Saving Seafood

CALIFORNIA: Local fishermen and their catch take center stage at Monterey Bay restaurants

January 18, 2019 — In fishing ports across the country, it’s often difficult to find the local catch in local restaurants. Salmon, tuna, shrimp and cod are menu staples. While all delicious, they don’t often reflect seasonal fish local fishermen are taking back to the docks.

To counter this, a group of local organizations, businesses and fishermen in Monterey, Calif. are spotlighting the local catch and area chefs who bring them to plate with “Get Hooked,” a week-long initiative to recognize restaurants that provide the in-season harvest to their patrons.

“Commercial fishing is an icon of Monterey’s history, yet most consumers are unaware that 90 percent of the seafood we eat in the U.S. today is imported,” said Roger Burleigh, marketing and supply chain manager for the Monterey Bay Fisheries Trust who’s spearheading the campaign. “We want to draw attention back to our local seafood bounty and the fishermen who catch it.”

Read the full story at National Fisherman

CALIFORNIA: Can sustainably caught swordfish make waves on the Central Coast?

December 31, 2018 — Will sustainably-caught swordfish receive a wave of support from Central Coast fishermen, consumers and restaurateurs?

Clean-fishing advocates sure hope so as efforts continue to phase out the use of drift gillnets — the mile-long, 100-foot-wide nets currently used to catch swordfish — which  commonly collect and kill protected species like whales, dolphins, and sea turtles.

On Sept. 28,  Gov. Jerry Brown signed Senate Bill 1017, which requires the state Department of Fish and Wildlife get funding for and enact a transition program that would help fishermen switch to alternative fishing gear.

Under the program, up to $10,000 would be offered for fisheries to turn in their drift gillnet permits, and transition to “clean-fishing” gear.

The California Department of Fish and Wildlife has until March of 2020 to roll out the drift gillnet “buyout.” However, the department still needs to raise $1 million to trigger the revocation of all drift gillnet permits. The money would have to come from federal funding or private donor sources.

Read the full story at the Monterey Herald

Why Whale Entanglements Are on the Rise in Monterey Bay

June 13, 2018 — The morning fog in Moss Landing is still thick when Peggy Stap and her volunteer whale rescue crew load up their GPS-equipped buoys, flying knives and repurposed lacrosse helmets.

It’s just after 9 a.m. on this Tuesday morning when Stap steers her 40-foot boat into the harbor. Her 13-year-old rescue dog, a local social media celebrity known as “Whiskie the Whale Spotter,” shares the captain’s seat. After a quick safety check—calm water, good weather—Stap relays the latest radio chatter to her small team of researchers, photographers and curious visitors.

“Tim’s got a gray whale that doesn’t look healthy,” Stap says. She revs the engine and heads for the open waters of the Monterey Bay.

Following up on vague reports from whale-watching boats, fishermen and park rangers has become a near-daily routine for the 63-year-old Michigan transplant. As founding director of the nonprofit research and rescue group Marine Life Studies, Stap has carved out a niche as the Monterey Bay’s go-to first responder for injured whales.

Lately, that means helping to cut loose more and more of the 60,000-pound animals who get caught in crab lines, fishing nets and other ocean hazards. It’s a task that has grown increasingly daunting since 2006, when Stap and Mary Whitney of Carmel’s Fluke Foundation started an early version of the Whale Entanglement Team (WET) that now struggles to keep pace with calls about animals in distress.

“We’ve had three entanglements just in the past couple of weeks,” says Laura Kasa, former director of Save Our Shores and a consultant to the recently formed Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary Foundation. She says the new organization is prioritizing fundraising for entanglement to ensure rescue crews have necessary supplies.

Read the full story at Good Times

CALIFORNIA: Short salmon season is tough on fishermen

June 11, 2018 — This year’s commercial salmon season is putting local fishermen in a squeeze.

The two separate openings in the first week of May and the last 12 days of June are meant to protect a scarce group of king, or chinook, salmon. But the openings increase the pressure on fishermen, who might not be able to pay off expensive permits and equipment with such restrained fishing opportunity.

“This year they almost shut us down,” said local fisherman Lorenzo Sanchez, 42. Recreational salmon season will run a bit longer, from April 7 until July 2, but is still shorter than a traditional season.

At local fish markets, scarce salmon might be available during the season opening, but consumers should expect high prices. During the May opening, said Phil DiGirolamo, owner of Phil’s Fish Market and Eatery in Moss Landing, “it was the highest-priced salmon I’ve ever seen.” Fillets sold in his market for $20-25 per pound, and may well be more expensive this June.

