Saving Seafood

News for the New England Region

ASMFC Northern Shrimp Section and Advisory Panel to Meet November 15 & 16

November 1, 2018 — The following was released by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission:

The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s Northern Shrimp  Advisory Panel (AP) and Section (Section) will meet on November 15 and 16, 2018, respectively, at the Maine Historical Society, Reading Room, 489 Congress Street, Portland, Maine. The AP will meet November 15 (1:30 – 4:30 p.m.) to review public comment on Draft Addendum I, review the 2018 Benchmark Stock Assessment, and formulate AP recommendations for the Section’s consideration on both the Draft Addendum and the 2019 fishery specifications. The Draft Addendum proposes providing states the authority to allocate their state-specific quota between gear types in the event the fishery reopens. The Section will meet November 16 (9 a.m. – Noon) to consider final action on Addendum I and set 2019 specifications. Meeting materials will be available at http://www.asmfc.org/home/meeting-archive by November 9th.
 
For more information, please contact Megan Ware, Fishery Management Plan Coordinator, at mware@asmfc.org or 703.842.0740.

Fish council to review catch share regulations

November 1, 2018 — In May 2010, the world of the Northeast groundfishermen experienced a seismic transformation, as federal fishery managers ditched days-at-sea as its primary management tool and implemented a sector system centered on an expanded catch share program.

Now, nearly nine years later, the New England Fishery Management Council said it will conduct its first comprehensive evaluation of the groundfish catch share program to determine whether it is meeting its goals and objectives to improve the management of the fishery.

The review, according to council Executive Director Tom Nies, is not connected to any specific event or issue within the fishery, such as the widescale cheating, sector manipulation and ultimate conviction of New Bedford fishing kingpin Carlos A. Rafael.

“It’s not a response to Carlos, but it may help us identify areas related to his activities that we can address,” Nies said Wednesday.

The Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s own catch share policy actually mandate that the councils periodically produce “a formal and detailed review … no less frequently than once every seven years” on catch share programs.

“This is the first review, really, since catch shares originally were implemented in 2004, and more importantly, expanded in 2010,” Nies said. “It’s been on our radar for a couple of years. The next step is to assemble a staff and get the report written.”

Read the full story at the Gloucester Daily Times

Ocean Shock: Lobster’s Great Migration Sets Up Boom and Bust

October 31, 2018 — STONINGTON, Maine — This is part of “Ocean Shock,” a Reuters series exploring climate change’s impact on sea creatures and the people who depend on them.

A lobster tattoo covers Drew Eaton’s left forearm, its pincers snapping at dock lines connecting it to the American flag on his upper arm. The tattoo is about three-quarters done, but the 27-year-old is too busy with his new boat to finish it.

Eaton knows what people here in Stonington have been saying about how much the boat cost him.

“I’ve heard rumors all over town. Small town, everyone talks,” he says. “I’ve heard a million, two million.”

By the time he was in the third grade, Eaton was already lobstering here on Deer Isle in Downeast Maine. By the time he was in the eighth grade, he’d bought his first boat, a 20-footer, from a family friend. The latest one, a 46-footer built over the winter at a nearby boatyard, is his fourth.

Standing on the seawall after hauling lobster traps for about 12 hours on a foggy day this August, he says he’s making plenty of money to cover the boat loan. He’s unloaded 17 crates, each carrying 90 pounds of lobster, for a total haul of nearly $5,500. It’s a pretty typical day for him.

Eaton belongs to a new generation of Maine lobstermen that’s riding high, for now, on a sweet spot of climate change. Two generations ago, the entire New England coast had a thriving lobster industry. Today, lobster catches have collapsed in southern New England, and the only state with a significant harvest is north in Maine, where the seafood practically synonymous with the state has exploded.

The thriving crustaceans have created a kind of nautical gold rush, with some young lobstermen making well into six figures a year. But it’s a boom with a bust already written in its wake, and the lobstermen of the younger generation may well pay the highest price. Not only have they heavily mortgaged themselves with pricey custom boats in the rush for quick profits, they’ll also bear the brunt of climate change — not to mention the possible collapse of the lobstering industry in Maine as the creatures flourish ever northward.

