Saving Seafood

WASHINGTON: Trident Seafoods declares ship ‘total loss’ after fire at Port of Tacoma

February 19, 2021 — Trident Seafoods lost one of its fleet overnight after a massive fire broke out while the ship was docked at the Port of Tacoma on Wednesday night.

Tacoma firefighters battled the fire into Thursday.

The vessel, the 233-foot Alaskan fish processor Aleutian Falcon, was moored at Trident Seafoods on Pier 12 near the mouth of the Hylebos Waterway.

On Thursday, Trident Seafoods told The News Tribune in an emailed statement: “The Aleutian Falcon, the company’s smallest seasonal processing vessel, was a total loss to the fire.”

The company said no one was injured.

“We are grateful to the Tacoma Fire Department for their swift response and watch on scene, and that no one was injured,” said Trident CEO Joe Bundrant in Thursday’s statement. “We will conduct a full investigation of cause.”

The Aleutian Falcon is moored at Trident’s Tacoma facility between its time in Alaska supporting summer salmon fisheries. When operating, the vessel with a crew of 120 supplemented Trident’s shore-based and larger processing vessel operations throughout Alaska, according to the company.

Read the full story at The News Tribune

CDC requires commercial fishing crews to be masked at all times in U.S. waters

February 17, 2021 — Fishermen must wear masks while they are underway, even while sleeping, and the Coast Guard intends to enforce it.

That’s an edict issued as a public health emergency by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in a Marine Safety Bulletin issued on Feb. 1. It requires the wearing of masks at all times in U.S. waters on all commercial vessels “when boarding, disembarking, and for the duration of travel” to prevent the spread of the COVID-19 virus. The action states that “conveyance operators traveling into or within the U.S. may transport only persons wearing masks and must use best efforts to ensure that masks are worn.”

Best efforts include allowing entry to a vessel only to those who wear masks, instructing persons that failure to comply constitutes a violation of federal law, and removing any person who refuses to comply. Exemptions apply to children under 2 years old, a person with a disability who cannot safely wear a mask or a person for whom wearing a mask would create a risk to workplace health, safety or job duty, or if an operator is “the sole occupant of the vehicle.”

Read the full story at the Anchorage Daily News

ALASKA: ‘Brutal’ start to 2021 crabbing

February 17, 2021 — It was a hectic and hazardous opening weekend for commercial crab fishermen and the Coast Guard monitoring the fleet.

Commercial crabbing kicked off in Washington with a majority of fishermen dropping their first load of pots late last week for a 73-hour day soak period.

Fishermen reported encountering challenging conditions during their initial trips offshore with rogue waves, freezing rain and dense fog combined with usual turbulence of crossing the Columbia River Bar in boats loaded with crab pots.

Fishermen described the opening weekend conditions as “gnarly,” “brutal,” and in some instances “the worst they’ve ever seen.” One said he was simply grateful there weren’t any deaths despite some close calls.

Read the full story at The Chinook Observer

Coast Guard suspends search for missing boater

February 8, 2021 — In the first 24 hours after a 30-foot recreational crab boat was found empty and stuck on the pillars of the Buckman Bridge, personnel in the water and from the air searched more than 72 square miles of the St. Johns River looking for the missing boater. That area is roughly the same size as Washington, D.C.

Shortly before 8 p.m., the U.S. Coast Guard said that it suspended its search for the missing man.

The Coast Guard, Jacksonville Fire and Rescue and the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission joined local responders in the search shortly after an off-duty police officer reported seeing a boat spinning aimlessly in a circle in the St. Johns River just before 8 a.m. Thursday. Minutes later, it crashed into the bridge.

FWC, the lead agency, identified the missing man as 20-year-old Michael Vaughn III, of St. Augustine, who was out crab fishing by himself. Local fishermen, who said they know Vaughn, pray that he’s found. One of them told News4Jax he believes the younger Vaughn was out on the water alone around 6 a.m. Thursday.

Read the full story at News4Jax

New Coast Guard Cutter Named For Heroic Sailor Buried In Unalaska

February 5, 2021 — Near the base of Mount Newhall in Unalaska, among several weathered Russian Orthodox crosses, a tall stone marks the grave of seaman Charles Moulthrope.

Moulthrope was buried in Unalaska in 1896, at the age of 23, after he died during service in nearby waters. But 125 years later, his name lives on, as a recently commissioned U.S. Coast Guard cutter now carries the name Charles Moulthrope.

This will be the first modern Coast Guard cutter named for an enlisted member of the Revenue Cutter Service. The ship is meant to bring recognition to the sacrifices made by Moulthrope and other sailors who served in this precursor of the U.S. Coast Guard, according to Senior Chief Petty Officer Sara Muir.

“The first ten revenue cutters were ten oceangoing cutters,” Muir said. “We’re talking about wooden vessels with sails that were built at the behest of the United States Congress in the early 1790s, largely to crack down on smuggling.”

Moulthrope is recognized for heroically saving his crewmates, while they were serving off the Oregon coast.

Read the full story at KUCB

Maine man charged with false distress call to Coast Guard

February 1, 2021 — A Maine man is charged with making a false distress call to the Coast Guard on Dec. 3, 10 days after four fishermen, including Michael Porper of Gloucester, were lost at sea when the fishing vessel Emmy Rose sank off Cape Cod.

Nathan Libby of Rockland, Maine is charged with making the mayday call to the Coast Guard around 6:30 a.m. on Dec. 3 via VHF-FM radio channel 16.

The caller over several minutes described a 42-foot fishing vessel and its three-man crew, saying the boat was taking on water off Spruceheads, Maine, the rudder was broken and the dewatering pumps could not keep up with flooding.

