State and Local

August 24, 2013 — Like their customers, most charter fishing boat captains on Long Island have no expectations of netting huge payoffs. Their ebbing industry has long struggled with strict regulations and rising gas and bait prices. Sandy gave it another beating. The storm destroyed supplies and curbed customers' spending and caused a total of $58 million in damages to New York's recreational fishing industry.

Charter captains are eligible for Small Business Association loans and as much as $50,000 each of the $20 million Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo allocated from federal grant money this May for the recovery of New York's fishing industry.

Fishing fleet owners applying for their share say the process is painfully bureaucratic and the funds are slow to arrive. While state officials say they are moving as quickly as possible, many charter captains are piloting this season without government aid, driven more by a dogged affinity for their avocation than a sense of practicality.

"We have a better chance of seeing God than seeing that money," said captain Mike Wasserman, whose boat docks in Freeport, a South Shore community hammered by Sandy.
Many fishing fleet owners have applied — with no result, they say — for grant money provided by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and distributed through New York State Homes and Community Renewal.

According to a state government official, applicants will receive assistance within a two-year disbursement period, on a timeline that accommodates their individual circumstances and the varying scope of their needs.

Read the full story at Newsday

August 20, 2013 — There’s something fishy going on at The Family Pantry.

The Harwich-based social services facility, which provides food and household goods to needy families across the Cape, is launching a pilot program that will expand its roster of edible necessities to include local fish, courtesy of the Chatham-based Cape Cod Commercial Fishermen’s Alliance.

The Palmer & Jane D. Davenport Foundation of South Yarmouth is funding the program.

Alliance fishermen caught 670 pounds of scallops and delivered them to Raw Seafoods in Fairhaven, where they were flash frozen and packaged for distribution at the pantry. The first shipment will be distributed Thursday, Aug. 22, to the pantry’s clients.

“I approached the alliance about helping with this idea,” said Mary Anderson, executive director of the pantry. “One of the challenges for us is having protein available because it’s expensive.”

Anderson said that alliance chief executive officer John Pappalardo and his staff did the lion’s share of “figuring out how to do it.”

“The distribution will be one pound per client, so if the client is an individual, that person would have a couple nights of fresh fish. If it’s a family it would be one meal,” said Anderson. The fish will kept frozen and be distributed every day the facility is open until it runs out. This first delivery, Anderson said, should last three to four weeks.

Read the full story at the Harwich Oracle

August 22, 2013 — The Commercial Fishermen’s Festival returns with tales of the sea, competitions, demonstrations, fresh seafood, vendors and more.

The festival runs Sept. 14 and 15, 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Saturday and 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Sunday at the Hammond Marina near Fort Stevens State Park.

Deadliest Catch

Always a crowd-pleaser, some of the crews from the Discovery Channel’s Deadliest Catch will be on hand. Johnathan Hillstrand, Captain of the Time Bandit, is scheduled to appear.
He’s attended several times, said Cyndi Mudge, founding organizer of the festival.

Also on hand from the Deadliest Catch will be Emmy Award winning producer and director of photography Todd Stanley. He’s been with the show since the first season and has braved more than a dozen trips out to the Bering Sea, according to his bio.

His work is also seen on shows including After the Catch, Hillstranded, Bering Sea Gold, Iditarod, Lobster Wars, Lobstermen, SOS Coast Guard, America’s Most Wanted and Inside Edition.

Read the full story at the Coast River Business Journal

August 22, 2013 —  With today’s tricky fishery laws, keeping the wrong fish out of your nets has become as big a challenge as finding the right fish in the first place. That’s where Kevin Dunn comes in.

He’s a commercial fisherman by day and net-maker on the side. His trawl nets can be found on boats from Kodiak, Alaska, to Monterrey, Calif., but one of his newer items is an excluder that keeps protected fish out of the net.

A catch share system that went into effect in 2011 means boats have a set limit of each species they can catch. Catch too much of a particular species and your boat can be placed in a maritime time-out.

Dunn skippers the Iron Lady, a trawler out of Warrenton.

“I have a menu of fish I can go out and catch … and one of the constraining species was halibut,” he said. “We can’t keep halibut; it’s a federal fish. Even if it’s dead. We have to throw it over.”

When the quota system was put in place, people came and discussed what had worked to keep halibut out of the nets in Alaska where there are a lot of halibut, Dunn said. One of the ways was excluders.

