Enforcement

EASTON, Md. — January 17, 2014 — One of the largest “oyster busts” in Maryland in recent years unfolded in the Easton Walmart parking lot Wednesday evening, Jan. 15.

According to a news release, the Maryland Natural Resources Police arrested a Virginia truck driver and seized a tractor-trailer filled with oysters, many of them undersized.

Rhoderick J. Newman, 66, of Tappahannock, was charged with one count of attempting to transport undersized oysters out of state andfive counts of possession of undersized and unculled oysters. The truck, reportedly owned by Cowart Seafood Corp., of Lottsburg, Va., is being held in an NRP impoundment lot.

Acting on a tip, officers pulled over the truck, which was westbound on U.S. 50 through town. The truck was directed to the far end of the Walmart parking lot for inspection.

According to the news release, officers found that the truck contained 188 bushels of oysters. Working by the light of their vehicle headlights, they counted and measured every oyster, an operation that lasted more than six hours.

Read the full story at the Easton Star Democrat

December 16, 2013 — A state board has fined Greenpeace $15,000 for traveling through Alaskan waters without a marine pilot.

The violation occurred during Greenpeace’s “Save the Arctic” tour to protest Shell’s oil exploration in July 2012.

Greenpeace had sent the Esperanza, their 237-foot, Dutch-flagged research vessel. The Esperanza were supposed to study corals and sealife in the Beaufort and Chukchi seas.

Along the way, the vessel stopped into a few Alaskan towns. That’s where it ran into trouble.

Crystal Dooley is a coordinator for the Alaska Board of Marine Pilots. She says that for large, foreign vessels, "pilotage is compulsory at all entrances from seaward to Alaska’s bays, sounds, rivers, straits, inlets, harbors, ports, or other estuaries or passages within three nautical miles of the state's coastline."

Read the full story at KUCB

SEAFOOD.COM by John Sackton — December 12, 2013 — D.C. Air & Seafood Inc., a Maine wholesaler owned by Christopher Byers, pled guilty in federal court to a conspiracy to illegally harvest scallops from a closed area. In the plea, the Maine seafood wholesaler, provided documents showing it failed to report landings of about 79,666 pounds of scallops.

As part of its plea agreement, D.C. Air & Seafood agreed to pay $520,371 in restitution to the United States, and to be placed on probation for five years. The company will also be barred from the scallop industry during that time.  This is the maximum penalty sought in the original indictment.

Also specific individuals were charged:  Christopher Byers, 41, of Winter Harbor, Maine, the owner of D.C. Air & Seafood; fishermen George Bamford, 39, of Harrington, Maine; Robert E. Hersey Jr., 43, of Harpswell, Maine; Daniel Mahoney, 50, of Harrington, Maine; and Michael McKenna, 37, of Steuben, Maine.

Christopher Bays also pleaded guilty to separate charging documents alleging they’d conspired with each other and the six fishing boat operators to prepare false reports to hide the over-harvesting, said U.S. Attorney Paul Fishman. Authorities said the six boat operators – several of whom are from Maine – have previously pleaded guilty to charges in the case and await sentencing.

According to the complaint, from March 2007 through March 2008, Byers owned a wholesale seafood business that purchased Atlantic Sea Scallops harvested by federally permitted vessels in the Elephant Trunk Access Area. The Elephant Trunk Access Area is a large sea scallop fishing ground off the mid-Atlantic coast, which is managed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and which was open to limited scallop fishing by federally permitted vessels for two-week periods in March of 2007 and 2008. During those periods, individual vessels were restricted to harvesting no more than 400 pounds of scallops per vessel per trip.

Vessels operated by Bamford, Hersey, Mahoney and McKenna harvested thousands of pounds of scallops over the legal limit during the two-week periods in 2007 and 2008 for purchase by D.C. Air & Seafood. The scallops were off-loaded in Atlantic City, N.J. from the fishing vessels to trucks used by Byers and D.C. Air & Seafood.

The conspirators filed false fishing vessel trip reports showing the amount of scallops harvested were 400 lbs or less.  In addition, DC Air & Seafood had hidden compartments built into several of the scallop vessels to hide the thousands of pounds of additional scallops.

