Saving Seafood

News for the South Atlantic Region

NORTH CAROLINA: Valuable N.C. shrimp fishery suffering, group wants financial aid for shrimpers across Southeastern and Gulf coasts

September 13, 2023 — In what has turned out to be a bad year for many commercial shrimpers, a regional shrimpers’ association has sent governors of eight states, including North Carolina, a letter requesting emergency assistance for the watermen.

Thomas Newman, fisheries liaison for the Morehead City-based N.C. Fisheries Association, a private trade and lobbying group for commercial fishermen, said the letter came from the Southern Shrimp Alliance, based in Tarpon Springs, Florida.

Newman said the request is warranted.

“The shrimpers in our state have been struggling to make ends meet this year,” he said in an email Monday.

“Foreign imports of shrimp have reached unheard of levels, all the while sending domestic shrimp prices to an all-time low.

“If the historic low prices were not bad enough, the sheer volume of the imported shrimp has also caused issues with buyers not having enough cold storage space for domestic caught shrimp. Adding to this inflation and high fuel prices is plenty enough hardship on our fishers to request a fishery resource disaster.”

Read the full article at NEWS-TIMES

NORTH CAROLINA: Shrimp Disaster Assistance Request

September 11, 2023 — The following was released by NORTH CAROLINA FISHERIES ASSOCIATION:

As many of you know, the shrimpers in our state have been struggling to make ends meet this year. Foreign imports of shrimp have reached unheard of levels, all the while sending domestic shrimp prices to an all-time low. If the historic low prices were not bad enough, the sheer volume of the imported shrimp has also caused issues with buyers not having enough cold storage space for domestic caught shrimp. Adding to this inflation and high fuel prices is plenty enough hardship on our fishers to request a fishery resource disaster.

 The Southern Shrimp Alliance did just this on August 25th and sent a letter to all 8 coastal governors from Texas to North Carolina. Our shrimpers have struggled all season with low price returns, lay days due to market conditions, high fuel prices, and inflation. Some vessels have not even harvested shrimp this year, knowing they would lose money every week just trying to work. It’s time to help our hard-working American families.

 As of writing this update, we have yet to hear from the NC Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ), NC Division of Marine Fisheries (DMF), or Governor Roy Cooper’s Office on whether they intend to request disaster relief or not. We will keep you updated.

NORTH CAROLINA: The Last Fish

August 28, 2023 — Glenn Skinner isn’t happy.

Skinner is a licensed commercial fisherman who relies on his catch to make a profit. He’s been on the water 47 years; he started accompanying his longshoreman father on boats at age 3. Like most of his commercial brethren, Skinner doesn’t limit himself to one type of catch—he snags finfish using a gill net in the spring, trawls for shrimp in the summer, and spots roe mullet from his boat’s tower in the fall.

I met Skinner on a hot day in early June at a Beaufort processing center, or fish house, where he typically brings his catch. Skinner is soft-spoken and wore an Ocean and Coast shirt and a Myrtle Beach hat. He’s been out on the water less and less over the past five years, he said as we talked in the dust by his truck, which sported an “Eat Local Seafood” sticker. He’s become increasingly frustrated with what he sees as overregulation at the state level due to lobbyists who want to curtail commercial fishing.

“I couldn’t make up my mind if I wanted to get into the fight or get out of the fishery,” said Skinner. He chose the former, and now serves as the executive director of the North Carolina Fisheries Association, a nonprofit that advocates for commercial fishing interests at the state and federal levels.

The following day, I met Rip Woodin, a 76-year-old in boat shoes and a fly-fishing T-shirt, in the noisy lobby of a fly-fishing conference in Morehead City. Woodin, like Skinner, is a North Carolinian deeply invested in fishing. And like Skinner, he’s not happy.

Woodin started fly-fishing while working as a journalist in Wyoming, and bought an 18-foot boat when he moved to Atlantic Beach in 2005. His favorite to catch are redfish, which slither through spartina grass hunting for crabs during the full moon. He’s on the water about 25 days a year, but keeps very little of what he brings in—he says he releases most of his catches because he’s worried about the stock, as commercial fishers scoop up 200,000 pounds of redfish annually.

