Saving Seafood

Atl Herring Days Out Call on June 14 – Cancelled

June 7, 2017 — The following was released by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission:

The previously scheduled Atlantic Herring Days Out call on June 14 at 10:00 AM has been cancelled. The Atlantic Herring Section members from Maine, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts are scheduled to reconvene via conference call to review fishing effort on the following days:

  • Wednesday, June 28 at 10:00 AM
  • Wednesday, July 12 at 10:00 AM
  • Wednesday, July 26 at 10:00 AM
  • Wednesday, August 9 at 10:00 AM

 To join the calls, please dial 888.394.8197 and enter passcode 499811 as prompted.

MASSACHUSETTS: Seafood supplier tries to make inroads with local eateries for Gloucester-landed fish

June 7, 2017 — Frank Ragusa is making a point, leaning forward in his chair and punctuating each sentence by banging his hand on the conference table, producing thumps so loud they later sound like explosions on the recording of the conversation.

In between bursts of percussion, the chief executive officer and partner in Gloucester’s Finest Seafood makes the same impassioned point he has been making since he returned to Cape Ann two years ago from Seattle as the director of fresh seafood at Gloucester Seafood Processing.

The point is this: The Gloucester story still plays in the farthest reaches of the nation. The saga of America’s oldest commercial fishing port, of slicker-clad, fishermen wrestling fresh marine life out of the cold waters of the Atlantic, still strikes a chord.

Out there.

“Most of our biggest customers right now are outside New England,” Ragusa said while sitting in the conference room of the seafood processing company he founded last year as a tenant within the confines of the Cape Ann Seafood Exchange on Harbor Loop.

Rising from the ashes of GSP’s surreal closure last year by the Mazzetta Company, Gloucester’s Finest Seafood is at the heart of Ragusa’s crusade to help breathe new life into America’s oldest fishing community by promoting its bounty of freshly harvested seafood.

Read the full story at the Gloucester Times

Researcher says young lobsters on decline in Gulf of Maine

June 6, 2017 — While landings of lobster in the Gulf of Maine have hit recordbreaking highs, the number of young lobsters appears to be declining, and marine scientists are trying to figure out why.

That’s just one of the many topics being examined at the 11th International Conference and Workshop on Lobster Biology and Management that’s taking place in Maine this week.

This marks the first time the conference has been held in New England. Previous editions of the conference were held in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Cuba, Mexico, Japan, and Norway. The only other time it was hosted in the United States was in 2000, when it was held in Florida.

Richard A. Wahle of the University of Maine says the number of young lobsters is falling in the Gulf of Maine despite years of record-breaking harvests, according to the Associated Press.

Wahle’s American Lobster Settlement Index quantifies the population of baby lobsters at dozens of sites in New England and Canada every year. Most monitoring sites from New Brunswick to Cape Cod reported some of the lowest levels since the late 1990s or early 2000s, and scientists and fishermen are working to better understand this trend, according to the Associated Press.

The conference, which is being chaired by Wahle and Kari L. Lavalli of Boston University, kicked off Sunday with informal icebreaker activities, live music by a fiddle band, and plenty of New England clam chowder.

The confab, which runs until Friday in Portland, is expected to draw more than 200 lobster biologists, oceanographers, fishery managers, and lobstermen.

The schedule includes dozens of presentations and panel discussions, and sessions with titles like “The Hunger Games: how starvation affects attractiveness of lobsters used to bait traps in the Florida spiny lobster fishery,” and “From lobsters to dollars: an economic analysis of the distribution supply chain in Maine.”

Read the full story at the Boston Globe

MASSACHUSETTS: Video series with local chef showcases Gloucester fish

June 6, 2017 — The Gloucester Fresh campaign to market Cape Ann’s bounty of seafood has made its way to the little screen. Several of them, actually.

The campaign, which in the past has included digital billboards and other marketing tools, now has produced five seafood video demonstrations of recipes tailored to the local catch, as well as a tutorial from local fisherman Al Cottone on how to shop and buy the freshest seafood.

“By utilizing fresh and local seafood you are not only preparing delicious and healthy food, but also supporting your community,” Gloucester Mayor Sefatia Romeo Theken said in a statement. “We’re excited to launch a new series of captivating cooking videos which will help inspire chefs of all kinds to utilize affordable, seasonal, local, and regional seafood.”

Got a hankering for pollock with mashed potatoes and parsnips? Got you covered. Pining for a new flounder recipe? There are two, as well as individual recipes for whiting pate and redfish with warm spring corn and a tomato salsa.

“These really are updated recipes, with a fresher and more modern approach to cooking,” said Heather Atwood, the esteemed local food writer who began working with the city and the Gloucester Fishermen’s Wives Association on raising the regional and national profile of Cape Ann seafood.

The videos, shot in the kitchen of Atwood’s Rockport home, feature Annie Copps, a well-known presence on the Boston restaurant and food-writing scene. Copps has worked in the kitchens of restaurants such as Olives and Jasper’s, as well as serving as food editor at Boston Magazine and Yankee Magazine.

