Saving Seafood

Navy to build $146.7 million NOAA marine operations center in Rhode Island

December 6, 2023 — The U.S. Navy awarded a $146.7 million contract to New York-based Skanska USA to design and build a new National Oceanic and Atmospheric base on Naval Station Newport in Rhode Island, with plans for the facility to eventually be homeport for NOAA’s Marine Operations Center – Atlantic. 

Design details are still being finalized, according to a brief prepared statement issued by NOAA late Tuesday. requirements include having a pier that will accommodate four large vessels, a floating dock for smaller vessels, space for vessel repairs and parking and a building to be used for shoreside support and as a warehouse. Construction is anticipated to be completed by 2027. 

Design and construction of the NOAA port will be “funded in part by the Inflation Reduction Act — a historic $3.3 billion investment to help communities, including tribes and vulnerable populations, prepare, adapt and build resilience to weather and climate events in pursuit of a climate-ready nation,” according to the agency. “The act also supports improvements to weather and climate data and services, and strengthens NOAA’s fleet of research airplanes and ships.”

Read the full story at National Fisherman 

Navy steams ahead with sonar testing despite state opposition, orca impacts

October 4, 2021 — Over the objections of Washington state officials and orca advocates, the U.S. Navy is steaming ahead with a plan for seven more years of testing sonar and explosives in waters off the Northwest coast.

The Navy says the piercing noise from its tests and training activities could harm eight species of whales listed under the Endangered Species Act.

But Navy officials, backed up by the National Marine Fisheries Service, say the occasional, temporary disturbances won’t threaten the orcas’ or any other species’ survival.

“At this time the Navy intends to proceed over the objection of the State of Washington,” the Navy’s Record of Decision document, published Friday, states.

Read the full story at KUOW

 

Navy to limit sonar to protect whales

November 5, 2018 — So, tomorrow’s Election Day and here’s hoping our democratic process has provided you with some suitable candidates worthy of your vote. If not, you can always write in the FishOn staff, based solely on our simple dual campaign promises:

“If nominated, we will hide. If elected, we will demand a recount.”

We think it’s what our Founding Fathers and Mothers had in mind all along – self-imposed term limits.

We also have our own method for choosing candidates: They should be strong advocates of the commercial fishing industry, fans of baseball and they should have sent us presents on our birthday and Christmas.

Shuffling through the pile last weekend, and gotta say: It’s not looking great for this crop of cheapskates.

But that’s us. Y’all should head out and vote. If nothing else, it’s an hour away from work. Unless you live in Chicago, where you can turn it into a full-time occupation.

The new Navy slogan should be “Shhhhhhh”

The U.S. Navy last December adopted the 10th slogan in the storied history of the military service (and its a collected advertising agencies). The slogan is “America’s Navy, Forged by the Sea.” Thank God the French Navy already had taken “We Surrender, Take Our Ship” out of the running.

Our Navy made some news last week when it announced it will expand areas in which it limits its use of sonar and explosives off the East Coast as a means of helping protect the imperiled right whales. It’s doing the same in the Gulf of Mexico to help protect the Bryde’s whale.

Read the full story at the Gloucester Daily Times

California: Offshore wind farms coming to California — but the Navy says no to large sections of the coast

May 7, 2018 — Fans of renewable energy anticipate a bonanza blowing off the coast of California.

But a map released by the U.S. Navy puts large swaths of the state off limits to future offshore wind farms — including all of San Diego and Los Angeles, extending up to the Central Coast.

The military does not have the final say in the matter, as federal and state officials — as well as wind energy companies and at least one member of Congress — are working with the U.S. Department of Defense to develop a more flexible plan.

But the back-and-forth adds an extra layer of complexity to the nascent industry on the West Coast, where geographic features make it harder to construct wind farms in the Pacific than those on the East Coast.

“There’s a lot at stake here” for California to meet its ambitious clean energy goals, said Robert Collier, a policy analyst at the Green Energy Program at the UC Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education. “California is going to need a lot more renewable energy from all sources. Offshore wind is not the only potential solution, but it is part of a multi-pronged strategy.”

Why offshore wind must float on the West Coast

The sight of wind turbines anchored into the ground, their blades turning like giant pinwheels, has become more common in recent years.

But it’s rare to see a wind farm looming over open water — at least in the United States. European companies with projects in places like Denmark and Scotland have taken the early lead in offshore wind energy.

