Saving Seafood

Rep. Rob Bishop: Antiquities Act abuse heads East

June 27, 2016 — The following is excerpted from an opinion piece by Rep. Rob Bishop (R-UT), chairman of the House Committee on Natural Resources, published Saturday by the Boston Herald. Rep. Bishop visited New Bedford, Mass., earlier this month, where he met with Mayor Jon Mitchell, Rep. Bill Keating (D-MA), and representatives of the local commercial fishing industry. He also toured a local scallop vessel, the New Bedford harbor, the Fairhaven Shipyard, and a scallop processing company.

Some say cultural trends start on the West Coast and make their way East, but one trend moving eastward is bad news for New Englanders.

In my home state of Utah, the federal government owns 65 percent of the land. That is a problem. In the waning days of his administration, President Clinton compounded the problem by mandating the Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument. With virtually no local support, he locked up 1.7 million acres of Utah, an area larger than some states.

This monument designation was an abuse of the Antiquities Act. Passed in 1906, the Antiquities Act was originally intended for presidents to quickly prevent looting of archaeological sites. The executive power exercised under the Antiquities Act has grown far beyond the original purpose.

Now [President Obama] has his sights set on New England fisheries off the coast of Cape Cod.

Earlier this month I traveled to New Bedford, the highest-grossing commercial fishing port in our country. I spoke with local seafood workers about a potential marine monument designation off the coast. Such a designation would override the current public process of established fisheries management and could be catastrophic to the 1.8 million-plus jobs that fishing creates.

Fishing leaders expressed concern over restricted access, potential job loss, and the damage to the local fishing industry that would obviously follow a marine monument designation. Instead, they want a better public process created under the House-passed Magnuson-Stevens Act, still pending renewal in the Senate.

Read the full opinion piece at the Boston Herald

MASSACHUSETTS: ‘He was like us’: Gloucester celebrates St. Peter

June 27, 2016 — GLOUCESTER, Mass. — On a day when Greasy Pole walkers and seine boat racers crowned their champions, when musical finales ranged from the U.S. Navy Band Northeast concert band to Jimmy Geany and Paul London, the namesake of St. Peter’s Fiesta was the real center of attention.

Thousands lined Gloucester’s streets under idyllic, sunny skies Sunday for the Procession of St. Peter, with bearers carrying the life-sized 1927 statue of the patron saint of fishermen through Gloucester’s streets to culminate the final day of the 89th St. Peter’s Fiesta.

The procession, which over two hours primarily wound from St. Peter’s Square up Washington and Prospect streets, then into the Sargent Street neighborhood before returning to Prospect and the churches of St. Ann and Our Lady of Good Voyage, featured a handful of marching bands and floats.

More than one statue

But it was the appearance of St. Peter and the statues of other related saints that drew the grandest cheers, punctuated with the familiar chants of “Viva, San Pietro” throughout the nearly two-mile route.

Read the full story at the Gloucester Daily Times

US offers fishermen help in paying monitors

June 24, 2016 — Over the past year, the region’s groundfishermen have argued that the federal government was jeopardizing their livelihoods by forcing them to pay for a controversial program that requires government-trained monitors to observe their catch.

On Thursday, after months of heated debates with fishermen, officials from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced that they have found money to cover most of the observer costs for the rest of the fishing year.

NOAA officials said that a contractor they hired to place observers aboard fishing vessels failed to do so for about one-third of the total number of days that they were expected to accompany fishermen to sea. As a result, NOAA has enough money to cover an estimated 85 percent of the rest of the so-called at-sea monitoring program.

“That’s an estimate because it depends on how much fishing occurs over the year,” said Samuel D. Rauch, deputy assistant administrator for regulatory programs at NOAA Fisheries.

Groups representing groundfishermen, who have been required since March to pay hundreds of dollars every time an observer accompanies them to sea, have argued that the costs were too much to bear and would put many of them out of business. NOAA estimates it costs $710 every time an observer joins them, though most fishermen have negotiated lower fees.

But many groundfishermen, who catch cod, flounder, and other bottom-dwelling fish, have already been suffering from major quota cuts. NOAA last year, for example, cut the region’s cod quota by 75 percent.

