Saving Seafood

Nantucket Group, Island Fishermen Sue Federal Government To Vacate Vineyard Wind Approvals

January 13, 2026 — Already suspended by the federal government over national security concerns, Vineyard Wind is now facing another challenge: a federal lawsuit filed by the Nantucket-based offshore wind opposition group ACK For Whales and two island fishermen seeking to vacate its permits.

The non-profit activist group has been joined by Martha’s Vineyard fisherman and Wampanoag tribe member William Vanderhoop and Nantucket lobsterman Dan Pronk in the legal challenge. They claim the federal government violated the Offshore Continental Shelf Land Act (OCSLA) and the Administrative Procedures Act when it approved Vineyard Wind under the Biden administration.

The lawsuit, filed last Friday in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, seeks orders vacating Vineyard Wind’s record of decision and its construction and operations plan, claiming the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) and the Department of the Interior ignored “the disruptive effects the turbines have on civil aviation and national defenses, imperiling safety.”

“They were in such a rush to achieve their political goals, they didn’t care what corners they cut, the threat to our national defense or personal flying safety, or how high our electric bills would go,” said Nantucket resident and ACK For Whales president Vallorie Oliver in a statement. “This was politics at its worst.”

The group’s lawsuit also alleges that BOEM is violating the law by allowing Vineyard Wind to continue to operate.

“BOEM is engaging in ongoing violations of OCSLA because it continues to allow Vineyard Wind 1 project to operate under approvals that were issued using an interpretation of OCSLA…that the Office of the Solicitor has since withdrawn as erroneous,” the lawsuit states.

Read the full article at the Nantucket Current

MASSACHUSETTS: Boston Harbor shellfishing poised to reopen after a century

January 9, 2025 — For nearly 100 years, most of Boston Harbor has remained closed to shellfishing for direct human consumption- a legacy of a 1925 national typhoid epidemic linked to contaminated oysters. In the decades since, only a small number of specially licensed harvesters were allowed into limited areas of the harbor to collect moderately contaminated soft-shell clams, which were required to be sent to a shellfish purification facility before entering the market.

That long-standing restriction is now on the verge of changing.

Thanks in large part to the multi-billion-dollar Boston Harbor clean-up, water quality has improved enough for portions of the harbor to be reclassified as Conditionally Approved, allowing shellfish to be harvested for direct consumption. The areas under consideration include some of the most productive shellfish habitats in the state, located in parts of Winthrop, Hingham, and Hull. Once reopened, both commercial and recreational shell fishermen will be able to harvest shellfish for personal use or direct sale for the first time in a century.

Read the full article at the National Fisherman

MASSACHUSETTS: Fishing Heritage Center Awarded Expand Massachusetts Stories — Story Forward Grant from Mass Humanities to Share the Catch from Casting A Wider Net

January 8, 2026 — The following was released by the New Bedford Fishing Heritage Center:

New Bedford Fishing Heritage Center (FHC) has been awarded an Expand Massachusetts Stories — Story Forward Grant from Mass Humanities to share the Casting A Wider Net (CAWN) exhibit with the greater New Bedford community in a new initiative called Sharing the Catch. The funding will allow FHC to travel the CAWN exhibit to three sites across New Bedford in 2026, create tie-in programing and curriculum materials, and develop a CAWN digital exhibit on FHC’s website. The exhibit will travel to the Greater New Bedford Community Health Center, the Community Economic Development Center, and Global Learning Charter Public School. This will allow students and community members who were not able to view the exhibit at FHC a new opportunity to learn about and connect to the stories of immigration, labor, and family that are integral to New Bedford’s fishing industry in the spaces they frequent most often, breaking down barriers to access and bringing the archive to life.

