Management & Regulation

Fishing Vessels from New Bedford join a fleet of boats in protest of the Obama Administration's oversight of the fishing industry,

See the photo gallery from The Standard Times.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

August 26, 2010 – Last week, the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council (MAFMC) voted to increase the total allowable catch of summer flounder for 2011 to 33.95 million pounds.

While specific size, season and bag limits for recreational anglers won't be determined until sometime in November, the increase is obviously good news for the local fishing community and a sure sign that the stock is on its way to being rebuilt.

This positive development is due in part to the fact that when the Magnuson-Stevens Act was reauthorized by Congress in 2006, lawmakers from New Jersey and New York successfully fought to include a provision to extend the rebuilding timeframe for summer flounder by an additional three years. Initially, the deadline was 2010. It also showed that the fishery could be put on the path to recovery without shutting it down.

Read the complete story form The Asbury Park Press.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

August 27, 2010 – A fleet of more than 14 fishing boats, mostly from New Bedford, staged a protest in the waters off Vineyard Haven yesterday afternoon to make a statement about fishery restrictions while President Obama is visiting the Vineyard.

“Fishermen have gone through a lot of pain. We support the rebuilding and don’t believe in overfishing. We want an increase in catch limits. We are not asking to catch more than biologically is allowed . . . We are trying to get the attention of the President, that this is an issue of a lack of balance,” declared Jackie Odell, executive director of the Northeast Seafood Coalition.

The coalition, made up principally of Gloucester and New Bedford commercial fishermen, ran a full-page advertisement in the Gazette on Tuesday this week.

“My business is only one of hundreds facing extinction . . . Is this the way to rebuild our storied, centuries-old groundfish fishery?” wrote Capt. Russell Sherman in a letter that was the centerpiece of the advertisement.

Read the complete story from The Vineyard Gazette.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Having successfully shut down an estimated 23,000 American oil drilling jobs off the Gulf Coast, citing possible environmental concerns, the Obama administration is now moving on New England fishermen.

It's rained during much of Obama's latest vacation there. And now the Democratic president is scheduled to be confronted with a flotilla of protesters today off his private estate on the souvenir-laden island of Martha's Vineyard.

"They want to close the fisheries into 'commodities markets' where the government essentially licenses fishermen and then allocates the catch based on a predetermined distribution plan. The 'commodities markets' will kill many fishing-based jobs and essentially turn fishermen into government employees, and they’re not happy about it."

Lubchenco, a former official with the Environmental Defense Fund, has said that her policy goal is to eliminate "a significant fraction of the vessels."

Negotiations between Lubchenco and congressional delegations from New England, an important region within Obama's political base, have broken down.

Read the complete story from The Los Angeles Times.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sea-going protesters have set a course for the president’s vacation spot on Martha’s Vineyard with a flotilla that keeps growing – and yesterday got a boost from Bay State Sen. Scott Brown.

Bay State Sen. John Kerry gave the protest his backing Tuesday.

Yesterday, Brown said, “I’ve met with fishermen a couple of times and their concerns are real. Those are real jobs, not just fishing jobs.”

Brown said of Obama’s fishing policies, “I have no problem with him protecting species that need to be protected. But there’s been very little flexibility with (regulators) when they get new information that they’re wrong.”

“It’s gotten a lot bigger,” said Richard Canastra, co-owner of the New Bedford and Boston Seafood Display Auction, one of many angry about fishing limits. “It’s crazy. My phone hasn’t stopped ringing.”

He said as many as 15 large vessels will leave from New Bedford. More are expected from Gloucester and ports in Rhode Island, New York and New Jersey, according to Tina Jackson of the American Alliance of Fishermen.  

Read the story in full from The Boston Herald.                                

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

NEW BEDFORD — Once overfished, spiny dogfish are now so plentiful in the waters of New England and the Mid-Atlantic that fishermen have reached the current catch limit after three months instead of six.