Read the full story at the Coast River Business Journal

August 22, 2013 — The decision of whether to release water from the Trinity River should be reached by around noon today, Judge Lawrence O'Neill announced after a full day of hearing testimonies on Wednesday from tribal officials, fishermen and federal scientists fighting to prevent a massive fish kill.

”The judge heard a very robust scientific defense on a very basic principle which is that fish need water,” Jan Hasselman, an Earthjustice attorney representing the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen's Associations, said. “He wanted to know if water flows affect fish disease, and he got a pretty resounding 'yes' from a pretty solid consensus of scientists.”

The federal Bureau of Reclamation had authorized the flows to begin Aug. 13, finding the supplemental flows were needed to protect an estimated 272,000 returning Chinook salmon — making it the second largest return on record.

The Fresno-based Westlands Water District and the Los Banos-based San Luis & Delta-Mendota Water Authority filed suit against the bureau, claiming the releases would decrease already low water allocations available to farmers for irrigation. San Joaquin Valley farmers also argue that the bureau did not have the authority to authorize the flows.

The same day the releases were slated to begin, O'Neill granted a temporary restraining order and set a hearing for tribal and government officials to show evidence on how the extra water would save fish.

Read the full story at the Eureka Times-Standard

August 17, 2013 — MOREHEAD CITY, N.C. — As the N.C. Marine Fisheries Commission prepares to review a petition for rulemaking that could ban shrimp trawling from the state’s coastal waters, it’s shrimp advisors are also looking at management options to reduce bycatch that could put more restrictions on where shrimpers can fish in coastal waters or on the gear they can use.

The MFC’s Shrimp Fishery Management Plan Advisory Committee received these management options from the N.C. Division of Marine Fisheries, the division of the state that enforces fisheries regulations and conducts fisheries-related research, at the regular committee meeting Thursday. No action was taken at the meeting, however; the committee will come up with its list of recommended options for the MFC at the Sept. 11 committee meeting.

A number of people who came to the meeting Thursday, including commercial and recreational fishermen, were opposed to additional restrictions on shrimp trawling. Fifteen people spoke during public comments, all of them opposed to one or more of the proposed management measures.

The committee is looking at these measures to try and reduce bycatch in the shrimp trawl fishery. According to data from the N.C. Division of Marine Fisheries, the state division that implements fisheries regulations and conducts fisheries-related studies, finfish are often caught in shrimp trawls, particularly spot, croaker and weakfish.

The committee is looking at a suite of options that include gear restrictions on trawl headropes – the line on a trawl that supports the mesh or webbing nearest the water surface that determines the net’s size, area restrictions and removal of certain trawls from the Recreational Commercial Gear License (RCGL). Among the measures under consideration are:

– Reducing the maximum headrope length for all internal coastal waters.

– Implementing a maximum number of rigs (i.e. a maximum number of trawl nets) in internal coastal waters.

– Implementing a maximum vessel size in internal coastal waters.

– Prohibiting all shrimp trawling in all internal coastal waters.

– Prohibiting all shrimp trawling in Pamlico Sound and its tributaries.

– Prohibiting all shrimp trawling in portions of Pamlico Sound to allow a buffer to sensitive habitats.

– Prohibiting all shrimp trawling in Special Secondary Nursery Areas.

– Prohibiting shrimp trawling in the Intracoastal waterway canal from Sunset Beach Beach Bridge to the S.C. state line, including Eastern Channel, lower Calabash River and Shallotte River.

– Eliminating otter trawls as an authorized gear of the RCGL.

Read the full story at the Carteret County News-Times

August 19, 2013 — The return of big chinook salmon to the Kuskokwim River of Western Alaska is over for the year, and some are wondering how much damage the cellphone might have done to a once-magnificent run of fish.

Subsistence fishermen in the Bethel area reported good fishing through the season, and most everyone seems happy with the fish they've put up for the winter. 

This season didn’t resemble the turmoil of 2012, when the Alaska Department of Fish and Game closed the fishery to protect the chinooks and a rebellion broke out along the river, only to be followed by a series of difficult trials in the spring. So a summer with people fishing and catching fish was a good thing. 

'Case of the missing salmon' 

There is only one small problem. They caught too many kings, as the chinooks are also called. The spawning goal for the Kusko will not be reached this year, state fisheries biologist Kevin Schaberg said.

In Bethel, the regional hub near the lower end of the 702-mile-long river 400 miles west of Anchorage, people are talking about this as "the case of the missing salmon."

