Saving Seafood

Equinor to support New York Bight whales monitoring

April 10, 2019 — Offshore wind power developer Equinor Wind US is entering a joint project with conservationists and scientists to deploy two new acoustic buoys to expand detection and monitoring of whales in the New York Bight.

To be operated with the Wildlife Conservation Society’s New York Aquarium and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) in Massachusetts, the buoys will provide near real-time monitoring of species including sei, fin and humpback whales, and the extremely endangered North Atlantic right whale.

The buoys will become a broader network with a previously deployed acoustic buoy, funded by the G. Unger Vetlesen Foundation and the Flora Family Foundation, now on station about 22 miles off New York.

Read the full story at WorkBoat

NOAA maintains East Coast bluefish catch rules for this year

April 4, 2019 — Federal fishing regulators say catch quotas and regulations for Atlantic bluefish will be about the same this year as they were in 2018.

Bluefish is an oily fish that is popular with some seafood fans on the East Coast, where it is fished commercially. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says rules for this year are only experiencing minor adjustments, in part because no states exceeded their quota allocations last year.

Fishermen will be able to harvest more than 7.7 million pounds of bluefish from Maine to Florida this year. The states with the most quota are North Carolina, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, Virginia, Florida and Massachusetts.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at the San Francisco Chronicle

NEW YORK: New measures to protect striped bass being eyed for the fall

March 28, 2019 — A steady drop in the population of spawning-aged striped bass is leading fisheries regulators to consider new measures to limit fishing impacts on that vital East Coast species as soon as this fall, state regulators said at a meeting this week.

Fishermen were given the floor at a meeting of the civilian Marine Resources Advisory Council in Setauket to suggest and opine on measures to limit so-called discard mortality — essentially the unintended killing of fish that are too small or over the limit of the one fish at 28 inches that anglers are allowed to keep in a season that starts April 15 through December 15. Any new measures would apply to recreational, not commercial, striped bass fishing.

Suggestions included everything from banning surfcasting and commercial fishing nets to requiring hooks that limit damage to fish. The measures were alternately greeted by heckles or applause from the standing-room-only crowd of chiefly fishing boat captains and anglers from across Long Island.

Read the full story at Newsday

Gas pipeline would ‘rip up the clam beds’ in New Jersey for New Yorkers’ sake, foes say

March 27, 2019 — Richard Isaksen has been clamming and crabbing in Raritan Bay and fishing lower New York Bay for 50 of his 63 years. It’s a hard life, but it’s the only one he knows, and all he wants for himself and his fellow fishermen is to be able to keep plying those waters.

“We ain’t asking for nothing,” said Isaksen, of Middletown, who’s the skipper of the 65-foot fishing boat Isaetta and president of the Belford Seafood Coop in Monmouth County. “We just want to make a living.”

But that could much tougher, Isaksen said, if state regulators join federal counterparts in approving the so-called Rarian Loop, a 23-mile underwater natural gas pipeline that would run along the sea floor across Raritan Bay and Lower New York Bay to Brooklyn.

“They’re going to interrupt everything in the bay,” said Isaaksen, whose Monmouth County fishing cooperative belongs to a coalition of environmentalists, fishermen and elected officials opposed to the project. “They’re going to rip up the clam beds. They’re going to destroy the crab beds where the crabs bed down. And then it goes out to Brooklyn, south of the Rockaways, right? That’s where we do our fluke fishing.”

The Williams Companies, Inc., a Tulsa, Oklahoma-based company, has already been granted permits by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission for the Raritan loop, part of Williams’ Northeast Supply Enhancement project, a $1 billion expansion of the 10,000-mile Transco Pipeline network stretching from Texas to New York.

Read the full story at NJ.com

NOAA official talks ‘damage’ to scallop industry from offshore wind

March 25, 2019 — The federal fishing administrator for the Greater Atlantic region told The Standard-Times Wednesday that although offshore wind will not threaten the overall sustainability of the scallop industry, the damage to it could be significant, especially for fishing grounds off New York. But later in the day, he clarified his comments, saying the “damage” remark does not accurately reflect his position.

Michael Pentony’s initial comments came when asked in an editorial board meeting if offshore wind gives the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration cause for concern about the sustainability of the scallop industry, particularly with regard to wind turbines off New York.

He began, “I think it’s difficult to say that we have concerns about the sustainability of a three-to-five-hundred-million-dollar-a-year fishery.”

Asked specifically about damage to the industry, he said, “The damage could be significant, and we definitely have concerns about that. I’m less concerned about the overall long-term sustainability of the fishery, but certainly, we have concerns about the impacts of that particular area and how that could … play out.”

Read the full story at The New Bedford Standard-Times

MASSACHUSETTS: Spaniards visit Gloucester to talk fishing

March 21, 2019 — Antonio Basanta Fernandez and Mercedes Rodriguez Moreda had completed their tasks at the Seafood Expo North America in Boston and were scheduled to first fly to New York and Ottawa for meetings before returning home to the Spanish region of Galicia.

But before they boarded the flight to New York on Tuesday night, the two executives of the Department of the Sea within the regional government of Galicia had an important stop:

They wanted to come to Gloucester and talk fishing.