“This will definitely lessen the economic burden on small, family-owned fishing businesses, and will allow time to address many logistical issues that have surfaced since industry payments began,” said Jackie Odell, executive director of the Northeast Seafood Coalition, an advocacy group for groundfishermen in Gloucester.

Read the full story at the Boston Globe

MASSACHUSETTS: ‘Watch is now over’ for longtime Scituate harbormaster

June 24, 2016 — SCITUATE, Mass. — Elmer Pooler weathered many storms at the helm of the harbormaster’s boat — always with a pipe in his mouth — but in his final patrol, the water in the harbor was calm.

A casket with Pooler’s body, flanked by members of the harbormaster’s office and his family, was loaded onto a boat in Scituate Harbor on Tuesday for his honorary “final patrol.” The boat then retraced the same route Pooler frequently took in his more than three decades on the job.

Pooler, the longest serving Scituate harbormaster, died peacefully on Thursday at 90 years old.

On Tuesday, Brad White, who founded New England Burials at Sea, volunteered to take Pooler on his final ride. White, after all, considers Pooler his mentor.

Elmer E. Pooler Jr. made his final ride on the vessel White Cap, sailing from the dock past the town pier and out to the lighthouse jetty, before returning to the harbor. About 15 boats gathered around the White Cap, carrying friends, family members, and Scituate residents.

From the back of the boat, behind Pooler’s casket, White read a John F. Kennedy quote: “We are tied to the ocean. And when we go back to the sea, whether it is to sail or to watch it, we are going back to whence we came.”

Four cannon blasts — one for each decade of service — rang out before the procession continued. Pooler served as harbormaster for 20 years and assistant harbormaster for 14.

Read the full story at the Boston Globe

Carlos Rafael trial set for January 2017

June 23, 2016 — BOSTON — The trial of indicted fishing magnate Carlos Rafael and alleged smuggling accomplice Antonio M. Freitas is scheduled for January 2017, which would be nearly a year after federal authorities raided Rafael’s seafood business on New Bedford’s waterfront.

The two defendants’ cases have progressed side by side so far. Neither appeared in U.S. District Court on Wednesday in Boston, where District Court Judge William G. Young scheduled their trial to begin on Jan. 9, 2017, in a brief status conference.

Neither a federal prosecutor nor lawyers for Rafael and Freitas commented afterward.

Rafael, a 64-year-old Dartmouth resident who owns one of the largest commercial fishing operations in the U.S., including scores of New Bedford-based vessels, faces 27 counts on federal charges including conspiracy, false entries and bulk cash smuggling, according to the indictment filed last month.

Freitas is a 46-year-old Taunton resident and Bristol County Sheriff’s Office deputy, suspended without pay. He faces two federal counts, one for bulk cash smuggling and one for international structuring.

Read the full story at the New Bedford Standard-Times

MASSACHUSETTS: Fiesta procession pays tribute to fishing families

June 22, 2016 — For some, St. Peter’s Fiesta means the Greasy Pole Walk, seine boat racing, and the 5K road race.

For others, it’s about the carnival rides, the food and nightly music and other entertainment.

But at the core of St. Peter’s Fiesta lies the celebration of Gloucester’s fishing heritage, its religious tributes to the patron saint of fishermen and the importance of family. And nothing brings that all together like Fiesta’s signature event — the Sunday procession to St. Peter, in which bearers carry St. Peter’s likeness and other statues through the city’s streets.

The procession not only oozes pageantry and religious tradition, but also spotlights some of Gloucester’s Italian, Sicilian and longtime fishing families with stops and special tributes along the route.

Joe Novello, who heads the Fiesta Committee and is once again the chief coordinator for the 89th festival, noted that families treat the procession’s stops, and the turning of the statute of St. Peter, in front of homes along the route as if St. Peter himself has come to visit for a moment or two.

“It brings it all together,” he said. “It adds to the whole celebration, and it gives the procession — and Fiesta — a meaning. When people go out of their way to do that, it makes it special for everybody.”

Read the full story at the Gloucester Times

MASSACHUSETTS: Gov. Baker throws oar into lobster fight

June 21, 2016 — Gov. Charlie Baker has tossed his two cents across the Atlantic Ocean and into the Swedish lobster contretemps.

