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Confusion after LIPA wind farm meeting postponed

July 25, 2016 โ€” New York Stateโ€™s decision to postpone LIPAโ€™s consideration of an offshore wind farm that is popular with environmentalists prompted confusion and rancor in its aftermath, as the Cuomo administration works on a wind-energy blueprint that could include other areas directly off Long Island.

A presentation prepared by the Long Island Power Authority this month โ€“ before the state stepped in recently and nixed a LIPA trustee vote โ€“ included a map of up to six โ€œpotentialโ€ New York wind-energy areas, including a long, straight swath 12 miles off the coast of the entire South Fork.

Another site comprises more than 100,000 acres in an area beyond an existing wind-energy area that LIPA and Con Edison previously had identified about 12 miles from Long Beach. Fishing groups oppose use of the location for a wind farm.

The New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, which has taken over that LIPA-Con Ed project, has been working for months on a comprehensive plan for wind energy for the state. A draft โ€œblueprintโ€ of that plan is due out in coming weeks.

A map similar to LIPAโ€™s that lists the same six potential wind energy areas for New York appears in the stateโ€™s April cost analysis for Clean Energy Standard. In it, NYSERDA identified the South Fork coastal area off the Hamptons as having the potential to produce 3,081 megawatts of wind power from about 385 turbines rated 8 megawatts each.

The U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, which leases ocean sites, has yet to receive any formal request for the Hamptons-area site or other proposals beyond NYSERDAโ€™s, said spokesman Stephen Boutwell.

If it were to, he said, the agency would work with the New York Renewable Energy Task Force, which includes federal and state agencies, local governments and tribes, to โ€œidentify other users of the areas and environmental concerns to assess the suitability of areas for leasing.โ€

Should the state move forward with any of the additional wind-energy areas listed in the LIPA and NYSERDA maps, they can expect opposition from fishing groups.

โ€œThose [potential] wind-energy areas would destroy multiple fisheries,โ€ said Meghan Lapp, fisheries liaison for Seafreeze Ltd., a Rhode Island commercial fishing group. Added Drew Minkiewicz, an attorney for the Fisheries Survival Fund, representing commercial scallopers, โ€œAll of them [wind-energy areas] are right smack dab in the middle of scallop grounds.โ€

Read the full story from Newsday at National Wind Watch 

Plan Wants to Shift Mid-Atlantic Scallop Season Start Date to April 1 to Get Stock Data in Time

July 22, 2016 โ€” SEAFOOD NEWS โ€” The New England Fishery Management Council submitted a proposal to NMFS that asks to shift the start to commercial scallop fishing in the Mid-Atlantic fishery one month to April 1.

According to the Councilโ€™s plan, moving the start of the fishing season is so federal and third party researchers have more time to submit stock assessment findings so a comprehensive fishery management plan can be agreed upon prior to the season.

It would also reduce the need to for mid-season adjustments, which happens when stock data is submitted past deadline.

โ€œThe combined measures are expected to improve the overall timing of scallop fishery specifications so that final measures are available for the fishery at the start of the fishing year,โ€ the Councilโ€™s proposal said.

The plan is the result of ongoing discussions among industry stakeholders, third-party research firms and state and federal fishing authorities on how to effectively produce the most comprehensive scallop management plan each season.

All scallop fishery data is supposed to be submitted by August 1 of each year so a management plan can be finalized for the next fishing season. Since several state and federal agencies are involved in setting allocations and days โ€“at-sea,  even a one week delay can grind the process to a halt.

And in recent seasons late data submissions, mostly by federal fishery authorities, did result in mid-season adjustments to the scallop management plan.

The hope now is to approve the one month delay, which will give all scientists enough time to submit data on time.

The one month shift is not likely to have a large impact on the Mid-Atlantic scallop fishery since most major industry stakeholders have been aware of that the shift could happen. Additionally, historical data shows that March and April are generally low producing months for a majority of Mid-Atlantic scallopers.

