Saving Seafood

Viking Power: New Bedford scallop boat launches in Alabama with a ‘positive energy bow’

December 23, 2019 — Lars Vinjerud II can’t stop growing his fisheries and seafood business. “I’m lucky,” he says. “I’ve got a lot of good people working for me.”

Vinjerud’s company Fleet Fisheries in New Bedford, Mass., has 14 boats in the scallop, lobster and longline fisheries, and branches in the seafood marketing, a machine shop and more boats scheduled for construction. “Ya just keep rolling,” he says.
Vinjerud’s newest contribution to the New Bedford waterfront is the Viking Power, a vessel that is definitely outside the box. The Viking Power is 106 feet long, has a beam of 30 feet and draws around 14 feet, and catches the eye immediately because of its unique bow shape, which slants down forward into the water.

“I’ve been drawing this boat for 20 years,” says Vinjerud. “I took the design to Williams Fabrication [in Bayou La Batre, Ala.]and we took it to a company called C. Fly Marine. And they modeled it going 6 or 8 knots in 15-foot seas.” According to Vinjerud, the bow cuts through waves and reduces the motion of the vessel, giving the crew a safer more comfortable work platform.

“I call it the positive energy bow,” says Vinjerud. “Like how in judo you use the other person’s energy in your favor.”

Read the full story at National Fisherman

Erich Stephens leaving Vineyard Wind

December 20, 2019 — Erich Stephens, the public face of Vineyard Wind before it won an offshore wind contract in 2018, is leaving the company.

Vineyard Wind announced Thursday that Stephens, chief development officer and a founding principal of the company, would be departing.

Stephens told The Standard-Times it seemed like the right time to make a transition while the company waits for federal permitting of Vineyard Wind 1, to be located off Martha’s Vineyard, and before things ramp up for its second project in Connecticut.

“It’s really just a personal decision about the positions I want to have in my career,” he said.

Vineyard Wind has grown out of the entrepreneurial phase of its history and become a more mature development company, he said. Stephens said it’s not uncommon for the success of a young company to mean that, “exactly because of its success, it turns into something different in terms of your day-to-day work and responsibility.”

The company has tapped Rachel Pachter, vice president of permitting affairs, to replace him as chief development officer.

Stephens said he is excited about Pachter’s promotion because it allows her to advance her career and maintains continuity for Vineyard Wind.

Stephens has held senior leadership positions in the company, formerly called OffshoreMW, since 2009. Following last year’s selection of Vineyard Wind to build Massachusetts’ first offshore wind farm, he was responsible for pre-construction development.

Read the full story at the New Bedford Standard-Times

Fishy stat: Elizabeth Warren goes overboard with claim on re-imported fish

December 19, 2019 — The first quick-fire question Tonight Show host Jimmy Fallon put to Elizabeth Warren Dec. 5 was, “What is the most important issue facing American voters today?”

“Corruption,” Warren fired back.

That fits well with her campaign message that big corporations and the uber-rich have wormed their way into the corridors of power in Washington.

But Warren has another bit of fishy business on her mind.

In a Dec. 10 policy brief, she laid out plans to leverage the power of the oceans to fight climate change and boost jobs in the fishing industry. Among her points, Warren said America had offshored too much of the fish processing business.

“We must also rebuild the necessary infrastructure to once again support vibrant coastal communities and a local seafood economy,” Warren said. “Today, roughly one in four fish eaten in the United States was caught here and sent to Asia for processing before being re-imported for American consumers. By building processing plants in the United States, we can not only decrease the carbon footprint of the seafood industry, but we can also create a new class of jobs in the Blue Economy.”

Dare we say, that 1-in-4 statistic had us hooked.

We got in touch with the fishery researchers who wrote the paper Warren used to support her assertion. They said they didn’t offer that stat, and while they don’t have an exact estimate, her figure is probably too high.

Read the full story at PolitiFact

Ocean Acidification Could Mean Smaller Scallops, Threatened Industry

December 19, 2019 — In a new experiment, scientists working at the Mass Maritime Academy in Bourne are finding that ocean acidification may have a profound effect on juvenile sea scallops.

Scientists at the Academy, in partnership with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), are exposing sea scallops to three different levels of acidity, to see how they adapt to changing ocean chemistry.

Over the last 25 years, oceans have become increasingly acidic and that trend is expected to continue, as the water absorbs greenhouse gases produced by human activity.

“Research has shown that other bivalves [like oysters, clams, and quahogs] are affected by ocean acidification,” said Shannon Meseck, a research scientist at the NOAA Fisheries Millford Laboratory. “But to date, there’s no published research on the sea scallop, which is surprising because it is the second most important fishery in the Northeast. Second, to lobster.”

When Meseck started working toward her PhD more than two decades ago, she said, she learned the pH of the ocean—which measures its acidity—was 8.15. Today, the pH has dropped to 8.1, and in the next 100 years it could be as low as 7.8.

Read the full story at WCAI

Northern Wind’s $12m plant expansion makes room for more scallops, other products

December 19, 2019 — Northern Wind is already one of the three largest processors, distributors and direct offloaders of fresh and frozen scallops in North America, but its recently announced $12 million plant expansion in New Bedford, Massachusetts, promises to also make it an even larger player in both the scallop and overall seafood space, CEO George Kouri tells Undercurrent News.

The 32-year-old company revealed this week that it is in the process of completing construction on what will be a 38,000 square foot processing facility with a 21,600 square foot freezer capable of holding up to 5.5m pounds of seafood. That’s 11 times the company’s previous freezer holding capacity.

The new freezer is already up and running, and the rest of the facility could be ready to roll shortly after New Year’s Day, Kouri said.

