Saving Seafood

Japanese imports affecting New Bedford scallop market

March 23, 2024 — It’s not Godzilla. But a smaller, more succulent beast is emerging from the Pacific Ocean that could spell problems for the Port of New Bedford: 18 million pounds of imported Japanese scallops.

The 2023 scallop season ends this month, and it has been a challenging one for New Bedford’s most lucrative industry. It’s marked by increasing costs for vessel owners, fewer days at sea for fishermen and the lowest annual harvest in more than a decade.

It’s part of a natural cycle in the fishery, reflecting a recent decline in scallop populations along the East Coast. But unlike previous years, where fewer scallop landings have meant higher prices — balancing out the impact on seafood companies and their fishermen — this year, scallop prices have remained in an unexpected slump.

Through the “pandemic years,” as New Bedford scallopers fondly recall, 10-20 count scallops reached an unprecedented high, sometimes climbing over $30 per pound while remaining at an average of over $16. Through 2023, scallops of the same count dipped under $11 per pound and averaged around $13, according to data from New Bedford’s public seafood auction, the Buyers and Sellers Exchange (BASE).

Read the full article at The National Fisherman

MASSACHUSETTS: State shutting down many South Coast shellfish beds due to sewage

March 13, 2024 — The Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries is immediately shutting down thousands of acres of shellfish beds surrounding the New Bedford and Fairhaven wastewater treatment plant outfalls to comply with federal health and safety standards.

More than 18,000 acres of the Dartmouth, Fairhaven and New Bedford coastline, including quahogging areas off the outer New Bedford Harbor, will be reclassified from being conditionally approved shellfishing areas to prohibited. This means the state will not permit harvesting shellfish from these areas under any conditions.

The decision represents a roughly 11,000-acre increase in closures from the roughly 7,000 acres in New Bedford Harbor that were closed in October 2023 over concerns about sewage contamination. The state agency will not be revisiting the classifications for another year, at least.

Shellfish beds along roughly 90,000 acres of lower Buzzards Bay — from Westport to Mattapoisett, and out to the Elizabeth Islands — will also be reclassified, from being approved shellfishing areas to conditionally approved. These beds will be open to harvest except under emergency conditions like sewage overflows, which occur during heavy rains. Shellfish caught in those areas also cannot be sold to the European Union.

“Here in Massachusetts, we pride ourselves on our nation-leading seafood industry, including culturally and economically important traditions of shellfishing in Buzzards Bay,” Department of Fish & Game Commissioner Tom O’Shea said.

“While it’s difficult to see any additional areas closed to shellfishing, these actions are necessary to comply with national standards and protect consumers from real public health risks.”

The shellfish bed reclassifications will affect recreational fishermen on the west side of Fairhaven, and two commercial quahog fishermen who historically dredge the offshore beds, DMF officials said. These vessels had commercial landings of less than $20,000 in 2020.

There will be no recourse for fishermen affected by the closures. However, they can use other open and conditionally open beds to fish, a DMF official said.

Read the full article The New Bedford Light 

Fishermen can start applying for offshore wind compensation: Learn how

March 6, 2024 — Commercial fishermen in Massachusetts and other states who have been negatively impacted financially by the growth of the offshore wind industry have a relatively short window in which to apply for compensation under Vineyard Wind’s new Fisheries Compensatory Mitigation Program.

Vineyard Wind, a joint venture between Avangrid, Inc. and Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners, through its affiliate Vineyard Offshore, announced March 4 that the deadline for impacted fishermen to apply and qualify for payments based on defined criteria is June 3 and that there will be no other opportunity to apply.

Read the full article at the Standard-Times

MASSACHUSETTS: Officials press to end child labor in New Bedford seafood plants

January 18, 2024 — The photograph was passed from one top official to the next. It was passed first to Police Chief Paul Oliveira, then to City Councilor Shane Burgo, then to schools Superintendent Andrew O’Leary and to state Rep. Chris Hendricks.

