Saving Seafood

NPFMC June 2017 Agenda

May 2, 2017 — The following was released by the North Pacific Fishery Management Council: 

The AGENDA and SCHEDULE are now available. Documents will be posted through links on the Agenda. The deadline for public comments is 5:00 pm (AST) Tuesday, May 30, 2017.

The Council meeting will be broadcast at npfmc.adobeconnect.com/june2017. Motions will be posted following the meeting. Alaska Airlines offers travel discounts to the meetings. Other meetings to be held during the week are:

Scientific and Statistical Committee: June 5-7, Ballroom 2
Advisory Panel: June 6-10, Ballroom 3
Enforcement Committee: June 6, 1-4pm, Egan Room
Council: June 7-13, Ballroom 1

Submit comments to npfmc.comments@noaa.gov.

Seven Gulf Groups Endorse Chris Oliver for Asst. NOAA Administrator

April 27, 2017 — The Gulf Seafood Institute joined six other Gulf of Mexico seafood industry organizations in endorsing Texas-native turned North Pacific Fishery Management Council Executive Director Chris Oliver for the open position of Assistant Administrator for NOAA Fisheries.

In a letter to Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross, Jr., the fleet of Gulf supporters called Oliver “a motivated and talented leader with a passion for bridging divides among diverse fishing interests. Those qualities would benefit the “notoriously complex” environment in the Gulf of Mexico.

The Gulf-based groups to endorse Oliver include: 
Alabama Charter Fishermen’s Association (Orange Beach, AL), Charter Fishermen’s Association (Corpus Christi, TX), Clearwater Marine Association (Clearwater, FL), 
Gulf of Mexico Reef Fish Shareholders’ Alliance (Galveston, TX), Louisiana Restaurant Association (Metairie, LA), 
Southeastern Fisheries Association (Tallahassee, FL) and The Gulf Seafood Institute, (New Orleans, LA).

“Federal fisheries in the Gulf of Mexico…involve a host of competing user groups, including our hardworking commercial harvesters, professional charter boat operators, a growing private angling community, and of course, a skyrocketing tourism and consumer economy dependent on the long-term health of them all,” the letter stated.

Read the full story at the Gulf Seafood Institute

FFAW Says Hundreds of Crab Vessels Iced in Will Need Compensation Due to Late Start, As in Past

April 21, 2017 — SEAFOOD NEWS — The Fish, Food and Allied Workers union said that hundreds of snow crab fishing boats are being kept ashore by the ice that has built up around Newfoundland and Labrador. President Keith Sullivan called on the federal government to pay compensation to fish harvesters who are kept away from the fishery. “For many, E.I. benefits run out next week, which will leave families without any income for the foreseeable future, since ice is expected to be a problem until at least mid-May,” the FFAW wrote in a statement.

New England regulators will allow lobster fishing in proposed deep-sea coral protection zones on the Mount Desert Rock and Outer Schoodic Ridges. The New England Fishery Management Council voted 14-1 Tuesday to ban most fishing in the canyons and plateaus where slow-growing, cold-water coral gardens flourish in the dark waters of the Gulf of Maine. But pleas from Maine lobster fishermen who say a trap ban in fertile gulf fishing grounds would cost them millions of dollars helped sway an initially resistant council to grant a lobstering exemption. The Council will vote on the exemption at its meeting in June.

In other news, Greenpeace released its annual sustainability rankings of canned tuna products sold in the US market. John Sackton writes how these rankings have almost nothing to do with tuna sustainability. “Instead, like other supermarket rankings undertaken by Greenpeace, the ranking system is used to reward banners that conform to Greenpeace’s ideology and punish banners that don’t,” Sackton writes.

Meanwhile, the Gulf Seafood Institute and six other Gulf of Mexico seafood industry organizations endorsed North Pacific Fishery Management Council Executive Director Chris Oliver for the open position of Assistant Administrator for NOAA Fisheries. “It is imperative that NOAA Fisheries be guided by an experienced Administrator with a solid track record of uniting these varying interests with a spirit of positivity and mutual respect,” the groups said in a letter sent to Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross, Jr.

Finally, biologists at NOAA Fisheries’ Southwest Fisheries Science Center cracked the code on how to spawn Pacific sardines in the laboratory, opening a new window on the life cycle of the commercially important species. Some in the industry hope it will better inform industry and managers as to what environmental factors would augment wild reproduction and recruitment.