“I’ve known Annie for, gosh, I don’t know how long, just from being involved with food,” Atwood said. “She’s just fabulous and did a great job in these videos.”

Read the full story at The Gloucester Times 

MASSACHUSETTS: The oldest surviving Grand Banks fishing schooner is rising once again

June 5, 2017 — Forty-eight pairs of wooden ribs curve upward in a small shipyard on this pine-fringed harbor. Bearded men work with saws, trim oak pieces smooth, and run their fingers along the oiled frame taking shape before them.

The Ernestina-Morrissey, the oldest surviving Grand Banks fishing schooner, is rising once again.

The restoration of the 19th-century vessel, the flagship of Massachusetts since 1983, resurrects a seaworthy ambassador for the state and a floating classroom that can teach students ranging from kindergartners to cadets at the Massachusetts Maritime Academy.

The $6.3 million project also represents a victory for historical preservation, one that could keep the schooner sailing well past 150 years since its launching in 1894 at the James and Tarr Shipyard in Essex, Mass.

“Something like this doesn’t come around too often in one’s lifetime,” said Eric Graves, president of the Boothbay Harbor Shipyard, a waterfront workplace even older than the two-masted schooner being rebuilt from the keel up.

The schooner is undergoing a carefully crafted, labor-intensive overhaul that began in 2015 and might not be completed until early 2019, said David Short, the lead shipwright on the project.

Old frames and planks are being removed and new ones installed, including Danish white oak from a royal forest that long served Denmark’s navy. When Short and his crew are finished, nothing will remain of the original 114-foot schooner except “her name and her history,” he said.

But the ship that returns to the sea will be an exacting replica of the sleek and sturdy schooner that fished the Grand Banks out of Gloucester and Newfoundland, later explored the Arctic, and finally was used to bring Cape Verde immigrants to the United States as late as 1965.

That trans-Atlantic legacy is one that Licy Do Canto, a Roxbury native whose grandmother emigrated aboard the schooner in the early 1950s, wants preserved as a testament to the dreams and struggles of all generations who have traveled to the United States in search of a better life.

The homes of many Cape Verdean immigrants in Massachusetts contained two photographs, Do Canto said: one of President John F. Kennedy and one of this schooner. Do Canto envisions a future where the schooner is able to cross the Atlantic once again and revisit Cape Verde.

Read the full story at the Boston Globe

Fishing group wants people to eat more dogfish, skates

June 1, 2017 — A Cape Cod commercial fishing group is promoting an effort to get more consumers to eat locally caught dogfish and skates in restaurants.

The Cape Cod Commercial Fishermen’s Alliance is supporting “Pier to Plate” by working with more than 20 restaurants and markets on Cape Cod to get dogfish and skates to customers.

The alliance says commercial harvest of the two fish is high, but nearly all of the catch goes to Europe and Asia. Spiny dogfish are caught from Maine to North Carolina on the East Coast, and the catch grew from less than 4 million pounds in 2005 to nearly 19 million pounds in 2015.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at the New Jersey Herald

Feds want to cut sport fishermen’s haddock catch, prohibit cod

May 31, 2017 — Tom Orrell was under the impression he’d entered the charter fishing business with his Gloucester-based Yankee Fleet. He didn’t know it came with such a large roller-coaster.

Up one incline, down the next, riding the rails of ever-changing regulation while plying the Atlantic in search of the fin fish and fishing experience his recreational fishing customers seek.

It doesn’t appear that 2017 is going to provide much solace.

Orrell and the rest of the Cape Ann for-hire charter fleet are bracing for a mid-season audible by NOAA Fisheries that could change the rules of the game right at the height of the season.

“It’s unreal,” Orrell said Wednesday. “It makes it very difficult to run a business.”

Citing recreational catch excesses in haddock and cod in the 2016 season, NOAA Fisheries seeks to enact measures to produce a 20 percent reduction in daily bag limits for haddock while taking away the solitary cod recreational anglers currently are allowed to catch and keep each day.

But the most significant impact on the recreational segment of the fishing industry could come in the fall, when charter owners have the Hobson’s choice of a four-week closure that includes the bountiful Labor Day weekend or a six-week closure that wipes out the last half of September and all of October.   

 “It’s not much of a choice,” Orrell said. “It’s like picking out your cleanest dirty shirt to go to work.”

Still, Orrell said, his preference would be to suffer through the later, longer closure rather than lose his Labor Day trips.

“Later on, the weather changes and it becomes more unpredictable and the pollock start moving in,” Orrell said. “And once you take the people off the boat, they don’t just turn around in the fall and come back fishing.”

NOAA Fisheries, which also is proposing a spring closing from March 1 through April 14, is seeking public comment on the proposed changes. An agency spokeswoman said they could be enacted as soon a late June or early July.

