July 30, 2019 — The 2019 lobster season in the U.S. state of Maine has been off to a slow start, partially the result of the industry facing a number of challenges,
According to a story in the Associated Press, Maine lobstermen are reporting that their season so far hasn’t picked up as quickly as the past few years. Typically, the season is in full swing by July, but so far the catch has remained relatively stagnant.
October 1, 2018 — A proposal by the New England Fisheries Management Council on 25 September to make large changes to the herring fishery could lead to many Maine, U.S.A.-based lobstermen to sit out the next season.
The NEFMC’s Amendment 8, which was in the works for years, will lead to multiple changes to the region’s herring fishery. Boats using midwater trawl gear will be banned from within 12 nautical miles, and a new control rule was created that takes into account the herring fishery’s impact on other fisheries in the region.
Most importantly from the perspective of the lobstermen, however, was the drastic cut in quota that the new decisions represented. The quota has fallen from north of 100,000 tons to just under 50,000 tons, with the proposal potentially setting the future quota at just over 21,000 tons.
That massive reduction was criticized at the hearing by Patrice McCarron, executive director of the Maine Lobstermen’s Association.
“There’s no one that has more at stake,” she said during the hearing. “The lobster industry will bear the brunt of all the decisions that are made here.”
The lobster industry was already seeing a bait shortage on the horizon. As early as July, the industry was anticipating a bait shortage, according to reports in the Portland Press Herald.
“The price of herring for bait is already high,” Port Clyde, Maine lobsterman Gary Libby told the Press Herald in July 2018. “A lower quota will only create more hardship for lobster fishermen because the price of bait is the biggest expense, and with projected lower catch of lobster in the next few years we will need bait at a cost that will help fishermen maintain their businesses that helps the local economy.”
June 13, 2018 — Two years ago in the pages of The Standard-Times we delivered some straight talk about New England’s fisheries and the opportunities that groundfish fishermen and regulators will realize when they embrace comprehensive catch monitoring. As the New England Fisheries Management Council (NEFMC) prepares to meet this week, we felt it was important to communicate again how critical “full accountability” is to the successful stewardship of this fishery.
“It is based on the straightforward idea that fishermen need to keep track of their catch, both the fish they bring to the dock and any unwanted ‘bycatch’ they may discard at sea. Why? Because in the absence of comprehensive catch monitoring, there is no basis upon which fishermen and (government) scientists can establish a productive level of trust and cooperation. This means that fishery managers often assume the worst when they estimate fish stocks and are required, under federal law, to take very conservative approaches in order to account for that uncertainty when they set catch limits and allocations. Completing the negative feedback loop, fishermen interpret low allocations as bad science and the cycle of mistrust rolls on.”
That cycle of mistrust is what the NEFMC is addressing as they consider alternatives for establishing catch accountability, particularly whether and how to advance electronic monitoring (EM) in the New England groundfish fishery from pilot project to widespread implementation. What we said two years ago is precisely what we would say to the council today.
“In fisheries where catch monitoring is in place, an entirely different … feedback loop is established. Reliable catch and discard data from fishermen, combined with scientific survey results, give fishery managers not just critical and complete information, but the ability to eliminate a major source of uncertainty and to set catch limits with confidence. Over time, as more-reliable and verifiable data comes in, confidence grows and cooperation develops between fishermen and managers.”
Read the full opinion piece at the New Bedford Standard-Times
May 23, 2018 — Commercial fishing companies are against proposed changes to the Atlantic herring fishery management plan.
The New England Fisheries Management Council wants to establish a new process for setting the sustainable harvest limit, referred to as the “acceptable biological catch.” That control rule, which is set every three years, would be in place for a longer period of time.
The Town Dock, a Rhode Island-based seafood dealer and processor, said in a statement changing that rule would be problematic for the fishery.
Read the full story at Rhode Island Public Radio
January 8, 2018 — After 15 years of research and deliberation, federal fishing officials this week approved a landmark set of regulations that will open a large swath of the region’s waters to fishing while maintaining other closures to protect vulnerable species.
The opening of one area east of Nantucket, closed since the 1990s, could be extremely lucrative, allowing fishermen to catch as much as $160 million worth of additional scallops in the coming fishing season, regulators estimate.
