Saving Seafood

Coast Guard helicopter crew battles high winds to rescue 9 from grounded fishing boat in Alaska

January 7, 2026 — Nine crew members were hoisted to a helicopter off a commercial crab boat amid near gale force winds, strong downward drafts from a nearby cliff and rough seas after the fishing vessel grounded on an Alaska island in the Bering Sea.

The Coast Guard said there were no injuries to the crew members of the Arctic Sea, a 134-foot (41-meter) boat owned by the Coastal Villages Region Fund and fishing for tanner crab.

The ship grounded Monday on the northern shore of Saint George Island, the southernmost of the small Pribilofs islands group with fewer than 100 residents, predominantly Aleuts. The group of islands is located about 750 miles (1,207 kilometers) west of Anchorage.

“I’m on the fog, I’m on the beach, we lost our steering,” someone from the Arctic Sea reports to the Coast Guard when calling in a mayday, according to audio provided by the Coast Guard. “We’re taking on water.”

Read the full article at the Associated Press

ALASKA: Coast Guard may briefly be unable to hear distress calls in Southeast Alaska this week

November 4, 2025 — The U. S. Coast Guard may briefly be unable to hear distress calls in Southeast Alaska for 3-5 minute intervals this week.

The Coast Guard sent out a notice on Monday, Nov. 3, that they would be undergoing maintenance upgrades from Nov. 3 – 7 – and this would impact receiving messages on the region’s emergency VHF channel 16.

In the broadly distributed email, the Coast Guard said they “may be unable to listen to or respond to distress calls on CH16 starting 03NOV25 until 07NOV25.”

But in a statement to KFSK later, the Coast Guard wrote, “the VHF-FM marine radio will not be down the entire 96 hours. It will experience a brief interruption, lasting only 3-5 minutes, during a scheduled upgrade within that 96-hour time frame.”

Read the full article at KFSK

US Senate passes military funding bill with FISH Act attached

October 13, 2025 — U.S. senators voted to attach legislation designed to combat illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing to the Senate’s annual military spending legislation just before it passed.

If passed, the Fighting Foreign Illegal Seafood Harvest (FISH) Act would require the U.S. government to establish a blacklist of vessels involved in IUU activities. Vessels on the list would be banned from U.S. waters. The legislation would also require the U.S. Coast Guard to increase at-sea inspections to combat IUU fishing. The bill also requires reports to be submitted on how new technologies can help combat IUU fishing and on how Russian and Chinese fishing affects the U.S. market.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

ALASKA: Diesel spill near Kodiak-area hatchery disrupts salmon fishery

September 4, 2025 — State officials say a grounded fishing vessel leaking diesel from a beach near Kodiak has prompted a commercial fishing closure as well as precautions at a salmon hatchery.

The Sea Ern ran hard aground in Izhut Bay off Afognak Island with a 12-foot gash in its bow, damaging two fuel tanks, according to a report issued Wednesday by the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation.

The U.S. Coast Guard said watchstanders received a distress call on VHF radio at approximately 6:30 a.m. Monday reporting the vessel hit a rock and was taking on water. There were three people aboard.

The good Samaritan vessel MS Kennedy responded to the distress call and recovered all three people from the vessel, the Coast Guard said. No injuries were reported.

Read the full article at Anchorage Daily News

CALIFORNIA: Mysterious ‘ghost ship’ lurks off Northern California coast. What happened to missing captain?

August 27, 2025 — Joel Kawahara’s fishing boat, the Karolee, traveled down the coast from Washington toward California waters, keeping a steady course that offered no hint that something had gone terribly wrong.

But when Coast Guard crews boarded the boat this month in Northern California, officials found no one on board. Its captain was nowhere to be seen. Somewhere along the roughly 400-mile journey, the 70-year-old Kawahara was lost.

“It’s a strange case,” said U.S. Coast Guard Petty Officer Steven Strohmaier. “There were no signs of distress, no signs of debris.”

