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

Lone survivor recalls scallop boat sinking

November 29, 2019 — Three Fishermen were killed at sea this week in a tragedy that will be long remembered by their families and others in New Bedford.

A fourth man survived, and told his harrowing tale to WHDH reporter Jonathan Hall, who interviewed him in his hospital room where he was recovering from hypothermia.

“We took one over the stern,” said 50-year-old Ernesto Garcia, recounting how a “rogue sea” – a big wave moving in a different direction from the others – capsized the 56-foot F/V Leonardo during rough weather on Sunday.

Garcia described how he and his crewmate, 35-year-old Mark Cormier Jr., were plunged into the chilly water. Garcia swam up towards the light, and reached the surface where he found a floatation ring. He and Cormier held onto the ring and swam towards a life raft, but after about 20 minutes Cormier was “face down in the water” and he slipped off the ring, Garcia said.

A signal from the overturned scallop boat had alerted the Coast Guard, and Garcia was pulled out of the water by a helicopter with the help of a rescue swimmer.

The loss is compounded for the family of the boat’s skipper, 51-year-old Jerry Bretal and his 29-year-old stepson Xavier Vega. Those two were near the bridge of the vessel went it went over, according to Garcia, who believes they may still be inside the Leonardo, on the seafloor 250 feet below the surface.

Read the full story at CommonWealth Magazine

Carlos Rafael Inks $25 Million Deal with Blue Harvest Fisheries

November 29, 2019 — The highly-anticipated forced sell-off of “Codfather” Carlos Rafael’s fishing fleet appears to be near completion, only months after the convicted criminal unloaded his scallop boats.

Undercurrent News reports that Blue Harvest Fisheries has inked a $25 million deal to buy at least 35 vessels and skiffs from Rafael along with their permits and fishing quotas. Blue Harvest maintains fleets in Fairhaven and in Newport News, Virginia. It is backed by Bregal Partners, a New York City-based private equity firm.

The pending deal with Blue Harvest – which still must survive a “right of first refusal” where other harvesters could step forward – comes as Rafael remains behind bars.

Rafael was arrested in 2016 following a federal sting, and was convicted on 28 criminal counts in 2017. Rafael admitted to raking in illegal profits and gaming the system by mislabeling 700,000 pounds of harvested fish over four years. He also illegally avoided paying taxes. Rafael was sentenced to 46 months in federal prison. To settle a separate civil suit with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, he was forced to sell his fishing fleet, pay $3 million in penalties, and never engage in the world of commercial fishing again.

Read the full story at WBSM

Council to set quota for groundfish stocks

November 27, 2019 — The nadir for fishing for Gulf of Maine cod arrived in 2014, when NOAA Fisheries slashed quota by 77% and implemented emergency area closures that particularly singed the Gloucester small-boat, day fleet.

Nine days later, the New England Fishery Management Council cut cod quota by another 75 percent for the 2015 fishing season and the decline and fall of Gulf of Maine cod was on.

The closures and withering cuts added fuel to the debate over the precision of the science federal fishery regulators use to count fish and highlighted the cavernous divide between what National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries scientists say their science reflects and what fishermen say they see on the water.

In some ways, those battles still are being fought. Groundfishermen continue to say they see far more cod in their time on the water than is remotely represented in NOAA Fisheries’ science and modeling — both of which they still find suspect.

And, said longtime fisherman Joe Orlando, cod remains the most important linchpin stock in the groundfishery.

Read the full story at the Gloucester Daily Times

Scientists review divisive whale risk reduction model

November 26, 2019 — A panel of scientists gathered in Woods Hole, Mass., last week to evaluate a controversial “decision support tool” used by NOAA’s National Marine Fisheries Service to design proposed rules aimed at protecting endangered North Atlantic right whales and other large marine mammals from entanglement with fishing gear.

Last spring, the NOAA Fisheries Atlantic Large Whale Take Reduction Team (TRT) recommended that the fisheries service adopt new rules that would, among other requirements, force Maine lobstermen to remove from the water 50 percent of the vertical lines used to connect traps on the bottom to marker buoys on the surface. The team includes fishermen, scientists, representatives of conservation organizations and fishery management officials from the federal government and from every state from Maine to Florida.

When the fisheries service made its decision last spring on how best to reduce the risk to whales, it relied on a “Decision Support Tool” based on a poll of TRT members rather than extensive data collected over the years as to where the whales are found and how much interaction there has been between them and Maine lobster gear.

