Saving Seafood

Fishery council considering Mitchell’s plea to open Northern Edge to scallopers

April 18, 2024 — Mayor Jon Mitchell and New Bedford fishing representatives are urging the regional regulatory council to open up the Northern Edge — a lucrative scallop ground that has long been closed to commercial fishing. The council, which shot the motion down five years ago, has agreed to consider the request.

On Tuesday, Mitchell delivered testimony to the New England Fishery Management Council (NEFMC). He cited challenging years ahead for the scallop industry, which is being strained by a slump in prices and fewer days at sea for fishermen; and he stressed the importance of the scallop fishery as a foundational part of the port’s economy.

“The scallop fishery is facing some challenging years upcoming, after a few years of low recruitment,” Mitchell wrote in a letter to the council. “The industry would benefit greatly by adding these areas to its available fishing grounds.”

The region under consideration is the northernmost portion of the broad and productive fishing grounds called Georges Bank. In 1994, the Northern Edge was closed to commercial fishing to protect habitat for spawning cod and other bottom dwelling fisheries. Thirty years later, scallop representatives told the council, groundfish populations like cod have continued to decline while the area has remained locked up to scallopers.

Read the full story at the New Bedford Light

MASSACHUSETTS: A submerged concern: offshore wind cables

April 18, 2024 — As offshore wind turbines undergo construction in waters south of the Vineyard, and with some already standing and delivering power, the debates on the Island regarding the industry continue.

And amid the conversations over a necessity for clean energy, and whether the projects are a blow to the Vineyard’s natural charm — coupled with a mix of online misinformation campaigns against the offshore wind industry — one subject has remained submerged: undersea cables.

While cables — which connect wind farms to the New England power grid on the mainland — aren’t the flashiest parts of an offshore wind farm operation, some are nervous about what may lie ahead with them.

John Keene, president of the Martha’s Vineyard Fishermen’s Preservation Trust, told the Times that some in the fishing industry are nervous about how the electromagnetic field from the cables can affect marine life.

Keene said the concern is that the fields emitted from cables could act like a fence, particularly for migratory species, and impact the behavior of marine species.

“There’s a lot of unknowns,” he said.

Read the full story at the MV Times

MASSACHUSETTS: MAYOR MITCHELL ADVOCATES FOR SCALLOP INDUSTRY

April 17, 2024 — Mayor Jon Mitchell testified before the New England Fishery Management Council Tuesday in Mystic, Conn., urging the board to open the Northern Edge scallop grounds to New Bedford commercial fishermen.

Prior to his public comments on Tuesday afternoon, Mayor Mitchell submitted a letter to Chairman Eric Reid and the other members of the Council calling for the opening of the “key new source of scallops.”

“While there are multiple species that are harvested by New Bedford fishing vessels, scallops are the prime drivers of economic activity within the Port of New Bedford,” Mayor Mitchell wrote. “The fishermen of New Bedford know this, and they take great care in maintaining the resource and recognize the strategic long-term importance of managing the biomass.”

Read the full release at the City of New Bedford

MASSACHUSETTS: New Englanders, with their love of seafood, may be at higher risk for PFAS exposure

April 16, 2024 — A study from Dartmouth found that higher consumption of seafood is linked to a higher risk of per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) exposure. While the study looked specifically at people in New Hampshire, New Englanders are likely at higher risk because a legacy of PFAS pollution exists alongside a cultural preference for fish.

Researchers analyzed PFAS concentrations in fresh seafood with a statewide survey of eating habits in New Hampshire. National nutrition surveys have found that New Hampshire and all of New England are among the top consumers of seafood nationally, making New Hampshire ideal for researchers to learn more about the extent of people’s exposure to PFAS through fish and shellfish in saltwater.

“Basically, New Hampshire is a kind of case study that quantifies seafood consumption, particularly in a New England state, in order to estimate the potential risk of PFAS exposure that may come from very frequently consuming marine seafood,” Megan Romano, corresponding author and associate professor of epidemiology at Dartmouth’s Geisel School of Medicine, said.

She said the findings, published in the journal Exposure and Health, make a case for setting PFAS limits on seafood, not to stop eating seafood.

Read the full article at wbur

MASSACHUSETTS: An ocean of ambition

April 10, 2024 — Last November, a group of New Bedford seafood companies crowded into a Zoom conference room hosted by Delaware’s bankruptcy court.

One by one, a trustee listed the assets up for sale: eight commercial fishing vessels and 48 federal fishing permits. It was a fire-sale liquidation for bankrupt Blue Harvest Fisheries — one of New England’s largest seafood companies — and the largest bundle of groundfish permits in recent history to come available on the market.

Bids, the trustee announced, would start at $10 million.

Cassie Canastra was first to act: “$11 million,” she said, without skipping a beat.

There was a brief pause, as a team representing O’Hara Corporation, part owner of New Bedford-based scallop giant Eastern Fisheries, huddled to discuss their options. They raised the bid to $11.25 million.

“$12 million,” Canastra responded, showing no sign of relenting.

For Blue Harvest, the bankruptcy auction marked the final chapter in its aggressive, eight-year expansion. For the New Bedford waterfront, it marked a changing of the guards — ushering in a new captain at the helm of the city’s fabled but struggling groundfish industry.