Still, some boats that do fish in March will have to adjust their plans for the delay, likely by conserving days-at-sea to last throughout the fishing year. There is also the possibility of declines in the meat fill ratios in the scallops depending on when the spring spawning season starts.

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

New York Wind Farm Part of Larger Offshore Energy Ambitions

July 14, 2016 โ€” UNIONDALE, N.Y. โ€” A New York utility plans to approve a wind farm off eastern Long Island that it says would be the nationโ€™s largest offshore wind energy project built to date.

The project would be the first phase of a more ambitious effort to construct hundreds of electricity-producing turbines in the Atlantic Ocean in the coming years.

The announcement that the Long Island Power Authority plans to approve a proposed 90-megawatt, 15-turbine wind farm in U.S. waters east of Montauk at a meeting next week was greeted enthusiastically by energy experts, elected officials and environmentalists.

โ€œThis is obviously an important development,โ€ said Jeffrey Firestone, a professor at the University of Delaware and an expert on offshore wind. โ€œHopefully, this will be something toward facilitating a more regional approach to the need for offshore wind energy.โ€

The U.S. lags behind Europe and others in development of offshore wind energy because of regulatory hurdles and opposition from fossil fuel and fishing interests, among other challenges. Many wind farms in Europe are already producing hundreds of megawatts of power.

The federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management has issued several leases for wind projects along the Atlantic coast, but none have come to fruition yet. LIPA said its project would be the next one built after one opens near Block Island, Rhode Island, later this year.

A scallop industry trade organization, the Fisheries Survival Fund, has raised concerns about some wind farm proposals, but not this one. Important scallop areas were removed from the possible lease areas for this wind farm, said Drew Minkiewicz, an attorney for the fund. He cautioned that other commercial fishermen could raise objections.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at ABC News

Carlos Rafaelโ€™s Trial Puts One-Fifth of New Bedfordโ€™s Fishing Fleet, $80 Million in Permits at Stake

June 27, 2016 โ€” NEW BEDFORD, Mass. โ€” Indicted fishing magnate Carlos Rafael controls nearly one-fifth of the harborโ€™s commercial fleet and had permits worth about $80 million last year, according to public records and local interviews.

He also has a fondness for Greek mythology.

Commercial fishing boats named Zeus, Hera, Hera II, Apollo, Athena, Poseidon, Hercules and Titan all are part of Rafaelโ€™s fleet. Many of his boats are painted with distinctive green-and-white coloring that makes them easily recognizable on local docks, such as Leonardโ€™s Wharf, where the Sasha Lee โ€“ named after one of his daughters โ€“ and other of his vessels often float, behind the Waterfront Grille.

Boat names also honor Rafaelโ€™s native Portugal, and Cape Verde to the south. Those vessels include the Ilha Brava, after Brava Island in Cape Verde; Aรงores, for the Azores archipelago; Perola do Corvo, or โ€œPearl of Corvo,โ€ after the smallest island in the Azores; Ilha do Corvo, for that island itself; and others.

The size and scope of Rafaelโ€™s fishing business indicate a significant chunk of New Bedfordโ€™s waterfront economy could be at stake should Rafael stand trial in January 2017. He faces federal charges tied to an alleged, multi-year scheme involving illegally caught fish, bags of cash from a wholesale buyer in New York City and a smuggling operation to Portugal, via Logan International Airport in Boston.

An initial survey of Rafaelโ€™s fishing permits, vessels and the corporations behind them, along with local data and interviews, provides a glimpse into an operation that has become a flashpoint for broader debates about industry regulation and oversight.

According to 2016 vessel permit data from NOAA Fisheries, for its Greater Atlantic Region, Rafael and his wife, Conceicao Rafael, control at least 36 local vessels with commercial fishing permits this year. Those vessels include a handful of skiffs or smaller boats, but all have permits for at least 10 species of fish, ranging from American lobster to Atlantic deep sea red crab, surf clam, monkfish and more.

Twelve of the Rafaelsโ€™ local vessels have high-value, limited-access scallop permits, according to the data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The values of those permits amount to tens of millions of dollars, making their future a vital question for the waterfront.