The 8×11 print showed scabbed, purple boils forming a ring around the wrist of a child who had been burned by chemicals while working an overnight shift at a New Bedford seafood processing plant.

“The chemical went through the glove and burned his hand,” explained Dax Crocker, of labor activist group Centro Comunidad de Trabajadores (CCT), which on Monday hosted a meeting with civic leaders to address the issue of child labor in New Bedford’s fish houses.

The picture was an example of a quiet but pervasive problem in New Bedford — illegal child labor in the city’s seafood processing plants and the risks that the dangerous jobs pose to undocumented, underage workers with little protection or other options for work.

In November, the U.S. Department of Labor launched a sweeping investigation into child labor and other potential labor law violations at multiple New Bedford seafood processing plants. The Labor Department has levied fines at meatpacking and food processing companies across the country for violating child labor laws. But with no action or fines yet imposed here, local officials have stepped up, saying it’s time to end the exploitative and often illegal labor trend.

Read the full article at the New Bedford Light

Filmmaker Helgeland drew on his New Bedford fishing past for ‘Finestkind’

December 26, 2023 — In a final scene of the film “Finestkind,” as the New Bedford-Fairhaven Bridge slowly pivots open, a father and son cross paths for what might be the last time. One is handcuffed in the back of a police van. The other is outward bound on a fishing trip.

Most in New Bedford know the bridge as little more than a morning traffic jam. But for Brian Helgeland, the 62-year-old New Bedford-raised screenwriter who returned to his hometown to shoot his newest film, the bridge is a symbol of his childhood and his development as a writer.

As a boy, Helgeland rode his bicycle over the bridge. As a young man working on scallop boats, he passed through the bridge as the first leg of a long voyage out to sea. And now, three decades later, the same bridge is also a set in his own film.

“That bridge is a memory, a movie location and a metaphor,” Helgeland told a local audience at an unofficial premiere of the film at the New Bedford Whaling Museum earlier this month.

Read the full article at the New Bedford Light

New Bedford Pols Call for More Transparency with Test Turbine

December 6, 2023 — Local legislators are not pleased with the way they and residents found out about a research project in New Bedford’s Clark Cove that features the installation of a temporary scale model of a floating offshore wind turbine.

“The energy bubbles up from the constituency, especially when they’re pissed off, and this one bubbled up with us organically on our own, but exactly what I would have predicted (is what) happened,” Sen. Mark Montigny (D-New Bedford) said in an appearance on WBSM’s SouthCoast Now Tuesday morning.

“There is no excuse for it,” he said.

Montigny is referring to the rumors that began Monday morning regarding what was being installed in Clark’s Cove. Some believed it was going to be a 300-foot-plus full-sized wind turbine, and potentially the first of many that were being erected without any public hearing.

Read the full story at WBSM

New Bedford South End Wind Turbine Just a Temporary Research Project

December 5, 2023 — There was some concern Monday morning regarding an offshore wind project happening down in the Clark’s Cove area of New Bedford’s South End, with rumors that a wind turbine was being erected off the shores of West Beach without any notification to the public.

However, what is being launched today is actually a prototype of a floating offshore wind turbine. The aluminum and fiberglass structure weighs 1,500 pounds and sits on a 19 foot-by-19 foot square platform, with a hub height of 27 feet off the water.

The blades on the turbine are 12 feet long, so when a blade is in the 12 o’clock position, the entire height of the structure will be 39 feet. It is 1/16th scale of a full-sized turbine.

The structure is being launched as a prototype demonstration by T-Omega Wind to study the effect of the wind and waves on the anchors for these floating offshore wind turbines. It is expected to last roughly 60 days, depending on the weather.

