Other News

June 29, 2012 – The Whaling City has a new claim to maritime fame: Yachting magazine has named New Bedford one of the 50 Best Ports in North America.

"If there was ever a town born for the water, it may be New Bedford. Its history is steeped in the commercial fishing industry. … Sailing is not lost on this salty city …," Yachting says in its current issue.

"For the last three years, we've focused on making our port very recreational boating-friendly. The result is a harbor that mixes work and play brilliantly," said Ed Anthes-Washburn, acting executive director of the Port of New Bedford, in a news release. "People love it because it's one of a few authentic, working seaports that actively invites and welcomes boaters to take advantage of our historic downtown."

Later he added "This is a culmination of three years of hard marketing we have been doing."

James Russell, president of the whaling museum, which is mentioned in the Yachting write-up, said that "for centuries, sea captains and their whaling ships sailed out of the great Port of New Bedford. … It's so gratifying to see that the sailing community has rediscovered this seaport, which has always been a welcoming and safe harbor to mariners since the days of Moby Dick."

Jeff E. J. Pontiff, owner of Whaling City Expeditions, which offers services including harbor tours and water taxis, said a lot of work has gone into getting New Bedford's name out to a wider audience.

Read the full article at the New Bedford Standard Times.

 

 

June 21, 2012 — NEW BEDFORD— Following the success of "Deadliest Catch," television shows about the hardships and dangers of commercial fishing have become something of a trend among television producers.

A new three-part series from the Discovery Channel has turned its focus on dangerous bodies of water. A one-hour show that airs locally on Friday, features two fishing boats and their crews from New Bedford as they fish for scallops in the North Atlantic. The other episodes in the "Deadly Seas" series have already been shown and took viewers to sea with fishermen in the Bering Sea and the Gulf of Alaska.

The local boats appearing on Friday’s show are the scalloper Westport and its captain Ed Welch, a Mattapoisett resident who has survived three hurricanes and a boat sinking, in addition to Tim Quinn and his crew on the scalloper Invincible.

Produced for the Discovery Channel by Raw TV the series is totally unscripted, publicist Paul Schur told The Standard-Times.

 

Read the full story at The New Bedford Standard Times

 

 

June 19, 2012 – One of the employees at Fresh Catch's Mansfield store was among workers helping to unpack a crate of lobsters from Maine Saturday when in the crowd of typically brownish-green crustaceans, he spotted a carrot-colored one.

"The guy took it out thinking it was already cooked," said Derek Barber, vice president of the company. "He thought someone was playing a trick on us."

But it was the lobster's actual color.

Now, bumping along in the lobster tank at the store with its more common colored compatriots, the lobster stands out in the crowd. Actually, according to marine experts, it could be 1 in 10 million.

"I've heard of blue lobsters," Barber said from the store Monday. "But in all my years in the business, I've never heard of, or seen, an orange one."
The lobster weighs in at about 1 1/2 pounds, said Fresh Catch owner Bill Sarro.

Read the full story at the Sun Chronicle.

 

 

June 16, 2012 – As it has been with banking, so it is with fishing.

That's the case Elizabeth Warren, the Democratic U.S. Senate candidate argued in a visit to Gloucester Friday, citing both of those fields as arenas in which the rich and powerful are becoming richer and more powerful, thanks to government policies that work against the working class.

In an interview at the Times, Warren cited as an example the way the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration commodified the New England groundfishery in 2010 by careful "gaming" of the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act to avoid giving the fishermen a vote on whether they wanted to work in the catch share allocation system prepared by the government.

The referendum requirement was written into the Magnuson reauthorization in 2006. A stakeholders' federal lawsuit filed by the cities of Gloucester and New Bedford challenging Amendment 16, the framework for the catch share system, raises a similar challenge to Warren's, and is now before the First U.S. Court of Appeals in Boston, with oral arguments expected in the fall.

Since the introduction of the catch share system used by fishing cooperatives, equity in the groundfish market has consolidated rapidly with small boat businesses selling out or giving up.

Read the full story at the Gloucester Times.