Rafael, a 64-year-old Dartmouth resident, faces 27 counts on federal charges including conspiracy, false entries and bulk cash smuggling, according to his indictment, filed last month.

Nothing about his trial next year is certain, including outcomes or penalties. Whether the waterfront could face the loss or seizure of any of Rafaelโ€™s boats, permits or properties is an open question, and will remain so until the case is resolved. Even whether the case actually goes to trial is uncertain, to a degree.

Read the full story at the New Bedford Standard-Times

Rep. Rob Bishop: Antiquities Act abuse heads East

June 27, 2016 โ€” The following is excerpted from an opinion piece by Rep. Rob Bishop (R-UT), chairman of the House Committee on Natural Resources, published Saturday by the Boston Herald. Rep. Bishop visited New Bedford, Mass., earlier this month, where he met with Mayor Jon Mitchell, Rep. Bill Keating (D-MA), and representatives of the local commercial fishing industry. He also toured a local scallop vessel, the New Bedford harbor, the Fairhaven Shipyard, and a scallop processing company.

Some say cultural trends start on the West Coast and make their way East, but one trend moving eastward is bad news for New Englanders.

In my home state of Utah, the federal government owns 65 percent of the land. That is a problem. In the waning days of his administration, President Clinton compounded the problem by mandating the Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument. With virtually no local support, he locked up 1.7 million acres of Utah, an area larger than some states.

This monument designation was an abuse of the Antiquities Act. Passed in 1906, the Antiquities Act was originally intended for presidents to quickly prevent looting of archaeological sites. The executive power exercised under the Antiquities Act has grown far beyond the original purpose.

Now [President Obama] has his sights set on New England fisheries off the coast of Cape Cod.

Earlier this month I traveled to New Bedford, the highest-grossing commercial fishing port in our country. I spoke with local seafood workers about a potential marine monument designation off the coast. Such a designation would override the current public process of established fisheries management and could be catastrophic to the 1.8 million-plus jobs that fishing creates.

Fishing leaders expressed concern over restricted access, potential job loss, and the damage to the local fishing industry that would obviously follow a marine monument designation. Instead, they want a better public process created under the House-passed Magnuson-Stevens Act, still pending renewal in the Senate.

Read the full opinion piece at the Boston Herald

Proposed wind farm off the New Jersey coast concerns local fisherman

June 21, 2016 โ€” LONG BRANCH, N.J. โ€” A proposal to build a wind farm off the coasts of Long Island and New Jersey is concerning some local fisheries, which say that the farm could hurt their livelihood.

The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management held its first of four public meeting in Long Branch Monday night to education the public on what environmental impacts a wind farm in the ocean could have.

Local fisherman Arthur Osche says that the proposed building site for the farm is right where he usually fishes for scallops. Scallops make up about 40 percent of his fishery business.

โ€œMy boat typically does about $3 million a year, so it would be like $1.2 million,โ€ he says.

Osche says that although he does support renewable energy sources, he does not want to see them build where he and other fisheries fish.

Read and watch the full story at News 12 The Bronx

Fishermen worry about plan for wind farm off New York coast

June 20, 2016 โ€” MINEOLA, N.Y. โ€” A long-stalled plan to build a forest of power-producing windmills off the coast of New York may finally be gathering momentum, and that is sparking concern among commercial fishermen who fear the giant turbines will ruin an area rich with scallops and other sea life.

Federal officials announced earlier this month that they would auction off the rights to build the wind power farm on a 127-square-mile wedge of the Atlantic Ocean.

The tip of the wedge begins about 11 miles south of Long Islandโ€™s popular Jones Beach and spreads out across an area, sandwiched between major shipping lanes, where trawlers harvest at least $3.3 million worth of sea scallops each year, as well as smaller amounts of mackerel, squid and other species, according to a study commissioned by the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management.

โ€œThereโ€™s got to be a better place,โ€ said Eric Hansen, a scallop fisherman based in New Bedford, Massachusetts.

