Saving Seafood

Scallop fishermen near end of season

March 21, 2018 — PEMBROKE, Maine — The Maine scallop fishing season opened during the first week of December and now, with two weeks or less remaining, reports on how good a season it has been are decidedly mixed.

On the good side of the ledger, there seemed to be plenty of scallops, often in places where none have been seen for years, Melissa Smith, who coordinates scallop management for the Department of Marine Resources, said last week.

With the season ending for draggers on March 29 along the Downeast coast (divers get six more days between March 30 and April 14), Smith said, only one of the seven rotational management zones that were open to fishing at the start of the season has been fully closed to fishing. Last year as the season ran down, only two of the seven rotational areas open at the season’s start remained fully open at its end.

“While emergency closures are still occurring each season,” Smith said in an email, “we’re observing that more harvestable area is remaining open during the season.”

The extended openings and “the expansion of harvestable scallops back to traditional beds,” she said, are indicators of the growth of the growth of the scallop resource in inshore waters.

According to Portland scallop dealer and former resource manager at DMR Togue Brawn, “they’re finding some nice pockets of big stuff still, which is a good indicator that the measures we put in place years ago are working.”

Without the closures and limits, the little “bump” in scallop population that occurred naturally “would have been just that. Guys would have found some nice patches and wiped them out. Now we’ve got something that could last.”

If there are more harvestable scallops around, their abundance may not be benefiting the pocketbooks of Maine’s fishermen.

Read the full story at the Ellsworth American

 

MASSACHUSETTS: CLF teleconference on Rafael agrees on one thing: More monitoring

September 14, 2017 — NEW BEDFORD, Mass. — Less than two weeks remain until the Carlos Rafael trial is scheduled to wrap up with sentencing set for Sept. 25 and 26.

The Conservation Law Foundation held a teleconference Wednesday to discuss the evolution of Rafael’s actions to his guilty plea and potential fallout from sentencing.

CLF attorney Peter Shelley discussed the topic with Togue Brawn of Downeast Dayboat, a commercial scallop company, and Patrick Shepard of the Maine Center for Coastal Fisheries.

“I think it’s fair to say all eyes on are NOAA fisheries and what’s it going to do,” Shelley said.

The answer at this point is no one really knows — at least until sentencing. NOAA has consistently told The Standard-Times it doesn’t comment on ongoing litigation.

However, the CLF teleconference provided recommendations on what can be done in the aftermath of Rafael’s sentencing.

Read the full story at the New Bedford Standard-Times

For Christmas Eve’s Feast of the Fishes, Maine offers many choices

December 19th, 2016 — When you ask a handful of Maine-based sustainable seafood experts what they would serve for a Christmas Eve Feast of the Fishes celebration, they say locals are not wanting for choice. In fact, you’d better be prepared to bypass the southern Italian menu of just seven fishes and opt for the Polish custom of serving as many as 12 courses, one for each apostle.

Regardless of whether you take holiday cues from Naples or Krakow, the fish-centric feast as practiced in both places takes place after sundown but before midnight. The meal centers on fish because, for Roman Catholics in generations past, Christmas Eve was a holy day of obligation: Rome dictated the day must include Mass but not meat.

Sustainable seafood-centric celebrations, regardless of how many dishes of fishes you serve, are no problem here in Maine. It’s more a matter of knowing which ones to buy at this time of year and why.

It’s no surprise that Togue Brawn, owner of DownEast Dayboat in Hancock, recommends scallops. She works with five Maine fishermen who harvest scallops within 3 miles of the Maine coast, and she sells them to customers within 24 hours of the mollusks being hauled out of the water during the state’s short winter scallop season.

Read the full story at The Portland Press Herald 

Elevating the Maine Scallop to Haute Cuisine

October 25th, 2016 — Togue Brawn and I hunker down in the wheelhouse for warmth, next to the captain who’s got one hand on his radio, the other turning the wheel. The GPS, he grunts, is broken. He’s navigating blind.

Behind us on the deck, an enormous spool of steel cable unravels and drops an iron-mesh dredge—basically a supersized bag-like fishing net—down to the seafloor. The boat circles until the captain makes the call and the spool retracts, pulling up the dredge, which appears suddenly at the boat’s stern, swinging to and fro. Two deckhands, each clad in orange rubber overalls and knee-high boots, grab for the large bar beneath the net, yelling above the engine’s roar. The net groans with scallops, each nestled safely inside its brown shell flecked with mud and barnacles.

The deckhands start sorting, small scallops arching overboard and larger ones clattering into nearby bins. Then they don thick workman’s gloves to pry open the shells, tossing the entrails into the sea; the jiggling adductor muscle, the part we eat, goes into buckets, where they gleam bright white. All around us, on the decks of near-identical boats (mostly retrofitted lobster vessels) other fishermen—and they are almost all men—do the same, silhouetted against the pink streaks of a frigid dawn. By mid-morning, they have found their rhythm, and the whole of it—the unwinding, dragging, hauling, sorting, and shucking—coupled with the bobbing of the boat, feels like an act of meditation.

The scene will no doubt replay tomorrow and the day after that and so on until the season is done. Today is December 1, and scalloping season has opened in eastern Maine.

Read the full story at Hakai Magazine