Other News

With surf and turf as the key ingredients of the 2009 Working Waterfront Festival, you can expect to find enough seafood and produce — and entertainment related to growing, catching and cooking it — to keep your stomach satisfied throughout this weekend’s two-day festival.

To ensure that residents will continue to feast on local seafood and produce after the festival, area fishermen and farmers are invited to join a roundtable discussion about Community Supported Fisheries programs that are popping up around New England. The programs, which are modeled after Community Supported Agriculture, allow people to buy a weekly share of fish caught by local fishermen.

"With Community Supported Agriculture, shareholders pay in advance to farmers, and in this case, to fishermen, so they can have a weekly delivery of that week’s fresh catch," said Andrianna Natsoulas, campaigns coordinator for the Northwest Atlantic Marine Alliance, a Maine-based advocacy group for sustainable fishing.

Read the complete story at The South Coast Today.

The future of the fishing industry is in jeopardy.  Fishermen struggle with a host of challenges including government regulations, waterfront access and rising prices for everything from fuel and ice to insurance and gear.

Fishermen and business owners from Alaska, New Bedford and Chatham discuss the bleak future of the fishing industry.

Fishermen these days commonly fish alone or with a small crew when they would have been able to employ many people (all making a good living) a few years ago, simply because government intervention seems to make the fishing industry impossible to be involved with first hand. Because of this, it seems that the fishing industry is not a lucrative business for young people and therefore there really is no new generation being recruited for the industry.

Listen to the commentary here [mp3]

The number of over-80-foot-long groundfish draggers — the big boats — in the Gloucester fleet has just grown by one to six.

Local vessel owner and shore captain Joe DiMaio was responsible again.

Economics, fish regulations, sales and sinkings have down-sized the big-boat dragger fleet component, which once numbered over 30 vessels in the 1980s to its current number.

"You got to take chances in this business," said DiMaio, a gutsy fifth-generation fisherman turned shore captain and vessel owner, who emigrated from Porticello, Sicily, to Gloucester in 1973. Since then, during groundfishing’s many flows and ebbs, especially when other boat owners have either talked about or gotten out of fishing, he’s owned 14 medium- to large-size draggers, including the fleet’s last three new stern trawlers — the 92-foot Italian Princess in 1989, the 92-foot Princess Diana in 2000, and the 99-foot Princess Laura in 2003.

Read the complete story at The Gloucester Daily Times.

For the last decade, the Northwest has been embroiled in a contentious legal dispute over the fate of fish in the Columbia and Snake river basins.

In the 1990s, 13 species of Columbia basin salmon and steelhead were given protection under the Endangered Species Act, which compelled the federal government to take aggressive action to restore these populations to health. But an ongoing lawsuit claims that the government has not done enough.

Public debate has centered around four hydroelectric dams in the lower Snake River basin that provide 5 percent of the region’s energy needs. Some want to see those dams breached because they believe the fish cannot recover with the dams in place. Others are adamantly opposed to breaching as unnecessary, harmful to the region’s economy and of dubious benefit to salmon.

Read the complete story at Oregon Live.

By the end of this year, the world is projected to reach an unheralded but historic milestone: Half of the fish and shellfish we consume will be raised by humans, rather than caught in the wild.

Reaching this tipping point is reshaping everything from our oceans to the livelihoods and diets of people across the globe. It has also prompted a new round of scientific and political scrutiny, as researchers and public officials examine how aquaculture is affecting the world’s environment and seafood supply.

"Hunting and gathering has reached its maximum," said Ronald W. Hardy, who directs the University of Idaho’s Aquaculture Research Institute and co-authored a study on the subject in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "We’ve got to grow more."

Read the complete story at The Washington Post.

The Obama adminstration announced it will largely continue the Bush administration’s plans for salmon recovery in the Columbia Basin, with the addition of an "insurance policy" for the fish that could include breaching dams on the Snake River.

Federal agencies have been reviewing the Bush administration’s plan to manage the network of hydroelectric dams on the river, known as the 2008 Biological Opinion, for the past five months. The review was in response to litigation by several parties, including the state of Oregon and the Nez Perce Tribe of Idaho, that claimed the plan was inadequate to recover the basin’s 13 endangered species of salmon and steelhead.

