March 23, 2016 — A National Marine Monument for New England. Should the President designate the Cashes Ledge Closed Area and the New England Coral Canyons and Seamounts as the first Marine National Monument in the Atlantic? Come and hear experts Vito Giacalone from the Northeast Seafood Coalition and Peter Shelley of Conservation Law Foundation tackle the issues and the controversies surrounding Presidential action. A Panel with Vito Giacalone,
As Onerous Fees go into Effect that Threaten New Hampshire’s Fishing Industry, Sen. Shaheen Provides an Opportunity for Industry Leaders to Send a Message to Washington
March 3, 2016 — The following was released by the Office of Senator Jeanne Shaheen:
Senator Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), the lead Democrat on the Senate Small Business and Entrepreneurship Committee, invited two prominent industry leaders in the New England fishing industry to testify at a committee hearing today. Through her leadership on the committee, Senator Shaheen was able to make New Hampshire’s struggling fishing industry a major focus of Thursday’s hearing. James Hayward and Dr. Joshua Wiersma both spoke to the enormous threat that new federal at-sea monitoring fees and existing catch limits pose to New Hampshire’s fishermen. As of the first of this month, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is forcing New Hampshire fishermen to pay for an at-sea observer program, which monitors catch sizes for conservation purposes. The program, which was previously paid for by NOAA, will cost fishermen an estimated $700 per day on fishing trips.
“Fishing is an integral part of New Hampshire’s economy and heritage,” said Shaheen after the hearing. “Our struggling small-boat fleet needs relief from onerous federal regulations so New Hampshire’s fishermen can continue to make a living. Catch limits and at-sea monitoring fees threaten the very existence of our fishing industry. I’m very pleased that Mr. Hayward and Dr. Wiersma took the time to inform the Senate of their first-hand experience in our region’s fishing industry.”
During the hearing Mr. Hayward and Dr. Wiersma delivered a dire warning to the Senate.
Mr. Hayward: “Time is crucial and the road we’re headed down right now is not a good one. It’s pretty much the end is near and if things aren’t changed soon, at least to some extent, the fleets going to look a lot different in thirty six month. I can assure you of that.”
Shaheen: “Will we still have any fishing in New Hampshire if we don’t see some changes from NOAA?”
Mr. Hayward: “What will happen is the infrastructure will be gone and when that’s gone, the boats will leave. The ones that want to remain will be forced out because they will have no place to offload, market or sell.”
That interaction can be watched here.
At a separate hearing today on the Senate Appropriations Committee, Senator Shaheen confronted the Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker with the testimony she had just heard from Mr. Hayward and Dr. Wiersma. NOAA is an agency of the U.S. Department of Commerce. Their interaction can be watched here.
Background information on Senator Shaheen’s invited witnesses:
James Hayward, President of XI Northeast Fisheries Sector, Inc.
James Hayward is a second generation commercial fisherman. He is primarily a day boat gillnet fisherman operating in the Gulf of Maine ranging from 20 to 120 miles from port. He currently owns two fishing boats located in Portsmouth Harbor, New Hampshire. He owns and manages Heidi Seafood Services, the only federally licensed groundfish dealership at the State facility in Portsmouth Harbor. He is president of the community’s groundfish sector, XI Northeast Fisheries Sector, Inc., as well as treasurer of New Hampshire community supported fisheries, New Hampshire Community Seafood. He is also a board member of the Northeast Seafood Coalition and the Northeast Sector Services Network, and a member of the Seafood Harvesters of America.
Dr. Joshua Wiersma, Manager, Northeast Fisheries, Environmental Defense Fund
Dr. Wiersma has over 15 years of experience working with commercial fishermen in New England to improve their business conditions. His doctoral research, which examined the value of collaborative research to New England fishermen, led him to work directly for the ground fishing industry after graduation. Initially hired by the Massachusetts Fishermen’s Partnership as a Fisheries Economist, he then worked for the Northeast Seafood Coalition as their Sector Policy Analyst where he helped to create the twelve Northeast Fisheries Sectors. He went on to manage New Hampshire’s two ground fishing sectors for the next five years. Over this time, he also co-founded and was the Executive Director of New Hampshire Community Seafood Association, a successful community supported fishery cooperative that offers fresh, local, underutilized fish to the New Hampshire public through a type of fish share model. He is now the Manager of Northeast Fisheries at Environmental Defense Fund, where he continues to work with fishermen to shape effective fisheries management, to improve fisheries science and data collection, and to develop better seafood markets and other business opportunities.
New quotas cut deep for fishing industry
February 3, 2016 — Fishermen and fishing stakeholders say the darkness that has descended on the Northeast groundfish fishery over the past three years is only going to grow deeper in 2016, with some fishing stakeholders envisioning the final collapse of the small-boat industry due to slashed quotas for species they believe are abundant.
“With these cuts, we will not have a fishery as we know it anymore,” said Vito Giacalone, the manager of Gloucester-based Northeast Fishing Sector 4 and the policy director at the Northeast Seafood Coalition. “The great shame to this is we’re going to have this entirely detrimental economic impact while the stocks are in great shape and no one in the government is listening. There is just no leadership.”