“The scallop industry is thrilled to be able to access significant scallop beds,” said Drew Minkiewicz, an attorney at the Fisheries Survival Fund in Washington D.C., which represents the scallop industry. “Allowing rotational scallop fishing on these areas will increase the scallop fishery revenue in the short term and in the long run.”
Yet many in the industry had hoped that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration would go further.
Minkiewicz and others objected to the decision to maintain the ban on fishing on the northern edge of Georges Bank, where there are significant amounts of scallops but also vulnerable species such as juvenile cod.
Minkiewicz said the industry would continue to press NOAA to reconsider opening those fishing grounds.
“The scallop industry respectfully disagrees with [NOAA’s] conclusion that allowing limited scallop fishing [there] . . . was not consistent with the law,” he said.
NOAA officials said that opening such areas could be harmful to some fish.
Read the full story at the Boston Globe
December 12, 2017 — What the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) decides next to do about areas off the coast of New England that’ve been closed to scallop fishing for a decade or more could be the difference between another good season and a 14-year record in terms of harvest volumes.
Based on earlier surveys and estimates made by staff at the New England Fishery Management Council (NEFMC), the 2018-19 scallop season, which starts April 1, will generate at least 51.5 million pounds worth of landings – a little better than the roughly 47.5m lbs expected this season.
But it could also generate as much as 60m lbs, which would be the biggest harvest since the 2004-05 season when 64.6m lbs of scallops were landed.
One of the most important factors will be whether NOAA follows NEFMC’s recommendations and opens the Closed Area 1 “sliver” of the Georges Bank and also an area described as Nantucket Lightship West.
Based on surveys reported in September, Closed Area 1 contains 19.8m lbs (9,016 metric tons) of exploitable scallop meat, meaning a lot of scallops were found with shells at the minimum 4 inch-wide diameter needed to be caught in dredging nets. Even better, as much as 45.6m lbs (20,670t) of exploitable scallop meat is projected to exist in the western portion of the Nantucket Lightship area.
Read the full story at Undercurrent News
November 21, 2017 — The following was released by the New England Fisheries Management Council:
The New England Fishery Management Council supports today’s announcement by the National Marine Fisheries Service’s (NMFS) Greater Atlantic Regional Fisheries Office (GARFO) that it will be enforcing groundfish sector rules and the Northeast Fishery Sector IX operations plan.
Under Amendment 16 to the Council’s groundfish plan, GARFO’s regional administrator has authority to withdraw approval of a sector at any time he or she, after consulting with the New England Council, determines that: (1) sector participants are not complying with the requirements of an approved operations plan; or (2) “continuation of the operations plan will undermine achievement of fishing mortality objectives” of the Northeast Multispecies Fishery Management Plan.
Regional Administrator Bullard consulted with the Council on two occasions – first during the Council’s June meeting in Portland, ME and then again during the September meeting in Gloucester, MA. On September 27, the Council voted to request that “GARFO immediately enforce sector regulations and the Sector IX operations plan.”
“We asked them to enforce the rule, and that’s what they’re doing,” said Council Executive Director Tom Nies. “Since 2004, the Council has emphasized repeatedly that sectors are responsible for monitoring their catch and enforcing sector provisions. Sector IX failed to comply with its own enforcement provisions when its president admitted to reporting violations.”
NMFS published an interim final rule on April 28, 2017 stating it had “provisionally approved” the Sector IX operations plan for 2017 and 2018, along with the annual catch entitlement (ACE) allocated to the sector for 2017.
Carlos Rafael, who was president of the sector at that time, pleaded guilty on March 30 to falsely reporting catch information for 13 vessels operating under the sector. However, since the Rafael case was under litigation when NMFS published the interim final rule approving all of the region’s 19 sectors and their operations plans, the agency stated its intention to take “additional action” if warranted for Sector IX following settlement of Rafael’s criminal case.
Rafael was sentenced September 25 in U.S. District Court in Boston to 46 months in prison, three years of supervised release, and fines. On October 11, he was further ordered to forfeit his interests in four vessels and their associated permits.
