Saving Seafood

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

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

Lund’s lands New Bedford scallop processing facility, closes frozen office

November 22, 2019 — Lund’s Fisheries has added a new piece to its growing Atlantic scallop puzzle in US fishing hub New Bedford, Massachusetts, acquiring JT Sea Products from its founder along with its processing facility, the company has confirmed with Undercurrent News.

Cape May, New Jersey-based Lund’s has been, for the past few years, building scallop sales to match the size of its dominating squid business. Though he declined to provide annual revenue figures, Lund’s president Jeff Reichle told Undercurrent in an earlier interview that scallops have already gone from representing between 5% and 10% of his 64-year-old company’s sales three or four years ago to as much as 40%.

At least seven of Lund’s 19 vessels are equipped with scallop permits, and other scallop owner-operator vessels have been working out of Lund’s facilities for the past 20 or 30 years, he said.

Read the full story at Undercurrent News

How to bring wind energy to shore: Massachusetts company submits 20-year plan for grid to transmit power from Atlantic Ocean turbines

November 22, 2019 — With proposals pending to install giant turbines to generate wind power in the Atlantic Ocean a transmission company announced Thursday a 20-year plan to bring transmission ashore without splaying a mass of power cables along the bottom of the ocean.

Anbaric, a Wakefield, Mass.-based company that specializes in early stage development of large-scale electric transmission systems and storage solutions, filed an application with the U.S. Department of the Interior proposing non-exclusive rights-of-way to develop the “southern New England OceanGrid,” an offshore transmission system intended to boost the region’s offshore wind resources. It’s proposing corridors through which cables would bring power to Connecticut and elsewhere in southern New England.

“A planned grid approach makes sense,” said Peter Shattuck, Anbaric’s vice president for distributed energy. “The desire is to not have cables snaking willy nilly across the ocean floor.”

The transmission network on the outer continental shelf would link wind lease areas using a common system and deliver power to the on-shore grid. Anbaric touts greater efficiency, improved reliability, less of an environmental impact and the ability to direct the energy to specific areas. The Southern New England OceanGrid would be developed in phases and anticipates an offshore transmission network connecting up to 16,000 megawatts of offshore wind to Connecticut, Massachusetts and Rhode Island.

Read the full story at The Hartford Courant