The Casting A Wider Net Community Oral History Project was developed to collect and share stories of Cape Verdean, Vietnamese, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Guatemalan, and Salvadoran members of New Bedford’s commercial fishing industry. The project was designed to honor the integral role they play in our food system, build bridges of understanding between newer and older immigrant groups, expand capacity for people to tell their own stories in their own language, and ensure fisheries science and policy is informed by those voices. CAWN provided ethnographic training for nine community members who led the documentation effort. They conducted, transcribed, and translated fourteen interviews in four languages: English, Spanish, Vietnamese, and Kriolu. The interviews, interview transcripts, and associated photographs are now publicly accessible on the Center’s online collections database and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Voices Oral History Archive. Learn more about CAWN on FHC’s website: https://fishingheritagecenter.org/programs/community-documentation/.
These interviews provided the basis for the CAWN exhibit which was on display at FHC from November 2024 – June 2025. The exhibit featured photos, videos, and audio excerpts in English, Spanish, Portuguese, Cape Verdean Kriolu, and Vietnamese, and opportunities to reflect on and respond to narrators’ stories. The exhibit then travelled to the Cape Verdean Veterans’ Memorial Hall and was on display during the Cabo Verdean Heritage Month in July to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Cape Verde’s independence from Portugal. The exhibit opening featured a panel of Cape Verdean CAWN community ethnographers and narrators who spoke about the project and its significance for New Bedford’s Cape Verdean community. The exhibit remained on display through the end of August 2025.

Project funding for CAWN was provided by: the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, a Mass Humanities Expanding Massachusetts Stories Grant, and a New Bedford Creative Wicked Cool Places Grant.

The CAWN traveling exhibit is supported in part by: A Wicked Cool Places grant funded by the City of New Bedford through its Arts, Culture & Tourism Fund, and by the New Bedford Economic Development Council, which receives support in part from the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency.
About New Bedford Fishing Heritage Center. Established in 2016, New Bedford Fishing Heritage Center is located at 38 Bethel Street in New Bedford’s Seaport Historic District and is dedicated to preserving and sharing the story of the commercial fishing industry, past, present, and future. Learn more about FHC’s mission and programs by visiting the Center’s website: www.fishingheritagecenter.org

Black sea bass tagging study tracks shifting range in MA waters

January 7, 2026 — Black sea bass, once considered primarily a mid-Atlantic species, has become increasingly common in Massachusetts waters over the past several decades. As biomass has grown, fishing effort has followed, particularly in southern New England, where the species is now a staple for recreational anglers and an emerging consideration for commercial fisheries.

Recreationally, between 250,000 and more than one million black sea bass are caught each year in Massachusetts, with much of that activity concentrated in Buzzards Bay, Nantucket Sound, Vineyard Sound, and along Cape Cod. The fish typically arrive in state waters in mid-spring, when they aggregate to feed and spawn. Several spawning aggregations in Buzzards Bay are well known and consistently draw in fishermen, while new spawning locations continue to be identified. However, the timing and location of other feeding and spawning aggregations remain less understood.

Read the full article at National Fisherman

Four Governors Protest Latest Wind Farm Stoppage

January 2, 2025 — Gov. Kathy Hochul and the governors of Rhode Island, Connecticut, and Massachusetts have written to Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum to demand rescission of the Trump administration’s Dec. 22 pause of leases for five wind farms under construction, including Sunrise Wind and Empire Wind off New York and Revolution Wind off Rhode Island and Connecticut.

In the latest round of on-again, off-again whiplash with respect to offshore wind, the Dec. 22 announcement escalates the president’s hostility to the renewable energy source, which he has criticized by citing multiple falsehoods. The latest rationale, according to the Interior Department, is that wind farms could interfere with radar systems.

The five wind farms “have already been subject to extensive federal review, including an assessment that expressly addressed national security considerations,” the governors wrote to Mr. Burgum on Dec. 24. “Neither the Department of the Interior [Bureau of Ocean Energy Management], nor any other federal agency, including the Department of Defense, informed our respective States of any purportedly new risk prior to these suspensions nor did they account for our States’ substantial reliance interests — our States’ economies are dependent on the power that these projects will generate — in these vital projects that already have undergone many federal approvals, including from the DoD. The absence of such notice undermines our ability to plan effectively and violates basic principles of cooperative federalism. The sudden emergence of a new ‘national security threat’ appears to be less a legitimate, rational finding of fact and more a pretextual excuse to justify a predetermined outcome consistent with the president’s frequently stated personal opposition to offshore wind.”

