State and Local

GALLOWAY TOWNSHIP, N.J. — March 8, 2013 — Summer flounder fishermen will lose 25 fishing days this year under regulations approved unanimously Thursday by the New Jersey Marine Fisheries Council.

The council had six options to choose from to meet a reduction plan mandated by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, or ASMFC, and chose the one that won the most support in a packed meeting room at the Atlantic County Library.

The option chosen keeps the daily bag limit of five fish per day and the minimum fish size of 17.5 inches that were in place last year. It shortens the season by 13 days in May and 12 days in September.

Last year’s season ran from May 5 to Sept. 28, a total of 147 days. Council chose a season from May 18 to Sept. 16, for 122 days.

Anglers left with some hope that days could be added later and were urged to return for the council’s May meeting. The ASMFC is considering a plan to allow states that are not using their whole flounder quota to put the extra fish in a pool from which other states could draw. There will be a public hearing on the plan, but a date has not been set.

“That’s a voluntary contribution program by other states. I’m not too sure how many we’ll get,” Council Chairman Dick Herb said.

The ASMFC is blaming a decline in spawning stock for lowering the East Coast flounder harvest from 21.22 million pounds last year to 19.07 million pounds. Cuts are different for each state, and New Jersey had the highest at more than 15 percent. New York was second at 14 percent.

 

Read the full article at The Press of Atlantic City

 

 

AUGUSTA, Maine — March 7, 2013 —  Fearing back-to-back seasons of record landings but diminished prices, a majority of lobstermen, processors and dealers told lawmakers Wednesday that they're willing to pay more to do their jobs if the state will spend more marketing its trademark product.

Their message was aimed at the Legislature's Marine Resources Committee, which is considering a bill to expand marketing of Maine lobsters by increasing surcharges on the licenses of lobstermen and dealers.

The bill, sponsored by Rep. Chuck Kruger, D-Thomaston, is the result of numerous meetings of industry representatives during a difficult 2012 season, in which lobstermen hauled more crustaceans than the year before but saw demand and prices fall.

The proposal, designed to expand the market for Maine lobster, is supported by the Department of Marine Resources. It restructures the duties and composition of the Legislature-created Lobster Promotion Council to improve the focus of the agency's marketing mission.

The council already collects surcharges from lobster license holders, crab fishermen, dealers and industry related services. But supporters of Kruger's bill argue that the council's current budget isn't sufficient to expand into other markets.

This year's marketing budget is about $380,000. Kruger's bill would increase the budget to $1 million in 2014, $2 million in 2015 and $3 million in 2016 through step increases in license surcharges.

Dealers and lobstermen testified in favor of the bill on Wednesday. While some lamented the steep increases in surcharges, other said it was necessary.

 

Read the full story from the Portland Press Herald

 

 

AUGUSTA, Maine — March 6, 2013 — The top fisheries regulator in Maine told legislators Wednesday that the state would like to limit the four native Indian tribes in the state to 100 total elver fishing licenses for this year — less than half of the total amount that one tribe issued to its members in 2012.

Leaders of the Passamaquoddy Tribe, which issued more than 200 licenses to its members last spring, told the Legislature’s Marine Resources Committee that they oppose this limit. Clayton Cleaves, chief of the Passamaquoddy Tribe at Pleasant Point, urged the committee on Wednesday to delay implementing any limits on tribal elver licenses until 2014, after the 2013 elver fishing season.

“We need more time,” Cleaves told the committee during a packed public hearing in Augusta. “This is a very delicate and serious matter.”

At issue is the state’s newly lucrative elver fishery , which over the past two years has become one of the most valuable commercial fisheries in Maine, second only to the state’s $339 million lobster industry.