Read the full story at the San Diego Union-Tribune

 

Public skeptical of Navy bombing plans

November 10, 2017 — HILO, Hawaii — Despite Navy assurances that the military is using the latest science to protect marine mammals during bombing and sonar training exercises, most of the approximately 75 people attending a public meeting Thursday evening remained skeptical.

The meeting, the final of four across the Hawaiian islands, is part of the Navy’s draft environmental impact statement seeking permission from the National Marine Fisheries Service to continue military training activity over the next five years.

Capt. Vinnie Johnson, commanding officer, Pacific Missile Range Facility, said the Navy can remain stewards of the environment and protect marine mammals while conducting tests that are necessary for defense of the nation.

“We can be responsible stewards of natural resources, we can be responsible stewards of cultural resources and we can be responsible stewards of our community,” Johnson said.

Officials said mitigation measures such as trained lookouts aboard ships who halt exercises if marine mammals are seen in the vicinity and extra precautions during humpback whale season keep harm to a minimum.

Fewer than .03 percent of mammals are expected to die from testing, although many more could experience temporary behavioral effects, they said. Disorientation, fleeing the area, or in extreme cases, beaching can occur when the mammals’ activity is impaired by noises from bombing and sonar.

Johnson said the Navy was not testing prior to a beaching last month of pilot whales on Kauai, which resulted in five whale deaths. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scientists are still investigating.

Members of the public, bringing their messages through speeches, on paper, through oli and even in song, weren’t buying it. Impassioned speeches urged the military to clean up areas it’s already polluted before continuing bombing practices.

 

Read the full story at West Hawaii Today

 

James G. Stavridis & Johan Bergenas: The fishing wars are coming

September 14, 2017 — Lawmakers are finally catching up to something that the Navy and Coast Guard have known for a long time: The escalating conflict over fishing could lead to a “global fish war.”

This week, as part of the pending National Defense Authorization Act, Congress asked the Navy to help fight illegal fishing. This is an important step. Greater military and diplomatic efforts must follow. Indeed, history is full of natural-resource wars, including over sugar, spices, textiles, minerals, opium and oil. Looking at current dynamics, fish scarcity could be the next catalyst.

The decline in nearly half of global fish stocks in recent decades is a growing and existential threat to roughly 1 billion people around the world who rely on seafood as their primary source of protein. No other country is more concerned about the increasingly empty oceans than China, whose people eat twice as much fish as the global average. Beijing is also the world’s largest exporter of fish, with 14 million fishers in a sector producing billions of dollars a year.

In order to keep its people fed and employed, the Chinese government provides hundreds of millions of dollars a year in subsidies to its distant-water fishing fleet. And in the South China Sea, it is common for its ships to receive Chinese Coast Guard escorts when illegally entering other countries’ fishing waters. As such, the Chinese government is directly enabling and militarizing the worldwide robbing of ocean resources.

Read the full opinion piece at the Washington Post

Ryan Zinke, Trump’s Cowboy Enforcer, Is Ready for His Closeup

July 31, 2017 — He raised eyebrows for his threats against Senator Lisa Murkowski after she voted to block the Republican health care bill; he raised ire for slashing Obama-era environmental protections. And all the while, Ryan Zinke—a former Navy SEAL Commander tapped by Trump as Secretary of the Interior—has been raising his own profile. Is there room for another star in Trump’s Washington?

It was almost parody, the way he rolled in, Ryan Zinke’s six-foot-four frame hunched in the bucket seat of a black SUV. The tires sent up dust as they stopped, and out stepped the secretary of the interior, his gold “MONTANA” belt buckle glinting in the sun. He palmed his cowboy hat onto his head slowly, deliberately, and beheld the horse before him. “Hello, Tonto,” Zinke said, his voice as deep as you might expect from a former SEAL commander who fancies himself a kind of latter-day Teddy Roosevelt. Tonto blinked.

Though Zinke may have looked the part of the Western cowboy, he is in fact a big player in Donald Trump’s Washington. That much was made clear last week when—despite the many chores that keep him busy at the Interior Department—Zinke decided he wanted a piece of the healthcare debate, too. He rang up Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski, urging her to fall in line on the White House-backed effort to repeal Obamacare, and threatening to compromise energy projects important to her state if she didn’t. The move no doubt endeared him to Trump, but it sparked the ire of House Democrats, who now want the incident investigated. (“The call was professional and the media stories are totally sensationalized,” Zinke’s spokeswoman tells me.)