And yet, he said, because of the high quality of the fish, discerning customers keep the salmon in high demand. “We got a few fish at a time and they were sold as soon as we got them,” he said. He expects to sell all the salmon he can get his hands on.

Read the full story at the Monterey Herald

West Coast sardine fishing closed for 4th year; ‘alarming’ 97% population decline

March 8, 2018 — Sardine fishing nets will remain empty for a fourth straight year along the West Coast, where biologists are comparing the dramatic decline of the schooling fish to the infamous collapse that led to the downfall of Monterey’s once-thriving Cannery Row.

The northern Pacific sardine population, stretching from Mexico to British Columbia, has plummeted 97 percent since 2006, according to an assessment released this week by the National Marine Fisheries Service and the Pacific Fishery Management Council.

The perilously low numbers give regulators no choice but to close fishing, which had been scheduled to start July 1, from Mexico to the Canadian border.

The 14 voting members of the fishery council, which makes policy along the coasts of California, Oregon and Washington, will meet April 8 in Portland, Ore., to discuss the results, but everyone agrees a fishing ban is inevitable. The council is required by federal law to close ocean fishing when the numbers fall this far below conservation objectives.

Read the full story at the San Francisco Chronicle

 

‘Fish Hub’ Plans To Restore Monterey’s Fishing Roots, One Piece At A Time

February 22, 2018 — Cities along the Monterey Bay are full of seafood restaurants. But what ends up on your plate can often come from another part of the country, even another part of the world. The Monterey Bay Fisheries Trust wants to change that by breathing new life into Monterey’s commercial fishing industry.

Scott Fosmark opens the metal gate to the Monterey Municipal Marina. He’s wearing a black baseball cap with a logo for his family business, Fosmark Fisheries, LLC.

It’s a sunny winter day on the waterfront. We walk down a ramp that leads us to the rows of white sailboats, each tightly tied to the dock with rope. It’s a beautiful scene, but Fosmark seems almost homesick.

This whole harbor used to be completely filled with commercial fishing boats. I can remember coming down here with my grandfather and having him unload his salmon right here,” says Fosmark.

Fosmark is a fifth generation commercial fisherman from Monterey. He grew up on his parents’ boat, pulling in albacore at just six-years-old. But now, his boats are up in Oregon.

“I’m sure a lot of people are probably scratching their heads, why are there no fishing boats here? Well, you know, the fish stocks were challenged,” Fosmark says.

Twenty years ago, the federal government declared many of the popular species caught off Monterey, like rockfish, overfished. This limited the number that could be caught. To help the fish recover, what’s called the “catch share” program was created. It requires fishermen to own fishing rights, which are expensive and hard to get. Many local fishermen got priced out by bigger companies with deeper pockets.

Fosmark says, “They left Monterey, they went up to the Pacific Northwest.”

Then, in 2014, the non-profit Monterey Bay Fisheries Trust formed to support smaller, local fishing operations. It currently has rights to fish about six and a half million pounds of groundfish, which it leases to local fishermen at a discounted price. Sherry Flumerfelt is the Executive Director of the Fisheries Trust.

“Having access to fishing rights is one piece of a much larger puzzle,” says Flumerfelt.

She says another piece of the puzzle is the buyer. Because when the boats left, local restaurants, stores and cafeterias had to form other relationships with other suppliers.

Read the full story at KAZU

 

New Fish Hub Hopes to Rebuild Demand for Monterey Fish

February 1, 2017 — Once a major source of local fish in California, the coastal city of Monterey is now filled with restaurants serving farmed salmon and imported Asian shrimp. But a conservation group there wants to change that fact. Borrowing a marketing and distribution idea from its land-based counterparts, the Monterey Bay Fisheries Trust is planning to launch a “fish hub,” designed to market and sell products from a variety of local producers in one central location.

Still in the planning stages, the Monterey fish hub could take many forms—it could be a facility, entirely virtual, or simply shared marketing. But the idea is a transparent business that brings Monterey fish, identified by the region and by the name and practices of fisherman who caught it, to both individual customers and large institutions in the area.

“Fishermen need a place where we can actually meet the public and introduce our products, and it can’t just come from one source—it needs to be a community effort,” says third-generation fisherman Giuseppe “Joe” Pennisi, who first generated the fish hub idea with Fisheries Trust Executive Director Sherry Flumerfelt back in January, 2015. Based out of the port in Monterey, Pennisi says he has no local market for his catch.

Read the full story at Civil Eats

Tough Seasons for California Crabbers

August 31, 2016 — The recent crab season in California was abysmal, to say the least.

