprise energy strategy executive vice president Leon Oliver, Mayflower Wind president John Hartnet, and Vineyard Wind CEO Lars Thaaning Pedersen signed a letter to the U.S. Coast Guard advocating for the one-nautical-mile spacing and east-west configuration. The letter was accompanied by a report executed by W.F. Baird & Associates Ltd. that concludes such distancing and orientation of turbines is advantageous.

For Vineyard Wind, the width is a mile short of what it previously supported. As The Times reported in December 2018, Vineyard Wind was in support of two-mile transit corridors, while fishermen pushed for four-mile corridors. However, the executives contend in their letter that the widths are “responsive to fishermen’s requests.” Among other reasons, fishermen in Rhode Island and Massachusetts have pushed for wider navigation spaces between wind turbines for safety reasons, due to the length of mobile gear some fishing vessels trail. The executives state the width they propose addresses mobile gear concerns.

In a statement to The Times, Meghan Lapp, fisheries liaison for Rhode Island’s Seafreeze Ltd. and a board member of the Responsible Offshore Development Alliance (RODA), found the executives’ announcement foreseeable, and as evidence they may not be taking fishing industry input to heart.

Read the full story at the Martha’s Vineyard Times

Many fishermen aren’t on board with wind industry’s new plan

November 20, 2019 — The fierce competitors in the local offshore wind industry probably hoped to make a big splash with this news: They teamed up to propose a grid that creates uniform spacing between each tower and a similar orientation for the various wind farm proposals south of Martha’s Vineyard.

One of the chief goals was to assuage concerns among fishermen who worry that an uncoordinated array of hundreds of towers would make the waters hard to navigate — effectively displacing them from rich fishing grounds.

However, plenty of fishermen aren’t taking the bait. For many of them, the one nautical mile distance proposed between each giant turbine tower simply isn’t enough — especially for boats that are dragging big nets behind them.

Persuading fishermen to toe the line could be crucial to the nascent industry’s survival. Construction was about to begin on what would have been the first major offshore wind farm in the US until Interior Secretary David Bernhardt dragged out the permitting in August. Bernhardt ostensibly wants a study of the cumulative impact from all the wind farms in the pipeline, before allowing the first one to proceed.

Read the full story at The Boston Globe

Top climate hawk bashes first big offshore wind project

November 15, 2019 — For the past seven years, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse has given a weekly address about the dangers of climate change. Increasingly, some greens wonder if he is full of hot air.

The Rhode Island Democrat, one of the Senate’s top climate hawks, has emerged as a leading critic of Vineyard Wind, an 84-turbine offshore wind project proposed in federal waters 15 miles south of Martha’s Vineyard. Whitehouse has questioned the federal government’s review of the project, the first large-scale development of its kind in the United States, and criticized Vineyard Wind for failing to adequately consult fishermen.

His barbs have raised eyebrows in climate circles and in Massachusetts, where Vineyard Wind has the enthusiastic backing of the state’s political establishment, and comes as the Trump administration weighs the future of the project.

In August, Interior Secretary David Bernhardt called for an additional round of environmental review of the project (Climatewire, Aug. 12). A division of Interior, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, is currently conducting a cumulative impact study of other offshore wind projects proposed for the area.

In an interview, Whitehouse said he was simply pushing for improvements to BOEM’s permitting process to better accommodate the concerns of fishermen and other ocean users.

He argued that Vineyard Wind had already settled on the design of its project with investors before taking input from fishermen. And he cited the Block Island wind farm, a five-turbine project built by Rhode Island-based Deepwater Wind, as an example of how wind developers should approach fishermen’s concerns.

Keating said he appreciates the difficulty Whitehouse faces in balancing the concerns of fishermen next to the economic potential of offshore wind. He represents New Bedford, Mass., America’s largest commercial fishing port, and has heard similar concerns about offshore wind from some constituents. But he added: “I really feel an urgency and I feel an imperative that we have to go forward on this. This is gonna be great for our economy.”

Read the full story at E&E News

Mayflower Wind wins second Massachusetts bid for wind power

November 5, 2019 — An 804-megawatt plan by Mayflower Wind won the second Massachusetts state bid for offshore wind energy, as developers forge ahead despite a federal study of how the burgeoning new U.S. market may affect the commercial fishing industry and other maritime interests.

Mayflower Wind, a 50/50 joint venture between Shell New Energies US LLC and EDPR Offshore North America LLC, beat out Vineyard Wind and Bay State Wind, which hold adjoining federal leases the companies obtained south of Martha’s Vineyard, in the competition for the state power bid. Mayflower says it will deliver long-term power below the state’s original price cap of USD 84.23 (EUR 76.1) per megawatt-hour, and more than 10,000 jobs in state over the life of the project.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

NEW YORK: Stonington fishermen say wind farm developer not responding to their concerns

October 23, 2019 — Local fishermen say they’ve been waiting for months for Ørsted to respond to a host of concerns they’ve presented  about a proposed 75-turbine wind farm about a dozen miles southwest of Martha’s Vineyard.

Joe Gilbert, who has a fleet of four commercial boats based at the Stonington Town Dock, said he met with John O’Keefe, head of marine operations for Ørsted, in March to discuss the “vast” concerns that he and other fishermen have ranging from potential environmental impacts to spacing in between turbines. The meeting, which lasted several hours, was productive with O’Keefe taking copious notes, Gilbert said.

“I thought it was the beginning of an open dialogue between the wind developer and the fishermen,” Gilbert said. “I understand we have to try and coexist, and these folks came down wanting to know what our issues were to hopefully work with us so we would all be good neighbors.”

Gilbert said he never heard back from O’Keefe about how Ørsted plans to address the issues, even after following up multiple times with him and other company officials. Eventually, he and a group of Stonington fishermen were offered a meeting in September with Matthew Morrissey, Ørsted’s head of New England markets.

They reiterated their concerns, including those that required more immediate attention, such as a close call earlier in the year between a survey vessel and a fishing vessel in the waters south of Martha’s Vineyard. Gilbert said the fishing vessel tried to communicate with the survey vessel to determine right of way, but the operators on the bridge of the survey vessel, which operates under the Marshall Islands flag, did not speak English.

Morrissey “promised a two-day response” to address their concerns, Gilbert said, but he and the others still haven’t heard back.

Read the full story at The Day

An Uncertain Future For Vineyard Wind

August 30, 2019 — The Vineyard Wind project is a proposed 800 megawatt offshore wind farm just south of Martha’s Vineyard. The future of Vineyard Wind, however, is in limbo since the federal government put its review of the project on hold. WGBH Morning Edition Host Joe Mathieu talks with WGBH’s Cape Cod bureau reporter Sarah Mizes-Tan about where the project currently stands and what it could mean for the state of Massachusetts. The transcript below has been edited for clarity.

Joe Mathieu: Let’s start with the basics. You’ve really taken a deep dive on this. Explain the proposal — how many turbines are we talking about?

Sarah Mizes-Tan: So Vineyard Wind is proposing to build an 84-turbine wind farm off the coast of Massachusetts, just a couple miles south of Martha’s Vineyard. Eighty-four turbines is a sizable amount of turbines, and they say when this is fully running this should generate enough power for 400,000 homes. That would be more than what Pilgrim Nuclear Power Plant created when it was fully operational.

Read the full story at WGBH