Northern Wind, which opened some 32 years ago, is already processing some 18m lbs of scallops annually, buying all of the scallops produced by some 70 vessels with which the company has 30+ year agreements. Though imports account for between 25% and 30% of annual scallop sales.

Read the full story at Undercurrent News

Fishing companies fined $1M for dumping oil into New Bedford harbor

December 17, 2019 — Two fishing companies will pay a combined $1 million in fines and face five years of probation for two separate oil spills in the busy New Bedford harbor, a federal judge ruled Monday as he admonished the company’s owner at the hearing.

“Let me make myself clear — it is not enough to come in here and plead guilty and then go out and say, ‘the government is big and strong and we had to do this as a cost of doing business,’” federal Judge William Young told owner Barry Cohen at U.S. District Court. “These are crimes — they were meant by Congress to be crimes.”

Sea Harvest Inc. and Fishing Vessel Enterprises, Inc., the operators and owners of the two commercial fishing boats, respectively, which spilled the oil, pleaded guilty to two counts of violating the Clean Water Act, which criminalizes oil spills in U.S. waters and shorelines.

Crew members for the fishing vessel Enterprise, which fished for surf clams, pumped out water, putrid clam juice and “some amount” of oil from the boat’s engine room in September 2017, lawyers for the companies wrote in a filing earlier this month. The dumping created a sheen on the water in the New Bedford Harbor, which was noticed by local authorities immediately, the filing said.

Read the full story at The Boston Herald

Resilient New England Coral Is Teaching Us about the Future of Reefs

December 16, 2019 — The following was released by NOAA Fisheries:

Dave Veilleux and Sean Grace lean over trays lined with thumb-sized coral colonies, varying in color from white to brown to a mix of white and brown. An instrument called a fluorometer beeps, and they move on to measure photosynthesis in the next colony. In the background, you can hear the constant flow of seawater from Long Island Sound, and the whir of the carbon dioxide system hard at work.

Grace chairs the Biology Department at Southern Connecticut State University, and Veilleux runs the shellfish hatchery at NOAA Fisheries’ Milford Laboratory. The two have known each other for 15 years, since Veilleux was Grace’s first graduate student. They’ve teamed up again to study the effects of ocean acidification on New England’s only hard coral species, the appropriately named Astrangia poculata, or northern star coral.

Northern star coral is considered a model for investigating coral response to environmental change. Researchers want to pinpoint what makes this hardy coral uniquely able to thrive in harsh conditions. This may provide ideas on how to help boost the resilience of more delicate tropical coral species. The Milford Lab has two state-of-the-art ocean acidification experimental systems built for carbon dioxide exposure studies, making it an ideal setting for this research.

Read the full release here

NOAA Fisheries Closes Nantucket Lightship and Closed Area I Closure Areas to Gillnet Gear

December 16, 2019 — The following was released by NOAA Fisheries:

In compliance with a recent Federal District Court Order, NOAA Fisheries is implementing a closure of the Nantucket Lightship and Closed Area I Groundfish Closure Areas for gillnet gear only.

This rule is effective tomorrow. All gillnetters must remove their gillnet gear from these areas as soon as possible, consistent with safe vessel operations.

Background

The October 28, 2019, Court Order prohibits NOAA Fisheries from allowing gillnet fishing in the former Nantucket Lightship Groundfish Closure Area and the Closed Area I Groundfish Closure Areas (see map below) until NOAA Fisheries has fully complied with requirements of the Endangered Species Act and the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act, consistent with the Opinion.

After the Order was issued, we notified gillnetters in these areas on November 1 that all gillnet gear needed to be removed from these two areas and that we would be issuing a formal rule closing these areas. That formal rule has now been issued.

Read the full release here

Fishermen get scant mention in ‘Blue New Deal’

December 16, 2019 — We here at FishOn are simple folk and we live by some pretty simple rules. Rule No. 1 is why stand when you can sit. Rule No. 2 is that any meeting that lasts more than 15 minutes and involves more than three people generally is a colossal waste of time for everyone.

The same principle, of course, can be applied to the various pledges, promises and plans issued by anyone running for elective office. And that brings us to our own Sen. Elizabeth Warren and her seemingly bottomless capacity, in her quest for the presidency, for issuing plans to cure everything but the common cold.

Warren’s campaign last week released its most recent plan — a Blue New Deal for Our Oceans — and let’s just say this is not the most fishing-friendly document on the shelf.

The 15-page document touches on many issues. It addresses expanding offshore renewable energy and building climate-ready fisheries. It talks about expanding community-based seafood markets and investing in regenerative ocean farming and building climate-smart ports.

It urges the protection of ocean habitats and the restoration of marine ecosystems. It calls for the end of offshore drilling and makes the case for that old environmental crowd-pleaser, expanding protected marine areas that would be closed to commercial fishing.

And on and on and on. It’s a Utah lake. About a mile wide and an inch deep.

But nowhere in those thousands of words spread across 15 pages does the plan directly address the plight of the commercial fishing industry and the fishermen who have as much at stake in the blue economy as anyone.

Read the full story at the Gloucester Daily Times

NEW HAMPSHIRE: Offshore Wind Task Force Meeting Draws Crowd; Sununu Pushes For Quick Development

December 13, 2019 — Northern New England began an ambitious planning process for offshore wind development in the Gulf of Maine Thursday.

More than 200 stakeholders packed into the first meeting of the new regional wind task force at UNH.

They say the new industry will take years to develop – but it could be a powerful way for Maine, Massachusetts and New Hampshire to fight climate.

The big turnout surprised organizers with the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management. One facilitator said he’d never been to a standing-room-only task force meeting before.

Governor Chris Sununu was energized as he kicked off the day-long event. He says he intends to see offshore wind development succeed in the Gulf of Maine as quickly as possible.

Read the full story at New Hampshire Public Radio