Data collected by NOAA show that since the beginning of 2017 70 percent of right whale deaths attributable to human-related causes (21) have occurred in Canadian waters while just 30 percent (nine) have occurred in U.S. waters. Not all of those deaths were clearly attributable to entanglement with fishing gear.

Read the full story at The Ellsworth American

BARRY RICHARD: New Bedford Boat Sinking A Holiday Heartbreaker

November 26, 2019 — As I write this, the U.S. Cost Guard continues to search for three men who were lost at sea when the New Bedford-based F/V Leonardo went missing during the storm on Sunday. The Coast Guard says the vessel capsized in nine-foot seas with 29-knot winds gusting to 39 knots. The F/V Leonardo met its fate some 24 nautical miles southwest of Martha’s Vineyard or roughly 40 miles from home.

One man was rescued from a liferaft. The three missing men were not believed to be wearing survival suits of lifejackets.

The West Island Weather Station reports: “The 56.6-foot New Bedford scalloper F/V Leonardo is registered to Mary Lou Fishing Corp at 17 Bertrand Way, Acushnet. The 50-ton scalloper was built in 1967, according to Boat Database. The corporation is registered to Luis Martins.”

November is a rough month for the New Bedford fishing fleet. According to the website Lost Fishermen From The Port of New Bedford, the F/V Leonardo is the seventh vessel lost to the sea during November since 1919. November weather can be cruel and is often merciless.

Read the full story at WBSM

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

Blue Harvest inks deal to acquire 35 Rafael groundfish vessels for $25m

November 26, 2019 — One of the most anticipated forced sell-offs in the history of US commercial fishing – the unloading of Carlos Rafael’s fleet in New Bedford, Massachusetts — looks to be on the verge of completion.

Blue Harvest Fisheries, a US scallop and groundfish supplier backed by New York City-based private equity Bregal Partners, has signed a purchase agreement to buy at least 35 vessels and skiffs and all of their associated permits from Carlos Rafael for nearly $25 million, documents obtained by Undercurrent News confirm.

The deal includes millions of pounds of quota for at least eight types of fish in the Northeast multispecies fishery, including cod, haddock, American plaice, witch flounder, yellowtail flounder, redfish, white hake, and pollock.

Read the full story at Undercurrent News

Network could deliver wind power across southern New England

November 25, 2019 — The company that is turning the site of a former coal-burning power plant in Somerset into a green energy center has filed a federal application to develop a single transmission network that could deliver power from offshore wind farms to Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut.

Anbaric, a Wakefield-based company that focuses exclusively on transmission, said it filed its application with the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management for “non-exclusive rights-of-way to develop the Southern New England OceanGrid,” which it described as an “independent, open-access” offshore wind transmission system.

If approved, the company said its plan would be to link existing wind lease areas to one common transmission network and then deliver as much as 16,000 megawatts of clean power to the three southern New England states. The project’s benefits, according to Anbaric, would include greater efficiency, improved reliability, and limited environmental impacts.

“As offshore wind’s potential gains momentum, it’s time to think big and plan rationally. It becomes clearer every day that transmission must lead the way towards greater scale, reliability, and efficiency, just as it has in Europe,” Anbaric CEO Edward Krapels said. “Individual wind farm developers have gotten the industry off to a good start, but we now need a networked grid to minimize conflict and create a truly reliable offshore transmission system that will substantially de-risk wind projects.”

Read the full story at The Boston Globe

Fishermen look to DC delegation for aid

November 25, 2019 — Former fisherman Sam Parisi appeared before the city Fisheries Commission on Thursday night to tout his campaign for national legislation to help fishermen as the federal Farm Bill helps farmers.

“We need someone to draft a fish bill like the farm bill,” Parisi told the commission members at City Hall. “The only way we can survive is with federal legislation and assistance. Farmers get paid not to grow certain crops. Why can’t we get paid not to fish certain stocks?”

Parisi requested the commission write a letter to the city’s congressional delegation in support of drafting of a bill specifically to help fishermen and fishing communities. But commission members, while appreciative of Parisi’s sentiments, also expressed concerns that a campaign to write, pass and enact federal legislation is fraught with its own perils.

“The danger is saying we’ll back a bill that doesn’t exist,” said Chairman Mark Ring. “You don’t want to back something 100% without seeing it.”

While Parisi’s concept was short on specifics beyond federal reimbursement when catch quotas are cut, his proposal led to an active discussion on the next steps for a fishery that continues to find itself under the siege of still-dormant cod quota in the Gulf of Maine, questionable stock assessments and expanding regulation — and cost — of all manner of monitoring.

Read the full story at the Gloucester Daily Times