July 8, 2020 — Already struggling to stay in business since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the owner of a fourth-generation New York City seafood wholesaler was devastated to hear the news last week that restaurants in the city cannot open for indoor dining – only outdoor.
To top it off, Broadway theaters will remain closed through the end of this year, and nightclubs remain closed.
June 1, 2020 — Federal fisheries regulators on Tuesday delayed a plan to restart a program requiring commercial fishermen to take observers on fishing trips starting Monday, following widespread criticism of the move.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, citing concerns about the spread of the coronavirus, said it would restart the program Aug. 1.
Even while setting the Aug. 1 date, “we recognize that this public health crisis continues to evolve and changing conditions may warrant re-evaluating these plans,” NOAA said in a statement.
“Should our plans regarding redeploying observers and at-sea monitors change, we will announce any changes as soon as practicable,” the agency said.
Representatives for local fishermen said the restart should be pushed back further.
“Come back to us when there’s a vaccine” or effective COVID-19 treatment, said Bonnie Brady, executive director of the Long Island Commercial Fishing Association, based in Montauk.
June 23, 2020 — Fishermen should be prepared to see an armada of boats descend on our best striped bass fishing concentration points this week, possibly through much of July. Commercial striper fishermen will begin their intense harvesting season on June 24 — this Wednesday.
The first days of the frenetic, highly competitive season usually bring the very highest prices — and some of the lowest thoughtful behavior. With the lure of a thousand dollars for a day’s work, motivation can be powerful. If the initial supply is high, though, rewards can plummet fast. Too much early success by too many fishermen hurts their final bottom line.
Whole, gutted wild striped bass averaging 11 pounds right now are retailing at New York’s Fulton Fish Market for $213.18 per fish. That’s about $19.38 per pound and includes bones and head. Fillets are selling for about $29.99a pound What Massachusetts fishermen will get this year is anyone’s guess, but it likely won’t be stable or fair.
I remember lamenting back in 2014 that while the retail price of striped bass in the market was anywhere from $17 to $26 per pound, fishermen were getting only $4 to $5 a pound. Added to the challenge this year is the presence of seals stealing hooked fish off a line and great white sharks chomping off all but the heads.
Commercial fishing days starting this week will be limited to Mondays and Wednesdays until the state’s quota of 735,240 pounds is reached. That’s a huge toll on a species that has been in decline for at least the last five years. Commercial fishermen bring their fish to buyers the same day they catch them, so those wholesalers can immediately report our state’s catch. Seafood lovers should expect stripers at their favorite markets and restaurants this week.
June 16, 2020 — The reopening of Long Island restaurants for outdoor dining hasn’t translated into banner days for the region’s commercial fishermen and fish dealers, who say demand for wholesale fish, clams and oysters is inching up but nowhere near past levels.
While many local fishermen sell to local retailers, a steady local business even through the pandemic, the lion’s share of local fish go to companies that distribute to restaurants throughout the region and across the country. Three months of lockdowns over the coronavirus has backed up the market for the products, leaving warehouses for local frozen fish such as squid fully stocked, while drastically reducing demand for local clams and oysters. Market prices for most have fallen, though some, like fluke, are on the rebound.
Local fishermen have been catching and selling fluke, but with the New York quota at 100 pounds a day, the market isn’t lucrative. The market for porgies, also known as scup, has picked up as the plentiful fish come into season and more consumers learn to appreciate its value (and cook it whole).
Bill Zeller, owner of Captree Clam in West Babylon, said his business is down by around two-thirds from where it was a year ago, nearly all of the drop tied to restaurant closures. He delivers to distributors across the nation — Florida, Boston, the West Coast, where protests in recent weeks also led to some order cancellations just as some states were reopening.
May 28, 2020 — In the early days of the coronavirus shut-downs, commercial fishermen were among those gut-punched by the impacts of an economy screeched to a halt.
Fishermen were told they could keep working, and the fish they sought were plentiful, but the value of fish at markets reeling from the forced closures of tens of thousands of restaurants and people fleeing into their homes was minimal.
But fishermen say that as the pandemic has settled into the habits of humans across the world, where one window of opportunity has closed, others have opened and helped the industry keep itself … well, afloat.
They have been buoyed by a steep drop in the amount of seafood being imported to the U.S. from other countries — the practice itself a plague that many fishermen said the country needs to rid it self of — and a populace that has still eagerly sought out seafood to eat while in quarantine.
With restaurants either closed or doing a fraction of their usual business, fishermen have relied more on selling to retail seafood markets, or at retail farmers markets, selling fish off the back of their boats or pickups and, in some cases, door-to-door deliveries, to peddle their catch.