At its January meeting, the New England Fishery Management Council voted to ask NOAA Fisheries to enact new measures on cod and haddock because preliminary 2016 data showed recreational anglers substantially exceeded the annual catch limit (ACL) for Gulf of Maine cod and haddock.

Read the full story at the Gloucester Times

Fishermen hoping to reel in Obama-era conservation

May 31, 2017 — New England fishermen are looking for a seat at the table as the Trump administration mulls whether to make any adjustments to an Obama-era marine monument off Cape Cod that has drawn criticism for the potential impact on the fishing industry.

“The monument was put in place with probably less than full input by the fisheries’ people,” New England Fishery Management Council Chairman Dr. John Quinn said. “In reviewing it, we should be included in this process.”

Quinn is one of eight signatories of a letter drafted earlier this month and sent to Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke and Secretary of Commerce Wilbur L. Ross Jr. asking the Trump administration to consult with the nation’s eight regional fishery management councils before taking any action.

Trump signed an executive order last month calling for a review of national monument designations made under the Antiquities Act since Jan. 1, 1996. The order, dated May 1, calls for an interim report to the president within 45 days and a final report within 120 days.

The Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument, created by former President Barack Obama last September, protects an area roughly the size of Connecticut 130 miles off the coast of Cape Cod.

Read the full story at the Boston Herald

MASSACHUSETTS: $185K in state Senate budget for industry-based cod survey

May 31, 2017 — The state Senate’s amended 2018 budget includes $185,000 to continue the industry-based cod survey that could help close the divide between commercial fishermen and regulatory scientists on the true state of the Gulf of Maine’s cod stock.

The survey funds now must survive the legislative conference committee formed to reconcile the differing budgets produced by the state Senate and House of Representatives before the final budget goes to Gov. Charlie Baker.

“This is really one of the rays of hope, that we can produce science that is credible and also acceptable to the people that have to live with it,” said Senate Minority Leader Bruce Tarr of Gloucester, who, along with Assistant Majority Leader Mark Montigny, a Democrat from New Bedford, pushed to include the money in the Senate budget.

Tarr said the House budget contains only $125,000 to continue the industry-based survey.

“We’re significantly higher, but obviously we’re hoping to get the larger amount,” Tarr said. “The governor is a strong proponent of collaborative research, so I would say the likelihood is very strong that he will continue to support this program.”

Researchers from the state Division of Marine Fisheries, working on commercial fishing boats, recently completed the first year of the random-area survey that was funded with federal fishery disaster funds.

The goal of the survey, begun last year at the behest of Baker following his meetings with fishing stakeholders, was to produce “credible scientific information that could be accepted by fishermen, scientists and fisheries managers” and used in future NOAA Fisheries cod stock assessments.

As with many elements of commercial fisheries management, agreement between fishermen and regulatory scientists on the data used to generate cod assessments has been hard to come by.

The release in April of the preliminary results of the survey — appearing in a Boston Globe story — set off a firestorm among commercial fishermen and prompted some backtracking by the Baker administration.

The initial results, according to the Globe story, were in direct line with the dire assessments of NOAA Fisheries scientists about the imperiled state of the Gulf of Maine cod stock.

Fishing stakeholders were incensed.

“We’re appreciative and supportive of the state’s work and very much want the work to continue,” Vito Giacalone, policy director for the Gloucester-based Northeast Seafood Coalition, said at the time. “We’re not appreciative of the premature conclusions publicized by the scientists. It is this kind of scientific double standard that drives the loss of credibility of the science community in the eyes of industry.”

Read the full story at the Gloucester Times

Advancing fishing rule aims to protect deep-sea coral in New England waters

May 31, 2017 — Fishing trawlers bring in an average of $6.4 million annually to Bay State ports from fish scooped off seabeds 600 meters or more below the surface of New England waters.

In an effort to save coral on the ocean floor, the New England Fisheries Management Council is advancing a proposed restriction on draggers and trawlers fishing at those depths.

The waters off New England do not get that deep until beyond George’s Bank and lobstermen that fish on the bank do not set traps at that depth, according to council staff. The proposed rule would exempt the relatively small red crab fishery.

The council’s Habitat Committee signed off Tuesday on the proposal, which affect fishing operations in a roughly 25,000 square mile area. If it is passed by the full council it would need to go through the National Marine Fisheries Service, also known as NOAA Fisheries, before it would go into effect.

Environmental groups Wild Oceans, Earthjustice, Pew Charitable Trusts and Conservation Law Foundation urged the council’s scientists to study an alternative proposal, which they said would protect more coral than the plan the council advanced. The council agreed to study the conservation groups’ proposal.

“There could be changes at any point in time. Ultimately when the full council votes on this June 22, we’ve got this preferred alternative going in. That hasn’t changed. But other things may be brought up,” said Habitat Committee Chairman John Quinn, a Dartmouth resident and former state rep.

Read the full story at the Boston Business Journal