 

 

June 11, 2012 – Robert Mannino apologized as he lowered an ordinary wooden ladder instead of a gangplank for visitors to come aboard the 149-foot Nantucket Lightship/LV-112.

For 39 years, this lightship was ambassador and traffic cop, the first to greet trans-Atlantic travelers on the world's great ocean liners, and a warning for ships approaching the treacherous Nantucket Shoals.

Now, Mannino, president of the U.S. Lightship Museum Society, wants to renovate the ship and open it as a Boston Harbor maritime museum. It is currently berthed at the Boston Harbor Shipyard and Marina but will be moved to a more accessible location nearby and open for tours as of July 14.

The LV-112 is the largest and best-known of the 179 lightships that marked hazards in U.S. waters between 1820 and 1982. Only 17 of those vessels survive, nearly half in private ownership. The LV-112 was recently designated a National Historic Landmark, as well as one of only 20 historically and/or architecturally significant buildings or sites selected as National Treasures by the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

Two years ago, the ship itself had to be rescued from Oyster Bay on Long Island, where it had been neglected for eight years after a failed effort to turn it into a museum. Mannino and his nonprofit group raised $230,000 to move it to Boston, clean the bottom of more than 4 tons of barnacles and marine growth, repaint it and make it seaworthy.

He estimates it will cost $870,000 more for structural repairs, plumbing, heating, electrical and mechanical systems, main engine and auxiliary engine servicing, fire suppression systems, and cosmetics.

Last week, the vessel was tied securely to the dock but the smell of fuel oil, combined with a rolling swell from a passing vessel was enough to induce queasiness. The officer's quarters, with the leather bench built into the arc of the stern, and its snug, white bunk rooms, suddenly went from cozy to claustrophobic.

Read the full story at the Cape Cod Times.

 

 

June 9, 2012 — When a floating dock the size of a boxcar washed up on a sandy beach in Oregon, beachcombers got excited because it was the largest piece of debris from last year’s tsunami in Japan to show up on the West Coast.

But scientists worried it represented a whole new way for invasive species of seaweed, crabs and other marine organisms to break the earth’s natural barriers and further muck up the West Coast’s marine environments. And more invasive species could be hitching rides on tsunami debris expected to arrive in the weeks and months to come.

“We know extinctions occur with invasions,’’ said John Chapman, assistant professor of fisheries and invasive species specialist at Oregon State University’s Hatfield Marine Science Center. “This is like arrows shot into the dark. Some of them could hit a mark.’’

Though the global economy has accelerated the process in recent decades by the sheer volume of ships, most from Asia, entering West Coast ports, the marine invasion has been in full swing since 1869, when the transcontinental railroad brought the first shipment of East Coast oysters packed in seaweed and mud to San Francisco, said Andrew Cohen, director of the Center for Research on Aquatic Bioinvasions in Richmond, Calif. For nearly a century before then, ships sailing up the coast carried barnacles and seaweeds.

Now, hotspots like San Francisco Bay amount to a “global zoo’’ of invasive species and perhaps 500 plants and animals from foreign shores have established in U.S. marine waters, said James Carlton, professor of marine sciences at Williams College. They come mostly from ship hulls and the water ships take on as ballast, but also get dumped into bays from home aquariums.

The costs quickly mount into the untold billions of dollars. Mitten crabs from China eat baby Dungeness crabs that are one of the region’s top commercial fisheries. Spartina, a ropey seaweed from Europe, chokes commercial oyster beds. Shellfish plug the cooling water intakes of power plants. Kelps and tiny shrimp-like creatures change the food web that fish, marine mammals and even humans depend on.

 

Read the full story at The Boston Globe

 

June 7, 2012 – When the tsunami hit the northern coast of Japan last year, the waves ripped four dock floats the size of freight train boxcars from their pilings in the fishing port of Misawa and turned them over to the whims of wind and currents.

One floated up on a nearby island. Two have never been seen again. And one made an incredible journey across 5,000 miles of ocean that ended this week on a popular Oregon beach.

Along for the ride were hundreds of millions of individual organisms, including a tiny species of crab, a species of algae, and a little starfish all native to Japan that have scientists worried if they get a chance to spread out on the West Coast.