May 13, 2020 — Montauk’s fishermen have launched a historic and innovative new initiative to deliver fresh, New York State-certified seafood straight from their boats to local residents’ doorsteps. The effort, called Dock to Dish 3.0, comes just in time, as restaurant closures and stay-at-home orders have hurt traditional distribution channels and put perishable catches in danger.
Dock to Dish 3.0 is now operating locally as a pilot program for Montauk area residents, offering no-contact subscriptions via an e-commerce platform, with deliveries eventually expanding in June to reach more than 1,000 customers around Long Island and the NY Metropolitan Area each week. More than 500 people have already joined a waiting lists for memberships.
Designed to replace recently crippled and collapsed supply lines, and bring safety and balance to unpredictable market conditions that have arisen during the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, this new system creates a distribution channel between Montauk’s commercial fishing fleet and NY consumers. The Long Island Commercial Fishing Association and United Parcel Service (UPS) have stepped up as partners to facilitate the subscription program, which will allow more than two dozen Long Island fishermen to ship New York State-certified fish fillets and sea scallops to members.
May 13, 2020 — On Tuesday morning, commercial fishing boats sat idle in the water at the Montauk town dock—an uncommon sight, especially this time of year. But lately, it’s become the new normal.
Bonnie Brady, the executive director of the Long Island Commercial Fishing Association, said that the majority of East End commercial fishermen, who are essential food production workers, are reeling from the COVID-19 pandemic. They’ve lost a tremendous amount of sales since many restaurants closed.
“When the restaurants closed, we lost the market with which we sold our fish,” Brady said. “We need to find ways to create markets, to create processing on the fly, long-term create mobile fish markets—anything and everything until we get our present system back in order.”
Pot fisherman Jim Auteri, who catches lobster, was hoping for a banner season.
May 8, 2020 — Containing more than $2 trillion in stimulus spending, the CARES Act seemingly had something for everybody reeling from the coronavirus pandemic. That includes the nation’s fishermen, many of whom call Long Island their home. CARES contains $300 million to compensate both those who live off the sales of their catches and those whose boats are chartered by recreational anglers.
Boats that docked in Montauk alone in 2018 nabbed 12 million pounds of fish and cleared $18 million for the catch.
But for six weeks, none of the appropriated $300 million had been divvied up or released, and Rep. Lee Zeldin was badgering Congress and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for details on how it would be divided and paid out. Then, Thursday afternoon, information began to trickle out. The money is reportedly being allotted based on past-year revenues of each state’s fishing industries, so much of it went to big fishing states. Sen. Susan Collins tweeted that Maine, for instance, got about $20 million.
May 5, 2020 — In 1963, on their way home from the hospital after he was born, Louis Rozzo’s parents stopped by a building on Ninth Avenue in Chelsea, where the family ran a wholesale seafood business, to weigh him in a scallop scale. This March, when virtually every restaurant, club and hotel that bought seafood from him closed and his firm’s income dried up in a matter of days, Mr. Rozzo went back to where it all began.
The F. Rozzo & Sons building was still in the family. Mr. Rozzo converted the ground floor into a makeshift store where he sells clams, scallops, sea bass and American red snapper to people who are suddenly cooking at home a lot more than they used to.
“I’m seeing people taking home fish, then coming in the next day and showing me pictures of how they prepared it,” he said. Some of them undertake recipes that require the better part of a day. Mr. Rozzo enjoys their enthusiastic feedback, although he also suggested that some of the energy New Yorkers are devoting to their kitchen projects is, like his overnight fish store itself, born of desperation.
“There’s not much else to do,” he said. “It’s either that or go home and drink all day.”
May 6, 2020 — Fisherman Marty Scanlon has not returned to his Long Island home since leaving for North Carolina at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic in New York.
Scanlon, a longliner captain from Hauppauge left for North Carolina in early March — roughly the same time the first case of Covid-19 emerged in Manhattan. In the weeks that followed, Gov. Andrew Cuomo ordered most businesses to close, effective March 22, casting a pall over New York City restaurants in a once-bustling culinary capital.
Business for Scanlon has been brutal ever since.
“We basically don’t have the money to go home,” Scanlon said, over the phone. “We can’t go home til we pay our bills.”
Scanlon’s plight is reverberating across the Northeast. While meat, poultry and produce remain in demand, seafood, a once-reliable market, has been swapped for the whims of the home chef who has grown unused to, and perhaps slightly intimidated by the prospect of storing and preparing fish.
And it’s putting an $11 billion industry in New York and New Jersey on the ropes, with as much as a 30 percent drop in revenue since the coronavirus took hold in the region.
Scanlon and his crew aim to scrape 1,000 pounds of mixed swordfish and tuna each night, but it has become increasingly difficult to bear each trip’s financial costs in the face of dwindling profits, he said.