Under the conspiracy count  Byers faces a maximum potential penalty of five years in prison and a $250,000 fine, when he is sentenced in March, authorities said.

The maximum penalty for the company is up to five years of probation and a fine in an amount that is the greater of $500,000 or twice the gross gain, which is what was agreed to in the guilty plea.

This story originally appeared on Seafood.com, a subscription site. It has been reprinted with permission.

View the press release from the New Jersey District Attorney's office

 

 

HONOLULU — December 6, 2013 — A fishing boat captain has pleaded guilty to trying to sell shark fins to a Honolulu hotel restaurant.

Matthew Brian Case says he finned dead sharks while at sea, with the hopes of selling them to earn extra money for his crew.

Prosecutors say he concealed about 100 shark fins in a hidden compartment of the boat.

Read the full story by the Associated Press at the Huffington Post 

CHATHAM, Mass. — October 24, 2013 — When the 45-foot vessel the Lori B departs here for windy, 30-hour monk-fishing voyages, Nick Muto knows he will be sharing cramped quarters with his crew, the haul and often an unwelcome guest: a federally mandated observer who makes sure legal catch limits aren't exceeded.

As the oversight program has grown in tandem with the government's use of quotas to prevent overfishing, so has friction between fleets and observers, from Cape Cod to Alaska. That has led to a push by crews and their advocates to replace human observers with cameras, an option regulators are exploring.

"We don't want them on the boat. We feel as though they're out there to kind of shut us down," said Mr. Muto, a burly crew captain and the chairman of the Cape Cod Commercial Fishermen's Alliance. Saying cameras would be more reliable and cause less tension, he described seasick observers who stayed in their bunks and others who "don't give us any respect that we know what we're doing."

Observers, often young biology graduates who work for private companies that contract with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, say they are well trained and necessary for thwarting illegal overfishing. They earn between $13 and $17 an hour in a job with high turnover.

"It's almost like hazing; they're going to make your life as hard as possible," 28-year-old Christopher Stump said of the crews he worked with off Gloucester, Mass. The Arizona native entered the field after attending a marine-technician program in Hawaii, where he works as an observer after a stint in the Northeast.

Read the full story at The Wall Street Journal 

 

 

The following was relased by the New York Department of Environmental Conservation:

A group of four fishermen are facing felony charges after they were caught by New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) Officers with 74 striped bass that they had allegedly illegally speared in waters off Valiant Rock in Block Island Sound, Commissioner Joe Martens announced today.

In late August, the Environmental Conservation Officers (ECOs) were on a routine patrol from Shinnecock to Fishers Island when they observed three divers with spear guns in hand boarding the fishing vessel Sea Spearit at Valiant Rock in a shallow area East of Gull Island. Upon boarding the vessel, operated by Christopher R. Miller of Montauk, the ECOs found both tagged striped bass and untagged striped bass in coolers. Some of the tagged fish bore the tags belonging to Miller; others were tagged with tags belonging to Miller's sister, Tanya J. Miller, who was not present on the ship.

All the fish had spear wounds evident in their gill areas. New York State Environmental Conservation Law forbids the taking of striped bass for commercial purposes by spear due to the fact there is a slot size limit that is hard to determine until the fish are actually in hand, and that this is considered a much easier way to secure a fish whose populations have to be managed in order to ensure the continued viability of the fishing stock.

Read the full press release at The Post-Standard

 

October 11, 2013 — BOSTON — A Coast Guard Station Menemsha crew issued a violation to a fishing vessel for its illegal catch, Friday at approximately 8 a.m.

he New Bedford-based, 85-foot scallop fishing vessel was loaded with more than 50 bushels of in-shell scallops within a line of demarcation in Buzzards Bay, Mass. The time outside the line of demarcation counts against a vessel's days at sea; vessels shucking more than the permitted 50 bushels of scallops inside the line creates a competitive advantage by increasing their catch while not counting against their days at sea.

At the time of the boarding, the vessel was carrying well in excess of the 50 bushels permitted for the trip. Law enforcement authorities are still determining an exact number.

Station Menemsha and other regional Coast Guard units conduct fishery boardings on a regular basis in coordination with partner law enforcement agencies and Coast Guard Air Station Cape Cod.

