Saving Seafood

MASSACHUSETTS: Can a $10M wind-energy center in New Bedford withstand opposition from locals and Trump?

January 17, 2025 — A state agency will continue efforts to develop a more than $10 million offshore-wind-based, ocean-energy innovation center in New Bedford in 2025, despite national opposition to offshore wind and local opposition to a proposed site.

Nationally, President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to halt offshore wind development.

Locally, an attorney has compiled 236 signatures in opposition to the center’s “preferred” site, a 17,000-square-foot parking lot abutting the Bourne Counting House off McArthur Drive on Homer’s Wharf, leased through the Port Authority. The center would include the Bourne Counting House building, which would be renovated.

Read the full article at The Herald News

Fishermen may not like offshore wind, but some work for it

January 6, 2025 — A fishing boat named Saints and Angels sat docked at Leonard’s Wharf after a recent fishing trip. Ice covered some of the deck as a man cut into the boat’s steel side to create a door for scientific buoy deployment. Nearby vessels were being worked on, some with anti-offshore-wind flags whipping in the wind. Just the American flag flew on the Saints as Tony Alvernaz climbed up to the wheelhouse.

The blue-hulled scalloper, built in 1997, started out as a tender boat, transporting loads of fish between vessels and processing facilities. After a few years catching tuna, the vessel brought in over a million pounds of scallops over its life. But times, regulations and fish stocks have changed. The bivalves are still relatively lucrative, but vessels have spent more and more days sitting at the docks while expenses have risen.

So two years ago, Alvernaz, the part-owner of six scallopers, put aside his personal feelings and did something he never thought he’d do: He signed up to work for an offshore wind company.

In about two years, Vineyard Wind has paid about $8 million to local fishermen and vessel owners — many from New Bedford, like Alvernaz — to provide safety and security work during the wind farm’s construction (a figure that includes fuel costs).

About 45 fishing boats have worked as safety vessels, guard vessels, science vessels and scout vessels on the project, which remains under construction 15 miles south of Martha’s Vineyard. This could mean sitting at a site 24/7, guarding scour protection before the monopiles go in, identifying and transmitting locations of fishing gear to be avoided, or moving through the wind area looking out for and alerting other vessels of activity.

It’s an example of collaboration and co-existence amid what has been a contentious relationship between the two industries.

Read the full story at The New Bedford Light

Vineyard Wind meets one 2024 deadline, misses another

January 3, 2024 — Vineyard Wind made mixed progress on its wind farm at the end of the year, meeting one deadline while missing another. It installed the last of 62 foundations for its wind turbines, a new map shows, pounding the remaining pieces into the seafloor before a New Year deadline, when pile driving is restricted through May. But the project missed its former goal of being fully operational by 2024, and has quite a bit of work ahead in 2025.

With the foundations finished, all but three are now connected to yellow transition pieces, which will allow tower installation to proceed, according to the Dec. 30 map. But the same map shows the project still has to install 30 towers and generators, and about 120 blades. That means dozens more barge transits in and out of the Port of New Bedford with the major turbine components on board.

Read the full article at The New Bedford Light

MASSACHUSETTS: ‘It’s not going to be pretty’

December 26, 2024 — On a chilly November evening, the first after a string of 70-degree days, people made their way to a former storefront on Acushnet Avenue in New Bedford’s North End. Some of the 50 or so gathered made small talk with friends, mainly in Spanish and K’iche’, a language spoken by over a million people in rural Mayan communities of Guatemala.

Voters had elected Donald Trump to the presidency a second time just two weeks before, and this fact sat heavily in the air among those in attendance — primarily immigrants from Central America, many of them undocumented — at the Centro Comunitario de Trabajadores (CCT), or Worker’s Community Center.

During the campaign, Trump promised voters mass deportations, pledging at points to declare a national emergency and involve the military in rounding up immigrants. He has publicly mused about changing the Constitution to end birthright citizenship. In an appearance on “Meet the Press,” Trump said he’d consider deporting US citizen children of deportees to avoid separating families, and his pick for border czar, Tom Homan, said the largest deportation operation in history would start on January 21, the day after Trump’s inauguration.

The first speaker of the evening was New Bedford Police Chief Paul Oliveira, who was peppered with questions in Spanish about how Trump’s deportation plans might affect the work of the local police. If we suffer a hate crime, can we still report it? If Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) issues a detainer, do police act on it?

Read the full article at the New Bedford Light

MASSACHUSETTS: Opposition stalls plans for waterfront energy center

December 19, 2024 — Three months after a state agency and New Bedford’s mayor endorsed a waterfront spot for an energy research and development center, the project is in limbo in face of City Council opposition.

A city-owned parking lot between Merrill’s on the Waterfront and the Fairfield Inn & Suites will stay as it is for the time being; the state has suspended pursuit of that location. But the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center (CEC) is still pursuing the project.

Although it’s not clear exactly where in the city, the agency is focused on  New Bedford as the site of the Ocean Renewable Energy Innovation Center, devoted to research and business development for new, ocean-based alternative energy technology, including wind power.

