Saving Seafood

NORTH CAROLINA: New Fish Passage Facility Restores Access to 1,000 Miles of Habitat in North Carolina

October 5, 2023 — The following was released by the NOAA Fisheries:

NOAA and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission have been working with Duke Energy on major upgrades to fish passage facilities along hydropower dams in North Carolina. These upgrades are reopening access to hundreds of miles of upstream spawning and rearing habitat for American eel, American shad, and blueback herring. The work highlights NOAA’s efforts to support migratory fish.

New Plans for Old Dams

On the Pee Dee River in North Carolina, Duke Energy operates the Yadkin-Pee Dee Hydroelectric Project. This includes the energy generating Blewett Falls and Tillery Projects and their associated dams. Originally built in 1912, the Blewett Falls Project has a long history of generating hydropower for the region. The Blewett Falls Dam is located 29 miles downstream of Tillery Dam and almost 200 miles upstream from the Atlantic Ocean. It’s also the first obstacle to fish migrating inland from the ocean.

In 2015, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission issued a new license to Duke Energy to operate the Yadkin-Pee Dee Project. Through the relicensing process as part of the Federal Power Act, NOAA Fisheries and partners requested fish passage at both the Blewett Falls and Tillery Projects. At Blewett Falls, the original dam builders had created a fish ladder, but it was non-functional due to an ineffective design. There were no fish passage structures at Tillery. Through coordination with NOAA Fisheries and partners, Duke Energy began work on fish passage and facility upgrades in 2020.

NORTH CAROLINA: North Carolina’s captain Jimmy Ruhle passes at age 75

October 3, 2023 — James A. Ruhle Sr., a well-known North Carolina captain and commercial fishing advocate, passed away Sept. 28 at age 75.

Ruhle was a 2004 recepient of National Fisherman’s Highliner award, recognizing his long dedication to responsible fisheries management and cooperative research. Ruhle served for nine years on the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council and participated in numerous research projects with scientists.

Read the full article at the National Fisherman

NORTH CAROLINA: Dare commissioners oppose NOAA amendment, joined by Congressman Murphy

“We’ll continue fighting for you,” said Dare County Board of Commissioners Chairman Robert L. Woodard to Dewey Hemilright, a pelagic longline waterman from Kitty Hawk.

At the Sept. 6, 2023 meeting of Dare’s commissioners, Hemilright protested the proposal that pelagic watermen pay for all electronic monitoring equipment and operation.

In an email, Jeff Oden, another longline fisherman, accuses the National Marine Fisheries Service of creating a major contraction of the fishery.

Read the full article at The Coastland Times

 

NORTH CAROLINA: Valuable N.C. shrimp fishery suffering, group wants financial aid for shrimpers across Southeastern and Gulf coasts

September 13, 2023 — In what has turned out to be a bad year for many commercial shrimpers, a regional shrimpers’ association has sent governors of eight states, including North Carolina, a letter requesting emergency assistance for the watermen.

Thomas Newman, fisheries liaison for the Morehead City-based N.C. Fisheries Association, a private trade and lobbying group for commercial fishermen, said the letter came from the Southern Shrimp Alliance, based in Tarpon Springs, Florida.

Newman said the request is warranted.

“The shrimpers in our state have been struggling to make ends meet this year,” he said in an email Monday.

“Foreign imports of shrimp have reached unheard of levels, all the while sending domestic shrimp prices to an all-time low.

“If the historic low prices were not bad enough, the sheer volume of the imported shrimp has also caused issues with buyers not having enough cold storage space for domestic caught shrimp. Adding to this inflation and high fuel prices is plenty enough hardship on our fishers to request a fishery resource disaster.”

Read the full article at NEWS-TIMES

NORTH CAROLINA: Valuable N.C. shrimp fishery suffering, group wants financial aid for shrimpers across Southeastern and Gulf coasts

September 12, 2023 — In what has turned out to be a bad year for many commercial shrimpers, a regional shrimpers’ association has sent governors of eight states, including North Carolina, a letter requesting emergency assistance for the watermen.

Thomas Newman, fisheries liaison for the Morehead City-based N.C. Fisheries Association, a private trade and lobbying group for commercial fishermen, said the letter came from the Southern Shrimp Alliance, based in Tarpon Springs, Florida.

Newman said the request is warranted.

“The shrimpers in our state have been struggling to make ends meet this year,” he said in an email Monday.

“Foreign imports of shrimp have reached unheard of levels, all the while sending domestic shrimp prices to an all-time low.

