Saving Seafood

Group hopes to solidify, amplify voice of fishing interests

November 16, 2015 — A new coalition of seafood industry interests is being assembled to help tell the commercial fishing industry story nationally, regionally and locally without being drowned out by the larger reach of well-funded special interest groups, organizers said Monday.

The National Coalition of Fishing Communities, according to its organizers, will provide an informational platform for fishing communities, commercial fishermen, fishing advocacy groups and other fishing stakeholders “all the way up the food chain.”

“We need to balance the protection of the resource with the protection of the fishing communities,” said Bob Vanasse, the executive director of the Savings Seafood website and the driving force behind the new coalition. “We need the entire supply chain to work together.”

Toward that end, Vanasse wants to include processors, seafood marketers and even restaurants to help portray the most accurate state of the industry and “move the national conversation in a positive direction.”

The coalition boasts a familiar name.

Former Gloucester Harbor Planning Director Sarah Garcia is the director of outreach and membership for the Washington D.C.-based coalition.

“This is a really exciting and innovative idea that will help us develop a shared message among all of the nation’s fisheries,” Garcia said. “We’re not just a clearinghouse for information for those with an interest in the management of the fisheries. We’re spreading the message that we all have to speak up for the domestic fishing industry so we can hear fishermen’s voices as well as the environmentalists.”

Read the full story at Gloucester Daily Times

 

Development at historic D.C. fish market drives wedge between businesses

October 31, 2015 — On a cool Saturday morning, Sunny White was where he has spent most of the past 45 years, at the fish market on Washington’s Southwest Waterfront, selling crabs to anyone he could persuade to buy.

“Hey, King! What you looking for?” White barked at a stranger in a Los Angeles Kings cap, pushing a crab at the man and his girlfriend before they could slip around the corner to check his competitor’s prices.

Anything was better than losing a customer to Jesse Taylor Seafood, owned by the Evans clan, otherwise known as White’s chief rival in the hurly-burly of peddling crabs.

“If you haven’t sold it in the first minute,” White said, reciting his own first law of fish market survival, “you’re not getting nothing.”

After four decades in the market’s trenches on Maine Avenue SW, White, 67, and his brother Billy, 60, owners of several business there, including ­Captain White Seafood City, are long accustomed to the open-air, over-the-counter hustle that has drawn customers since the early 1800s.

Slashing prices, shouting salesmen, loudspeakers and bullhorns — the Whites and Evanses have, over the years, tried whatever it takes to beat one another.

Yet their rivalry has grown more acrimonious as a developer seeking to transform the waterfront into another luxury Shangri-La has targeted two of the Whites’ businesses for eviction while forging an alliance with the Evanses.

Read the full story at the Washington Post