Shifts by 85 percent of species

In the U.S. North Atlantic, fisheries data show that at least 85 percent of the nearly 70 federally tracked species have shifted north or deeper, or both, in recent years when compared with the norm over the past half-century. And the most dramatic of species shifts have occurred in the last 10 or 15 years.

Just in the last decade, for example, black sea bass have migrated up the East Coast into southern New England and are caught in the same traps that once caught lobsters. Back in the 1980s and 1990s, only 50 percent of lobster caught in the United States came from Maine. That started to shift in the 2000s, and this decade, nearly 85 percent of all lobster landings are in Maine.

Read the full story at VOA News

BOEM Announces Public Meetings For South Fork Offshore Project

October 31, 2018 — The U.S. Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) has announced three upcoming public meetings in New York, Massachusetts and Rhode Island to discuss Deepwater Wind’s proposed South Fork offshore wind project.

BOEM plans to prepare an environmental impact statement (EIS) for the construction and operations plan (COP) of Deepwater Wind’s South Fork Wind, proposed offshore Rhode Island and Massachusetts. The plan would allow construction and operation of up to 15 turbines that connect via a transmission cable to a grid in East Hampton, N.Y., the east end of Long Island.

Read the full story at North American Wind Power

 

NEFMC Update – October 31, 2018

October 31, 2018 — The following was released by the New England Fishery Management Council:

The New England Fishery Management Council will hold several committee and advisory panel (AP) meetings in November, as well as a webinar for Whiting Amendment 22.  Here’s a run-down of what’s happening.  Committee and AP meeting presentations and documents will be posted on the Council website as they become available.  Two additional events that pertain to Council activities also are listed.

The full Council will meet December 4-6, 2018 at the Hotel Viking in Newport, RI.  An agenda will be posted in the near future at NEFMC Newport, RI 2018 meeting webpage.

 

BOEM opens process for New York offshore wind power

October 31, 2018 — Federal energy officials are opening an environmental impact study for what could be the first offshore wind power project in East Coast federal waters, with public sessions next week on the South Fork Wind Farm proposal east of Montauk, N.Y.

The 15-turbine array is proposed by Deepwater Wind, the company that pioneered the first U.S. commercial offshore wind project at Block Island, R.I. Now in the process of being acquired by Denmark-based energy company Ørsted for $510 million, Deepwater Wind would build the South Fork array about 19 miles southeast of Block Island and 35 miles east of Montauk.

The Bureau of Offshore Energy Management is holding public scoping meetings Nov. 5 to Nov. 8 at Amagansett,  N.Y.;  New Bedford, Mass.; and Narragansett, R.I. Agency officials say they provide “multiple opportunities to help BOEM determine significant resources (e.g. avian, marine mammals) and issues, impact-producing factors, reasonable alternatives, and potential mitigating measures to be analyzed in the EIS.”

Read the full story at WorkBoat

Report maps potential environmental impacts of offshore wind energy

October 31, 2018 — A four-year study of planned wind energy areas off the East Coast found that building and operating offshore wind energy arrays could affect some of the region’s most commercially valuable fish species.

The report by scientists with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration was written to help the federal Bureau of Offshore Energy Management to evaluate development plans for eight offshore wind energy leases issued by the agency.

Those areas, extending from the largest proposals to date off southern New England to North Carolina, represent just about 2.7% of what NOAA Fisheries defines as the Northeast U.S. Continental Shelf Large Marine Ecosystem, according to the report. Since then four more leases have been issued, for a dozen proposed wind developments in all.

“While the extent of the WEAs (wind energy areas) may appear small in comparison with the entire system, it is the largest pre-planned anthropogenic (man-made) development in the coastal ocean in this region,” the authors note. “Further, the LME is not homogeneous, so that the effects of WEA development can potentially have impacts out of proportion to its small size.”

Read the full story at WorkBoat

Man Pleads Guilty to False Fishery Disaster Relief Request

October 31, 2018 — A New Hampshire man has pleaded guilty to giving false information in an effort to get fishery disaster relief funds following Hurricane Sandy.

