Saving Seafood

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

Study documents ‘chronic social disruption’ plaguing New England fishing communities

November 22, 2019 — Years of fishery failures and tightening restrictions on the Gulf of Maine groundfish fleet have put severe psychological strain on fishermen and chronic disruption to the social fabric of New England fishing communities, according to a team of academic researchers.

Drawing on six years of surveys and interviews, the team based at Northeastern University in Massachusetts “found that psychological distress and social disruption were pervasive throughout New England fishing communities,” the authors wrote in their paper in the journal Proceedings of the Natural Academy of Sciences.

“For instance, our results indicate that 62 percent of captains self-reported severe or moderate psychological distress one year after the crisis began, and these patterns have persisted for five years,” the report states.

Among its conclusions, the report strongly recommends more monitoring and managing of social effects and “human well-being” beyond economic analysis, to moderate the adverse effects on communities of fisheries disruptions like the long-running New England groundfish struggle.

“This particular fishing fleet has been through so much pain,” said Steven Scyphers, an assistant professor of marine and environmental studies at Northeastern and lead author of the study report.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

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

Why Atlantic Canada’s lucrative seafood industry is concerned about Elizabeth Warren

November 21, 2019 — Canada is defending measures it has taken to protect critically endangered North Atlantic right whales, as political pressure — and blame — mounts from the United States in the wake of a rash of whale deaths in Canadian waters in 2019.

“We’re very confident that our measures are world-class in nature and stand up extremely well to those in the United States,” said Adam Burns, the Department of Fisheries and Oceans’ director of resource management.

Burns was responding to the latest salvo from Massachusetts senators Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey, who are threatening a ban of some Atlantic Canadian seafood products.

The senators blame a Canadian “roll back” of whale protection measures in 2019. Canada had 12 right whale deaths in its waters in 2017, then none in 2018.

Read the full story at CBC News

Tracking New Bedford scallops from ocean to plate, with blockchain

November 21, 2019 — Are the fancy scallops on the menu really from the North Atlantic?

Reports of mislabeled fish have left some diners wondering if their snapper is really snapper. But with the help of digital data, one New Bedford seafood company has no trouble proving the provenance of its scallops.

Captain Dan Eilertsen’s Nordic Inc. is working with a Fall River fish processor, tech juggernaut IBM and a California restaurant company to use blockchain technology to track scallops from ocean to table.

Just scan a QR code on your restaurant menu and see exactly where the scallops were caught, when, and by whom.

“This is going to be a good way of sustaining our fishing industry and showing people that you can trust where your food comes from,” said Eilertsen, a longtime fisherman and owner of six scallop boats.

One if his vessels, the Venture, is equipped with IBM Food Trust, which creates a permanent, shared record of data about where food comes from and where it’s been. At every step along the way, people enter data into the blockchain.

On board the vessel, scallops get shucked, washed, bagged and weighed. A printer spits out a label with a QR code that goes right on the bag.

Read the full story at the New Bedford Standard-Times