Skinner and Woodin represent opposite sides of a bitter dispute in North Carolina. Commercial fishermen like Skinner accuse recreational fishermen of promoting overregulation by pushing the state to impose gear limitations, reclassify species as recreational only, and restrict shrimp trawls in certain areas. Skinner believes these measures are imperiling the livelihood of people who rely on the sea to make a living—and he believes they are partially responsible for driving the number of commercial fishers down from more than 5,300 in 1994 to under 2,300 in 2021.

Read the full article at The Assembly

NORTH CAROLINA: State WRC sets recreational flounder season separate from state fisheries division season

August 28, 2023 — The N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission will allow a recreational summer flounder season in inland waters in September, creating consternation at the N.C. Fisheries Association, a private trade and lobbying group for commercial fishermen who have been mostly cut off in recent years from a species that once was one of their primary money-makers.

“In the middle of trying to rebuild the southern flounder population in our state, the North Carolina Wildlife Resource Commission has decided this year to have a separate recreational season outside of the recreational season set by the North Carolina Division of Marine Fisheries (DMF),” Thomas Newman of the association said in an email Monday.

“Not only do these season dates not align (the WRC season runs September 1-14 and the DMF season runs September 15-29) but the WRC has set a four-flounder bag limit (per day) during their season while the DMF bag limit is only one flounder.” 

Glen Skinner, executive director of the Morehead City-based association, said Monday the separate seasons for coastal waters and jointly managed inland waters will cause confusion for the recreational fishermen, who will have different rules to contend with by crossing an “imaginary line” that delineates waters where the fisheries division has sole authority (coastal waters) and waters where saltwater and freshwater fish are jointly managed by the two agencies.

“You could catch fish on one side of the line, and it would be legal, cross that line and it would be illegal, then cross the line again and it would be legal again,” he said. “It makes no sense.”

In addition, he said, it goes against the state’s plan to rebuild the stock by allowing a higher daily catch.

It’s long been an important fishery, and everyone – both state agencies and commercial and recreational fishermen – want the overfished stock rebuilt.

In 1994, the commercial southern flounder season was worth more than $8 million, with a catch of 4.8 million pounds, but it’s been steadily declining since then. In 2021, the last year for which statistics are available on the fisheries division website, it was worth only $1.4 million for a catch of about 480,000 pounds.

The state marine fisheries commission, policy-making arm of the fisheries division, addressed the issue briefly during its quarterly meeting Friday in New Bern. Phillip Reynolds, legal counsel for the commission, said, “There is no scientific basis showing that (the WRC season and bag limit) is an appropriate measure.”

The fisheries commission adopted the Southern Flounder Fishery Management Plan Amendment 3 during its May 2022 business meeting. The goal of Amendment 3 is to achieve a self-sustaining population for the overfished stock that provides a sustainable harvest. Amendment 3 maintained a 72% reduction across the fisheries and carried forward several management measures, including minimum size, from Amendment 2. 

Read the full article at the NEWS-TIMES

Court upholds that trawling doesn’t violate Clean Water Act

August 15, 2023 — Commercial shrimpers can continue to harvest by trawler in the Pamlico Sound without a Clean Water Act permit, and the state will continue to manage its fisheries.

The U.S. Court of Appeals upheld last week a district court’s Sept. 17, 2021, decision that trawling in the North Carolina estuary does not violate the Clean Water Act, as alleged in a lawsuit that the North Carolina Coastal Fisheries Reform Group filed in August 2020 against a half-dozen commercial shrimping businesses.

The reform group argued that bycatch being thrown back into the water is a pollutant and disturbing sediment with trawl nets is dredging, either of which, the group contended, would require commercial shrimpers to obtain a Clean Water Act permit. The three-judge panel rejected the argument.

The district court dismissed the suit in 2021 because the Clean Water Act does not regulate bycatch — the state does — and that disturbing sediment with trawl nets does not violate the act.

The Clean Water Act establishes “the basic structure for regulating discharges of pollutants into the waters of the United States and regulating quality standards for surface waters,” the EPA explains.