As the average price elver fishermen have earned has shot up from around $188 per pound three years ago to nearly $2,000 per pound last year , people have clamored for ways to get into the fishery. Last month, Maine Department of Marine Resources held a lottery for elver licenses that were not renewed by prior license holders. Only four licenses were available , yet more than 5,000 people applied for the chance to win a license.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is considering listing American eels under the Endangered Species Act, which has made DMR officials wary about increasing the number of licenses or fishing gear it permits in the fishery. Since 2006, the state has issued only 407 elver licenses statewide.

But last spring, more than six weeks into the 10-week elver season, the Passamaquoddy Tribe caught state officials and others off guard when it issued 236 licenses to its members. Two other Native American groups in Maine — the Penobscots and Micmacs — each are limited by state law to issuing eight elver licenses a year, but the Passamaquoddies face no such legal limit.

Before 2012, the tribe issued only a handful of licenses to its members, DMR Commissioner Pat Keliher told the committee.

Since the 2012 season closed at the end of May, DMR and Passamaquoddy officials have been in discussions to see if they might reach a compromise on the maximum number of licenses the tribe can issue each year. DMR officials introduced a bill, LD 451, to also limit the tribe to eight licenses but have publicly acknowledged while in negotiations with tribal officials that eight was too few.

On Wednesday, during a public hearing on LD 451, Keliher told legislators that DMR would like to limit each of the four recognized native tribes in Maine to 25 licenses apiece, including the Maliseets, who currently do not have authority to issue any elver licenses.

He said that if the tribes would like, they can work out among themselves how much of those 100 total licenses each tribe gets, but that DMR wants an overall limit of 100 licenses for the four tribes.

 

Read the full story at Bangor Daily News

 

 

March 6, 2013 — Salting was the form of fish preservation for eons.

But small scale ice-making for the Gloucester fishing fleet was underway long before Nathaniel Webster constructed an earthen dam to form Webster’s Pond in 1848, and that marked the real start of fish ice manufacturing, according to a presentation by Scott Memhard at the Cape Ann Historical Museum last October.

His research was abetted by his wife, Martha Oaks, curator of the museum. Indeed, Memhard met Oaks while doing research into the field that he and his father Dick Memhard had bought into in 1983.

Webster and his son were visionaries, perceiving that ice would be the essential bedding for the great fishing industry growing in Gloucester

The second great ice family of Gloucester were brothers William and Francis Homans, who in 1878 and at great risk, invested more than $75,000 to create an artificial, 32-acre lake in West Gloucester, named Fernwood, that had a capacity of producing 38,000 tons of cut ice.

Other ice makers were threatened by the size and scope of Homans’ great innovation, and the lake was sabotaged immediately, and other ice houses, on Cape Pond, Day’s Pond and Niles’ Pond were burned. But Fernwood Lake and Cape Pond Ice Co., which cut from the pond in Rockport to the east of Route 127 today, where the commuter rail tracks come close to the highway, persevered.

 

Read the full story at the Gloucester Times

 

 

March 6, 2013 — Some of the city's biggest name chefs, including Daniel Boulud, Jean-Georges Vongerichten and Bill Telepan, are throwing their clout behind an effort to preserve the old Fulton Fish Market at the South Street Seaport to prevent developers from tearing it down. The land and buildings there are owned by the city.

The chefs, 10 of whom appear in a video expressing support for a public food market, say they would like to see the fish market's Tin Building and New Market Building transformed into a food bazaar where they could shop for their restaurants and the public could shop, too. The fish market itself moved to the Bronx in 2005.

A grassroots organization, Save our Seaport, and the New Amsterdam Market, which operates a seasonal weekly food market at the Seaport, have launched a petition they will submit to the City Council later this month.

"We are requesting of the City Council that the rezoning of the area preserve the fish market as a public market site," said Robert LaValva, founder and president of New Amsterdam Market.
Mr. LaValva enlisted the help of a prominent restaurant public relations firm, Bullfrog & Baum, which is working pro bono for the group and produced the video of 10 celebrity chefs, which appears on New Amsterdam Market's website.