Groups including the Long Island Commercial Fishing Association and the Fisheries Survival Fund and a seafood company in Rhode Island have already voiced objections about damage to the fishing ground and potential navigation hazards for vessels traversing the area.

โ€œWeโ€™ll fight it every step of the way,โ€ said Drew Minkiewicz, an attorney representing the Fisheries Survival Fund, although he stopped short of threatening legal action. He said scallop fishermen donโ€™t object to all wind farms, but are angry the New York site was chosen without their input.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at the Times Union

40 years of change: For fishing industry, the spring of 1976 was the start of a new era

June 20, 2016 โ€” The following is excerpted from a story published Saturday by the New Bedford Standard-Times:

NEW BEDFORD, Mass. โ€” When you talk about fishing here in New Bedford, you have to start with the whaling era โ€” and the lessons learned.

For decades, the pursuit of whaling chugged along without any dramatic changes. The ships, the equipment, the culture remained essentially the same for years, feeding countless families, lining countless pockets โ€ฆ until the bonanza ran out and the industry collapsed in the early part of the 20th century, never to be revived.

The fishing industry, both local and national, might have fallen into that same trap, but 40 years ago the U.S. government changed the game, adopting the most sweeping changes in the laws governing fisheries that reverberates to this day.

On April 13, 1976, the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act was passed and immediately accomplished two major goals.

One, it set into motion a new and unique scheme of regulation to rebuild dwindling fish stocks, a system dramatically different than anything else the government had tried until 1976.

Two, it expelled foreign fishing vessels from fishing inside a 200-mile limit from Americaโ€™s shoreline.

It isnโ€™t talked about much today, but until 1976 the capacity of the foreign fleet exceeded the Americans, sending huge factory ships into fertile places like Georges Bank to virtually vacuum the fish into the hold and freeze it on the spot, allowing the ships to stay for weeks at a time. โ€œThere were West Germans, Poles, Russians, East Germans,โ€ recalled former fisherman James Kendall, now a seafood consultant.

In 1975, the National Marine Fisheries Service reported there were 133 foreign fishing vessels fishing on Georges Bank. The Magnuson-Stevens Act ended that decisively.

Since 1976, much has changed. The unions, which once represented the fishermen and the workers in the fish houses, virtually disappeared from the waterfront. The venerable fish auction at the Wharfinger Building on City Pier 3 is now a museum piece, since the brokers years ago put down their chalkboards and picked up computer screens. Today it has evolved into a computerized display auction elsewhere on the waterfront, with complete transparency and documentation, and bidders located across the nation.

What else has changed?

For lack of a better term, everything.

Where, oh where has our groundfish fleet gone?

At the BASE New Bedford Seafood Display Auction, co-owner Richard Canastra called up data of groundfish sales in recent years that demonstrate a dropoff of more than 30 percent in the last few years alone.

Today there are some days that donโ€™t warrant conducting the auction at all. โ€œSometimes itโ€™s like a candy store,โ€ he said. โ€œFive pounds of this and three pounds of that.โ€

Much of the blame for the shrinking of the groundfish fleet, particularly in New Bedford and Gloucester, is laid at the feet of the catch shares and sector management introduced in 2010 by NOAA Administrator Jane Lubchenco. It dispensed with most of the old days-at-sea  system, which had reduced the annual days at sea to 50, down from around 225, that the boats once had available to them.

The term โ€œsectorsโ€ was unfamiliar to the industry when NOAA announced their arrival in 2010. Essentially they are cooperatives, in which individual boats are grouped together along with their catch allocations, and the sector manager manages them as efficiently as he or she can.

This was predicted to cause a consolidation of the industry into the bigger players as the smaller ones werenโ€™t getting enough quota to make it profitable to fish.

For some boat owners, the problem was that the catch shares were determined by the history of the boats but the practice of shack left no paper trail, no formal record, so catch shares were reduced in many cases.

Dr. Brian Rothschild, dean emeritus of the UMass Dartmouth School for Marine Science and Technology and a critic of NOAA, noted that many boat owners found that they can โ€œown it and lease it out and obtain money in windfall profitsโ€ without even going fishing.