“We affirm the district court’s decision that Fisheries Reform Group fails to plausibly allege that shrimp trawlers are violating the Clean Water Act by either (1) throwing their bycatch back into Pamlico Sound, or (2) disturbing sediment on the Sound’s floor with their trawl nets, thereby causing it to resettle,” Judge Julius Richardson wrote in the panel’s unanimous opinion decided Aug. 7.

Read the full article at CostalReview.org

NORTH CAROLINA: Abundant elsewhere, NC’s blue crab population dwindles

August 9, 2023 — Bob Dillard’s mind is imprinted with memories of summer days dropping fish-head-baited lines to catch what would usually yield a basketful of blue crabs in Topsail Sound.

“In a matter of 45 minutes, no more than an hour, probably less, you’d fill up the basket with nice crabs,” he said.

The little, soundside cinderblock house his grandparents owned at the south end of Topsail Island has long been gone — torn down and replaced by a much larger, modern beach house.

But Dillard, 76 and a resident of Bolivia in Brunswick County, returns to Topsail Beach each year, renting a house for one week to spend with his children and grandchildren and to fish for blue crabs.

Last month, he rented a house on the sound, a spot perfect for taking a crab pot, he thought.

“I baited it every day and all I caught was fish,” Dillard said. “What I was seeing this year was you were just waiting around and you don’t see any crabs.”

Read the full article at CostalReview.org

NORTH CAROLINA: NC joins pact to cover offshore wind-related fisheries losses

June 14, 2023 — North Carolina has joined nearly a dozen other East Coast states to create a financial compensation program that would cover economic losses within the fisheries industry caused by Atlantic offshore wind development.

The Fisheries Mitigation Project aims to establish a regional administrator to oversee the process of reviewing claims and making payouts collected through a fund paid for by wind developers to commercial and for-hire recreational fisheries industries to mitigate financial loss associated with offshore wind farms.

Read the full article at CoastalReview.org

Staying Alive

June 13, 2023 — Thirty years on, fishermen call for a re-evaluation of catch share programs that give foreign investors and non-participants a share of the catch.

Individual Transferable Quotas are far from a new idea in fisheries.

The International Commission for the Northwest Atlantic Fisheries attempted to manage fisheries in the Northwest Atlantic from 1949 to 1979. The organization started discussing quota management in the 1960s and introduced national fishing quotas in the early 1970s. ICNAF sought to make these national quotas transferable in the late 1970s, but with Canada, the United States, and other North Atlantic Rim countries establishing what were then called Fisheries Conservation Zones extending 200 miles from their coasts, ICNAF was disbanded.

While countries such as Canada and Iceland aggressively pursued policies of quota management, including Individual Transferable Quotas (ITQs), the United States saw only three fisheries –Alaska halibut, Atlantic surf clam, and southern Atlantic wreckfish – adopt quota management before declaring a moratorium on the use of a tool that most saw as privatization of a public resource.

In 2000, Maine Sen. Olympia Snowe failed in her efforts to extend the moratorium. Under pressure from Jane Lubchenco, who headed to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration fisheries under President Obama, groundfish fishermen in New England – the last bastion of defiance against what many fishermen saw as the  privatization of fishing rights – agreed to the start of a catch share program in 2011.

Read the full article at the National Fisherman

Federal red snapper rules advance toward approval despite criticism

March 9, 2023 — New federal regulations on red snapper are on their way to final approval, and neither the people voting for the plans nor federal officials have much faith in them.

The Snapper-Grouper Committee of the South Atlantic Fishery Management Council (SAFMC) shepherded along Amendment 35, which is part of the SAFMC’s efforts to reduce overfishing of red snapper. Final approval is expected later in the week, despite its unpopularity among some Council members and from NOAA Fisheries.

“Bottom line for me is I don’t think (Amendment) 35 does anything for us,” NOAA Fisheries Regional Administrator Andy Strelcheck said at the SAFMC’s quarterly meetings on Jekyll Island, Georgia.

“I don’t think it’s a solution, I think it’s just going to create more anger with anglers, I think it’s ultimately not addressing the crux of the problem, which is, obviously, reducing discards and trying to shift discards to landed catch.”

The committee’s options at this point in the process were either to approve a proposal that significantly reduced catch limits, or approve one that shut down the fishery altogether, with the exception of those with exempted fishing permits.

Read the full article at Florida Politics