Opinion

October 15, 2013 — Once again, a bill at the federal level attempts to cover all the bases and winds up quite possibly doing more harm than good.

The New England Fishery Management Council's Habitat Omnibus Amendment threatens to shut down even more fishing areas to the Northeast groundfish fleets — the commercial fleets, that is.

Some of the same areas that reportedly will be closed to commercial vessels in an effort to protect spawning stocks (which have been shown to have migrated from many of these protected areas as a result of the same climatic shifts that sent the stocks north and east to the Canadian Maritimes and Scandinavia) will remain open to recreational boats, which hold nearly 40 percent of the haddock and cod quotas.
The Northeast Seafood Coalition's Jackie Odell says the Closed Area Technical Team showed up very late in the process of this amendment (which has been in the works for more than five years).

Time and time again, it takes years to develop an amendment, and then at the last minute, it's rammed through the process because time is running short. The quickened pace sends us blazing past red flags and critical questions because we just don't have time for nuance (or sometimes even for common sense).

This is no slight on our fishery management council members across the country. They have their hands full. It is no easy task to manage wild and farmed fisheries in any region of the country.

Jes Hathaway is the editor in chief of National Fisherman magazine and NationalFisherman.com.

Read the full opinion piece at National Fisherman magazine

October 12, 2013 — Are lobsters the new symbol of climate change?

The answer, increasingly, is yes. Lobster populations are exploding in the Gulf of Maine, but are plummeting in the waters of southern New England. In 2012, the Gulf of Maine set a record catch of 126 million pounds, double the average of a decade before and six times the average of the 1980s.

Meanwhile, annual lobster landings in Buzzards Bay were just 72,000 pounds last year, down from 400,000 pounds in the late 1990s and from just under a million pounds in the 1980s, according to Massachusetts state lobster biologist Bob Glenn.

The population loss is likely due to warmer waters and disease that may be associated with such water. “We just watched a geological event occur in about a decade,” Glenn said. Scientists speculate that the population boom in Maine is also due to record warm waters, which fueled massive early productions, as well as the overfishing of ground fish that eat lobsters.

The lobster catch in Maine had a record value of $340 million. But the bounty backfired for many individual lobstermen, who were stuck with the lowest per-pound prices in nearly 20 years.

Further adding to the uncertainty is new research published last month in the journal Science that found that American lobster as a species has shifted 43 miles northward in the last decade. These unprecedented shifts concerned researchers at a Gulf of Maine research conference this week in Portsmouth, N.H.

Read the full story at The Boston Globe 

 

October 13, 2013 — The resumption of clamming after 23 years on a once-toxic site off the New England coast should send a message to both the local fishing industry and the federal agencies that oversee it: By working together to find solutions, rather than engaging in endless conflict, fishermen and regulators can give new hope to the local seafood industry.

The small section of Georges Bank was closed to surf clam and quahog shellfishing in 1990 because of toxic algae blooms, leaving untold millions of dollars of seafood on the ocean floor. But a five-year trial in which clammers used a safety testing kit developed by the Food and Drug Administration showed that the area could be safely harvested.

Read the full editorial at the Boston Globe

October 11, 2013 — Options for health insurance coverage can be pretty limited in Alaska for small businesses and the self-employed. That includes commercial fishermen, who make up a major segment of the economy.

Some in the industry say the cost and lack of access to comprehensive health insurance is a barrier to new fishermen and an ongoing concern for those already in the business.

I have to disclose right at the beginning, I commercial fish part of the year but this story wasn’t originally going to involve me personally. I was just going to be the usual, detached narrator. I was confident that when I was working on my boat, I was covered by the comprehensive insurance my wife and I get through her state job. In the course of researching this story, I found out I was wrong. But I’ll get back to that later.

First, here’s a full-time fisherman Lance Watkins, who works in multiple fisheries:

“So when I listen to the news these days, they’re all about getting small businesses going again. We want small businesses to thrive and go and go small business. I know I’m a very small business as an owner of my small fishing business but I know other owners of their very small businesses and their business decisions are extremely restricted because they have to worry about the high cost of health care.”

Watkins is a slim, healthy, 36-year old who is married with two young children. He says his family used to pay for a temporary policy, hoping his wife could find a job with benefits. When she became pregnant with their second child, he says they were unable to qualify for a regular policy because insurance companies considered pregnancy a preexisting condition. They ultimately ended up getting insurance for the kids through the state-run Denali Kid-Care program.