“It’s certainly not dead,” public information officer Jonathan Darling said in mid-December, weeks after the state agency halted its effort to win City Council approval of a proposed lease for that parking lot and a portion of the historic stone-block Bourne Counting House next to it. Mayor Jon Mitchell supported that location.

The agency planned to use a part of the counting house on MacArthur Drive for offices and meeting space. It also aimed to put up a building to accommodate startup companies and a space for building prototypes for ocean-related energy gear — chiefly, but not exclusively, wind power.

Two council members and one property owner have objected to the location, saying they feel the project is out of place on the waterfront and would interfere with existing businesses. One council member questioned whether the proposed 15-year lease is the best possible deal for that property.

Read the full article at The New Bedford Light

Council advances plan to cut Northeast US scallop quota 28 percent

December 6, 2024 — The New England Fishery Management Council (NEFMC) voted to enact Framework 39 for the 2025 scallop fishing season – which includes a significant drop in the scallop allowable catch.

The Fisheries Survival Fund – which was established to advocate for the long-term sustainability of the Northeast U.S. scallop stock – supported the council’s decision and advocated for it to select Framework 39 before the council meeting. The organization said the allocations “reflect the need for pragmatic balancing” of fishing effort in the region to ensure the continued success of the fishery.

New Bedford Mayor Jon Mitchell also wrote to the council in support of Framework 39. New Bedford, Massachusetts is consistently ranked among one of the top ports by value in the U.S. – in part thanks to the high value of the scallop fishery.

“The scallop industry is a cornerstone of New Bedford’s economy, supporting not only fishermen and their families, but also the numerous shoreside businesses that rely on its success,” Mitchell wrote.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

With Trump, New Bedford’s fishermen hope for better times

December 2, 2024 — A cold wind cut across New Bedford harbor as Jim Kendall, a retired scallop boat captain, surveyed the city’s main fishing pier. Many of the boats sat idle, while a few crew members cleaned their decks and repaired equipment.

Kendall remembers how busy these docks used to be years ago, when there were fewer regulations and closures, and fishermen could head out most days of the year.

Now, “if you can fish, say, 60 days a year, you’re doing pretty damn good,” he said.

New Bedford is the most valuable commercial fishing port in the country, landing hundreds of millions of dollars worth of seafood every year. But Kendall said bringing in that haul is getting harder, and the margins tighter. He blames Washington, and specifically the Democratic Party, for the change in fortunes.

“A lot of the Democrats had basically forgotten about the fishing industry or just don’t pay much regard to it,” he said.

As for President-elect Trump, “the fishing industry is really supporting him.”

All across Massachusetts’ South Coast, cities and towns that voted for President Biden in 2020 flipped to Trump’s column in 2024. The former president even came close to winning here in New Bedford, a storied working-class city that overwhelmingly supported Biden just four years ago.

Kendall said he’s surprised Trump didn’t win New Bedford outright, given all the support he sees among the fishermen.

Read the full story at WBUR

MASSACHUSETTS: Ocean-energy center on New Bedford’s Homers Wharf hurts fishing industry, says abutter

November 25, 2024 — A proposed state ocean-energy center fronting Homers Wharf is drawing opposition from a prominent local attorney who is an abutting property owner.

Richard T. Moses, who is also a retired Superior Court judge, said the proposed building “clearly does not belong on Homers Wharf” in a letter to the City Council Property Committee.

City Council approval is required for the proposal because the Mass. Clean Energy Center wants to lease the site for 15 years. The Port Authority’s enabling legislation requires a council OK for leases longer than five years.

Read the full article at Standard-Times

Top U.S. ports for a quarter century

November 21, 2024 — For the 25th consecutive year, Dutch Harbor, AK, and New Bedford, MA, ranked as the top U.S. fishing ports for volume and value in 2022.

Nationwide, commercial landings that year were 8.4 billion pounds valued at $5.9 billion, down by 2.6 percent and 11 percent ($632 million), respectively.

Those are two of the top takeaways from the annual Fisheries of the United States report released this month by NOAA Fisheries. The data show a downward press almost across the board from Covid-driven impacts as the global pandemic waned in 2022.

The easy-to-read, 23-page report provides a national snapshot of U.S. commercial fisheries, aquaculture, seafood processing, imports and exports, market trends, and per capita consumption.

Read the full article at National Fisherman

MASSACHUSETTS: Cuban-born net maker shares his journey from Havana to New Bedford’s working waterfront

November 15, 2024 — When he had his chance, Cuban-born net maker Miguel Sanchez escaped his home country, jumping from a Cuban fishing boat aboard a ship heading to Canada.

The young law student escaped to start a new life, far away from Cuba and its oppressive dictatorship, the only member of his family to escape.

Sanchez left Havana abruptly on March 24, 1996, before heading to Canada, arriving in Nova Scotia on April 15, 1996.

A year ago, after spending more than 20 years in Nova Scotia, he got a call to work at Reidar’s Manufacturing on the New Bedford waterfront. His skills as a net maker were in demand.

Read the full article at the The Standard-Times