The new amendment – called the adaptive management implementation plan – addresses the concerns the litigating parties raised and provides a roadmap in the case of a dramatic drop in salmon numbers, said Jane Lubchenco, the administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Lubchenco and other regional federal executives announced their plan during a conference call with reporters on the morning of Tuesday, Sept 15.

Read the complete story at The East Oregonian.

Commercial fishing is one of the worlds’ most dangerous occupations in part because contending with unpredictable weather, frigid temperatures, icy waters and high winds are a part of the job description.

Listen as a fisherman talks about how fishing is a lifestyle more than just a job. One year around Thanksgiving he and some other fishermen decided that rather than spend the holidays with their families, they’d go fishing. However a monstrous storm came through, knocking out their radio, and they had to “lay” (stay tied to the boat lying down) for four days, while 5-6 story waves came crashing down on them. This storm caused the men to realize how their careers truly affect their lives.

Regulations have also made winter fishing more dangerous by having a smaller allotment of time in which one may fish. When the fishermen face a storm in the winter, and had to "lay", they would have to do their best to chip off the ice that would be accumulating on the boat.

Listen to the commentary about storms at sea.

See also: Working Waterfront Series – Immigration and Ethnicity,

        and Working Waterfront Series – Longshoremen,

        and Working Waterfront Series – Lumpers,

        and Working Waterfront Series – Changes in Technology.

 

Lumpers unload the fish from the boats.  Hear from two New Bedford lumpers talk about how their work has changed over the years.

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In this commentary, they talk about how the auction would start around 7am, and at the end of the auction the lumpers would take the scalloper out. They would finish this task around 10am, and directly afterwards get onto a dragger (and sometimes another dragger right after that), because there was so much work to constantly do.

Newer regulations have meant fewer boats being able to catch fewer fish, and for lumpers it has been tough to sustain a work force with such unpredictable work. Because the work is more seldom, when a lumper gets a call (they are on call 24hrs a day), they HAVE to drop everything and answer the call of duty, also regardless of the weather.

Listen to the commentary about "Lumpers" here.

See also: Working Waterfront Series – Immigration and Ethnicity,

        and Working Waterfront Series – Longshoremen,

        and Working Waterfront Series – Storms at Sea,

        and Working Waterfront Series – Changes in Technology.

 

New Bedford longshoreman Ray Houtman talks about the work of longshoremen who load and unload cargo from large vessels.

A large vessel would be about 50 ft deep, and therefore have HUGE cargo holding area, which would be filled with the seafood. It would be palleted, and moved on a truck for transport. However the workers had to work in perfect unison, because the crane operator getting the goods out of the hold usually wouldn’t be able to see what he was doing inside such a deep hold. However because the machinery was so loud, the other men wouldn’t be able to vocally communicate what needed to be done. Therefore they improvised by using signals.

The group needed to unload loose cargo consists of two wenchmen, one sign-man, one relief sign-man (just to give the other sign-man like an hour break), two fork lift operators (on the dock), two landers on the dock to help load the cargo, and ten laborers in the hold.

Click here to listen to Ray Houtman’s commentary.

See also: Working Waterfront Series – Immigration and Ethnicity,

        and Working Waterfront Series – Lumpers,

        and Working Waterfront Series – Storms at Sea,

        and Working Waterfront Series – Changes in Technology.

Immigrants from around the globe have settled in New England’s port cities creating a rich mosaic of cultural influences.

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Listen to the story of one immigrant who got small loans from all of his family and friends to come to America to become a fisherman, and was able to repay all the money he had borrowed, thus proving how lucrative the fishing industry is America was, especially as compared to places like Scandanavia.

The immigrants tended to bind together in their ethnic clans here in the states, changing the demographics of New England. Likewise, a Norwegian man says that in his small village back home, you would not be able to find nearly one house that didn’t have a man who had lived there before but had left to go fishing in America.

Listen to the interview – Immigration and Ethnicity.

See also: Working Waterfront Series – Longshoremen,

        and Working Waterfront Series – Lumpers,

        and Working Waterfront Series – Storms at Sea,

        and Working Waterfront Series – Changes in Technology.