Watkins was denied private insurance for himself because he’s a dive fisherman. He eventually qualified for major-medical coverage through the Alaska Comprehensive Health Insurance Association. That state organization sells insurance to Alaskans who can’t get it anywhere else. But it’s limited and like other insurance, it’s not cheap:

“The way I figure it is it’s a $10,000 deductible and a $5,000 premium for me. I’m paying $15,000 a year before I get any type of benefit from the health insurance. But I realize that health insurance is there in case something extremely catastrophic happens and that’s why you pay it. So, I don’t go to the hospital or go to the clinic. I take care of myself and if something catastrophic happens, that’s what the insurance is there for. So, I’m playing the game.”

Read the full story from KFSK at KTOO

October 8, 2013 — With a pot of just $10 million to cover no doubt dozens of applications from fisheries groups and waterfront businesses from around the country, it may not be realistic to expect all seven of the proposals coming out of Gloucester to get federal funding.

But it’s also vital that those deciding where to allocate the tariff dollars from the Saltonstall-Kennedy Act – which would top $100 million if NOAA and the Department of Commerce truly followed the law — give all of these plans a good look. For all of these innovative ideas would fit right in with not only bolstering the fishing industry, but with sparking alternative waterfront growth as well.

Read the full opinion piece at the Gloucester Daily Times

October 4, 2013 —  Opinion is divided about how much detail should be given in the on-pack labeling for seafood sold in Europe. There are those involved in the sector that believe too much information puts retail consumers off buying products, while others feel it provides the assurances that shoppers now want.

The recent Westminster Food & Nutrition Forum Keynote Seminar, “Next steps for U.K. fishing — consumer attitudes, sustainability and implementing the Common Fisheries Policy,” held in London, proved there are valid arguments on either side, but both will be aware that Brussels is pushing hard for the introduction of far more comprehensive fish labeling across EU member states as part of its Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) overhaul.

Fish labeling can be confusing for consumers; they want sustainable, convenient products that are available to them on a regular basis, but at the same time they are restrained in terms of time, said Adam Whittle, seafood industry consultant at the Billingsgate Seafood School. He added that they are also put off by “confusing messages” about products such as mackerel and whether it is okay to continue putting it in the shopping basket.

“People expect to be able to walk into a supermarket and for that supermarket to do the work for the individual. They don’t want to have to make those choices, they are outsourcing that trust to those organizations to spend the time and offer them a sustainable product without them having to feel guilty about enjoying such a healthy food.

“It’s too much, I think, to expect consumers to navigate through the minefield of sourcing sustainable seafood. I think it is catering service organizations like M&J Seafood, like Direct Seafoods, and the major multiple retailers who have to be the gatekeepers towards that sustainable product for consumers.”

Read the full opinion piece at SeafoodSource.com

October 2, 2013 — A historical moment for the life of the oceans is at hand as the Fisheries Committee of the European Parliament wrangles with proposed legislation to phase out the use of deep-sea-bottom trawls and other destructive fishing gear in the Northeast Atlantic. And yet this crucial legislation could well be killed in coming days, not least because some of the committee’s 25 members represent districts with powerful interests in deep-sea fishing.

As they discuss the merits of the legislation, many of the panel’s members are prone to repeating partial truths supplied by lobbyists about the sustainability of deep-sea fish stocks and the lack of damage to fish life at the bottom of the ocean. If these voices prevail in a vote later this month, then the committee will have succeeded in keeping the measure bottled up and away from consideration by the full Parliament.

The biodiversity of the deep sea is equaled only by that of tropical rain forests, and the destruction of rain forests has long been known to affect biodiversity and the global climate. Similarly the deep sea is home to countless species, including the oldest known living animal and to life-forms found nowhere else. Ninety percent of the ocean is below 200 meters, but not much is known about life in the deep sea; expensive research sampling has been done in about 1 percent of this vast area.

Over the years, as fisheries in shallow waters collapsed, the fishing industry began looking to the deep for new species to exploit. Most deep-sea fish have flesh that is not palatable, but a few were found that could be marketed for human consumption, if filleted and renamed to be made more attractive, or for processing into food pellets for poultry. These stocks were readily attacked using trawls large and heavy enough to reach as deep as 2,000 meters, and it took only 10 to 15 years to reduce the fish biomass by about 80 percent.

Read the full opinion piece at the New York Times

October 4, 2013 — Fishing is a very simple job: You put the net in the water, you pull the net out of the water. The more fish you catch, the more money you make. Fishing is also a dirty, difficult and dangerous job, often done in miserable weather, on a wildly rolling boat, with very little sleep. At this point, almost all the people I started fishing with are retired. I am ready to join them, worn out but grateful for the freedom fishing has given me and for the adventure it’s been.