This story originally appeared on Seafoodnews.com, a subscription site. It is reprinted with permission. 

Researchers identify widespread parasite in Alaska scallops

April 20, 2017 — A lot of Alaska’s scallops are sick, and scientists are trying to figure out why.

Alaska’s scallop fishery is a small one — in recent years, four boats, with just one operating in Kamishak Bay in Lower Cook Inlet. The rest operate out of Kodiak. Most scallop beds straddle the three-nautical mile line between state and federal management areas and is jointly managed by the National Marine Fisheries Service and the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. The permit system is attached to vessels rather than to individuals, restricting the entire fishery to nine vessels total under the federal system. Together, their 10-year average landing poundage of shucked meats is about 383,000 pounds, for total value of about $4 million, according to a report submitted to the North Pacific Fishery Management Council by the Scallop Plan Team.

But in recent years, the fishermen have had to start tossing a lot back. When they pull them up, a lot show signs of degraded meat with brown spots and a stringy texture and will occasionally slip off the shells at the processor. The condition, called “weak meats,” results in a lot of waste in the scallop fishery, as processors aren’t interested in buying scallops with weak meats.

“Weak meats are a very general term for the adductor muscles … being of a very low quality, very easy to tear,” said Quinn Smith, the Southeast Region fishery management biologist for Fish and Game in a report to the council on April 5. “High prevalence in 2014, 2015 was somewhere on the order of half of all scallops shucked couldn’t be marketed. That was much higher than the fleet had ever seen before.”

Read the full story at the Peninsula Clarion

NPFMC April Newsletter

April 19, 2017 — The following was released by the North Pacific Fishery Management Council:

Appointments

The Council appointed Davin Holen to the newly formed Bering Sea Ecosystem Plan Team. Holen is currently the Coastal Community Resilience Specialist at Alaska Sea Grant. Tyson Fick was appointed to the Pacific Northwest Crab Industry Advisory Committee (PNCIAC) as a non-voting member. Fick is based out of Juneau, and is currently the executive director of the Alaska Bering Sea Crabbers. We welcome them both to their new roles.

C1 Scallop SAFE and Plan Team Report

The Council reviewed the 2017 SAFE report for Alaska weathervane scallops. The Council’s SSC set the ABC at 1.161 million pounds of shucked scallops, a level equivalent to 90% of the OFL, and consistent with the ABC control rule for scallops. While the ABC is specified federally for the entire stock, guideline harvest levels (GHLs) are established by ADF&G for the State’s scallop registration areas and districts. Constraining harvest to the GHLs is facilitated by State monitoring of fishery CPUE, and districts are closed to scallop harvest when catch rates fall below established minimum performance standards.

More than 85% of the total Alaska scallop harvest occurs in the Yakutat and Kodiak registration areas. Catch rates have been variable among those areas with increases occurring in Yakutat, but decreases in Kodiak. Declines have been strongest in the Shelikof District of Kodiak and the State lowered GHLs there by about 30% (105k lbs to 75k lbs) in the 2015/16 season. While overall declines have occurred in statewide scallop harvest over the past seven years, revenue has been stable. The stock status of Alaska weathervane scallops is not viewed as a conservation concern since scallops are distributed in many areas that have been closed to fishing to protect crab populations and in areas not defined as commercial beds. Staff contact is Jim Armstrong.

Read the full newsletter here

Electronic monitoring finally catching on among Alaska’s commercial fishermen

April 10, 2017 — Automation is coming to Alaska fishing boats in the form of cameras and sensors that track what’s coming and going over the rails.

Starting next year, electronic monitoring systems can officially replace human observers as fishery data collectors on Alaska boats using longline and pot gear. Vessel operators who do not voluntarily switch to electronic monitoring remain subject to human observer coverage on randomly selected fishing trips.

The onboard observer requirement originally covered vessels 59 feet and longer, but was restructured in 2013 to include boats down to 40 feet and, for the first time, was applied to the halibut fishery.

“Those smaller vessels have had a hard time accommodating human observers,” said Bill Tweit, vice chairman of the North Pacific Fishery Management Council, which oversees the program.

Smaller boats also had a hard time with skyrocketing observer costs under the restructured program, which in some cases went from less than $300-$400 per day to more than $1,000.