Based on the call, the Coast Guard began a search that spanned more than five hours, which included the use of a Coast Guard rescue crews from Rockland, Maine, a Maine Marine Patrol vessel, and a helicopter from Coast Guard Air Station Cape Cod.

Read the full story at the Gloucester Daily Times

ALASKA: Coronavirus outbreak at Trident seafood plant in Akutan now includes 135 workers

January 27, 2021 — A COVID-19 outbreak at the Trident Seafoods plant in the tiny, remote community of Akutan now encompasses 135 workers including several sick enough to require medevacs to Anchorage.

The plant, North America’s largest, right now has about 700 workers quarantined on an island in the Bering Sea with the nearest hospital hundreds of miles away. Trident is taking the unusual step of stockpiling medical supplies including ventilators in case weather grounds air ambulances.

Two COVID-positive workers were sick enough to get flown Monday to Anchorage for hospitalization, according to state health officials. Another worker with breathing problems was medevaced earlier.

“We arranged Coast Guard-assisted evacuations yesterday for two employees whose condition was quickly worsening,” Trident spokeswoman Stefanie Moreland said in a statement Tuesday. “We now have more private-sector resources lined up in case further emergency evacuations are needed and weather permits.”

Read the full story at Anchorage Daily News

The national security imperative to tackle illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing

January 26, 2021 — Over the last few years illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing has become more recognized as a national security concern. At first glance, fish hardly seem to be on par with other cutting edge national security issues — cyber, space, artificial intelligence, drones, nuclear proliferation, and perhaps most importantly the return of strategic competition now commonly referred to “great” power rivalry (although perhaps not for long). But in the years to come, make no mistake, fishin’ may indeed become an increasingly important mission for the United States and its security partners and allies around the world, and most certainly those in the Indo-Pacific.

To succeed in this mission, the Biden administration should lean on the U.S. Coast Guard to do what it does best, especially in the Pacific, where Chinese fishing fleets do double-duty as maritime militias that threaten and intimidate the fishers from neighboring nations. The administration should also continue to develop counter-IUU bilateral agreements, including those that may allow prosecuting masters of vessels that commit “grave breaches.” It may also need to make a hard choice between partnering with China’s neighbors, or with China itself, to best address this threat.

Fishing, a $401 billion global industry, provides 20% of the protein intake for nearly half of the world’s population, and global fish consumption has been on the rise for almost 60 years. Yet 93% of the world’s fish stocks are fully exploited, overexploited, or significantly depleted, and global climate change is adversely affecting stocks.

Read the full story at the Brookings Institute

NEW JERSEY: How this family-run seafood business banded together to stay afloat for the next generation

January 25, 2021 — Water is everywhere in Cape May County, and land is borrowed space the loan sharks of the Delaware Bay and Atlantic Ocean periodically reclaim without eviction notice. People who make their livings here—lighthouse historians, funnel cake artists, surf instructors, hotel housekeepers, Coast Guard officers, mackerel processors, marine biologists, barbacks, and shot girls—do so because of and in spite of the water, and the tourism water brings every summer, reliable as the tides that flood and drain the saltwater marshes that stitch together ocean and bay.

Twenty-four-year-old Sara Bright is one of these people. She sells seafood by the seashore, in Wildwood more specifically, a town famous for its rambunctious boardwalk, wide white beaches, and midcentury neon. She lives with her parents in nearby Cape May Courthouse on a seagrass-fringed pond her commercial fisherman father, Bill, dug before she was born. If you told Sara a year ago that she’d be among the 52% of pandemic refugees under 30 that moved back home in 2020, and that she’d be working with her family in the seafood industry, “I would have laughed and said no way, my life is in Colorado.”

Sara and her three siblings—Tess, 26, Sam, 23, and Will, 20—grew up on the Cape’s man-made and moon-made waterways, digging littlenecks, catching crabs, going on fishing trips with Bill, and helping him and their mom, Michelle, run Hooked Up Seafood, the family’s acclaimed dockside food truck. But the mountains and the snow pulled each Bright kid West. After college and a year in New York, Tess moved to Denver for a marketing job with a 48-brand software portfolio. Sara followed her, committed to Colorado but leery of the corporate world. “A lot of my friends were getting jobs but weren’t happy, and I started to panic,” Sara says. “Growing up we were taught to chase adventure, and that life should be anything but boring.”

Read the full story at Fortune

Ask a Highliner: Bob Dooley talks fishing, bycatch reduction, safety and more

January 22, 2021 — How much firewood does it take to build a new 52-foot salmon troller? Bob Dooley has the answer to that and just about any other question about West Coast and Alaska fisheries you can throw his way.

When Brian Hagenbuch profiled Dooley as a 2017 NF Highliner, the title of his feature was “Community champion,” and that’s been Dooley’s story through every decade of his nearly 60-year career.

Starting as a deckhand on a salmon troller out of his home town of Half Moon Bay, Calif., at the age of 11, Dooley ended his fishing career on Bering Sea and West Coast pollock and whiting trawlers. In his years on the water, he witnessed the inception of the Magnuson Act and the 200-mile limit, joint-venture fishing, observer coverage, Coast Guard safety regulations, and perhaps the biggest change in fishing in his lifetime — bycatch reduction.

“We went from the wild, wild west of joint ventures to overcapitalization of the fleet with the advent of factory trawlers, particularly in pollock and the West Coast in whiting. And we basically had 200 percent catching capacity with the same amount of fish,” Dooley says, describing technological advancements and government programs that changed the way people went fishing.

Read the full story at National Fisherman