Massachusetts Archives - Page 293 of 362

It’s a Boy! Right whale calves spotted in Cape Cod Bay

April 5, 2017 — On Monday, April 3, the Center for Coastal Studies (CCS) right whale aerial survey team spotted a right whale mother and calf pair in the north end of Cape Cod Bay between Race Point and Marshfield. This sighting came just hours after researchers from the Northeast Fisheries Science Center identified a different mother / calf pair observed in the Cape Cod Canal. These are the first sightings of the new calves of the year in Gulf of Maine waters.

The male calf spotted by the CCS team is the offspring of a whale named Pediddle, a whale at least 39 years old that was first identified in 1978 and first seen in Cape Cod Bay in 1979. The new calf is Pediddle’s eighth documented by scientists; her last calf was born in 2009.

“During the sighting the mom was subsurface feeding while the calf was rolling and tail slapping,” said Alison Ogilvie, an aerial observer for the Center’s Right Whale Ecology Program. “Mom and calf looked very healthy considering they’ve just completed a more than 800 mile migration from the calving grounds off Georgia and Florida.”

The aerial survey team also observed and photographed 71 other individual right whales in Cape Cod Bay on Monday, the most seen so far this season.

Read the full story at Cape Cod Today

What’s Happening To Cod In New England?

April 4, 2017 — Cod stocks in New England are at an historic low, down 80 percent from a decade ago, according to new data from the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries.

Those findings are contested by some in the fishing community.

Vito Giacalone, policy director of the Northeast Seafood Coalition in Gloucester, said, “Everyone that fishes the Gulf of Maine, amateur fishermen that go out for the first time — no one can believe that someone can actually say that this cod stock is not in good shape.”

Listen to the interview at WBUR

Carlos Rafael faces $109K fine, loss of 13 vessels

April 4, 2017 — New Bedford fishing mogul Carlos Rafael may have to surrender up to 13 of his groundfishing vessels and must pay almost $109,000 in restitution to the Internal Revenue Service as part of his plea agreement with federal prosecutors.

Rafael pleaded guilty last Thursday to falsifying fish quotas, conspiracy and tax evasion in U.S. District Court in Boston and is scheduled to be sentenced there on June 27 by Judge William G. Young.

The 65-year-old Rafael could face up to 76 months in prison on the three charges — far less than the up to 20 years he would have faced under the original 27-count indictment. Federal prosecutors, however, have recommended a prison sentence of 46 months and a significant period of supervised release.

Young is not bound by the specifics of the plea agreement, nor must he follow federal prosecutors’ sentencing recommendations.

“Based on my experience, (Rafael) is probably looking at least three to four years in prison and a substantial fine,” New Bedford Mayor Jon Mitchell, a former federal prosecutor, told the Undercurrent News fishing website. “But I think the bigger question is what happens to his groundfish permits. They may be subject to forfeiture, but his forfeiture obligation can be subject in a number of ways.”

Read the full story at the Gloucester Times

“Sacred Cod” Tells of Fishery and Way of Life in Peril

April 3, 2017 — New England’s iconic cod fishery has hit an all-time low. Scientists point the finger at a combination of fishing and climate change. Many fishermen reject that assessment and blame their woes on regulators. A new documentary film, Sacred Cod, tells the story of two populations in crisis – the cod, and the fishermen who’ve built a way of life around them.

Cod fishing is what brought the first Europeans to New England, and the commercial fishery is the oldest in the nation. Hundreds of years of fishing pressure has brought cod populations in southern New England and the Gulf of Maine to record low levels. Federal fishery biologists have estimated that the reproductively active population is just 3-4 percent of what would be needed for a healthy, sustainable fishery.

That hasn’t improved in the past few years, despite fishing restrictions that amount to a virtual closure of the fishery. Scientists say climate change is a likely culprit. Rising water temperatures affect reproductive success, reducing the number of eggs a female produces and also reducing survival of young codfish. Scientists are also seeing changes in the base of the food chain that may be linked to climate change.

Many fishermen reject this assessment, though, and say fishing restrictions are unnecessary. They contend that there are plenty of cod to be caught, if you just know where to look.

Read the full story at WCAI

New Bedford mayor: What’s next after Rafael’s guilty plea

April 3, 2017 — All eyes are on Carlos Rafael’s sizeable load of assets—32 fishing vessels, 44 permits and a business named Carlos Seafood—now that he’s facing up to 20 years of jail time when he receives his sentence in June.

