Saving Seafood

Tuna meltdown

September 18, 2025 — For Marty Scanlon, president of the Blue Water Fishermen’s Association (BWFA), tuna fishing is a passion as much as a business. Since 1991, he has been running his 43-foot vessel, the Provider II, out of Long Island. But the business is getting rough.

By the time he gets into the Willie Etheridge Seafood dock in Wanchese, N.C., in August 2025, just ahead of Hurricane Erin, he and his crew are at their limit. A problem with the longline reel has forced them to haul back fifteen miles of gear by hand, and not for a lot of fish.

 “It took us two days to get the gear back,” says Scanlon, pointing to a pile of monofilament in a big fish box. “And it only took us a half an hour to unload.”

According to Scanlon, the number of East Coast U.S. tuna fishermen has dropped precipitously from 438 to 68 over the course of his career. The remaining fishermen have faced numerous challenges, among them cheap imports and uncertain and ambiguous regulations.

Read the full article at National Fisherman

Commercial fishing industry on the ropes as pandemic-era shoppers avoid seafood

May 6, 2020 — Fisherman Marty Scanlon has not returned to his Long Island home since leaving for North Carolina at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic in New York.

Scanlon, a longliner captain from Hauppauge left for North Carolina in early March — roughly the same time the first case of Covid-19 emerged in Manhattan. In the weeks that followed, Gov. Andrew Cuomo ordered most businesses to close, effective March 22, casting a pall over New York City restaurants in a once-bustling culinary capital.

Business for Scanlon has been brutal ever since.

“We basically don’t have the money to go home,” Scanlon said, over the phone. “We can’t go home til we pay our bills.”

Scanlon’s plight is reverberating across the Northeast. While meat, poultry and produce remain in demand, seafood, a once-reliable market, has been swapped for the whims of the home chef who has grown unused to, and perhaps slightly intimidated by the prospect of storing and preparing fish.

And it’s putting an $11 billion industry in New York and New Jersey on the ropes, with as much as a 30 percent drop in revenue since the coronavirus took hold in the region.

Scanlon and his crew aim to scrape 1,000 pounds of mixed swordfish and tuna each night, but it has become increasingly difficult to bear each trip’s financial costs in the face of dwindling profits, he said.

Read the full story at Politico

Will Obama fence off more of the ocean? US fishermen are fearful

September 13, 2016 — American fishermen are deeply fearful that the Obama White House could cut them off as early as this week from major fishing areas of the U.S. continental shelf on both coasts, further restricting one of the most highly regulated fishing industries in the world.

At stake are millions of dollars in fishing revenue and hundreds of jobs — and in some parts of the country, the survival of an embattled way of life that has persisted for centuries but is facing environmentalist pressures unlike anything before — and without  the chance for hearings and legislative back-and-forth that U.S. laws normally require.

“This totally affects us, but we don’t know what’s going on,” one fishing boat owner, who asked to remain anonymous, told Fox News. “We are just out of the loop. No one even wants to say what effect it will have.”

“They are throwing all fishermen under the bus, along with their supporting industries” declared Marty Scanlon, a fishing boat owner and member of a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration fisheries advisory panel on highly migratory fish species in the Atlantic. “They’ve done everything they can to put us out of business.”

What the fishermen fear most is the kind of unilateral action by the White House that they have already seen elsewhere. As part of their ongoing environmental ambitions, the Obama administration’s Council on Environmental Quality, and the president himself, are aggressively interested in creating preservation zones that would ban fishing and other activities within large portions of the 200-mile U.S. “exclusive economic zone” of maritime influence, and just as interested in getting other nations to do so, in their own as well as international waters.

That aim, supported by many important environmental groups, is cited as urgently required for protection against diminishing  biodiversity, overfishing and damage to coral and unique underwater geological features — not to mention the fact that with only a few months remaining in his term, the president sees such sweeping gestures as part of his legacy of achievements, and as the boat owner put it, “the window is narrowing” for the administration to act.

As one result, pressure from lobbying campaigns both for and against new declarations of such no-go zones both along the U.S. northeastern Atlantic coast and the coast of California have been mounting.

So has, apparently, behind-the-scenes maneuvering to get influential Democratic legislators to support such new preservation areas publicly — a tough call, since the affected fishermen are also constituents. So far, many of the Democrats are keeping a low profile.

Read the full story at Fox News