At the heart of the issue is the expanding difference between what fishermen say they are seeing on the water and the results from NOAA stock assessments used to produce the annual fishing quotas. Call it a watery Great Divide.
“The fish are in great shape and the only real constraint on catch is quota,” Giacalone said. “Fishermen are seeing that across the board on a lot of the species.”
The quotas, set for 2016 by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in the final groundfish framework, reflect a far different analysis by NOAA and its scientists. They include savage cuts to gray sole (55 percent), Georges Bank cod (66 percent), northern windowpane flounder (33 percent) and Gulf of Maine yellowtail flounder (26 percent).
“We’ve never had a greater gap between what the fishermen are seeing on the water and what the scientists are saying,” Giacalone said. “Never.”
Gloucester fisherman Al Cottone said his personal sector contribution (PSC) for 2016 includes a slight increase in Gulf of Maine cod from the 1,800 pounds he was allotted in 2015, but cuts in several other species such as yellowtail flounder (down 25 percent to 2,400 pounds); American plaice (down 17.6 percent to 2,800 pounds) and gray sole (down 6 percent to 2,800 pounds).
Read the full story at Gloucester Daily Times
Questions schooling around at-sea fishing monitors
January 16, 2016 — The battle over the cost and scope of at-sea monitoring of Northeast groundfish vessels, now being played out on various regulatory and legal platforms, promises a hectic end to the current fishing season and a complex start to the next.
There are no shortage of questions.
- When will the federal government run out of money and shift the responsibility for paying for observers to the permit holders?
- How will NOAA Fisheries respond to the recommendations from the New England Fishery Management Council that would significantly alter the at-sea monitoring program in the 2016 fishing season, which begins May 1?
- How do the fishing sectors, once they are handed the responsibility of paying for observer coverage, negotiate new contracts with monitoring contractors when they don’t know what rules will be in place for the remainder of this fishing season and the beginning of the next?
- Finally, what affect will the federal lawsuit, filed by New Hampshire fisherman David Goethel seeking the elimination of the monitoring program, have on the process in the short and long terms?
- “Knowing what the numbers are going to be and what the process is going to be is really important,” Northeast Seafood Coalition Executive Director Jackie Odell told the Gloucester Fishing Commission on Thursday night. “That kind of certainty is really essential.”
Presently, that certainty is nowhere to be found.
Proposed rule changes
Odell was before the board seeking its commitment to support the proposed rule changes for at-sea monitoring approved by the council in December. Those measures are designed to alter the methodology and cost of providing observer coverage to make the program more efficient and ease the ultimate burden of assuming the responsibility for paying for the coverage.
Read the full story at the Gloucester Daily Times
MASSACHUSETTS: Fishing Commission to talk monitoring, seafood show
January 13, 2016 — The city’s Fisheries Commission is set to discuss a variety of issues dealing with at-sea monitoring at its meeting Thursday night at City Hall, as well as details of Gloucester’s participation in the upcoming international seafood show in Boston.
The commission is scheduled to meet at 7 in the conference room on the first floor.
The groundfish at-sea monitoring items involve a request from the Northeast Seafood Coalition for the commission to support the recent votes by the New England Fishery Management Council to reduce the level — and ultimately the cost — of at-sea monitoring coverage mandated for groundfish vessels.
NOAA Fisheries has said it has enough money to continue paying for the monitoring — at an estimated cost of $710 per day per vessel — into some point early in 2016 and then plans to shift those costs to the permit holders.
MASSACHUSETTS: Northeast Seafood Coalition seeks support for monitoring plan
January 1, 2015 — The Northeast Seafood Coalition is seeking the city Fisheries Commission’s support for the New England Fishery Management Council’s recent vote to reduce the mandated level of at-sea monitoring for groundfish boats when the 2016 fishing season opens May 1.
Jackie Odell, NSC executive director, said she will make a formal request for a letter of support from the commission at its yet-to-be scheduled January meeting to begin building public and industry support for the actions the council took at its December meetings in Portland, Maine.
With the prospect of groundfishermen forced to assume the hefty cost of at-sea monitoring at some point within the first quarter of 2016, the council voted to reduce the level of mandated monitoring from approximately 24 percent of all groundfish trips to about 13 percent to help ease the additional financial burden looming on the horizon.
Read the full story at Gloucester Daily Times
New England fleet could see haddock quota double
December 4, 2015 — The annual catch limits for Gulf of Maine cod will increase slightly in 2016, while the quota for haddock will more than double if recommendations passed this week by the New England Fishery Management Council are approved by NOAA Fisheries.
One year after slashing total cod quotas by more than 75 percent to 386 metric tons, the council voted at its three-day meeting in Portland, Maine, to raise the total cod annual catch limit (ACL) to about 440 metric tons, with 280 metric tons designated for the commercial fishing industry in each of the next three fishing seasons.
The commercial industry’s Gulf of Maine cod ACL this year is 207 metric tons.
“It’s a slight increase and of course that’s always good,” said Jackie Odell, executive director of the Gloucester-based Northeast Seafood Coalition. “But it doesn’t come close to reflecting what fishermen — commercial and recreational — are seeing on the water and it’s certainly nothing that’s going to sustain the fishery.”
