Saving Seafood

MAINE: Discovery Wharf opens doors after year-long hiatus

June 21, 2021 — The Maine Center for Coastal Fisheries on Atlantic Avenue in Stonington has announced the reopening of its marine education center, Discovery Wharf. The interpretive center will open its doors beginning Tuesday, June 22, with a limited schedule and new reservation system.

Discovery Wharf has welcomed thousands of visitors from across the country and world, but it was closed to the public last summer due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, a news release reports. The use of a booking system this season will allow staff to follow CDC, state, and local guidelines as well as proper cleaning procedures in between visitors to ensure a safe experience for everyone.

Visitors can enjoy the marine touch tank, interactive display wall, and virtual reality exhibit. This year’s VR exhibit will feature new experiences, including scallop and offshore lobster fishing, a tour of an oyster farm, and ice fishing. Visitors can also expect to see a familiar face when being welcomed by Captain Leroy Weed, the star of MCCF’s online video series, “Ask Leroy!”

Read the full story at the Penobscot Bay Press

MAINE: Fish For Everyone to celebrate local seafood

July 17, 2020 — The Maine Center for Coastal Fisheries is sponsoring a week-long seafood celebration on the Blue Hill peninsula and the island from August 1-7, Paul Anderson, executive director, has announced.

The festival, dubbed the Fish for Everyone: A Seafood Celebration, has two tracks, according to Bobbi Billings, MCCF’s administrative director.

On one track, the MCCF will donate money to local nonprofits such as the Healthy Island Project, the Island Nursing Home, the Tree of Life and Island Food pantries. They can then buy local seafood with it, Billings said. On August 6, the nursing home will serve lobster and crab rolls and HIP will hold a seafood picnic for Salt Air Seniors.

On the second track, MCCF is encouraging local seafood dealers and restaurants to serve locally sourced seafood, and it will help promote those activities through social media and print, Billings said. A brochure will list where people can buy locally sourced seafood.

Read the full story at the Penobscot Bay Press

MAINE: Center for Coastal Fisheries takes talk series online

May 28, 2020 — The Maine Center for Coastal Fisheries will not be able to operate its annual “lunch and learn” series at its facility in Stonington this summer as normal. With a move to virtual meetings, the center has the ability to reach more people.

It is a series folks came to look forward to in the summer. The Maine Center for Coastal Fisheries has been inviting around 40 people to its facility on the last Friday of the month in the summer, bag lunch in hand, to learn about different types of fisherman. This year it cannot happen in person, at least in the early summer, due to COVID-19 safety measures.

“Everything’s changed and we’re unable to open up quite yet to have in person experience, so everyone’s getting used to webinars,” said MCFC president Paul Anderson.

The Center’s summer talk series will go virtual in 2020, starting this Friday, May 29.

As “lunch and learn” starts on Zoom, it is a chance for more people to learn about the coastal fishing industry.

Read the full story at WFVX

MAINE: Sea Grant director stepping down to take helm at nonprofit

May 19, 2017 — A University of Maine official who has led its Sea Grant program is stepping down to accept a chief executive position with the Maine Center for Coastal Fisheries.

Paul Anderson, currently the director of the Maine Sea Grant College Program where he has been for the last 16 years, will join MCCF in September and assume the chief executive job on Jan. 1, 2018.

The decision was announced by the nonprofit’s board of directors.

Anderson will succeed founding Executive Director Robin Alden, who is stepping down after 14 years at the helm of MCCF, formerly known as Penobscot East Resource Center.

The Sea Grant program was one of dozens of federally funded programs that would have lost its funding in President Trump’s original proposed budget.

The UMaine Sea Grant portfolio includes commercial fisheries, aquaculture, coastal community development, ecosystem health and coastal resiliency. Anderson also serves in national leadership with the Sea Grant Association, and is co-leader for the new state-bond-funded Alliance for Maine’s Marine Economy.

Read the full story at The Portland Press Herald 

Trump wants to end grants that support Maine fishing jobs

March 20, 2017 — The national $73 million Sea Grant program, which includes about a dozen researchers affiliated with the University of Maine, could be eliminated if Congress approves drastic budget cuts proposed for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration by President Trump.

Funding for the state’s Department of Marine Resources and for collecting weather and climate data in the Gulf of Maine also could be put at risk by the president’s proposal.

Paul Anderson, director of the Sea Grant program at University of Maine, said Tuesday that the money NOAA has funded for the program has been “money well spent” because it has helped draw additional funding to Maine and has helped spur economic development.

“I think [Trump] has just got a fundamentally different attitude about government,” Anderson said Tuesday, without going into further detail. “What [people can do to try to protect the program] is write to our congressmen and senators.”

Trump’s administration already is considering slashing funding for the U.S. Coast Guard, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security, and for the Environmental Protection Agency, which provides about 20 percent of Maine’s Department of Environmental Protection annual funding. Now, according to the Washington Post, the federal Office of Management and Budget is looking to cut funding for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration by 17 percent.

Read the full story at the Bangor Daily News

Trump’s proposed cuts to NOAA alarm Maine’s marine community

March 7, 2017 — A Trump administration proposal to slash funding for the federal government’s principal marine agency and eliminate the national Sea Grant program is prompting alarm in Maine’s marine sector because it depends on services provided by both.

President Trump wants to slash the budget of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration – the agency responsible for fisheries management, weather forecasting, nautical surveys and assisting marine industries – by 17 percent, The Washington Post reported Friday. And he wants to eliminate NOAA’s Sea Grant program, the marine equivalent of the federal agricultural extension and research service, in the fiscal 2018 budget, which begins Oct. 1.

“There was a lot of concern when the news broke, and a flurry of messages went out to our congressional delegation from fishermen and aquaculturists who understand how they benefit from Sea Grant,” said Paul Anderson, director of Maine Sea Grant at the University of Maine in Orono, one of 33 Sea Grant universities in the country. “I don’t now if on October 1st we will all of a sudden not exist.”

The news has sent reverberations across Maine’s marine community, which has long benefited from the partnership between UMaine and the federal government. Sea Grant researchers created the Fishermen’s Forum – the industry’s premier event – in 1976, and also helped found the Portland Fish Exchange and the university’s Lobster Institute, which researches issues of concern to the industry.

Patrice McCarron, executive director of the Maine Lobstermen’s Association, said the cuts to NOAA would be terrible for fishermen. “The industry relies pretty heavily on their forecast reports on the wind and the wave heights and make decisions day to day if they are going to go out, so those satellites are really important,” she said. “And nobody loves (the National Marine Fisheries Service), but keeping them fully funded and their research going is essential to manage our fisheries.”

She noted that recent cuts to the agency’s right-whale monitoring program had hurt fishermen because if scientists didn’t have time to find the whales, they had to assume they weren’t there, increasing the regulatory burden on lobstermen, whose gear the whales sometimes get entangled in.

Read the full story at the Portland Press Herald