Far upriver there is a different view. A resident of Sleetmute, some 305 miles upstream put bluntly:

"You want to know what the feeling is here? The feeling is they've been exterminated by the people in Bethel."

"The last I saw up here in the Takotna (River) there were only about 90 kings that showed up," added 77-year-old Ray Collins of McGrath. "Somehow, we've got to reduce the catch down in the lower river."

McGrath is about 520 miles upstream on the Kuskokwim, some 200 miles farther than Sleetmute. The returns of salmon to the Taknota River near McGrath were all but wiped out by miners trying to feed themselves and their dog teams during the Alaska Gold Rush, but they came back in later years and runs by the end of the 20th century were in the range of 400 to 700 fish per year.

Read the full story at the Alaska Dispatch 

 

August 19, 2013 — The highest ranking leader in the United States Coast Guard stopped into Unalaska, Alaska today to talk about Arctic strategy.

Commandant Admiral Robert Papp hosted a town hall meeting with city officials and leaders from the local Native corporation. It was the first time a sitting commandant has visited Unalaska.

Papp said that’s a nod to the strategic importance of the community — particularly, its port.

Unalaska has a deepwater port that’s ice-free all year. Even though the Coast Guard’s discussed building similar resources closer to the Arctic, in Nome or Kotzebue, Papp said that could be a long way off.

"The only deepwater port that we can rely upon is Dutch Harbor," Papp said. "That’s a long logistics line when you’re working up off Barrow, but most of my ships, we can’t get in any other place other than Dutch Harbor."

He urged city leaders to start promoting that fact now, before development takes off. He also encouraged them to keep an open mind when it comes to the kind of development that’s taking place up north.

Read the full story at KUCB 

August 19, 2013 — A fishing boat crashed into the shore of Atlantic City overnight, and the U.S. Coast Guard has launched an investigation into whether the captain was asleep at the wheel.

As Ileana Diaz of KYW-TV, Philadelphia reported Monday, the Coast Guard responded to the grounded vessel early Monday morning. The 56-foot Jessica Heather hit the shore shortly near The Pier Shops at Caesars, and was found around 2 a.m., the Coast Guard said.

“I came looking out; I was like, ‘Where is it going, the casino?’” a witness said.

The boat came pretty close to the casino, startling bystanders and capturing the attention of everyone around. The Jessica Heather was out at sea on a fishing trip, and the captain was headed back into Gardner’s Basin.

As the Press of Atlantic City reported, the Atlantic City Emergency Management Coordinator said a preliminary investigation led officials to believe the captain was asleep at the time of the incident.

The ship was on autopilot when she crashed into the sand just feet from Boardwalk Hall.

“Just missed the pier; that would have been devastating,” a witness said.

Fortunately, no one was hurt and nothing was hit. But the area has been catching the eye of just about everyone who walks by with a camera or an iPhone as the boat has been sitting there.

Read the full story at CBS New York 

 

Wilmington, N.C. — August 18, 2013 — The bays and sounds of North Carolina once yielded hundreds of thousands of bushels of oysters a year, before pollution, overfishing , disease and other factors caused their populations to decline.

Now a small group of scientists and growers is laying the groundwork to revive the industry by cultivating oysters in cages and bags. So far, oyster aquaculture has produced modest returns in North Carolina, accounting for less than 21 percent of a $2.9 million oyster industry.

But proponents look north to Virginia to show what’s possible. There, the state has invested heavily in developing strains of oysters that do well in aquaculture, and production from oyster growers has increased by more than 35 times since 2005.

“They’re going crazy with producing oysters right now,” said Marc Turano of N.C. State University and N.C. Sea Grant, an organization that supports coastal activity.

Nearly a dozen fish and shellfish are now raised through aquaculture in North Carolina, including trout, catfish, tilapia and even sturgeon. But unlike most other species, which are raised in tanks inside buildings, oysters are cultivated in the same public waters where wild shellfish live.

That means the benefits of oyster farming go beyond the farmers, who can attain year-round, large-scale production without relying on natural stocks that continue to dwindle. The oyster also helps the environment by filtering water, stabilizing shorelines and providing habitat for other commercial fisheries.

But oyster farmers face challenges, including storm damage, disease and theft. Meager state support to develop domesticated oyster lines and the interests of coastal landowners also put pressure on the industry.

Read the full story at the News Observer