Read the full article at the The Press Democrat

Conservation groups to sue NOAA Fisheries, US Coast Guard over West Coast vessel strikes on whales

July 31, 2025 — The Center for Biological Diversity (CBD) and Friends of the Earth plan to sue NOAA Fisheries and the U.S. Coast Guard over vessel strikes on whales and sea turtles off the coast of California.

According to CBD, neither NOAA Fisheries nor the Coast Guard have properly analyzed how California shipping lane designations could contribute to vessel strikes on whales or sea turtles.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

MASSACHUSETTS: Vineyard Wind Blade Break Reverberates One Year Later

July 11, 2025 — One year ago Sunday, the U.S. Coast Guard got a report it had never received before.

At 7:01 p.m., about 20 miles off the Vineyard’s southern shore, large pieces of debris were scattered in the water near the Vineyard Wind wind farm.

Green and white bits of fiberglass and foam, some the size of kitchen tables, were floating in the water, and eventually, with the help of wind and tides, would make their way onto Nantucket beaches.

Nantucket charter fishing Capt. Carl Bois was one of the first people to see the bobbing detritus off the outer continental shelf when he was out on his boat the next day.

“I’ve never seen anything on the water quite like that,” he said at the time.

Not long after, Vineyarders, Nantucketers, state lawmakers and some of the highest ranking officials in Washington, D.C. learned all too well what Mr. Bois was seeing: pieces of a broken Vineyard Wind turbine blade.

On July 13, 2024, the 107-meter GE Vernova Haliade-X turbine blade on the offshore wind energy farm’s southernmost turbine snapped unexpectedly and dumped thousands of pieces of fiberglass into the ocean. Broken about 20 meters from its base, a large portion of the blade would later drop into the water, sinking to the bottom.

Read the full article at the Vineyard Gazette

Inspector general reports US Coast Guard is not prioritizing IUU fishing enforcement

June 23, 2025 — A recent report by an internal U.S. government watchdog found that the U.S. Coast Guard is not prioritizing the prevention of illegal, unregulated, and unreported (IUU) fishing, leading it to miss its interdiction goals for the last two years.

According to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Office of the Inspector General, the Coast Guard devoted just 4 percent of its mission hours to tackling IUU fishing in 2023 and 2024. While setting a goal of interdicting 40 percent of foreign fishing vessels illegally operating in U.S. waters, the Coast Guard only interdicted 21 percent of those vessels.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

The gear fishermen can’t afford to leave behind

March 18, 2025 — A recent informal survey on FaceBook asked fishermen what gear they would never go offshore without. Many responded that they’d never leave port without a survival suit. “That’s smart,” says John Roberts, director of safety training at Fishing Partnership Support Services, a Massachusetts-based non-profit dedicated to improving the health, safety, and economic security of commercial fishermen. “A survival suit is probably the most important piece of safety gear you can have on the boat.”

After 30 years doing search and rescue for the U.S. Coast Guard, Roberts joined the Massachusetts-based Fishing Partnership two years ago and has been running safety trainings for fishermen around New England. “We teach them how to don and doff the suit, that is, get in and out of it, and how to get in the water,” says Roberts. “We encourage them to bring their own suits, and we go over how to store and maintain them,” Roberts notes that zippers should be waxed and lights in working order. “The reflective tape shouldn’t be peeling off. Sometimes a guy might have bought a suit and not used it, and we unpack it, and it’s got dry rot, or the zipper is rusted.”

The Coast Guard has a table—based on length, registration, and distance from shore—that indicates which vessels are required to carry survival suits for the crew, but Roberts recommends having your own suit, even if the vessel is not required to have one for you. He adds that certain vessels are required to conduct safety drills once a month, and thoseneed to be conducted by a certified drill instructor. He also notes that the survival suits should be serviced every two years. “They blow them up with air and look for leaks, dry rot, and open seams, and make sure everything is working.”

When it comes to brands, Roberts can’t make recommendations. “When you look around, Kent and Imperial seem to be the most popular brands, but Guy Cotton is making suits [Piel brand], and Viking is still making them, and Mustang. The important thing is not the brand, it’s that you have it with you and that it’s in good working order.”

Read the full article at the National Fisherman