The council voted to increase the commercial quota for Gulf of Maine haddock in 2016 to 2,416 metric tons from the current 958 metric tons, or an increase of 152 percent.
“Haddock is going up substantially, like through the roof,” Odell said.
The news was not good on Cape Cod and Gulf of Maine yellowtail flounder, with the commercial ACL falling 26 percent in 2016 to 341 metric tons, and witch flounder, which will have a 50 percent decrease in its 2016 ACL to 302 metric tons from the current 620 metric tons.
Read the full story at the Gloucester Daily Times
Climate change fuels cod collapse
November 3, 2015 — The strongest link yet between climate change and the collapse of New England’s cod fish stunningly confirms how global emissions fuel regional calamities. The problems can no longer be contained by fishery council catch limits. They now demand worldwide greenhouse gas solutions.
A team of scientists, including those from the Gulf of Maine Research Institute, the University of Maine, and the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences in Maine, found that average surface water temperature in the Gulf of Maine rose four degrees between 2004 and 2013. Temperatures in the gulf have risen faster than in 99 percent of all sea waters, with record warmth recorded in 2012.
Four degrees is trivial to humans, who can shed sweaters or seek shade. But for a cold-blooded fish at the southern edge of its breeding range, unable to turn on the AC against the northward shift of the Gulf Stream, four degrees is a sauna. Less cod larvae survive in warmer water, possibly because their cold-water zooplankton food is also less available. Surviving cod then seek deeper, colder water, where more voracious predators await to compound their mortality.
The study, published last week in the journal Science, helps explain why cod stocks have not rebounded under draconian federal catch limits. Adding in the negative impact of warmer water, researchers found that fishing mortality was far too high to rebuild stocks even when fishermen did not exceed quotas.
Read the full story at Boston Globe
A fisherman’s doubt, and his love of the sea
November 3, 2015 — He is up before the dawn, and, a creature of steady habits, he heads for the seashore.
It’s dark when Frank Mirarchi jumps into his black pickup truck, and dark still when he reaches Scituate Harbor. He parks on the town pier and stares at the ocean. But his 55-foot stern dragger is no longer moored there.
Actually, the boat is there. But it’s no longer his. It was renamed last June after he sold it — a poignant punctuation point to Mirarchi’s half-century career as a commercial fisherman.
“I’m down here every morning to watch the boats go out,’’ he told me Monday as we sat on a bench overlooking the dazzling harbor and under an unseasonably warm autumn sun. “I did it for 52 years. And I still love it.’’
I first met Mirarchi in early January when the harbor was icy and fat flakes of snow gently fell as if one of those snow globes had been softly shaken.
He is the son of a scientist and is something of a self-taught scientist himself. When I suggested Governor Charlie Baker would do well to pick his brain and appoint him to an ad hoc group looking into the travails of the cod fishery in the Gulf of Maine, the new governor took my advice. And soon Mirarchi was shaking hands with Baker on Beacon Hill.
When the latest news arrived last week about the depths of the cod collapse, the numbers were so alarming that I instantly thought of Frank and those like him who found their livelihood at sea.
Read the full story at Boston Globe
Climate change hurting New England cod population, study says
October 29, 2015 — The rapid warming of the waters off New England has contributed to the historic collapse of the region’s cod population and has hampered its ability to rebound, according to a study that for the first time links climate change to the iconic species’ plummeting numbers.
Between 2004 and 2013, the mean surface temperature of the Gulf of Maine — extending from Cape Cod to Cape Sable in Nova Scotia — rose a remarkable 4 degrees, which the researchers attributed to shifts in the ocean currents caused by global warming.
The study, which was released Thursday by the journal Science, offers the latest evidence of climate change — this time, affecting a species once so plentiful that fishermen used to joke that they could walk across the Atlantic on the backs of cod.
Fisheries management officials have sharply limited cod fishing in hopes of protecting the species, but they estimate the number of cod remain at as little as 3 percent of what would sustain a healthy population. The limits, in turn, have hurt fishermen.
“Managers [of the fishery] kept reducing quotas, but the cod population kept declining,” said Andrew Pershing, the study’s lead author and chief scientific officer of the Gulf of Maine Research Institute in Portland. “It turns out that warming waters were making the Gulf of Maine less hospitable for cod, and the management response was too slow to keep up with the changes.”
The institute had reported last year that the rise in temperatures in the Gulf of Maine exceeded those found in 99 percent of the world’s other large bodies of saltwater. The authors of Thursday’s study link the rapid warming to a northward shift in the Gulf Stream and changes to other major currents in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.
They say the warmer water coursing into the Gulf of Maine has reduced the number of new cod and led to fewer fish surviving into adulthood. Cod prefer cold water, which is why they have thrived for centuries off New England.
The precise causes for the reduced spawning are unclear, the researchers said, but they’re likely to include a decline in the availability of food for young cod, increased stress, and more hospitable conditions for predators. Cod larvae are View Story eaten by many species, including dogfish and herring; larger cod are preyed upon by seals, whose numbers have increased markedly in the region.
Read the full story at the Boston Globe
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