That triggered an announcement Wednesday by Patricia Kurkel, regional administrator of the National Marine Fisheries Service, that the fishery for dogfish will close at midnight Friday and stay closed until the second half of the regulatory year starts in November.

Recovery efforts for the small shark have been so successful that dogfish have become a nuisance, say fishermen and scientists.

They are by far the most abundant species to be brought up by NOAA's research nets, said Dr. Brian Rothschild, the dean emeritus of the UMass School of Marine Science and Technology. Twenty times as much dogfish by weight was recorded compared to the next most abundant species, redfish, he said.

Rothschild, who chairs the mayor's fishery advisory committee, remarked, "One has to wonder about an ecosystem that has such a dominant number of small sharks."

Read the complete story from The South Coast Today.

 

 

 

 

 

Those who are not able to attend the Protest on the Vineyard on August 26, but would like to join in spirit are welcome to sign this petition.

Our fisheries are in better shape than they have been since well before the passage of the Magnuson Act in 1976 and every fisherman worthy of the name is fully committed to sustainability, but our oldest and busiest fishing ports and the fishing communities that have nourished them and held them together for generations are in shambles. Tens of thousands of fishermen and others in fishing dependent businesses – both recreational and commercial – are out of work or are just barely holding on financially. Many more thousands of recreational fishermen have given up the sport because of too stringent regulations. And what is the response of Ms. Lubchenco? Pushing catch shares, a form of management that everyone agrees means fewer boats and fewer jobs, making cuts in the budgets of research programs that will prove that just about all of our fisheries are in good to excellent shape, and protecting personnel who were responsible for an out-of-control enforcement program that terrorized and demonized fishermen and only came to notice due to overwhelming political pressure and a resultant investigation by the Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Commerce.

And from the very beginning of the catastrophe which has yet to be permanently fixed in the Gulf of Mexico, she has done everything in her power to minimize the perceptions of the public regarding the seriousness of the impacts of the released oil and dispersants. From her complete lack of follow-up on her hyper-critical letter to the Minerals Management Service six months before the blow-out thru her denying the existence of the huge sub-surface oil/dispersant plumes to her stating at a White House media briefing in early August “now let’s say for example that a fish is eating some of these smaller creatures that had oil in them. That fish will degrade that oil and process it naturally and so it doesn’t bio-accumulate so it’s not a situation where we need to be concerned about,” she has downplayed the impacts of the devastation inflicted on the residents of the Gulf Coast states and on the ecology of the Gulf. Because her remarks are now part of the public record, and because they were placed there by the head of the federal ocean agency, how many billions of dollars in potential claims and settlements are they going to cost the tens of thousands of damaged individuals and businesses? 

Sign the petition from the official website.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Massachusetts fishermen are unhappy with recent federal regulations placed on the industry, and they're taking their frustrations right to the top.

A protest is planned for Thursday on Martha's Vineyard, the same place where the President and the first family are currently vacationing.

ABC6 Reporter John Guice caught up with some local fisherman, in today's "Voice of the People" report…

Watch the video from WLNE ABC New Channel 6.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Richard Canastra, the owner of the "Whaling City Seafood Display Auction," stopped by our ABC6 Studios, to talk about how the new fishing regulations are impacting the industry…

See the video from WLNE ABC News Channel 6.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

NEW BEDFORD, MA – August 24, 2010 – A brutal version of economic Darwinism pushed by the Obama administration is quickly transforming the New England groundfishery, according to assessments from fishing industry leaders presented here Tuesday.

Landing figures for the first quarter of the fishing year suggest a story of successfully managed conservation with rising revenues — just what the federal government had hoped for in the rollout of its catch share program.

But industry reports from Gloucester, Rhode Island and New Bedford, the nation's No. 1 port in landings' dollar value, Tuesday described the unsettling underside of the catch share experience, with a few big winners and many little losers already emerging.

Read the story in full from the Gloucester Times.