Epic neurotoxin levels found in Dungeness and rock crabs forced state officials to close fisheries for months instead of weeks, crippling one of the state’s most lucrative fishing industries and leaving fishermen in California’s Northern and Central coasts unable to make a living.

Boats loaded with new fishing gear and crab pots sat in harbors such as Bodega Bay and Monterey. Boat owners have had to lay off crewmembers, who left to find work elsewhere or collect unemployment.

In Crescent City, a small Northern California town of fewer than 8,000 people, the community has been hosting fundraisers to help struggling crabbers. The city has one of the largest landings for Dungeness crab.

Angel Cincotta, who owns the Alioto-Lazio Fish Company on San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf with her two sisters, told an NBC Bay Area affiliate that they have had to assuage customers’ concerns about the product they were selling.

“Crabs are currently coming out of Washington and Alaska, out of certified clean waters, so they’re safe to eat,” she told NBC.

The neurotoxin also affected rock crab season in Santa Barbara, one of the state’s biggest ports for rock crab fishing. The rock crab season, which runs all year, was delayed for months in Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties.

“Thousands of Californians are dependent on healthy a crab fishery, and this year we have faced a disaster,” said State Sen. Mike McGuire, chairman of the Joint Committee on Fisheries and Aquaculture. “Our magnificent and iconic crab fishery has gone from abundant to scarcity. And after a lousy salmon season, our fishery boats sit idle. Crabbers are struggling to make ends meet.”

Read the full story at Fishermen’s News

New Bedford Standard-Times: Stakeholders deserve open process in monument designation

August 26, 2016 — Today, the Standard-Times in New Bedford, Mass., the highest grossing seaport in the country, dedicated its opinion section to the issue of marine monuments designated by executive authority under the Antiquities Act. This was done in conjunction with today’s announcement that President Obama will quadruple the size of the Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument off the coast of Hawaii.

In its editorial, the Standard-Times noted that a monument designation off the coast of New England “lacks checks and balances that would deliver a better policy” and that environmental groups have pushed for a monument in secret “in order to gain an advantage over industry and other stakeholders.” 

Together with today’s editorial, the Standard-Times published letters to the White House by two coastal mayors, Jon Mitchell from New Bedford and Clyde Roberson from Monterey, Calif., questioning the efficacy of offshore monument designations and asking for a more transparent process. The following is excerpted from the Standard-Times’ editorial:

The National Park Service was established 100 years ago when President Woodrow Wilson signed the National Park Service Organic Act.

The 84 million acres under the NPS is a treasure that belongs to all of us, and we applaud efforts to expand the protection of our natural resources, but we also recognize some such efforts go too far, including in the push to establish a national monument off the New England coast.

The Canyons and Seamounts are indeed precious resources, but the scope and the current process being advanced by environmental organizations lack checks and balances that would deliver a better policy.

New Bedford Mayor Jon Mitchell last week sent a letter to the acting director of the Council for Environmental Quality, a White House agency that advises the president on such issues, noting the push for the seamounts monument has kept stakeholders from participating in the process.

Indeed, we have previously reported on efforts by environmentalists to keep their advocacy for the monument designation a secret in order to gain an advantage over industry and other stakeholders.

The president did not go along with the environmentalists last fall, and it is our fervent hope that if he isn’t advised by CEQ to pursue the more open process, the duty to represent and hear all stakeholders will prevail.

See today’s opinion page in the New Bedford Standard-Times

Read the full editorial at the New Bedford Standard-Times

Read Mayor Jon Mitchell’s full letter here

Read Mayor Clyde Roberson’s full letter here

Fishing industry fears Obama’s power over coastal waters

August 25, 2016 — The prospect that President Barack Obama could designate as marine monuments areas off the Massachusetts and California coasts is being met with resistance from various fishing groups and port-town mayors. If Obama uses his authority under the Antiquities Act to name as federal monuments the New England Coral Canyons and Seamounts, and many of the seamounts, ridges and banks off California’s coast, commercial fishing would be significantly restricted and the viability of two of the country’s most important fishing ports would be threatened — Monterey, Calif., and New Bedford, Mass., (the nation’s highest-grossing fishing port), the mayors of those ports argued in letters to the White House on Wednesday.

The mayors — Jon Mitchell of New Bedford and Clyde Roberson of Monterey — and industry groups, like the National Coalition for Fishing Communities, also argue such actions would sidestep the fishery management system overseen by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which makes decisions based on scientific analysis and public input to ensure the sustainability of seafood stocks.

Read the full story at POLITICO