GARFO’s announcement today withdrawing approval of the Sector IX operations plans means that vessels enrolled in Sector IX are prohibited from: (1) fishing on a sector trip and harvesting sector ACE; (2) fishing on a common pool trip; or (3) joining another sector.
However, the action does not reallocate the ACE to other sectors or to the common pool. NMFS is continuing to analyze the extent of the sector’s ACE overages based on the misreporting of catch information for several stocks. The agency stated, “Any accountability measures, such as assessing and deducting ACE overages incurred by the sector, (will) be determined in a future action.”
“For the future success of the sector system, fishermen and the public must be confident that sectors will adhere to management provisions.”
– New England Fishery Management Council in a September 29, 2017 letter to GARFO Regional Administrator John Bullard seeking immediate enforcement of sector regulations and the Sector IX operations plan
Learn more about the NEFMC by visiting their site here.
November 20, 2017 — NOAA Fisheries dropped the hammer on New Bedford’s Carlos Rafael-dominated Northeast Fishing Sector IX on Monday, withdrawing the sector’s operation plans for 2017 and 2018 and shuttering the groundfish elements of the sector for the remainder of this fishing season.
NOAA Fisheries, which announced the management action Monday morning, said the sector was derelict in its compliance of the previously approved plans and that noncompliance helped Rafael misreport the scope and nature of his catch in a scam that led to his conviction and 46-month jail sentence.
“The action follows the guilty plea of Mr. Carlos Rafael, a major participant in Sector IX, who admitted to falsely reporting catch information,” NOAA Fisheries said in its statement.
NOAA Fisheries said its review showed that Sector IX failed to uphold section plan requirements to the extent that it undermined “foundational principles” necessary for successful sector operations.
Read the full story at the Gloucester Times
June 22, 2017 — A deep-sea coral protection plan adopted Thursday won’t keep Maine fishermen out of their traditional Gulf of Maine fishing spots.
The New England Fisheries Management Council voted to ban all but lobstermen from fishing about 39 square miles of coral-rich area in two protection zones near Mt. Desert Rock and Outer Schoodic Ridge. About 50 Maine lobster boats from more than a dozen ports harvest more than $8 million worth of lobster from those areas, according to state estimates.
Marine Resources Commissioner Pat Keliher called the coral protection plan a good compromise.
“The Gulf of Maine coral motion is one I helped perfect,” Keliher said. “It gives adequate protection to the corals in certain areas of the Gulf of Maine and it exempts lobster gear, which has a lot of landed value and really a very low impact to the corals. We think it’s a good balance. … I would rather take a bite of the apple here one bite at a time instead of trying to do it all.”
Keliher noted that most fishermen avoid corals “like the plague” because it destroys their gear and costs them money.
Lobstermen turned out in big numbers at some of the public hearings on these proposed coral zones, but their anxiety faded once the council decided to choose a proposal that would allow lobster fishing in these areas as the preferred option. The council could have reversed course, but such a turnaround is rare for a board that works so closely with the fishing industry.
May 31, 2017 — New England fishery regulators might seek to reclaim some of the authority they lost when President Barack Obama virtually walled off thousands of square miles of ocean south of Cape Cod to commercial fisheries.
The designation of the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument last year was cheered by environmentalists, who said it would provide a “safe haven” for the birds, mammals and fish that live there. It is now part of a review President Donald Trump ordered Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke to conduct of certain national monuments and marine monuments.
On Tuesday, the New England Fisheries Management Council’s Habitat Committee recommended that the regulatory council provide feedback to the Trump administration about the designation of the 4,913 square-mile area by the continental shelf.
“I would strongly suggest we take the opportunity to comment,” said Eric Reid, a council member and the general manager of Seafreeze Shoreside, a seafood processing facility in Galilee, Rhode Island.
While the committee members did not delve into what the letter should say during Tuesday’s meeting, the council chairman, former Rep. John Quinn, the director of public interest at the UMass School of Law in Dartmouth, made clear he believes the council should have jurisdiction.
“The councils are the ones that are involved in opening and closing areas to fishing so we really want a seat at the table” of the review, Quinn told the News Service. He said, “That’s why these entities exist.”