Saving Seafood

As Vineyard Wind Moves Forward, Fishermen and Scientists Raise Questions About Impact

November 23, 2021 — The Biden administration has approved America’s first large-scale, offshore wind power project – Vineyard Wind off the coast of Massachusetts. But for every supporter of the project, there are detractors raising questions. Lisa Fletcher looked at the pros and cons of ‘reaping the wind’ on “Full Measure with Sharyl Attkisson.”

Ms. Fletcher examined what the project could mean for New Bedford, Massachusetts, the nation’s top grossing fishing port, and its valuable scallop harvest, which averages around $400 million a year in landings.

“The amount of wind farms they’re proposing will displace fisheries,” said Ron Smolowitz, the owner of Coonamessett Farm in East Falmouth, Massachusetts and a former fishing captain who worked with NOAA. “The fish will adapt, the fishermen can adapt, but they’ll need funding.”

Mr. Smolowitz said that current funding proposed by Vineyard Wind to compensate fishermen for their losses is “nowhere near enough.” The proposed funding would average roughly $1 million a year over the 30-year life span of the project, Mr. Smolowitz said, while one scallop vessel alone can gross $2 million annually, and there are 342 scallop vessels. “And that’s just one fishery,” he said.

Ms. Fletcher also examined other obstacles for the project, including the potential threat to critically endangered North Atlantic right whales.

“The industrial activity will increase shipping markedly both during the construction phase as well as during the maintenance phase,” said Mark Baumgartner, senior scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Mr. Baumgartner said he and his team are working on deploying acoustic monitoring, with funding from Vineyard Wind, to help prevent ship strikes with right whales.

Watch the full story here

Northern Wind finalizes Legit Fish partnership, launching traceable scallops

November 18, 2021 — New Bedford, Massachusetts, U.S.A.-based Northern Wind has announced a new partnership with Legit Fish that will enable the company to provide full-chain traceability for all of its domestically caught, Northern Atlantic scallops.

Starting Wednesday, 17 November, every case of Northern Wind scallops sourced from the Northeast U.S. scallop fishery will have third-party traceability of the products origin, harvest area, and landing-date – verifiable to government harvest records. Foodservice operators and consumers will be able to scan a QR code on the package to access information on the products, the company said.

Read the full story at SeafoodSource

 

MASSACHUSETTS: New Bedford is a shining sea of possibilities

November 10, 2021 — Stand here on Leonard’s Wharf, near where the Acushnet River empties into Buzzards Bay, and you’re surrounded by boats with colorful hulls and elaborate rigs. They help power the nation’s most lucrative fishing port, hauling hundreds of millions of dollars worth of scallops, fish, and lobsters from the Atlantic Ocean to be sold worldwide.

Next door, behind a rusty chain-link fence, sits a huge old power plant, long unused. The 29-acre site is one of two on New Bedford’s waterfront that is poised to host the assembly of massive wind turbines that would be shipped out and mounted in the Atlantic Ocean, promising much-needed clean energy for the Northeast.

Whether these two industries — one ages old, the other being birthed on the fly — can coexist in New Bedford harbor and out in the ocean will say a lot about the future of one of the most distinctive places in Eastern Massachusetts, a city that has for most of its 234 years drawn a living from the sea.

“The waterfront has always provided an opportunity for people,” said Laura Orleans, executive director of the New Bedford Fishing Heritage Center, who has spent a quarter-century telling the stories of New Bedford’s maritime history. “There have been a lot of people from many different cultures who have been very successful making a living on our waterfront.”

Read the full story at the Boston Globe

 

MASSACHUSETTS: How New Bedford became the scallop capital of the world

November 10, 2021 — Every weekday morning at 9, Cassie Canastra sits in a little conference room in a big warehouse on the edge of New Bedford’s harbor.

On the wall above her is a large video screen full of numbers, prices, and weights for batches of scallops. In front of her sit boat captains eager to sell their catch. And in the refrigerated warehouse out back are huge containers of scallops — as much as 1,500 pounds in a batch — that have been shucked at sea and loaded straight off the boats overnight, examined by buyers in the morning, and delivered to nearby processing plants by afternoon.