Oh, those pesky environmentalists!

It was โ€œnot right from the beginning that NOAA has enforced this,โ€ Rothschild said. โ€œOn top of that, NOAA enforcement didnโ€™t come from a desire to make good public policy but because it came under the influence of organizations like the Environmental Defense Fund,โ€ he said.

Catch shares and sector management have, however, withstood legal challenges in federal court, because of a legal doctrine named Chevron, in which government institutions are allowed to interpret laws such as Magnuson any way they wish unless the departures from congressional intent are egregious.

Rothschild is among those who believe that sector management under Magnuson has been ignoring key provisions of the act, notably the socio-economic impact evaluation and the instruction to use the best available science. That has largely excluded scientists outside of NOAA itself.

Outside scientists have occasionally run rings around NOAA. For example, SMASTโ€™s Dr. Kevin  Stokesburyโ€™s invention of a camera apparatus to quite literally count the scallops on the seabed individually has revolutionized scallop management, opened the door to a treasure trove of healthy scallops, and made New Bedford the No. 1 fishing port in the nation.

But NOAA now employs its own camera apparatus. It conducts regular surveys of fish populations and that has been a very sore point at times in recent years.

This is a departure from the days before Magnuson, when fishermen were issued permits for various species and were left largely on their own to discover how many fish were in the ocean, which were already dwindling at the time.

Read the full story at the New Bedford Standard-Times

Regulators close scallop fishery southeast of Cape Cod

June 16, 2016 โ€” NANTUCKET, Mass. โ€” The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is closing one of the key fishing areas off of New England where fishermen seek scallops.

The administration is closing the Nantucket Lightship North Scallop Access Area to scallop vessels that fish under โ€œlimited access general categoryโ€ rules. The closure goes into effect at 12:01 a.m. on Thursday.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at the Portland Press Herald

How do you get a $450,000 camera off the bottom of the sea?

May 26, 2016 โ€” The following is excerpted from a story published today by the Boston Globe:

Shortly after dawn last Friday, the R/V Hugh R. Sharp was towing a sophisticated array of sensors and cameras along the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. Then suddenly, the research vessel shuddered.

Within seconds, the line went slack, and the team of scientists and volunteers realized the $450,000 camera system was lost, somewhere off the Virginia coast.

Officials at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said they believe the cable connecting to the camera system, known as HabCam, snagged on the remains of the Bow Mariner, a well-known wreck in the area.

The scientists lost contact with the HabCam as a college student was piloting it. HabCam, which is about 10 feet long and weighs 3,700 pounds, was at a depth of about 240 feet, some 90 miles southeast of Delaware Bay.

The Sharp has only several weeks available in the spring to survey scallops, which last year had a catch valued at nearly $425 million, more than three-quarters of which went to fishermen in New Bedford.

Those representing fishermen said theyโ€™re deeply concerned about the prospects for this yearโ€™s survey.

โ€œThis will create uncertainty in the scallop assessment, meaning thereโ€™s a greater chance that weโ€™ll catch too few scallops, which will be a short-term loss, or too many, which will be a long-term loss,โ€ said Drew Minkiewicz, an attorney for the Fisheries Survival Fund, a trade group that represents scallopers throughout the Northeast.

Some in the fishing industry blame NOAA for allowing a college student to pilot the HabCam. They also raised questions about whether the incident occurred as a result of problems with another NOAA ship, the Henry B. Bigelow, which required unexpected maintenance this spring that delayed its survey of groundfish stocks more than ever before.

โ€œIโ€™m told that because of the Bigelow fiasco, [NOAA] transferred more experienced people from the scallop survey to the groundfish survey to try to make up for lost time,โ€ said Robert Vanasse, executive director of Saving Seafood, a Washington-based group that represents the fishing industry.

โ€œSince the volunteer wasnโ€™t as experienced, and since the captain was apparently driving directly into the path of a 600-foot sunken tanker, they didnโ€™t react quickly enough,โ€ he added.

Read the full story at the Boston Globe

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