Saving Seafood

Fishing regulators approve measures to conserve Atlantic herring

September 26, 2018 — New England fishing regulators on Tuesday approved two measures aimed at conserving the dwindling Atlantic herring stock.

The New England Fishery Management Council approved a rule that “establishes a long-term policy that will guide the council in setting catch limits into the future” at a meeting in Plymouth.

Such an option will result in more herring being left in the water “to serve as forage and be part of the overall ecosystem,” according to the council. Under that proposal, catch limits can be adjusted based on new information.

Additionally, the council approved a measure aimed at preventing midwater trawlers from fishing too close to shore for herring. The boats are banned from fishing within 12 miles of shore, an area stretching from the Canadian border through Rhode Island, that includes areas east and southeast of Cape Cod, according to the council.

Recent surveys have found that the Atlantic herring population in the Gulf of Maine is at risk of collapse. The fish provide a crucial source of food to species that include cod, striped bass, and humpback whales.

Read the full story at The Boston Globe

 

First offshore wind farm in federal waters inches closer

September 24, 2018 — What could be the first offshore wind farm in federal waters took a major step forward last month when Dominion Energy applied to the Virginia State Corporation Commission for approval to build two 6 MW wind turbines and the project’s grid infrastructure.

Called the Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind Project (CVOW), it would located about 27 miles off the coast of Virginia Beach on 2,135 acres of federal waters leased by the Virginia Department of Mines, Minerals and Energy. The two 6 MW turbines will sit in about 80 feet of water and generate wind energy for customers starting in December 2020.

Denmark’s Ørsted has been hired by Dominion Energy to build CVOW. Just this past Sept. 6, Ørsted opened the Walney Extension, the world’s largest offshore wind farm with 87 wind turbines generating potentially 659 MW of power in the Irish Sea.

A demonstration project, CVOW would be the second offshore wind farm in the U.S., following the Block Island Wind Farm in Rhode Island, which began operating in 2015. More importantly perhaps is that CVOW will be the first offshore wind farm to go through the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management’s (BOEM) approval process.

Read the full story at Marine Log

 

Atlantic herring quotas may be cut again

September 14, 2018 — The Atlantic herring is a small, seemingly unremarkable fish that has distinguished itself through sheer numbers. When herring spawn, they can cover the ocean bottom in a carpet of eggs inches thick. Migrating schools of the fish can number in the billions and have been known to stretch miles wide.

But despite its prolific nature, there are growing concerns in some quarters about the state of the fish’s population, which, according to federal data, has been in decline for the last five years. Environmental advocates and some fishing groups worry that if herring is overfished, it could spell trouble for striped bass, tuna and a whole host of other species in Rhode Island and elsewhere along the Northeast coast that prey on it.

“If there’s no big stocks of herring to entice these other fish into Narragansett Bay, they may pass us by,” said Michael Jarbeau, baykeeper for Providence-based environmental group Save The Bay.

On Tuesday, the New England Fishery Management Council will decide on a new set of regulations known as Amendment 8 that could include restricting fishing areas for herring and could for the first time account for the fish’s place in the larger ecosystem.

The council’s Atlantic herring committee met last week and backed a less restrictive version of the rules out of concern that anything tighter would shut down the fishery for as long as three years as stocks recover. The full council may adopt the committee’s recommendation or go forward with any of a host of other options.

Read the full story at the Providence Journal

Cape leaders look for solution to increased shark sightings

September 19, 2018 — CAPE COD, Mass. — We’ve seen them through out the summer; Video after video of shark encounters off the Massachusetts and Rhode Island coasts.

But this weekend, a deadly encounter occurred off the Cape – the first in the Bay State in over 80 years.

“This is a horrible tragedy,” said Dr. Greg Skomal, a shark expert with the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries.

 “No one wants a shark attack of any kind,” said Skomal, “and a fatal attack is the worst kind.”

After studying the case, Dr. Skomal thinks he knows the culprit in last weekend’s deadly attack.