The numbers on the screen tick up and down, 5 cents at a time, as bids come in from fish buyers all over town. The captains grumble, or do quick math on their cellphone calculators, subtracting the costs of fuel and other expenses to see how much they’ll earn for their days at sea. The final price — $22.05 per pound on Friday morning for one 1,357-pound batch of large scallops fished off the coast of southern New Jersey — eventually translates into what you pay for scallops at a supermarket or restaurant.

“We basically set the price for scallops all over the world right here,” said Canastra, whose father and uncle founded the auction house in 1994. “That’s pretty cool.”

Indeed, this nondescript warehouse is a key point in a global scallop trade that courses through New Bedford, powering the city’s fishing industry and its economy in general. More than $350 million worth of the meaty shellfish land here in a typical year, making scallops, as New Bedford Mayor Jon Mitchell puts it, the “cash crop” of the most lucrative fishing port in the United States.

Read the full story at the Boston Globe

 

Keith Decker to lead American Aquafarms

October 28, 2021 — American Aquafarms, a Maine-based aquaculture company with plans for ocean-based salmon operations, a hatchery, fish farm and processing plant, announced Wednesday that 30-year industry veteran Keith Decker will join the company as chief executive officer.

Decker has extensive experience in seafood production and processing, with particular experience guiding and directing fast-paced organizations through substantial change and development. He is currently CEO of Blue Harvest Fisheries, which he joined in 2018 as the firm moved from start-up to growth phase.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

 

MASSACHUSETTS: Gov. Baker breathes new life into offshore wind energy incentives

October 14, 2021 — In his keynote address to the American Clean Power Association’s Offshore Wind Conference, Gov. Charlie Baker announced significant changes to the state’s next round of energy contract bids.

“We’re ensuring that Massachusetts retains its leading edge position in the offshore wind policy debate in the US by proposing to, among other things, remove the price cap on project proposals to ensure that projects have the flexibility to incorporate storage, improve reliability, and offer greater economic development is part of their bids,” Baker told the hundreds of offshore wind energy advocates and industry people gathered in the Omni Seaport Hotel ballroom Wednesday afternoon.

Baker’s message was a response to criticism that his administration had, in the first three rounds of solicitations for state energy contracts, given disproportionate weight to bids offering a low price for electrical generation. Critics said the bids should have incorporated more incentive for wind farm developers to invest in local businesses and encourage manufacturing to be located in the state.

Massachusetts has historically had some of the highest electric rates in the country, and that resulted in the Baker administration’s emphasis on price. But technological leaps in wind turbine efficiency resulted in bid prices that were much lower than anticipated and many in the state Legislature — mayors like Jon Mitchell of New Bedford — and port city businesses complained to Baker that the state needed to factor in infrastructure.

Read the full story at the Cape Cod Times

 

MASSACHUSETTS: Monument fishing ban will hurt New Bedford businesses

October 13, 2021 — Just over 30 days ago, the fishing vessel Eagle Eye left federal waters more than 130 miles southeast of Massachusetts to make the 15- to 20-hour trip home to New Bedford Harbor. Its sister vessel, Eagle Eye 2, returned even more recently, with each carrying thousands of pounds of fresh tuna and a bit of swordfish.

John Cafiero, captain of one of the Fairhaven-based vessels, said he and his crew sometimes take multiple trips in the summer to fish in waters that in 2016 were established as a national marine monument. Tuna and swordfish are highly migratory species so sometimes “you don’t want to be in there,” he said, but for the past few years, it has been “really good.”

Cafiero said he didn’t know it then, but that trip might have been his last in the area.

On Oct. 8, President Joe Biden issued a presidential proclamation under the Antiquities Act of 1906 prohibiting commercial fishing in an area of water the size of Connecticut.

The administration cited conservation efforts needed to preserve the “vulnerable” deep marine ecosystems and endangered marine species that inhabit or migrate through the waters. The proclamation restores the commercial fishing restrictions first established by former President Barack Obama in 2016, when he declared two areas of water from surface to seabed as the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument.