Prosecutors say 56-year-old Dave Bardzik, of Ossipee, submitted several false and/or altered records to the state Fish and Game Department in 2015 in an attempt to qualify for the funds.

Investigators noted discrepancies between the 2015 submission and previous records Bardzik had completed. He admitted that he created the records because he would otherwise not have qualified for funds.

Required criteria included that “for hire” vessels, like Bardzik’s, must have taken at least 15 trips in three of the previous four years in which at least one New England groundfish species was harvested.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at U.S. News

UK delegates offer advice to New Bedford on offshore wind

October 31, 2018 — Visitors from the United Kingdom had clear lessons about offshore wind to share with the SouthCoast on Tuesday during an all-day symposium in New Bedford.

In the early days of the UK industry, communities in the Humber region were trying to figure out what kind of jobs they would get, said Mark O’Reilly, chairman and CEO of Team Humber Marine Alliance, a nonprofit business group based in East Yorkshire. Would it be welders? Fabricators?

The region got a blade factory that created 1,000 jobs, “which is great for jobs, not necessarily fantastic for supply chain. But you can’t have it all,” he said.

Because the UK is geographically close to established suppliers in Denmark and Germany, some of the hoped-for supply business did not materialize. New Bedford, in contrast, has the opportunity to position itself as the heart of the U.S. supply chain, one UK visitor said from the audience.

“Don’t squander it,” he said.

The symposium at the New Bedford Whaling Museum was hosted by the British Consulate-General in Boston, Bristol Community College, the city of New Bedford, and the New Bedford Wind Energy Center.

Harriet Cross, British consul general to New England, gave welcoming remarks. Speakers participated from England, Scotland and Northern Ireland, as well as from Massachusetts.

In a panel discussion on fishing, UK fisherman Davey Hill said he once led the charge against wind farms. “But I came quickly to realize that government policy doesn’t listen to fishermen,” he said.

With less space for turbines than the United States, the UK chose locations based on winds and water depth. Fishermen had no say, he said. But they decided to look for opportunities.

Today, some vessels serve as work boats for offshore wind, and also go out fishing. The process has benefited the fishing community because they have modernized their vessels and improved safety, Hill said.

Eric Hansen, a New Bedford scallop boat owner whose family has fished for generations, said unequivocally that vessels the size of those in the New Bedford fleet would not fish between turbines spaced 1.5 or even three miles apart. Showing the audience a radar image of a field of turbines, he said “Now, you show that picture to a fisherman, and he’d basically throw up. There’s no way they’re going to fish in that.”

Read the full story at the New Bedford Standard-Times

Canada looking to add flexibility to right whale protection measures

October 30, 2018 — Canadian authorities are seeking to add greater flexibility to fishing regulations put in place to protect critically endangered North American right whales.

At an industry roundtable in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, on Tuesday, 23 October, Minister of Fisheries, Oceans and the Coast Guard (DFO) Jonathan Wilkinson signaled a willingness to lessen the severe restrictions placed on various fisheries in 2018 to protect the whales.

In 2017, the death of 12 right whales in Canadian waters prompted DFO to impose extreme measures on fishing, shipping, and maritime traffic for the 2018 season. No right whales died in Canadian waters during this period, and the stiff measures kept Canada’s fishery on the right side of U.S. marine mammal protection legislation, which helped maintain access to U.S. markets for Canadian suppliers. However, fishermen said the closures cost them millions of dollars.

In recent months, regulators, scientists, and fishermen have worked together to find an accommodation in procedures for protecting the right whales. As a result of this work, a new pilot project has been proposed for the Grand Manan lobster fishery. In 2018, the sighting of a single right whale caused a 15-day shutdown of the fishery. For 2019, it will be sufficient for the Grand Manan lobster fishermen to cut their trailing buoy when a right whale is spotted.

New Brunswick Crab fishermen, who work in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, are hoping this potential new flexibility extends to them. Martin Noel of New Brunswick’s Acadian Crab Fishermen’s Association said his group supported that avenue.

Read the full story at Seafood Source