The chefs encourage the public to sign the petition, for which Mr. LaValva hopes to secure 10,000 signatures by the end of the month.

 

Read the full story here

 

 

ROCKPORT, Maine — March 3, 2013 — After holding more than a dozen meetings along the Maine coast in January, state fishery officials have decided not to pursue any new management measures for Maine’s most valuable fishery.

At the behest of the Legislature, the Maine Department of Marine Resources held the meetings to find out whether fishermen might support new rules aimed at improving the long-term viability of Maine’s $339 million lobster industry. Creating a tiered licensing system that could shorten wait periods to get into the industry and short-term measures that could help prevent a repeat of last year’s soft-shell glut were among the ideas discussed at the meetings.

On Saturday, at the annual Maine Fishermen’s Forum in Rockport, DMR Commissioner Patrick Keliher said the department has decided against pursuing any of the ideas that were floated. All of the proposals that were discussed pose complications that would lead to other problems, he said.

“We’re not going to pursue anything at this time,” Keliher said to a packed room of more than 100 people, most of them fishermen.

One of the issues that lobstermen faced last year was an unseasonal abundance of lobsters that were caught in spring and early summer, at a time of year when the North American lobster distribution network is ill-prepared for handling large volumes of live lobster from Maine. The timing of the supply temporarily pushed prices that Maine fishermen earned for their catch to below $2 per pound, the lowest level they had encountered in decades.

Scientists and industry officials have said that warmer-than-normal water temperatures in the Gulf of Maine caused lobsters to shed their shells earlier in the year than expected and contributed to the high numbers of lobsters that were caught. A record amount of more than 126 million pounds of lobster were caught in Maine in 2012, and warm water temperatures this winter suggest there will be an early molt and high landings again this year, according to industry officials.

 

Read the full story at the Bangor Daily News

 

 

CRANSTON, R.I. — March 1, 2013 — To promote the fact that the fishing, hospitality and tourism industries are crucial to the economy, Representative McNamara has introduced legislation to declare calamari the “official state appetizer.”

Rhode Island-style calamari is on menus of restaurants far and wide, as Rep. Joseph M. McNamara recently discovered during a visit to New Hampshire. It’s been found on the menus of restaurants in southern California.

“Rhode Island style” means the crispy fried rings and tentacles are tossed with thin loops of pickled hot peppers.

The fact that “Rhode Island style” calamari has such broad appeal may be interesting, but it shouldn’t be surprising that squid caught in Rhode Island, however it is prepared, is immensely popular – Rhode Island has the largest squid-fishing fleet on the East Coast. And with a take of nearly 7 million pounds a year, Rhode Island accounts for about 54 percent of squid landings in the Northeast.

Squid is to Rhode Island what lobster is to Maine, or cod to Massachusetts.

“Some much of what we hear or read about Rhode Island is negative,” said Representative McNamara (D-Dist. 19, Warwick, Cranston). “We need to start promoting the good and wonderful things about our state. And while squid may make some people squeamish, we should be boasting about the fact that Rhode Island is the east coast capital of squid, and that our style of preparing it is being used by chef across the country. Even Guy Fieri has a recipe for it.”

 

Read the full story by the Cranston Patch

WASHINGTON — March 1, 2013 — The U.S. Department of Commerce has awarded a $2.9 million U.S. Economic Development Administration grant to the R.I. Department of Environmental Management to “rehabilitate critical infrastructure” at the port of Galilee, lawmakers announced Friday.

U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Economic Development Matt Erskine joined Gov. Lincoln D. Chafee, U.S. Sens. Jack Reed and Sheldon Whitehouse and U.S. Rep. James R. Langevin in Narragansett Friday to make the announcement.

In a statement, Erskine said that the EDA grant would help “ensure the continued economic viability of Rhode Island’s fishing industry” as well as spur economic development, tourism and new investments in the Narragansett area.