His guilty plea agreement with the US government agrees to forfeiture of all 13 of his groundfish vessels, but his sizeable fleet of scallop vessels aren’t mentioned. A spokesperson at the Department of Justice (DOJ) declined to speculate on whether the federal government could seize these after his sentencing in June if Rafael couldn’t come up with the money to pay his fines, set at up to $7 million in the plea agreement.

New Bedford mayor Jon Mitchell, a former federal prosecutor, said there is flexibility within the terms of the plea agreement.

“Based on my experience, he’s probably looking at least three to four years in prison and a substantial fine,” Mitchell told Undercurrent News.

Rafael is facing multiple counts of federal crimes, some of which include a maximum sentence of five years and one of which provides a maximum sentence of 20 years.

“But I think the bigger question is what happens to his groundfish permits,” Mitchell said. “They may be subject to forfeiture, but his forfeiture obligation can be subject in a number of ways.”

Typically, in other cases where the government seizes assets, those assets are sold by the government in an open auction; however, this case is unusual, making the asset sale process possibly run differently, a spokesperson for the DOJ told Undercurrent.

Such a sale at a government auction raises big concerns for Mitchell.

“There’s a chance they may be bought up by government interests outside the port, and that scenario may have a direct impact on the industry here,” he said.

Mitchell plans to argue for Carlos’s permits to remain in the port of New Bedford, the largest seafood port in the United States.

The DOJ and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) could substitute cash for the forfeiture of vessels by allowing Carlos to pay an equivalent amount of cash, attained through a sale of the vessel to a New Bedford buyer, instead of simply handing the vessels over to them to sell, Mitchell said.

Read the full story at Undercurrent News

Gloucester to host hearing on new shrimp rules

April 3, 2017 — The traveling roadshow for public comment on proposed changes to the Gulf of Maine northern shrimp fishery is set to hit Gloucester the first week of June.

The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, which regulates the northern shrimp fishery, has scheduled four public hearings on the draft of Amendment 3. The draft includes state-by-state allocations and increased accountability measures, but does not call for limiting the number of shrimpers allowed into the fishery.

The Gloucester public hearing is set for June 5 at 6 p.m. at the state Division of Marine Fisheries’s Annisquam River Station on Emerson Avenue. The deadline for all public comment is June 21.

The AFMSC closed the northern shrimp fishery in December 2013 and it remains shuttered because the stock has been plagued by historic lows in recruitment and spawning stock biomass.

Initially, the commission’s northern shrimp section said it was going to consider a limited access program “to address overcapacity” in the fishery that draws shrimpers from Maine, New Hampshire and Massachusetts. It later changed course.

“Due to the uncertainty about if or when the resource would rebuild and the fishery reopen, the section shifted the focus of draft Amendment 3 to consider measures to improve management of the northern shrimp fishery and resource,” the AFMSC stated.

Read the full story at the Gloucester Times

MASSACHUSETTS: A milestone in the war over the true state of cod

April 3, 2017 — For years, fishermen from Gloucester to New Bedford have accused the federal government of relying on faulty science to assess the health of the region’s cod population, a fundamental flaw that has greatly exaggerated its demise, they say, and led officials to wrongly ban nearly all fishing of the iconic species.

The fishermen’s concerns resonated with Governor Charlie Baker, so last year he commissioned his own survey of the waters off New England, where cod were once so abundant that fishermen would say they could walk across the Atlantic on their backs.

Now, in a milestone in the war over the true state of cod in the Gulf of Maine, Massachusetts scientists have reached the same dismal conclusion that their federal counterparts did: The region’s cod are at a historic low — about 80 percent less than the population from just a decade ago.

“The bottom line is that the outlook of Gulf of Maine cod is not good,” said Micah Dean, a scientist who oversaw the survey for the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries. “What we’ve seen is a warning sign about the future of the fishery, and it’s a stark change from what we saw a decade ago.”

The state’s surveys, conducted on an industry trawler, also found a dearth of juvenile cod and large cod, suggesting that the population could remain in distress for years. The lack of small cod reflects limited reproduction, while the absence of the larger fish is a problem because they’re capable of prolific spawning.

Dean said he hoped fishermen would find the results credible, given that the survey sought to accommodate their concerns about the federal survey, conducted by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

To address their concerns, the state spent more than $500,000 to trawl for cod in 10 times as many locations. Rather than sampling the waters twice a year, as NOAA does, the state cast its nets every month from last April to January, and kept them in the water about 50 percent longer. They also searched for the fish in deeper waters, where fishermen have said they tend to congregate.

“It was an exhaustive survey meant to provide an answer to the questions that the fishermen were posing,” Dean said. “But the fish weren’t there.”