“If the historic low prices were not bad enough, the sheer volume of the imported shrimp has also caused issues with buyers not having enough cold storage space for domestic caught shrimp. Adding to this inflation and high fuel prices is plenty enough hardship on our fishers to request a fishery resource disaster.”

Mike Norman, who owns a 35-foot boat and sells shrimp at Norman’s Shrimp in Salter Path, mostly in the summer, said he agrees time are tough in the shrimp fishery and would welcome help.

Prices are very low, he said, and it’s hard to make money off shrimp these days.

Read the full article at Carteret County News-Times

NORTH CAROLINA: Shrimp Disaster Assistance Request

September 11, 2023 — The following was released by NORTH CAROLINA FISHERIES ASSOCIATION:

As many of you know, the shrimpers in our state have been struggling to make ends meet this year. Foreign imports of shrimp have reached unheard of levels, all the while sending domestic shrimp prices to an all-time low. If the historic low prices were not bad enough, the sheer volume of the imported shrimp has also caused issues with buyers not having enough cold storage space for domestic caught shrimp. Adding to this inflation and high fuel prices is plenty enough hardship on our fishers to request a fishery resource disaster.

 The Southern Shrimp Alliance did just this on August 25th and sent a letter to all 8 coastal governors from Texas to North Carolina. Our shrimpers have struggled all season with low price returns, lay days due to market conditions, high fuel prices, and inflation. Some vessels have not even harvested shrimp this year, knowing they would lose money every week just trying to work. It’s time to help our hard-working American families.

 As of writing this update, we have yet to hear from the NC Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ), NC Division of Marine Fisheries (DMF), or Governor Roy Cooper’s Office on whether they intend to request disaster relief or not. We will keep you updated.

NORTH CAROLINA: 2023 commercial red snapper season closed

August 28, 2023 — The North Carolina Division of Marine Fisheries and NOAA Fisheries announced that the commercial harvest of red snapper in state and federal waters of the South Atlantic was closed on August 18, 2023. All sales and purchases of red snapper will be prohibited during the commercial closure.

The North Carolina Proclamation FF23-053 states that “it is unlawful to possess red snapper taken from waters under the jurisdiction of North Carolina or the South Atlantic Fishery Management Council. Unless specified otherwise, the fishery will re-open July 8, 2024.”

Read the full article at the National Fisherman

NORTH CAROLINA: The Last Fish

August 28, 2023 — Glenn Skinner isn’t happy.

Skinner is a licensed commercial fisherman who relies on his catch to make a profit. He’s been on the water 47 years; he started accompanying his longshoreman father on boats at age 3. Like most of his commercial brethren, Skinner doesn’t limit himself to one type of catch—he snags finfish using a gill net in the spring, trawls for shrimp in the summer, and spots roe mullet from his boat’s tower in the fall.

I met Skinner on a hot day in early June at a Beaufort processing center, or fish house, where he typically brings his catch. Skinner is soft-spoken and wore an Ocean and Coast shirt and a Myrtle Beach hat. He’s been out on the water less and less over the past five years, he said as we talked in the dust by his truck, which sported an “Eat Local Seafood” sticker. He’s become increasingly frustrated with what he sees as overregulation at the state level due to lobbyists who want to curtail commercial fishing.

“I couldn’t make up my mind if I wanted to get into the fight or get out of the fishery,” said Skinner. He chose the former, and now serves as the executive director of the North Carolina Fisheries Association, a nonprofit that advocates for commercial fishing interests at the state and federal levels.

The following day, I met Rip Woodin, a 76-year-old in boat shoes and a fly-fishing T-shirt, in the noisy lobby of a fly-fishing conference in Morehead City. Woodin, like Skinner, is a North Carolinian deeply invested in fishing. And like Skinner, he’s not happy.

Woodin started fly-fishing while working as a journalist in Wyoming, and bought an 18-foot boat when he moved to Atlantic Beach in 2005. His favorite to catch are redfish, which slither through spartina grass hunting for crabs during the full moon. He’s on the water about 25 days a year, but keeps very little of what he brings in—he says he releases most of his catches because he’s worried about the stock, as commercial fishers scoop up 200,000 pounds of redfish annually.

Skinner and Woodin represent opposite sides of a bitter dispute in North Carolina. Commercial fishermen like Skinner accuse recreational fishermen of promoting overregulation by pushing the state to impose gear limitations, reclassify species as recreational only, and restrict shrimp trawls in certain areas. Skinner believes these measures are imperiling the livelihood of people who rely on the sea to make a living—and he believes they are partially responsible for driving the number of commercial fishers down from more than 5,300 in 1994 to under 2,300 in 2021.