 

Read the full story at Providence Business News

 

 

ALBANY, N.Y. — February 26, 2013 — Governor Andrew M. Cuomo today announced that the Department of Environmental Conservation and the Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation will hold their annual Spring Family Fishing Festival on Saturday, April 13.

Governor Cuomo introduced the initiative in his 30-day Executive Budget amendments to support tourism and benefit sportsmen and sportswomen throughout the state. Additional sponsors for the fishing festival include the Natural Heritage Trust, the Fisherman Magazine, Dick’s Sporting Goods, and radio stations 106.1 WBLI and 102.3 WBAB.

 
“Freshwater fishing is an activity that the whole family can enjoy, especially on Long Island,” Governor Cuomo said. “The spring fishing festival at Belmont Lake State Park is an excellent way to kick off the fishing season and introduce the whole family to the sport with no license needed to participate. At this festival, you can learn about freshwater fishing opportunities on Long Island and local fishing clubs, try your hand at fishing for trout, and the kids can participate in the casting contest and other fun activities.”

 
This year, Governor Cuomo’s Executive Budget proposes the New York Open for Fishing and Hunting initiative to streamline hunting and fishing licenses and reduce fees to support tourism opportunities and benefit sportsmen and sportswomen throughout the state. The plan would reduce fees paid by hundreds of thousands of hunters, anglers and trappers while maintaining support for New York’s fish and wildlife programs.

 

Read the full announcement 

March 1, 2013 — The following was released by the Alabama Seafood Marketing Commission

MOBILE, Ala. — This coming Monday and Tuesday, Mar. 4 and 5, more than 100 stakeholders from the Alabama Gulf Seafood industry will gather at the Mobile Convention Center with a singular goal in mind – to increase demand regionally, nationally and internationally, for seafood sourced from Alabama’s Gulf waters.

Governor Bentley and Alabama Department of Agriculture & Industries Commissioner John McMillan and Alabama Department of Conservation & Natural Resources Commissioner Gunter Guy along with other local elected officials will formally kick off the program with an opening address from 8:30 to 9:30 a.m. at the Mobile Convention Center on March 5.

“We see a limitless future for our Alabama Gulf seafood industry in the years ahead" said McMillan. "Our agriculture department food safety lab has conducted ongoing tests on Alabama Gulf seafood and has found their quality to be without question. This is a stellar record that speaks volumes about the integrity of the industry and their dedication to providing an excellent product."

The event will be anchored by panel discussions from keynote speakers focusing on the seafood trade, including:
  ·  Brian Davis, Alabama International Trade Center
  ·  Russ Wimberly, South Alabama Regional Planning Commission, and
  ·  Danielle Viguerie and Kristen Core with the Southern U.S. Trade Association
  ·  Seafood buyers from Whole Foods, Sysco, Inland Seafood and the Alabama Grocers Association
  ·  Representatives from the restaurant industry such as Wintzell’s Oyster House and Aloha
     Hospitality (Baumhower’s Wings, The Compleat Angler and Wings U).
  ·  James K Lyons, Alabama State Port Authority and Alabama Gulf Coast Restoration Council

The commercial fisheries of Alabama provide significant jobs, income and sales impact in the state of Alabama. More than 10,000 jobs are directly related to the seafood industry with a total economic impact prior to the Deepwater Horizon Spill of over $445 million annually.

“The economic impact of the seafood industry in Alabama has been reduced nearly $100 million annually since the spill,” said Chris Blankenship, director of Alabama Marine Resources and Program Administrator for the Alabama Seafood Marketing Commission. “The hardworking men and women of the seafood industry in Alabama have been the backbone of its coastal communities for centuries. The Alabama Seafood Summit is a step in regaining the market share that was lost during the oil spill, which is of utmost importance to the future viability of Alabama’s seafood community.”

For more information about the Alabama Seafood Summit or to register, please visit http://www.alseafoodsummit.com

###