Read the full article at The East Hampton Star

North Coast Seafoods raised USD 33,000 for breast cancer research via month-long oyster fundraiser

December 30, 2025 — Family-owned Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.A.-based sustainable seafood supplier North Coast Seafoods raised USD 33,632 (EUR 28,691) for breast cancer research and patient programs through a month-long oyster fundraiser. 

Throughout the month of October, North Coast collected a share of all proceeds from oysters sold at restaurants it supplies to be donated to the American Cancer Society at its inaugeral 13 November Shuck Cancer event in Boston.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

MASSACHUSETTS: Six decades of change on Cape Cod’s working waterfronts

December 17, 2025 — Over the past 60 years, Cape Cod’s fisheries have undergone dramatic change, mirroring broader shifts across coastal New England, wrote longtime fisherman William Amaru in a retrospective for The Cape Cod Chronicle. Amaru notes that his own fishing career spans the same six decades as the newspaper, a period when “virtually all aspects of life on Cape Cod saw more change than had occurred in the previous centuries on this peninsula.”

 The region’s fisheries had evolved from hemp line and handmade hooks to synthetic netting, spectra rope, and stainless-steel wire, while once dominant cod and haddock fisheries gave way to “robust catches of dogfish, skates, and monkfish.” At the same time, grey and harbor seal populations have surged. When The Chronicle first published, Amaru wrote, “even seeing a seal was rare. Today they number in tens of thousands in our waters,” a shift he shared has hindered fish stock recovery.

Read the full article at the National Fisherman

MASSACHUSSETS: Nantucket reaches deal on Vineyard Wind transparency, response

December 16, 2025 — After months of pressure from local leaders, Nantucket has won new guarantees from Vineyard Wind, securing an agreement that sets clearer rules for communication, public transparency, and emergency response as the offshore wind project progresses toward full operations.

The agreement was formally announced on Dec. 11.

Town leaders first raised the issue publicly in July, when they called for more consistent and transparent information about the project’s daily activities and a more reliable process for handling emergencies at sea. They said the town had struggled to get quick, detailed answers, and they wanted a system that let both officials and residents track what the project was doing.

Select Board member Brooke Mohr, who led the island delegation in the talks, said the push centered on protecting the island’s natural and economic landscape.

Many issues arose in the aftermath of the catastrophic failure of a blade on turbine AW-38 in July 2024, which sent tons of debris crashing into the ocean and then washing up on Nantucket’s south shore and elsewhere throughout the region. Others are related to the light pollution from the turbine field.

“Transparency and predictability are essential to protect our world-renowned coastline, fisheries, night skies, and heritage tourism economy,” she said.

Nantucket is listed as a national historic landmark.

The company is constructing its 62-turbine, 800- megawatt Vineyard Wind 1 project — a joint venture of Avangrid Renewables LLC and Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners — in waters starting about 15 miles southwest of Nantucket. The company earlier this month reported the project is progressing and has a current operational capacity of more than 400 megawatts.

Read the full article at Dredge Wire

MASSACHUSETTS: Massachusetts government awards USD 1.2 million in commercial fishing grants

December 16, 2025 — The Massachusetts state government has announced USD 1.2 million (EUR 1 million) in grant funding for the state’s commercial fishing sector.

“Massachusetts is home to a nation-leading seafood industry and thriving blue economy. Investing in the strength and resilience of our commercial fishing industry is crucial to sustain our local economies and coastal culture,” Massachusetts Energy and Environmental Affairs (EEA) Secretary Rebecca Tepper said in a release. “We are proud to support our commercial fishers, who provide us with healthy, delicious seafood, all while finding ways to advance innovative research.”

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

MAINE: Northern shrimp fishery closed for at least 3 more years, following unsuccessful pilot

December 15, 2025 — The New England shrimp fishery will remain closed for at least another three years.

Federal regulators said Thursday they found no improvement in northern shrimp stock status and new lows in abundance. The fishery has been closed for about a decade.

But last winter, Maine, New Hampshire and Massachusetts launched an industry-funded sampling pilot to learn more about the fishery in a warming of Gulf of Maine.

Seven of the nine participating fishermen were from Maine.

Fishermen were allowed to harvest up to 58,400 pounds of northern shrimp during the pilot. But they caught just 70 individual shrimp, totaling less than three pounds, according to regulators with the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission.

Read the full article at Maine Public