The Coast Guard forwards violations of fishery regulations to NOAA's Office of Law Enforcement for prosecution.

Coast Guard units throughout the Northeast are responsible for protecting living marine resources in one of the nation's most economically significant fishing regions. Crews throughout the region conduct almost 2,000 total boardings each year, and in addition to protecting the resource for future generations, they also maintain an even level for all commercial fishermen.

Read the release from the US Coast Guard

ROCKPORT, Mass.,– September 4, 2013 — As the summer season is winding down, two West Roxbury men are facing up to multiple charges for attempting to illegally take home some 30 Rockport summer staples — lobsters.

Igor Moochnick, 39, is facing 12 counts of illegally possessing small lobsters, while Pioter Epshtein, 42, is facing 18 counts of the same charge, with each illegal lobster amounting to a single charge.

Rockport Police said Tuesday the men are also facing charges because their diving equipment was not properly marked, and they more than 100 feet from their diving marker.

The incident started Monday — Labor Day — when divers on Old Garden Beach alerted a lifeguard of suspicious activity. The lifeguard then alerted police, as well as the shellfish constables and Harbormasters Scott Story and Rosemary Lesch.

The local divers — with the North Shore Frogmen, a diving club that has been active in the area since 1958 — said they noticed something fishy while preparing for a dive at about 10:45 a.m.

Vinny Egizi, one of four divers out that day and the Frogmen’s organizational treasurer, said he noticed that the two men were handling a lot of lobsters.

“If I get two or three lobsters a day, I’m pretty pleased,” he said.

Scuba divers can obtain lobster permits, but only lobsters of a certain size can be taken out of the water and kept.

Read the full story at the Gloucester Daily Times 

 

SAN FRANCISCO — August 27, 2013 — Catching undersize Dungeness crabs is a crime, and it's no defense to claim you didn't know they were too small. But it's not much of a crime, a San Francisco appellate panel said, and the penalty must be modest as well – not a fine that ate up a commercial fisherman's profit for the day.

In a ruling published Friday as a precedent for future cases, the Appellate Division of San Francisco Superior Court upheld Tim Estes' misdemeanor conviction for hauling in too many crabs below the legal minimum size, but overturned a judge's $47,000 forfeiture order and said Estes must be resentenced.

Estes, a Fort Bragg (Mendocino County) resident, has operated a crab boat for more than 20 years, piloting the vessel and directing placement of crab pots but leaving the measurement of crabs to his crew.

After taking in about 44,000 pounds of Dungeness crabs in offshore waters one day in November 2010, he was told by state Fish and Game wardens that some appeared to be below the minimum breadth of 6 1/4 inches, a level set by state law to help preserve the species.

After measurements in which Estes cooperated, the wardens found that crabs weighing 991 pounds, or 2.2 percent of the total, were undersize, and returned them to San Francisco Bay. Estes was charged with violating a law against catching more than 1 percent undersize crabs in any single haul.

Read the full story at the San Francisco Chronicle

August 16, 2013 — A fisherman who tried to illegally sell a giant bluefin tuna that he'd caught while daytime swordfishing off South Florida this past June and the person who was given the tuna to sell have been assessed heavy fines for their transgressions.

NOAA Fisheries issued civil violations totaling $27,500 to the two men.

That's some expensive sushi.

A Notice of Violation and Assessment of Administrative Penalty was sent to David Fidel, of Boynton Beach, who was fined $12,500 for violating the federal Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act "by selling or transferring or attempting to sell or transfer, for commercial purposes, an Atlantic tuna, shark or swordfish other than to a dealer that has a valid dealer permit.

"Specifically, on or about June 3, 2013, [Fidel] transferred a giant Atlantic Bluefin tuna landed on board his vessel to a person that did not have a valid dealer permit issued under [Magnuson-Stevens Act regulations] for commercial purposes.

"Moreover, when the giant Atlantic Bluefin tuna was landed aboard [Fidel's] vessel, [Fidel] had an Atlantic Highly Migratory Species Angling Permit, which precludes the sale or transfer of recreationally caught Atlantic Bluefin tuna for commercial purposes."

Read the full story at the Sun Sentinel