Moments like these can make Trump’s D.C. feel like a stressful place—a hive of murky gamesmanship and scrambled moral calculating. And a horse can help soothe some of that. I found Zinke and his mount, that Saturday morning not long ago, near the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool, where the U.S. Park Police houses its horses. As interior secretary, Zinke administers almost all of America’s public lands, including Washington’s various monuments and the National Mall, where he’d invited me to join him for a ride. (He’s also the boss of the Park Police officers, which means that when he refuses to wear a helmet, they have no choice but to indulge him.) So we set off down the Mall, the secretary wearing a blue checked shirt and white-stitched cowboy boots, like a wannabe Wayne for our hero-less times.

The 55-year-old likes to ride here every few weeks, to “get out in the field, like a commander should,” as he puts it. It’s also a fine way for a politician like him to glad-hand with sightseers—though none has any idea who Ryan Zinke is.

“You must be here from Texas!” one man shouts to the secretary.

Read the full story at GQ Magazine

Navy’s submarine hunts are too disturbing for marine life, California court rules

July 20, 2016 — They came as a wave, some 150 to 200 melon-headed whales churning into Hawaii’s Hanalei Bay like a single mass. It was a strange sight for the Kauai islanders to behold. Melon-headed whales live in the deep ocean, feasting on squid. But here they were, swimming in the shallows no more than 100 feet from shore.

Over the course of July 3 and 4, 2004, volunteers and rescuers shepherded the animals back to sea, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s account of the mass stranding. The Washington Post reported at the time that it was the largest event of its kind in 150 years of Hawaiian history. Almost all the whales made it back out into the open water. But not the entire pod.

A young calf, split off from the rest of the herd, perished the next day.

A year later, 34 whales died when they were stranded at North Carolina’s Outer Banks. Three years after that and half the world away, 100 melon-headed whales were again stranded en masse, this time on the shores of Madagascar. The reasons why whales beach themselves are not always clear — strandings have been likened to car crashes in that the causes are myriad but the conclusion is never good. With the melon-headed whales, however, something was different. The events were unusual enough, and involved such large numbers, to prompt scrutiny. In both cases, a prime suspect emerged: sonar.

Controversy over these sound waves continues today. And in the latest skirmish over oceanic noise pollution, a victory went to the whales. On Friday, a federal appeals court in San Francisco ruled that the Navy violated marine mammal protection laws, reversing a lower court’s decision that allowed military vessels to use a type of loud, low-frequency sonar approved in 2012.

Read the full story at the Washington Post

Navy’s new Zumwalt destroyer rescues ailing fishing boat captain off Portland

December 12, 2015 — The Navy’s new stealth destroyer endured a real life-and-death test Saturday when crew members aboard the future USS Zumwalt helped rescue a Maine fisherman suffering a medical emergency at sea.

The Zumwalt, a 600-foot-long guided missile destroyer built at Bath Iron Works, was conducting sea trials early Saturday morning when the U.S. Coast Guard requested assistance from any boats in the vicinity of the fishing vessel Danny Boy, located about 40 nautical miles southeast of Portland at 3 a.m. The captain of the Portland-based Danny Boy, 46-year-old Dale Sparrow, was experiencing chest pains, but a Coast Guard helicopter crew determined it was too dangerous to try to hoist the captain because of the 45-foot boat’s deck configuration.

The Zumwalt responded to the scene and launched an 11-meter “rigid hull inflatable boat” – the type used by Navy SEALs and other special forces – to bring Sparrow on board the destroyer.

“After medical evaluation, the patient was transferred from Zumwalt to a Coast Guard helicopter and then to an area hospital,” a Navy spokeswoman, Capt. Thurraya Kent, said in a statement Saturday night. The Coast Guard said Sparrow was flown to Portland International Jetport and then taken to Maine Medical Center.

Read the full story at Portland Press Herald

 

US probes dolphin death after Navy uses sonar

November 4, 2015 — HONOLULU (AP) ” The National Marine Fisheries Service on Wednesday said it was investigating the death of two dolphins found washed ashore in California shortly after Navy ships were using sonar in nearby waters.

The animals are being analyzed to try to determine what caused them to get stranded, agency spokesman Jim Milbury said.

The dolphins were common bottlenose dolphins, Navy spokeswoman Lt. Julie Holland said. They were found Oct. 21 at Imperial Beach and at Silver Strand beach in San Diego.

Two Navy ships were using mid-frequency active sonar 80 nautical miles away from where the dolphins were found, Holland said. They used the sonar for slightly more than an hour over two days from Oct. 19.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at New Bedford Standard-Times