"This is a very clear threat," said John Chapman, a research scientist at Oregon State University's Hatfield Marine Science Center in Newport, Ore., where the dock float washed up early Tuesday morning. "It's exactly like saying you threw a bowling ball into a China shop. It's going to break something. But will it be valuable or cheap glass. It's incredibly difficult to predict what will happen next."

Plans were being considered by state authorities to scrape all the living things off the dock and bury them in the sand, so they would not spread, Chapman said.

While scientists expect much of the floating debris to follow the currents to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, an accumulation of millions of tons of small bits of plastic floating in the northern Pacific, tsunami debris that can catch the wind is making its way to North America. In recent weeks a soccer ball washed up in Alaska, and a Harley Davidson motorcycle in a shipping contain

Read the full story from the AP at the Boston Globe.

 

 

June 5, 2012 – Josh Lawson of Bernard was pulling up his longline on a recent Wednesday morning when he saw “a big fish coming up.” It was a 257-pound, 7.3-foot –long Atlantic halibut.

Josh Lawson, left, at Thurston’s wharf with the 257-pound halibut he caught on May 16. With him is Mike Conners, who scooted out to Lawson’s boat to help his friend haul the giant aboard.

“Well, I was kind of stunned. I was pretty excited,” he said the following day. “I saw the white-bellied flesh, so I knew it was a big fish. And when the big head came up, I knew what it was. It was really an ancient fish. It was the biggest fish I’ve ever seen.”

Lawson was 20 minutes out from Bass Harbor on his boat, Jessica Keeley. Typically, he fishes for lobster and sells it to Thurston’s. But he also holds a state of Maine halibut permit. The state’s halibut fishing program provides an open season in May and June. The size must be 41 inches or greater with the head on, or 32 inches or greater with the head off. Commercial, party or charter vessels may not land more than 25 Atlantic halibut per year. Recreational vessels may land no more than 5 Atlantic halibut per year. All legal-size halibut caught and retained by a commercial or recreational fisherman, regardless of catch location inside or outside of state waters, must be immediately tagged. The fish may be caught only by using one of three sizes of circle hooks. No commercial vessel may use more that 450 circle hooks. Recreational fishermen using a tub trawl are limited to 100 circle hooks. Trawls must have marking buoys.

Read the full story at the Bangor Daily News.

June 6, 2012 — NEW BEDFORD — The upcoming Fishing for a Cause charity tournament, to benefit the children of the Schwartz Center, will have the best and brightest ocean science students in the area on hand to help at the Father's Day weekend event. Students from the School for Marine Science and Technology (SMAST) at University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth are signing up to volunteer at this second annual tournament.

"We're glad to help and it's a great chance for the students to get their hands on some fish", said Kevin Stokesbury, professor and chair of Department of Fisheries Oceanography SMAST.

The UMass volunteers will work with tournament organizers to weigh the fish brought in by participants and prepare the catch for processing. The Whaling City Seafood Display Auction will process the fish which will then be donated to the Hunger Commission.

In addition to the two-day charity tournament that takes place Friday, June 15 and Saturday, 16, Fishing for a Cause also features a seaside dinner and an awards barbecue under a tent at Pope's Island Marina; both are open to the general public with the purchase of a ticket.

 

Read the full story at The New Bedford Standard Times

June 5, 2012 — STOCKHOLM — A group of Swedish marine archeologists say they have found what they believe could be the world’s oldest stationary fishing traps on the bottom of the Baltic Sea, with the most ancient dating back at least 9,000 years.

Arne Sjostrom, an archeologist at Sodertorn University outside of Stockholm, says the remains of the seven basket traps, made out of hazel rods fastened together, have been found in a submerged ancient river valley off Sweden’s southern coast at a depth of 5-12 meters (16.5-40 feet).

Only one of the baskets has been carbon dated, and is estimated to be around 9,000 years old. Sjostrom on Tuesday said his team is “pretty confident this is the world’s oldest stationary fishing trap that has been found so far.”

 Read the full story by the Associated Press at the Washignton Post