There have been a number of times over the course of my 38-year career as a fisherman when I have questioned my choice of occupations.

Usually it happens when I am staring at my empty net strung out behind the boat while listening to radio reports which make it sound like everyone else’s net is on the verge of sinking with fish. It’s also happened when I’ve been on my knees on the back deck, seasick, waves breaking over the stern, puking as I try to run the hydraulics. Or one time when I was trying to make it back to Port Moller, Alaska, and a safe harbor as huge breakers towered over the boat, launching my 38-foot gillnetter airborne while we broke out the survival suits. Or when I’m in the engine room with the diesel roaring next to me — it’s 120 degrees down there and I’m drenched in sweat and bleeding from some busted knuckles and wrapped around the engine trying not to get caught up in a piece of machinery (which has happened) while I labor to fix some critical pump as we drift closer to calamity.

Then there are the countless times when I can’t ever imagine having done anything else with my life and feel grateful for the path that led from my first job on a purse seiner in Ketchikan to the present. I’ve watched walrus, sea otters and whales swim around and under my boat as I fished. I’ve seen lava shoot far up into the night sky from an eruption in the Aleutians. I saw the water around my boat turn red as a pod of orcas attacked a juvenile humpback whale, and watched a grizzly chase a pack of wolves off a walrus, dead on the beach, as we drifted just off shore with the net out. Then there’s the simple pleasure of just watching the net spool off the reel at dawn, happy that everything is working.

I knew at an early age that I wanted autonomy in my work, and that I needed an inordinate amount of stimulus, or reward, to stay interested in a job. Owning and running a fishing boat more than satisfies those criteria. The downside is that failure on a boat in Alaska leads to financial distress, or the loss of your boat — or worse. I am not unique in recognizing the names of friends on the memorial at Fishermen’s Terminal. Being away from my family is the other main drawback.

I fish in Bristol Bay now. It is a short season. I leave for Dillingham in early June to work on my boat and am home before the end of July. We store our boats on land over the winter as the waters of Bristol Bay freeze over for weeks in the subzero temperatures. In the past, I fished out of Dutch Harbor and Kodiak in the winter (for pollock, Atka mackerel and yellowfin sole), as far north as Norton Sound (for herring) in the early spring and out of Port Moller for salmon. I would leave home in May to prepare for the June 1st start of salmon season. Sometimes I wouldn’t return until September.

I once calculated the amount of time I’ve spent on a boat in Alaska: around six years. That’s six years of missing my children grow up, of summers away from my wife.

Read the full opinion piece at Crosscut

 

October 2, 2013 — Dogfish is delicious, extremely healthy, and the fishing industry and infrastructure in New Hampshire rely heavily on its revenue.

Recently, a letter to the editor was published in the Portsmouth Herald that criticized the annual N.H. Fish and Lobster Festival, known locally as the "Fishtival," for promoting the use of dogfish in local menus.

Fishtival was created five years ago as a collaborative effort of common interest organizations, fishermen and dedicated volunteers to celebrate our proud tradition of commercial ground-fishing in New Hampshire, where our hardworking fishermen are the stewards of our marine resources and have made extraordinary efforts to protect local fish stocks and our historic fishing communities.

Four years ago, remaining New England fishermen decided to take the future into their own hands by organizing into one of 17 selective harvesting cooperatives referred to as "sectors." In New Hampshire, this means we have two ground-fishing sectors composed of small, family-run fishing boats from Portsmouth, Rye and Seabrook harbors.

Read the full story by Joshua Wiersma at SeacoastOnline

October 1, 2013 — Fishermen and scientists have much in common. We each rely on our knowledge of fish stocks and environmental conditions to do our work successfully. I believe we can and must learn from one another. I have seen many examples of successful cooperation and collaboration.

As a newcomer to the region, I was honored to be invited to New Bedford to attend last weekend's Blessing of the Fleet. I was humbled to be among people representing generations of fishing families and maritime businesses. The energy and enthusiasm of those who participated resonated with the history of a city that has long depended on the sea and survived many difficult periods.

I am keen to build on these successes and to overcome the sometimes negative public rhetoric that challenges the integrity of federal scientists and greatly impedes our ability to work effectively with some industry and academic partners.

William A. Karp, Ph.D., Science and Research Director at the NOAA's Northeast Fisheries Science Center 

Read the full opinion piece in the New Bedford Standard Times