Read the full article at the New Bedford Light

MASSACHUSETTS: Mixed Results as Commercial Bay Scallop Season Ends

April 6, 2024 — After a banner year for Vineyard commercial scallopers in the 2022-23 season, this winter’s bay scallop season was something of a cool-down for the notoriously fickle fishery.

Island fishermen harvested around 2,500 fewer bushels this year, though local scallopers and fishmongers say it wasn’t all bad news for the fishery, as a lower harvest on- and off-Island prevented the precipitous drop in scallop prices that occurred last year.

“It was good this year,” said Matteus Scheffer, who drags from the Anita Penny out of Cape Pogue. “This year, we were all getting our [daily bushel] limits pretty well, for the most part.”

Edgartown shellfish constable Rob Morrison described the harvest as “not bad by modern standards.”

“Scallops are one of those things where their abundance does seem to be cyclical,” he added.

Read the full article at the Vineyard Gazette

Two Mass-based offshore wind farms clear biggest federal hurdle

April 4, 2024 –Two wind farms bidding for a contract in Massachusetts have cleared a major federal hurdle by receiving a favorable Record of Decision, a combined approval by agencies responsible for ocean energy, marine fisheries, and waterways engineering.

The projects are New England Wind 1 and 2, formerly called Park City Wind and Commonwealth Wind. Both are owned by Avangrid and are covered by a single decision.

Although the projects need additional federal permits, the decision announced Tuesday is considered the primary approval from the Biden administration, said Ken Kimmell, Avangrid’s chief development officer for offshore wind.

Read the full article at CAI

MASSACHUSETTS: New Bedford State Pier redevelopment proposals to be subject of May public meeting

April 2, 2024 — A public meeting to review proposals for the State Pier’s redevelopment is being planned for May.

MassDevelopment, the state’s development finance agency and land bank, manages the eight-acre pier property, which is owned by the state.

MassDevelopment President and CEO Dan Rivera stated in a communication to New Bedford legislators, “We are planning a public meeting in New Bedford at which all respondents will have an equal opportunity to make a public presentation explaining their respective proposals.”

He said they were trying to finalize a date in May.

Read the full article at the Standard-Times

MASSACHUSETTS: The complicated truths about offshore wind and right whales

April 1, 2024 — By the time researchers found the dead whale on a Martha’s Vineyard beach, her jet-black skin was pockmarked by hungry seagulls, her baleen had been dislodged from her mouth, and thin rope was wrapped tightly—as it had been for 17 months—around the most narrow part of her tail.

Researchers quickly learned this was a 12-ton, 3-year-old female known as 5120, and that she was a North Atlantic right whale, a species with just about 360 members left.

A few weeks later, NOAA Fisheries announced that the entangling rope came from lobster fishing gear set in Maine state waters. The pain and discomfort of the entanglement likely affected 5120’s ability to swim and eat until finally, experts say, exhaustion or starvation probably killed her. A final cause of death is still pending.

The death of 5120 was devastating to right whale advocates, who know that losing a female doesn’t just mean losing one whale, but dozens of others that could have come from her future calves. For them, a death is often followed by a period of grief, and a renewed commitment to their work. And that might have been the end of 5120’s story.

But then came the online comments. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, across social media blamed offshore wind farms—the noise, electricity generated, and the mere presence of turbines. Along the way, the truth about 5120 became a non-concern.

In many cases, the rumors about offshore wind hurting and killing right whales are quite possibly spread from a place of concern, mistrust, or fear by well-meaning people who want to know our oceans are safe for marine mammals. But few people want that more than right whale scientists, who have dedicated their careers to saving a species that appears to be just a few decades from extinction. For many of them, talking about offshore wind has its own challenges, both because of the unknowns that come with a nascent industry and the knee-jerk reactions from people on all sides of the issue. So they say that yes, they’re uneasy about the potential threats of wind farms. But they agonize over the prospect of climate change destroying right whales’ shot at survival via their food web and ecosystem.

Read the full article at CAI

Offshore energy projects in New England will need years to power up

March 30, 2024 — Following more than a year of tumult in the industry that called into question the future of offshore wind in New England, Massachusetts and its southern neighbors on Wednesday got the menu of options for the next phase of clean energy development.

Massachusetts is seeking as much as 3,600 megawatts of offshore wind capacity in its fourth procurement round, its biggest procurement ever. And through a tri-state partnership with Rhode Island and Connecticut, Massachusetts and its neighbors are planning to coordinate their selections for a combined 6,000 MW of offshore wind energy capacity, leading to the possibility of multi-state projects although the newly submitted bids in the aggregate fall short of reaching that 6,000 MW threshold.

The latest round of bids comes after Massachusetts and other states in the Northeast went backwards on offshore wind over the last year and a half. Both projects selected in Massachusetts’ last procurement became much more expensive as inflation took off and the war in Ukraine snarled supply chains, and the developers behind them paid multi-million dollar fines to back out of the contracts they had agreed to. Both projects were re-bid in some form Wednesday, are are expected to come with a higher price to ratepayers.

By Wednesday’s noon deadline, Massachusetts received proposals from three developers who also submitted their proposals for the multi-state solicitation: Vineyard Offshore, Avangrid Renewables and SouthCoast Wind. At their maximum, the projects that were bid to Massachusetts on Wednesday would represent a cumulative 4,270 MW of capacity. The developer Orsted also bid a 1,184 MW project to Rhode Island and Connecticut, making approximately 5,454 MW available for the multi-state effort.

Read the full article at New England Public Media