Some longtime cod fishermen remain unconvinced. They say the historic fishery has been fully rebuilt, although the federal and state surveys estimate it is only about 6 percent of the level needed to sustain a healthy population.

Vito Giacalone, policy director of the Northeast Seafood Coalition in Gloucester, which represents many of the region’s commercial fishermen, maintained that the state surveys had some of the same flaws as the federal surveys. Rather than conducting random sampling throughout the Gulf of Maine, the researchers should have trawled for cod in areas where fishermen are finding them, he and other critics said.

Read the full story at the Boston Globe

MASSACHUSETTS: Cabral hopeful lobster bill will finally get passed, bring new jobs to New Bedford

April 3, 2017 — It was billed as a legislative lunch with the likes of U.S. senators Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey, but much of a March 24 “legislative luncheon” at Seatrade International was actually about trying to hammer out an agreement on a bill governing the way you can sell lobsters in Massachusetts.

Other topics focused on policies that will govern the growth of the Port of New Bedford.

The luncheon had two parts, one public and one private. And the initial closed-door part, which besides Warren and Markey included the five members of New Bedford’s all Democratic House delegation, began with a heated debate over a lobster bill.

The bill (House Bill 2906) was co-sponsored by 13th Bristol District Rep. Antonio Cabral, who represents the downtown, South End and much of the waterfront. His proposed legislation would allow for the sale, processing and transport of lobster parts, which is already legal in Maine and New Hampshire but not Massachusetts.

“We’ve been trying to resolve this issue for some time,” Cabral said. “There was a bill during the last session, but we’ve made some progress.”

The packet handed to the attendees of the legislative lunch included two letters, one signed by Mayor Jon Mitchell and the other by Ed Anthes-Washburn, the executive director of the Harbor Development Committee. The letters supported two previous lobster bills that failed.

Anthes-Washburn’s letter, addressed to the State House, voiced support for Senate Bill S469 in 2015. After three readings and being passed to be engrossed by the Senate, the House sent it to the Committee on Ways and Means in 2016, where no further action was taken.

Read the full story at the New Bedford Standard-Times

Where does Rafael’s guilty plea leave Port of New Bedford?

April 3, 2017 — Carlos Rafael’s journey to Judge William Young’s Courtroom 18 in U.S. District Court began as an underage teenage fish cutter on the city’s docks.

Rafael personified the American Dream in climbing the economic ladder from immigrant with nothing to becoming the face of fishing in a port historically known for its harvest of the Atlantic Ocean.

On Thursday he wore the cloak of a criminal after he pleaded guilty to nearly 30 federal charges that included conspiracy, falsifying fishing quotas, false labeling and tax evasion.

It wasn’t necessarily a new look for the 65-year-old Rafael, who served six months in federal prison in 1988, but his focus after the plea agreement turned to the port that in many ways assembled the man who sat emotionless in the courtroom.

“I have a single goal,” Rafael said in a statement after his guilty plea. “To protect our employees and all of the people and businesses who rely on our companies from the consequences of my actions. I will do everything I can to make sure that the Port of New Bedford remains America’s leading fishing port.”

The Port of New Bedford generates $9.8 billion in total economic value, according to the city’s Harbor Development Commission. It represents 2 percent of Massachusetts’ gross domestic product. The stalwart of this industry could be facing more than six years of prison time after pleading guilty.

Rafael’s guilty plea puts his groundfish fishing vessels in jeopardy due to the possibility of forfeiting assets as part of the plea deal. According to the mayor’s office, Rafael owns about 80 percent of the groundfish permits in New Bedford. Groundfish accounts for about 10 percent of the port’s revenue. Even still, those close to the port say no one person can affect the reputation of the nation’s most successful port.

Read the full story at the New Bedford Standard-Times

MASSACHUSETTS: Gloucester to host hearing on new shrimp rules

March 31, 2017 — The traveling roadshow for public comment on proposed changes to the Gulf of Maine northern shrimp fishery is set to hit Gloucester the first week of June.

The Gloucester public hearing is set for June 5 at 6 p.m. at the state Division of Marine Fisheries’s Annisquam River Station on Emerson Avenue. The deadline for all public comment is June 21.

The ASMFC closed the northern shrimp fishery in December 2013 and it remains shuttered because the stock has been plagued by historic lows in recruitment and spawning stock biomass.

Beyond establishing state allocations and new accountability measures, the draft amendment includes gear provisions, including the mandatory use of “size-sorting grate systems designed to minimize harvest of small (presumably male) shrimp.”

Read the full story at The Gloucester Times