Sweden is attempting to convince the entire European Union — which numbers 28 member states — to ban the import of American lobsters to Europe.

The Massachusetts governor, in a letter dated June 16 to a chief official of the European Union, warned that a proposed ban on the importation of American lobsters into the EU would significantly and negatively impact United States and Canadian fishermen, while also imposing an economic hardship on European consumers and seafood distributors in Europe and the U.S.

The letter to Daniel Calleja Crespo, the EU’s commission’s director general for the environment, closely mirrors similar positions of NOAA Fisheries and its Canadian counterpart.

Read the full story at the Gloucester Times

An Unlikely Alliance Forms to Save Whales From Deadly Entanglements

June 21, 2016 — An unusual coalition of lobster fishers, marine scientists, and rope manufacturers is banding together to save the whales—and catch more lobsters.

The idea is to come up with buoy lines to mark submerged lobster traps that will break loose when a whale becomes entangled in them, which can seriously injure or even kill the animals.

The effort to find the right balance was launched by the 109-member South Shore Lobstermen’s Association about two years ago after the National Marine Fisheries Service closed a 3,000-square-mile area off the coast of Massachusetts to fishers from February to April, when whales frequent those waters.

Many of the animals are North Atlantic right whales, the world’s most endangered great whale species. According to the Fisheries Service, 83 percent of these whales bear signs of entanglement in fishing gear, which killed or seriously injured an average of 3.4 right whales per year from 2009 through 2013.

Read the full story at Take Part

Fishermen worry about plan for wind farm off New York coast

June 20, 2016 — MINEOLA, N.Y. — A long-stalled plan to build a forest of power-producing windmills off the coast of New York may finally be gathering momentum, and that is sparking concern among commercial fishermen who fear the giant turbines will ruin an area rich with scallops and other sea life.

Federal officials announced earlier this month that they would auction off the rights to build the wind power farm on a 127-square-mile wedge of the Atlantic Ocean.

The tip of the wedge begins about 11 miles south of Long Island’s popular Jones Beach and spreads out across an area, sandwiched between major shipping lanes, where trawlers harvest at least $3.3 million worth of sea scallops each year, as well as smaller amounts of mackerel, squid and other species, according to a study commissioned by the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management.

“There’s got to be a better place,” said Eric Hansen, a scallop fisherman based in New Bedford, Massachusetts.

Groups including the Long Island Commercial Fishing Association and the Fisheries Survival Fund and a seafood company in Rhode Island have already voiced objections about damage to the fishing ground and potential navigation hazards for vessels traversing the area.

“We’ll fight it every step of the way,” said Drew Minkiewicz, an attorney representing the Fisheries Survival Fund, although he stopped short of threatening legal action. He said scallop fishermen don’t object to all wind farms, but are angry the New York site was chosen without their input.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at the Times Union

MASSACHUSETTS: Can the nation’s oldest seaport reinvent itself?

June 19, 2016 — GLOUCESTER, Mass. — The story of Gloucester trying to find its next act is not a new one. For years, the nation’s oldest seaport, like so many others, has struggled to reinvent itself in the shadow of a fading fishing industry.

But several developments in recent weeks could serve as a meaningful catalyst for change in the post-fishing economy.

Last week, the much-talked-about Beauport Hotel — a luxury 94-room facility and the city’s only large-scale hotel — opened on the site of the former Birds Eye fish-freezing plant, featuring three conference rooms to lure business travelers, along with a large restaurant and a rooftop pool with views of the harbor to entice tourists.

The hotel followed the May opening of the Gloucester Biotechnology Academy, a one-year certificate program for high school graduates that’s an extension of the Gloucester Marine Genomics Institute, founded in 2013 by biotech entrepreneur Gregory L. Verdine to study marine genetics.

For this North Shore community, the waterfront additions are an important example of what they might call casting a line and waiting for a bite. Influential investors hope a growing marine biotechnology sector will support the working waterfront, not with fishing, but with year-round jobs rooted in science and tourism. A hotel like the Beauport only adds to the appeal.

Read the full story at The Boston Globe