State and Local

June 10, 2014 — As the Bering Sea's largest fishery opened on Tuesday, pollock fishermen were looking forward to a strong B season. They were also wading through a tide of criticism from rural users, who believe the industry's catching too much salmon.

Brent Paine represents more than 70 pollock trawlers for United Catcher Boats.

"I think a lot of the cooperatives are going to start early — like right now or this week — because of their concern for Chinook salmon bycatch," Paine says. "That tends to increase in the later part of the B season."

On top of that, many vessels will be using excluder nets to let salmon escape. And Paine says they'll all participate in the rolling hotspot closure program — avoiding areas where other trawlers have run into high concentrations of salmon.

But those tactics aren't enough to relieve tension between commercial and subsistence fishermen. It came to a head last week, when the North Pacific Fishery Management Council met in Nome.

"It was probably one of the toughest meetings I’ve attended in 20 years," Paine says.

Read the full story at KUCB

June 10, 2014 — Progress is on schedule with the Miami Harbor deepening and widening project, including the successful construction of artificial reefs and relocation of about a thousand healthy corals.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Jacksonville District, and its contractors are at the 35 percent completion mark, with more than one million cubic yards of material safely removed from the federal channel and the majority of mitigation construction completed.

Operations in the outer channel, which began in November 2013, calls for dredging approximately 2.1 million cubic yards of material from the harbor entrance channel, relocating coral, creating artificial reef, and constructing seagrass mitigation sites. The Corps estimates completing the outer channel construction by November 2014. This work will bring the entrance channel depth to 52 feet, plus one foot allowable over-depth, and widen the outermost portion of the entrance channel to 800 feet. Additionally, the project includes deepening and widening the inner channel, with full project completion scheduled for July 2015.

The Corps’ contractor, Great Lakes Dredge & Dock Company, are constructing approximately ten acres of artificial reefs and divers and scientists have already transplanted healthy corals greater than 25 centimeters and more than 700 healthy corals more than 10 centimeters in size from the project area to adjacent natural reef tracts and onto a portion of the newly created artificial reefs. Divers carefully harvested the corals from the channel’s edges, as collecting from the channel bottom was too dangerous in the busy port.

Read the full story form Dredging Today

June 9, 2014 — Salmon prices at wholesale show marked seasonal variations for both wild and farmed fish. It’s a pattern that has been tracked for decades by Urner Barry, the nation’s oldest commodity market watcher in business since 1895. The prices tend to decline through June, July, August and September and they begin rising again from November through the following April or May.

Two things drive the well-established pattern, said market expert John Sackton who publishes Seafood.com, an Urner-Barry partner.

“There’s a growth cycle for farmed salmon when they eat more and grow faster at certain times of the year, and so the harvests, particularly those that come into the US market from Chile for example, really peak in June, July and August, which are our summer months and the winter months in Chile,” Sackton explained. “Then there is the opening of the wild salmon season each summer and all of a sudden you get a lot more diversity and availability of Alaskan salmon.”

Sackton said buyers of both wild sockeyes and farmed salmon are starting to push back a bit on high prices. That’s likely reflected in the $3.50 advances for the first reds at Copper River in mid-May, which was down 50 cents from last year’s starting price.

A big wild card for North American salmon this summer is the projected 72 million sockeye return at British Columbia’s Fraser River. Sackton said Japanese buyers, who have been somewhat priced out of the sockeye market in recent years because there has been so much demand elsewhere and a drop in the yen has made it harder for them to buy, are hoping that a big run will open up more opportunities for them. Even though they’ve been buying less, Japan is still an important part of a three legged stool.

Read the full story at SitNews

June 9, 2014 — A proposal that would create a Commercial Fishing Resources Fund has made it into the budget proposal now being considered by legislators in Raleigh.

The plan, brought forward by the North Carolina Fisheries Association (NCFA), calls for a fund that would help the state meet requirements for the protection of sea turtles while also providing funds for projects to enhance the state’s commercial fishing industry.

NCFA president Jerry Schill said the plan as they presented it was included in the Senate version of the budget bill and now awaits consideration by the House of Representatives this week.

Schill was in Raleigh last week as the bill was reviewed on Senate side and will be back next week to continue meeting with legislators.

“There seems to be more questions about it on the House side so I’m not real sure how it will fare. I’m fairly confident it will make it in the budget,” he said.

If it goes in the House version, the question will be in what form.

“The Senate side has word for word what we proposed,” he said.

Read the full story from the Jacksonville Daily News

AVON, N.Y. — June 6, 2014 — New York state is taking steps to control the population of parasitic sea lampreys around Seneca Lake to protect other fish species.

The state's Department of Environmental Conservation says that next week it will begin treating tributaries of Seneca Lake with a chemical that kills lamprey larva but is harmless to most other aquatic wildlife.

When they grow up the lampreys become parasitic, preying on trout and salmon.