Read the full article at The Assembly

NORTH CAROLINA: State WRC sets recreational flounder season separate from state fisheries division season

August 28, 2023 — The N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission will allow a recreational summer flounder season in inland waters in September, creating consternation at the N.C. Fisheries Association, a private trade and lobbying group for commercial fishermen who have been mostly cut off in recent years from a species that once was one of their primary money-makers.

“In the middle of trying to rebuild the southern flounder population in our state, the North Carolina Wildlife Resource Commission has decided this year to have a separate recreational season outside of the recreational season set by the North Carolina Division of Marine Fisheries (DMF),” Thomas Newman of the association said in an email Monday.

“Not only do these season dates not align (the WRC season runs September 1-14 and the DMF season runs September 15-29) but the WRC has set a four-flounder bag limit (per day) during their season while the DMF bag limit is only one flounder.” 

Glen Skinner, executive director of the Morehead City-based association, said Monday the separate seasons for coastal waters and jointly managed inland waters will cause confusion for the recreational fishermen, who will have different rules to contend with by crossing an “imaginary line” that delineates waters where the fisheries division has sole authority (coastal waters) and waters where saltwater and freshwater fish are jointly managed by the two agencies.

“You could catch fish on one side of the line, and it would be legal, cross that line and it would be illegal, then cross the line again and it would be legal again,” he said. “It makes no sense.”

In addition, he said, it goes against the state’s plan to rebuild the stock by allowing a higher daily catch.

It’s long been an important fishery, and everyone – both state agencies and commercial and recreational fishermen – want the overfished stock rebuilt.

In 1994, the commercial southern flounder season was worth more than $8 million, with a catch of 4.8 million pounds, but it’s been steadily declining since then. In 2021, the last year for which statistics are available on the fisheries division website, it was worth only $1.4 million for a catch of about 480,000 pounds.

The state marine fisheries commission, policy-making arm of the fisheries division, addressed the issue briefly during its quarterly meeting Friday in New Bern. Phillip Reynolds, legal counsel for the commission, said, “There is no scientific basis showing that (the WRC season and bag limit) is an appropriate measure.”

The fisheries commission adopted the Southern Flounder Fishery Management Plan Amendment 3 during its May 2022 business meeting. The goal of Amendment 3 is to achieve a self-sustaining population for the overfished stock that provides a sustainable harvest. Amendment 3 maintained a 72% reduction across the fisheries and carried forward several management measures, including minimum size, from Amendment 2. 

Read the full article at the NEWS-TIMES

Court rejects allegations of N.C. shrimpers polluting waters

August 28, 2023 — A recent federal appeals court decision rejected arguments that North Carolina shrimpers are violating the federal Clean Water by discharging their bycatch overboard.

Seen as a significant win for the shrimpers as well as all commercial and recreational fishermen, the unanimous decision by the Fourth District Court of Appeals was handed down Aug. 7. The three-judge panel affirmed a previous lower court decision from September 2021 that was appealed by the plaintiffs, the NC Fisheries Reform Group.

The NC Fisheries Reform Group, recreational fisherman Joseph Albea and other anglers, had filed a citizen lawsuit alleging that certain named shrimpers in North Carolina are violating the federal Clean Water Act by discharging their bycatch overboard.

The anglers argued that bycatch being thrown back into the water is a pollutant and disturbing sediment with trawl nets is dredging, either of which, the group contended, would require commercial shrimpers to obtain a Clean Water Act permit.

The fisheries reform group, a Wilmington, N.C.-based nonprofit established in 2020, “to change how the State of North Carolina manages our public trust marine resources,” filed the lawsuit against Capt. Gaston LLC, Esther Joy Inc., Hobo Seafood Inc., Lady Samaira Inc., Trawler Capt. Alfred Inc., Trawler Christina Ann Inc., and Trawlers Garland and Jeff Inc.

The appeals court heard arguments on the case in fall 2022. This month the judges threw back the reform group’s claim.

“The Act forbids the unpermitted discharge of a pollutant. Returning bycatch to the ocean is not discharging a pollutant, so throwing it overboard without a permit is not forbidden by the Act,” Judge Julius Richardson wrote in the court’s opinion. “Likewise, because the trawl nets merely kick up sediment already present in the Sound, their use does not discharge any pollutants either. Accordingly, we affirm the district court’s dismissal of Fisheries Reform (Group) complaint.”

Read the full article at the National Fisherman