Environmental groups lauded the decision. But local fishermen, business owners and industry advocates said the closure deals yet another blow to a highly regulated industry and is unfair as recreational fishing in the monument may continue.

“These boats are more like your uncle’s pizza shop or your dad’s gas station,” said Mike Machado, lead buyer at Boston Sword & Tuna and a former New Bedford fisherman. “They’re small individual companies. They’re not like this big, evil fishing juggernaut.”

Read the full story at The New Bedford Light

 

U.S. Fishermen Are Making Their Last Stand Against Offshore Wind

September 30, 2021 — A few hundred yards south of the fishing boat docks at the Port of New Bedford in southeastern Massachusetts, workers will soon start offloading gigantic turbine components onto a wide expanse of gravel. Local trawlers and lobster boats will find themselves sharing their waterways with huge vessels hefting cranes and massive hydraulic jacks. And on an approximately 100-square mile patch of open sea that fishermen once traversed with ease, 62 of the world’s largest wind turbines will rise one by one over the ocean waves.

Known as Vineyard Wind, the project is set to be the first-ever commercial-scale offshore wind farm in the United States, generating 800 megawatts of power, or enough to power about 400,000 homes. Dozens of other offshore wind projects are in development up and down America’s east coast. But some in the fishing industry, including many New Bedford fishermen, are concerned that the turbines will upend their way of life.

Earlier this month, a coalition of fishing industry associations and fishing outfits, including 50 New Bedford fishing boats, filed a lawsuit against several U.S. agencies, including the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), which approved Vineyard Wind in May, alleging that they violated federal law in allowing the project to go forward. The fishing groups frame that fight as a matter of survival, a last ditch effort to slow down a coalition of banks, technocrats and global energy companies set on erecting multi-billion dollar projects that they worry could devastate their livelihoods.

Money is certainly a big issue for many of those behind Vineyard Wind—backers like Bank of America and J.P. Morgan have pledged about $2.3 billion in funding for the project, and they’re looking for returns on that investment. But there’s also a societal imperative to push ahead with such projects, with many green energy proponents saying there is little choice but to get offshore turbines built as soon as possible if the U.S. is to have any chance of meeting its obligations under the Paris Agreement and averting the worst effects of climate change. The Biden Administration is counting on such turbines to produce about 10% of U.S. electricity by 2050, and in coastal, population dense states like Massachusetts and New York, leaders view sea-bound wind farms as a lynchpin of their net zero ambitions.

Read the full story at TIME

 

New Bedford Fishermen Among Those Suing Over Vineyard Wind

September 15, 2021 — Local fishermen are among those in a coalition of commercial fisheries suing the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management over its approval of the Vineyard Wind project.

More than 50 fishing vessels based in New Bedford and Fairhaven are listed as members of the Responsible Offshore Development Alliance, along with 13 Massachusetts-based businesses and associations.

The group filed a petition in federal court on Monday to review the agency’s approval of Vineyard Wind, a project slated to become the country’s first commercial-scale offshore wind farm off the coast of Nantucket.

According to a statement from the coalition, fisheries professionals had been participating in the planning process for the 62-turbine project — but, the group said, their input was “summarily ignored by decision-makers.”

Read the full story at WBSM

 

Balance of power: BOEM and states look at compensation for fishermen; endangered whales pose challenge to developers

September 14, 2021 — The federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management is working with coastal states to come up with plans for potentially compensating fishermen for lost fishing grounds and other negative effects of developing offshore wind turbine arrays.

Fishing industry advocates are pushing anew to get fishermen deeply involved now to minimize impacts from sweeping plans to rapidly develop a U.S. offshore wind industry — and hoping to limit damage to the U.S. food supply.

The government’s drive toward creating more offshore wind energy areas in the New York Bight is looking like a repeat of its mistakes in planning southern New England projects and needs to be braked, fishermen said at an Aug. 6 meeting in New Bedford, Mass.

“It’s going to be responsible for the destruction of a centuries-old industry that’s only been feeding people,” Bonnie Brady, executive director of the Long Island Commercial Fishing Association, told officials of the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management.

Read the full story at National Fisherman