Read the full story by the Associated Press at The Wall Street Journal 

 

 

June 6, 2014 — While the Menhaden Chanteymen no longer perform as a group, locals and visitors will have a rare opportunity to hear from one of the group’s members about the Menhaden Fishing Industry and the people that worked it. Ernest Davis, one of the original Chanteymen, will make a presentation at the NC Maritime Museum in Beaufort on Friday, June 20 at 3:00 p.m. Mr. Davis’s appearance is being made possible by the Old North State Medical Society, Jacksonville Chapter.

The Menhaden Chanteymen consisted of retired African American fishermen who previously worked off the coast near Beaufort. The group, during their working years, used singing to synchronize the pulling of their nets of menhaden, or shad.

Read the full story from the Jacksonville Daily News

June 1, 2014 — Eels on a plane!

A Brooklyn businessman says the state unfairly snatched $60,000 worth of live baby eels he was flying from JFK Airport — and he’s ­suing to get them back.

Milton Sum paid a $291 fee to the US Fish and Wildlife Service so he could ship more than 81 pounds of baby eels to China on May 3, according to court documents.

Read the full story at the New York Post

June 6, 2014 — Starting today (June 6), the Wenatchee River will open to fishing for spring chinook salmon for the first time in nearly two decades.

With almost 10,000 hatchery chinook expected to return to the river this year, the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife (WDFW) announced openings on two sections of the river:

– From the Washington State Parks foot bridge at Confluence Park (just upstream from the confluence with the Columbia River) to 400 feet below Dryden Dam.

– From the confluence with Peshastin Creek to the downstream side of the confluence with the Icicle River and from that point to a marker on the opposite shore.

The fishery will be open seven days a week in both areas until further notice.

Anglers will have a daily limit of two hatchery spring chinook measuring at least 12 inches long and marked with a clipped adipose fin. Under statewide regulations, anglers may retain only one daily limit of salmon, regardless of how many waters they fish.

All wild chinook must immediately be released back into the water unharmed.

Read the full story at The Outdoor Wire

GLOUCESTER, Mass. — June 5, 2014 — The following was released by Maritime Gloucester:

Maritime Gloucester announced today a new interactive fisheries exhibit entitled “Think Tank,” thanks to a $25,000 technology grant from the Applied Materials Foundation, the philanthropic arm of Applied Materials, Inc. Applied Materials is the global leader in precision materials engineering solutions for the semiconductor, display, and solar industries, and Cape Ann, Massachusetts’s largest employer. The grant supports the acquisition of the new technology for Maritime Gloucester’s discovery center and educational facility.

With this generous gift, Maritime Gloucester has purchased a large, interactive, multi-touch table that is equipped with an integrated PC and supports animation, video, audio, photographic data and educational games. Community members, visitors and students will be able to play an interactive, animated game on the table in which they will seek to influence the size of a fishery population based on a variety of factors.  The game is part of a new exhibit called “Think Tank” that is designed to welcome all to the table to have a conversation about the challenges one faces when managing fisheries.” The exhibit was developed by Maritime Gloucester staff, its science consultant Dr. Jennifer Bender-Ferre, and its educational partner FableVision, a Boston-based media and  interactive development studio that specializes in story-based approaches to learning.
 
“The advanced technology this grant enables is a game changer for us,” noted executive director Thomas Balf. “It opens up new, exciting and interactive ways to engage audiences, present information and educate students and adults. It enhances our learning environment as a center for fun, highly engaging, and informative exhibits for anyone interested in maritime history and the future of our fisheries. We are grateful to Applied Materials and its Foundation in supporting this significant leap forward .”
 
The “Think Tank” exhibit opens on June 8th, World Oceans Day. Press and media are welcome to arrange for a visit to Maritime Gloucester which is open 7 days a week, 10:00 am to 6:00 pm.

View a PDF of the press release here 

 

YORK, Maine — June 4, 2014 — Local lobstermen are upset that a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) research vessel is back off of the coast of York mapping the depths for new nautical charts and inadvertently cutting their fishing lines and traps in the process.

This is the fourth time since 2009 that a NOAA ship has been working off the York coast, according to Mike Sinclair, president of the York Lobstermen's Association. Since that time, Sinclair estimates NOAA vessels have caused $25,000 in gear losses for the 50 lobstermen in the association and others who fish out of York Harbor who are not members.

What's upsetting lobstermen the most is NOAA has never notified them beforehand that a ship would be in their fishing waters, despite assurances given in March by the commanding officer of the present ship, the Ferdinand R. Hassler, according to Sinclair.

Commanding Officer Marc Moser told Sinclair in March he would notify the York harbormaster before the Ferdinand R. Hassler returned to the York coast, and that the ship would not be there until July, according to Sinclair.

“April 27 and the boat shows up here off of York, no notification, no e-mails,” said Sinclair, who serves on the Harbor Board that oversees the harbormaster's office. “This is the fourth time they've done this in York.”

Read the full story at the Portsmouth Herald