Economic Impact

For a few afternoons last week, life seemed almost normal in Plaquemines Parish, La., a hub of fishing industry where the Mississippi meets the Gulf of Mexico. At the annual seafood festival in Belle Chasse, people lined up for rides and sandbagging contests. Piles of crawfish cost $6, a dozen oysters $12. A Seafood Queen was crowned.

But the reality of the oil spill was never far away. “Dredge Baby Dredge” T-shirts were scattered throughout the crowd, and there was a lot of talk about whose business was how close to the edge. John Tesvich, whose company, AmeriPure Oysters, had a booth at the festival, has seen a 50 percent drop in output since the Deepwater Horizon spill imposed rolling closures on gulf waters. The fourth-generation oyster harvester said there is a chance his business will be wiped out, depending on “which way the oil blows.”

Much of the talk was about what people — shrimpers, offshore oil workers, dock owners, charter boat operators — could do to survive. To stave off collapse, they say they have only two options: apply to the Small Business Administration for a disaster loan, or file claims with BP. Neither does much more than buy a little time.

Read the complete story at The New York Times.

 

 

 

 

The cause of one potential problem, the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, is being partly blamed on a lack of government regulation.

The cause of another potential headache, the expected closing of nearly 6,000 square miles of federal waters off Georgia and Florida to snapper and grouper fishing, is seen by some fishermen as an overreaction by government regulators.

Together, the two factors could help make North Carolina's seafood a very sought-after product this year.

But they also could hurt the industry if oil whipping around the gulf eventually impacts the state's fishing grounds or if boats pushed north by the fishing closure put more pressure on local fish stocks.

Read the complete story at Star News Online.

 

 

 

 

 

Determined to prevent a repeat of last year’s problems in Closed Area II, scallopers are signing up to voluntarily participate in a “yellowtail flounder by-catch avoidance system” for this year’s Nantucket Lightship Access Area fishery.

The system, which was developed at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth School for Marine Science and Technology (SMAST), relies on two-way communication. Scallopers fishing in the Lightship area will provide real-time yellowtail catch data through daily e-mail reports to SMAST. And, SMAST, in turn, will tabulate the information and e-mail the location of yellowtail hotspots back to the fleet.

“It’s a simple concept,” said Cate O’Keefe, program manager of SMAST’s Marine Fisheries Field Research Group.

Simple, maybe, but potentially crucial to the success of the Nantucket Lightship fishery, where scalloping activity will be shut down once the fleet reaches its 2010 yellowtail flounder allocation for the area of 47 metric tons (mt), which is equivalent to only 103,617 pounds.

Last summer, despite efforts by SMAST to widely broadcast the location of yellowtail concentrations in Closed Area II, scallopers quickly harvested their yellowtail allocation of 158.5 mt, and the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) shut down the area just 15 days into the fishery.

Read all about this from Commercial Fisheries News.

 

 

 

 

 

 

If you've eaten a fish caught off the northeastern coast of the United States  in the past few years, chances are good that it passed through the giant refrigerated warehouse of the Gloucester Seafood Display Auction in Gloucester, Massachusetts.

That's where I met Steve Dunn, a fish grader, one morning last April. At 4:00 a.m., the building, big enough to hold three basketball courts, was filled with row after row of black plastic bins called totes, each tagged with a lot number and filled with ice and about 100 pounds' worth of whole fish—cod, haddock, monkfish, skate, pollack, flounder, hake, and sole—that had been unloaded from three boats a few hours earlier.

Read the full story in Saveur Magazine

 

 

The Cap Log Group, LLC (CapLog) recently released two white papers examining the Northeast Multispecies (Groundfish) Fishery.

The first that finds that the number of active vessels in the New England groundfish fleet has been in decline since its peak in the 1980s. This paper suggests that, regardless of management measures, the regional fishing fleet "may be going through an adjustment process that will bring it into balance with available resources." However, it also argues that the sector structure may actually provide the Council, the regulators and the industry with more tools than they have had in the past for slowing this process of consolidation, if they so choose.

Read the paper

The second paper explores what factors will affect whether the fleet increases groundfish landings relative to previous years. It finds that the vessels that landed the most fish in 2007 hold higher amounts of abundant stocks and lesser amounts of limited stocks. It suggests that such vessels may be best positioned to increase landings in 2010 due to holdings of these abundant stocks. The paper identifies the home ports of New Bedford, Portland, Boston and Portsmouth as having the highest concentration of such vessels. It also lists the home ports (e.g., South Shore, Point Judith) with the highest concentration of vessels that may face the greatest difficulty in maintaining landings at previous levels.

Read the paper

For more information and to download the white papers, see <www.caploggroup.info/publications>.              

The Commercial Marine Expo, a major marine trade show, will open its doors Wednesday on State Pier after selling out its indoor exhibit space, a first for the 42-year-old show.

The two-day exhibition, formerly named the Fish Expo Atlantic, is being held in New Bedford for the first time after being located in Providence for a number of years.

"Most shows are off 20 to 30 percent, just part of the economy, so the fact we're doing as well as we are is a real testament to New Bedford as a location and (to) the name change," said Ted Hugger, the show director.

After the inside exhibit space — 185 booths — sold out by mid-May, the show's organizers added an additional eight booths immediately outside the main hall under a tent; all but one of those booths had sold by Thursday, said Hugger.

Companies "really, really like the idea of having the show on the waterfront," he said. "It's where they're comfortable doing business. It's where there's a lot of business being done already."

Read the complete story at The South Coast Today [subscription site]

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Long before there was a bank bailout on Wall Street, there was a boat bailout in the Bering Sea.

While the Bering Sea Aleutian Islands crab rationalization program is approaching its five-year review, the program implemented in 2005 is still under fire from the critics who first protested its approval in 2002, and the encouragement of catch shares as a fishery management tool is now the official position of the U.S. government.

Catch share programs allot quota shares as a percentage of the total harvest to individuals or corporate entities based on their participation history in a fishery. Advocates, who now include National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Director Jane Lubchenco, say the tactic promotes sustainability, economic efficiency and safety for the fleet while preventing overfishing.

Read the full story in the Alaska Journal of Commerce

 

 

Lawmakers in southern New Jersey want to give fishing operations the same legal protections as farms.

The Garden State has had a right-to-farm law on the books since 1983, giving farmers the presumptive right to go about their noisy and sometimes smelly work routinely without interference from neighbors.

A measure that passed the state Assembly last month would give similar protections to fishing ports, commercial docks and fish-processing plants.

Read the pressofAtlanticCity.com story in full

 

 

Florida fishing guides are reporting fishing better than last year but charter bookings are down.

One charter captain on Florida’s west coast said, “I’m running the same boats at the same location with the same marketing program as last year and with weather and fishing that was actually better this year than in May of 2009. I have had a significant decline in bookings for the month as compared to the same month last year.”

Florida would like to get the word out that there are fish to be caught, hotels for sleeping and restaurants for eating. All are open for business, but needing customers.

Read the Orlando Examiner story in full

 

 

It's significant to me whether or not I can pay this month's bills, not if the total landings for the month are up or down. The landings could be up for any given month, but if only 20 percent of the fleet had the "privilege" of partaking in those landings and the other 80 percent is going broke, is that a successful program?

Read the full letter to the editor in the Gloucester Times