Read the full story at WLNE

 

Five Wild Days Aboard a New England Squid Boat

September 12, 2018 — Corey Harris wasn’t concerned about the storm. The captain of Rhonda Denise, a 77-foot commercial trawler, he’d been stuck in port all week, as two nor’easters, in early March, slammed the New England coast back-to-back. Now a third brewed offshore. But Harris saw an opportunity. “We’ll thread the needle between the storms,” he told me over the phone. We’d catch as much squid as possible, then haul ass back to port before the next system hit. Bring seasickness. medicine, he added. “It’ll be rough—but worth it.”

On the Thursday of our departure, the Port of Galilee, in Point Judith, Rhode Island, was full of boats but empty of people. If you’ve eaten calamari at a seafood shack or a little red-sauce joint, odds are it crossed the dock here in Point Judith. In 2016, the village’s 119 vessels landed 22.6 million pounds of squid, valued at $28.6 million—its best haul to date. It’s the 15th-highest-earning seaport in the country and first in squid on the Atlantic seaboard. By all measures, it’s the calamari capital of the East Coast. And with ongoing downturns in cod, flounder, and haddock, scores of commercial fishermen, not only here but also up and down the New England shore, now depend on squid to stay afloat in a notoriously unpredictable industry.

Harris met me in the parking lot. Among the local fishermen, he’s one of “the few young guys worth a shit,” a longtime captain told me. He’s also something of an anomaly. The salutatorian of his high school, in Babylon, New York, he dropped out of his university’s pre-dental program, in 2007, to work on trawlers, drawn to fishing for reasons that he can’t quite explain. Soft-spoken and ambitious, with a tight red beard, he started as a deckhand on Rhonda Denise, made captain by age 22, and became a co-owner a few years later. Now, at 31, he’s still 20 years younger than the majority of guys on the dock. “The storms have kept most boats in,” he told me. “There’s no fish on the market. Prices will be high.” There was no need to worry about the weather, he added—as long as we made it back by Monday.

Read the full story at Men’s Journal

 

How New England’s Jonah Crab Turned From Garbage To Delicacy

September 6, 2018 — The Jonah crab is a medium-sized crab, ranging from brownish to reddish to greyish, boasting big claws tipped with black. During the winter, when most of the year’s crabs are caught along the Atlantic coast from Maine down to Rhode Island, it has an exceedingly hard shell, requiring a hammer or a saw to open. It’s mostly served as a plate of the large claws, with someone else taking care of scoring and cracking them open for the customer.

If this reminds you of Florida’s famed stone crab, which sells for about $30 a pound, you’re on the right track; the two species are very similar in appearance and even flavor. And yet until just a few years ago, the Jonah crab cost about $0.50 a pound. Or it was free. “Lobstermen would pull them up and in most cases have no idea what to do with the things, so they’d usually just throw them back,” says Bryan Holden, a partner at Luke’s Lobster who’s been right at the forefront of the Jonah crab’s transformation. (Luke is his brother.)

Jonah crabs are attracted to the same bait as lobsters, and are equally as flummoxed by lobster traps, so for decades, they were simply a bycatch. Maybe the lobstermen would bring them home themselves, or sell them for basically nothing to the small seafood shacks that spring up along any coast. Until about four years ago, there was no Jonah crab industry: few were processing it, and hardly anyone besides those who make their living from the sea in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Maine had even heard of it.

Read the full story at Modern Farmer

MASSACHUSETTS: New Bedford’s Seafood Throwdown shows how delicious under-appreciated fish can be

August 16, 2018 — Two local chefs.

One mystery fish.

One local farmers’ market. And a live New Bedford audience.

We usually talk music in Spotlight, my friends, but this slice of outdoor summer entertainment is way too fun not to mention this week.

Think Food Network’s “Iron Chef,” but with local chefs, local ingredients, local judges, and a live showdown performed in downtown New Bedford. Oh, and it’s free. Limited sampling will be available.

Yup, you’re invited to bring a lawn chair to Custom House Square Aug. 23 at 5:30 p.m. for New Bedford’s 2018 Seafood Throwdown. The event is presented by the New Bedford Fishing Heritage Center, in collaboration with the Northwest Atlantic Marine Alliance, Coastal Foodshed, and New Bedford Farmers’ Market.