Read the full story at WBSM

 

The collapse of fishing giant Blue Harvest exposes the weakness of catch share policies

December 2, 2023 — In October 2023, wrecking crews finished scrapping the last of a dozen fishing boats that had once owned by the notorious New England fishing magnate nicknamed “The Codfather.” Carlos Rafael, who started out as a fish gutter in New Bedford, Massachusetts, aggressively worked — and sometimes cheated — his way up the ladder, eventually coming to dominate New England’s groundfish fishery (which includes cod, hake, flounder and other white fish) before a 2017 court decision sent him to prison for nearly four years and forced him to sell off his fleet. The sale, completed during his prison sentence, would earn him another $100 million. It was a profitable end for a fishing empire built on seafood fraud, tax evasion and consolidation.

So when the private equity-backed Blue Harvest Fisheries announced in 2020 that it was buying most of Rafael’s fleet and putting the boats back to work, some welcomed it as good news for the port of New Bedford, the hub of Cape Cod’s fishing industry. But others were alarmed that Blue Harvest’s majority equity holder was the Dutch-owned firm Bregal Partners — and that most of the money would ultimately move through a Swiss holding company and into the hands of a family of European billionaires, with only a tiny fraction going to the local fishing community. Now, only three years after assuming control and becoming the dominant player in the New England groundfish fishery, Blue Harvest has suspended its operations and filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy, leaving many fishermen unemployed once again.

In filing for Chapter 7, Blue Harvest may be leaving as much as $100 million in outstanding debts — many of them to local vendors who performed maintenance and upgrades on its fleet. An investigation by the New Bedford Light has found that the bankruptcy is likely an avenue for Bregal to avoid paying those debts and maximize the cash it could extract.

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From concrete gray to ‘tutu’ green, Mass. shows off the many colors of coastal resilience

November 18, 2023 — Hurricane Carol devastated the port of New Bedford in 1954, leaving millions of dollars of damage in its wake. The fishing community couldn’t risk another blow, so business leaders decided to construct a massive barrier at the mouth of the port.

The hurricane barrier is made of 900,000 tons of stone, 20 feet high and stretches 3.5 miles across New Bedford’s port. It can protect New Bedford, Fairhaven and Acushnet from a Category 3 hurricane.

When a storm comes and the water level stops rising behind the barrier, it is “such a feeling of security,” John Bullard, the former mayor of New Bedford and president of the board of the New Bedford Ocean Cluster, told Boston Public Radio on Thursday. Bullard was 15 when the barrier was built.

Yet there are only two hurricane barriers on the East Coast — the other is in Providence. And coastal cities are facing growing threats from sea level rise and storm surge connected to climate change.

In 30 years, sea levels may be as much as 1.5 feet higher than they were in 2000. And by 2070, they may be as much as 3 feet higher, according to predictions from NOAA and Climate Ready Boston.

Read the full article at GBH

MASSACHUSETTS: Deadly fentanyl raises stakes for addicted fishermen

November 16, 2023 — As the crew of the clam vessel Lori Ann prepared to set out from Fairhaven, the fleet manager was told that something wasn’t right with a fisherman below deck.

The manager climbed down into the cabin. There, he recalled, he found Thomas Post, a 48-year-old deckhand and father of two. The manager had worked with Post for years, and described him as an eccentric mentor to the young crew.

But on Oct. 8, 2021, Post was sitting upright at the galley table. He was naked. His eyes were wide open. His skin was cold. He had no pulse. Post, who often slept on the boat the night before fishing trips, had died that morning due to the combined effects of fentanyl and cocaine.

Post was just one of at least 70 New Bedford fishermen who died of drug overdoses in the five years between 2018 and 2022, according to state death records analyzed by The Light.

Drug overdoses are the leading cause of death for commercial fishermen in Massachusetts, records show. The vast majority of those deaths involve fentanyl. Since 2015, the powerful synthetic opioid has killed fishermen more than anything else. More than car crashes. More than work-related accidents. More than heart disease or cancer.

“This fentanyl is just everywhere,” said the manager who found Post dead in 2021. “I haven’t seen anything like it.” Earlier that same year, he recalled, a 24-year-old deckhand didn’t show up the morning of a fishing trip. When the fisherman’s mother came to pick up his last check, she told the manager that her son had died of a fentanyl overdose the morning of the trip.

Read the full article at the New Bedford Light