Starting in 2013, 15 pot cod boats aligned with the Homer-based North Pacific Fisherman’s Association and Saltwater Inc. of Anchorage field tested electronic monitoring in the Gulf of Alaska.

Read the full story at the Alaska Dispatch News

Fisheries Councils Express Concern Over Marine Monuments in Letter to President Trump

WASHINGTON (Saving Seafood) — March 24, 2017 — The Council Coordination Committee (CCC), comprised of representatives from the eight regional fisheries management councils, wrote to President Trump this month expressing its concern with the designation of marine national monuments under the Antiquities Act, and explaining how monuments have already adversely impacted commercial fishing activity.

“Designations of marine national monuments that prohibit fishing have disrupted the ability of the Councils to manage fisheries throughout their range as required by [the Magnuson-Stevens Act] and in an ecosystem-based manner,” the Committee wrote. “Our experience with marine monument designations to date is that they are counterproductive to domestic fishery goals, as they have displaced and concentrated U.S. fishing effort into less productive fishing grounds and increased dependency on foreign fisheries that are not as sustainably managed as United States fisheries.”

The Committee also reiterated its support for regional fisheries management, noting that through the Council process over 1,000 individual spatial habitat and fisheries conservation measures have been implemented, protecting more than 72 percent of U.S. ocean waters.

“The Councils use a public process, in a transparent and inclusive manner, and rely on the best scientific information available as required by the MSA,” the Committee wrote.

Read the full letter here

NPFMC Vacancy Announcement: Finance Officer/Admin Support

March 21, 2017 — The following was released by the North Pacific Fishery Management Council:

NPFMC is looking for a Finance Officer/Admin Support person to join our team. This person would be responsible for a variety of financial and administrative tasks in support of the activities of the Council and its staff, including budget preparation, grant reporting, accounts payable, travel and expense accounting, payroll, property, subcontracting, and other financial/administrative functions. Likely distribution of duties is 65% Finance related and 35% Administrative support.

The Council offices are located in Anchorage, Alaska

Full job description available on our website.

  • Minimum AA degree in accounting or finance, and minimum of 5 years similar professional experience in private, nonprofit, or governmental organization
  • This position is non-federal but subject to U.S. General Schedule federal equivalent, plus Alaska COLA/locality pay.
  • Application period closes April 15.

Send cover letter (statement of interest) and resume with three references to david.witherell@noaa.gov.

NPFMC April 2017 Agenda

March 7, 2017 — The following was released by the North Pacific Fishery Management Council:

The Council will begin meeting the week of April 3, 2017 at the Hilton Hotel in Anchorage, AK.

The AGENDA and SCHEDULE are now available. Documents will be posted through links on the Agenda. The deadline for public comments is 5:00 pm (AST) Tuesday, March 28, 2017.

Submit comments to npfmc.comments@noaa.gov.

NPFMC Newsletter February 2017

February 15, 2017 — The following was released by the North Pacific Fishery Management Council:

Thank you, Seattle!

The Council members and public enjoyed a spectacular seafood reception at the Renaissance Mariott Hotel in downtown Seattle following the first day of the Council meeting. Many thanks to the fishing industry businesses and groups involved in the North Pacific for hosting the event – a good time was had by all.

Nominations open for Charter Halibut Committee

The Council is seeking nominations for seats to be filled on the Charter Halibut Committee to include a 3A representative from a community that is not on the road system, and a 2C representative from one of the smaller communities to complement representation from Juneau and Sitka. Nominations are open until March 31. Representatives will be named at the April Council meeting. Please send a letter of interest to steve.maclean@noaa.gov.

BSAI Halibut Abundance-based PSC Management Workshop

In conjunction with the February Council meeting, the Council held a public stakeholder workshop to solicit input to identify measurable objectives and appropriate metrics for the development of alternative management measures for BSAI halibut PSC limits. Per Council request, the inter-agency AbundanceBased Management (ABM) workgroup translated the confirmed Council objectives into draft overarching goals to gather stakeholder input on these goals and associated measurable objectives and related performance metrics. The ABM workgroup is continuing to develop a range of alternative control rules along with a range of indices to further the process of developing alternatives for this action. This discussion paper will be presented at the April Council meeting, and will also include the results of the stakeholder feedback from the February workshop. Staff contact is Diana Stram.

Read the full newsletter here