This year it’s UMD vs. URI, baby.

In one corner, [ding ding ding!] we have Chef Kevin Gibbons, executive chef at UMass-Dartmouth. In the other corner, we have Chef Michael Comire, executive chef at the University of Rhode Island.

Read the full story at the New Bedford Standard-Times

Geologists examine R.I. Sound seabed for wind turbines

August 6, 2018 –Before you can build a wind farm in the ocean, you have to understand what’s on and underneath the ocean floor.

The differences between sand, silt, rocks and clay will go a long way to determining what kind of foundations can be used to hold towering wind turbines above the water’s surface and how those foundations will be anchored to the bottom.

“That data is crucial to how we build a wind farm,” said Paul Murphy, vice president of operations and engineering at Deepwater Wind.

Deepwater is set to embark on a study that could last a month or more to determine the underwater geology of 256 square miles of Rhode Island Sound about 18 miles southeast of Block Island.

There, in waters that it’s leasing from the federal government, the Providence-based company plans to install dozens and dozens of wind turbines over the next decade to supply power to New York, Rhode Island and Connecticut.

A liftboat brought to Rhode Island from Louisiana and retrofitted with a drilling rig at the Quonset Business Park was set to depart Sunday for Deepwater’s lease area, where it will take core samples from deep within the ocean bottom.

Once it’s in place, the specialty ship named “Supporter” will lower three tubular legs to the seabed about 120 feet below and then raise itself up about 30 feet above the water to create a stable base for drilling to proceed.

The results of the survey will be used to supplement the construction and operations plans that Deepwater must submit for approval to the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, the arm of the U.S. Department of the Interior that oversees all offshore energy.

Read the full story at the Providence Journal

Fishing Report: Not everyone’s is buying the “Blue Economy”

August 3, 2018 — Not all, including U.S. Senators from Rhode Island and Massachusetts, are buying into the administration’s “Blue Economy” strategy.

Last week, Timothy Gallaudet, NOAA chief and Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Oceans and Atmosphere said before a Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation panel that NOAA will promote its “Blue Economy” vision with more aquaculture and mineral extraction in federally controlled waters hoping to lessen seafood imports and increase energy production.

Earlier this year at the National Recreational Fishing Summit Wilbur Ross, Secretary of Commerce who oversees NOAA, said one of his primary goals is to focus NOAA’s attention on the seafood trade deficit. Ross said, “Ninety percent of the seafood we eat in America comes from foreign sources… So we are going to try to fix this.” Ross and Assistant Secretary Gallaudet said the top priority at NOAA now is to improve the fisheries trade deficit by increasing wild harvest and aquaculture.

Moving forward putting short term economic gains first to improve the trade balance with enhanced wild harvest could lead to overfishing to the determent of the fish. Additionally, concerns have been expressed about the environmental hazards associated with large scale aquaculture as well as possible conflicts with wild harvest in our oceans so caution will be needed here too.

Read the full story at The Providence Journal

US food distributors announce major acquisitions

July 31, 2018 — Two major food distribution mergers will undoubtedly change how seafood is procured and distributed in the United States.

On Monday, 30 July, Rosemont, Illinois-based US Foods said it will acquire five companies under the Services Group of America (SGA) umbrella, for USD 1.8 billion (EUR 1.5 billion) in cash. US Foods, which carries a wide range of seafood items including “Serve Good” sustainable options, is acquiring Food Services of America (FSA), one of the largest regional broadline distribution companies in the United States, specializing in servicing independent restaurants.

The deal also brings Systems Services of America, a foodservice distributor that specializes in casual, fast-casual, and quick service restaurants chains, to US Foods. Other distributors that are part of the deal include Ameristar Meats, a provider of custom meats and Amerifresh, which specializes in produce sourcing and marketing.

Plus, late last week, Providence, Rhode Island-based United Natural Foods said it was buying Supervalu in Minneapolis, Minnesota, a food distributor and operator of more than 3,000 grocery stores.

Read the full story at Seafood Source