“We know that Gloucester is one of the most important ports in northeast America,” Basanta Fernandez said Tuesday during an afternoon meeting at Gloucester City Hall with Fisheries Commission Chairman Mark Ring and commission director Al Cottone. “We think we share a lot of interests and there are a lot of similarities between our regions.”

Read the full story at The Gloucester Daily Times

NOAA Fisheries Announces 2019 Bluefish Specifications

March 11, 2019 — The following was released by NOAA Fisheries:

Today we filed a final rule approving and implementing the 2019 specifications for the Atlantic bluefish fishery recommended by the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council in cooperation with the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission.

The final 2019 specifications are fundamentally the same as 2018, with only minor adjustments to the final commercial quota and recreational harvest limit to account for most recent full year of recreational catch data (2017), and a 4.0 million lb of quota transferred from the recreational to the commercial sector rather than 3.5 million lb in 2018.

Table 1 (below) provides the commercial fishery state allocations for 2019 based on the final 2019 coast-wide commercial quota, and the allocated percentages defined in the Bluefish Fishery Management Plan. No states exceeded their state-allocated quota in 2018; therefore, no accountability measures need to be implemented for the 2019 fishing year.

Table 1. 2019 Bluefish State Commercial Quota Allocations.

State Percent Share Quota Allocation (lb)
Maine 0.67 51,538
New Hampshire 0.41 31,956
Massachusetts 6.72 517,828
Rhode Island 6.81 524,874
Connecticut 1.27 97,626
New York 10.39 800,645
New Jersey 14.82 1,142,264
Delaware 1.88 144,801
Maryland 3.00 231,426
Virginia 11.88 915,857
North Carolina 32.06 2,471,746
South Carolina 0.04 2,714
Georgia 0.01 732
Florida 10.06 775,558
Total 100 7,709,565

For more details please read the rule as filed in the Federal Register and our permit holder bulletin.

Questions?
Fishermen: Contact Cynthia Ferrio, Sustainable Fisheries Division, 978-281-9180
Media: Contact Jennifer Goebel, Regional Office, 978-281-9175

Offshore wind developers court recreational fishing community

March 8, 2019 — Offshore wind energy developers are courting recreational fishermen in the New York Bight, who could gain dozens of new fishing spots around turbine towers, but worry about impacts of the massive projects on traditional fishing grounds.

“Obviously the hot button for us is access,” said charter captain Paul Eidman of Anglers for Offshore Wind Power, a project of the National Wildlife Federation, which hosted the meeting in Toms River, N.J., on Wednesday along with the American Littoral Society for offshore wind companies and recreational fishermen.

“There’s a lot being proposed to go out in the ocean and on the bottom,” said Tim Dillingham of the littoral society, adding that the developing industry must avoid critical fish habitat and seafloor bumps and ridges that are important to anglers and the region’s big charter and party boat fleet.

There are conflicted feelings in the recreational community. Many anglers want to see the new hard structure that turbine construction would put into the water, swiftly attracting hydroid and shellfish growth that become the base for new fishing hotspots, much like artificial reefs.

Read the full story at Workboat

MASSACHUSETTS: Governor Baker touts promise of wind power, new technology

March 7, 2019 — New York recently set a long-term goal of generating 9,000 megawatts of energy from offshore wind power, while New Jersey plans to build 3,500 megawatts.

But Massachusetts is seeking to produce just 1,600 megawatts, a target critics say is too modest.

Some environmentalists had hoped that Governor Charlie Baker would announce a loftier goal Wednesday at a forum in Boston about the future of offshore wind power.

Instead, Baker spoke more broadly about his administration’s efforts to bring the nation’s first large-scale offshore wind farm to the waters off Martha’s Vineyard, a project that could begin by year’s end.

He also spoke about the promise of new battery technology that in a few years could make wind and other renewable energy reliable enough to replace fossil fuels.

“There’s a tremendous amount of momentum and enthusiasm about what’s possible with respect to deep-water wind off the East Coast,” Baker said at the forum, which was organized by the Environmental League of Massachusetts and State House News. “It’s a significant opportunity to dramatically improve our environment and to take literally millions of metric tons of emissions off the grid.”

Read the full story at The Boston Globe

As warming waters push fish north, fishing communities have little choice but to follow

March 1, 2019 — In 1997, large commercial fishing boats based in the coastal town of Beaufort, North Carolina began shifting about 13 miles northward per year. By the end of 2014, they were harvesting off the coast of New Jersey. Although this was an unusual circumstance, it wasn’t singular. As it turns out, many large-scale fishing operations along the East Coast followed similar patterns of movement within that time frame. These shifts will persist or even intensify if climate change continues to warm up our oceans, according to new research published in the latest issue of ICES Journal of Marine Science.

In the past century, global warming has gradually raised the temperature of water along the Atlantic seaboard. Like moneyed New Yorkers taking to the Hamptons to escape city heat, fish close to the coastline are swimming away from their usual marine homes and toward cooler and more comfortable waters. As a result, fishing operations are getting disrupted. While the stories of fishers who have to travel longer and longer distances to secure their catch are well documented, the movements of fishing communities over time have not been mapped until now.

Talia Young, a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University, conducted the first-of-its-kind ICES study in part because she wanted to bridge what she felt was a disconnect between the empirical data of marine species migration and its impact on humans.

Read the full story at The New Food Economy