Daily Archives: September 25, 2016
U.S. Coast Guard confirms one missing boater from Middletown has been found safe
The U.S. Coast Guard has confirmed that one of two Middletown missing boaters has been found alive. Nathan Carman was found Sunday drifting at sea by a freighter. He was in good condition and was coming back to an undisclosed port. There was no information about the whereabouts of his mother, Linda. “Good to go,” Coast Guard representatives said. He was not suffering from life threatening injuries, which is why he’s staying on the freighter. He was found on a four person inflatable life raft that is required safety equipment The family has been notified. Saturday night, friends held a vigil for the Carman’s at Linda’s home. For about a week, the Coast Guard searched roughly 60,000 square miles for Linda Carman and her son Nathan. Read the story here 20:48
Ushering industrial aquaculture into the Pacific Islands Region EEZ is anything but sustainable
Right now, anyone can throw a cage into the open ocean within the Economic Enterprise Zone and begin an aquaculture operation, said Joshua DeMello, of the Western Pacific Regional Fishery Management Council. The beginning of that aquaculture management program for the Pacific Islands Region is in the works, under the eye of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration National Marine Fisheries Service and in conjunction with Western Pacific Regional Fishery Management Council. The entities are preparing a programmatic environmental impact statement (PEIS) analyzing the possible environmental impacts of the proposed management program and alternatives. “The purpose of it is to develop a management program to support sustainable, economically sound aquaculture in the Pacific Island Region,” DeMello said. The PEIS process looks at options for permit duration, whether cages should be metal or net pens, and allowable species. But ushering industrial aquaculture into the EEZ is anything but sustainable, poses a threat to the environment and could impact commercial fishing, according to a biologist. Read the story here 20:13
Oops. Shrimp boat raises Holy Hell at the St. Simons Island pier!
A shrimp boat out of South Carolina apparently tried to stop at the St. Simons Island pier late Saturday afternoon to sell shrimp, but the sales pitch didn’t go as planned. The boat is called the High Tide, and was registered out of Hilton Head Island, S.C. The boat got its nets tangled in the railing and caused damage to the western tip of the structure. Shark fisherman Jacob Key said the shrimp boat stopped on the eastern tip of the pier, and the shrimper began handing over buckets of shrimp to a woman he knew on the pier, with plans to sell them to the anglers and sightseers there. But this caused a commotion with the anglers’ fishing lines, and the boat relocated to the south tip of the T-shaped pier. The boat was on the shore side of the pier on the western tip when its net became entangled in a light post. The trawler booms were down and the net and boom tore down several yards of railing, two light posts and a new fish-cleaning table. Read the rest here 18:25
Baseball mourns Miami Marlins ace Jose Fernandez – Killed with two others in boating tragedy
Jose Fernandez escaped from Cuba by boat on his fourth try as a teenager, and when his mother fell into the Yucatan Channel during the journey, he jumped in and pulled her out. Fernandez’s heroic backstory made his death early Sunday that much more heart-wrenching. The charismatic Miami Marlins ace was killed in a boating accident at age 24. Fernandez and two other people died when their 32-foot vessel slammed into a jetty off Miami Beach, authorities said. Authorities didn’t know the time of the crash. The capsized boat was found shortly after 3 a.m. “It does appear that speed was involved due to the impact and the severity of it,” Veloz said. “It does appear to be that they were coming at full speed when they encountered the jetty, and the accident happened.” The boat was owned by a friend of Fernandez. Read the story here 17:46:17
New book explores rise and ongoing value of commercial fishing in Whatcom County
Joshua Stilts grew up in Bellingham the son of a commercial fisher, but never got hooked on fishing himself. Instead, he pursued his interest in journalism. “Telling other people’s stories is what I was passionate about,” said Stilts, who now lives in Seattle. He recently combined his interest in storytelling with his family ties to fishing by writing “Whatcom Fish Tales: A Historical Look at the County’s Seafood Industry.” Stilts described his book as the first overview of the history of commercial fishing in the county for a general audience. His book is more than a personal memoir or a fishing company profile, but less than an academic history on the subject. Read the rest here 17:17
Four New Papers Link Solar Activity, Natural Ocean Cycles To Climate – And Find Warmer Temps During 1700s, 1800s
As of mid-September, there have already been 77 peer-reviewed scientific papers authored by several hundred scientists linking solar activity to climate change. There were 43 as of the end of June, as seen here. In other words, there have been 34 more papers linking solar forcing to climate change made available online just since July. This publication rate for 2016 is slightly ahead of the pace of published papers linking solar forcing to climate change for 2015 (95 Solar-Climate papers ) and 2014 (93 Solar-Climate papers). At this rate, it is likely that a list of 300+ scientific papers linking solar forcing to climate change will have been made available between 2014 and 2016. In addition, there have already been 41 papers published in science journals this year linking natural oceanic oscillations (i.e., ENSO, NAO, AMO, PDO) to climate changes. There were 27 such papers as of the end of June. The solar-ocean oscillation climate connection has gained widespread acceptance in the scientific community. For example, see “35 New Scientific Publications Confirm Ocean Cycles, Sun Are the Main Climate Drivers” Read the rest here 15:36
Herrera Beutler-backed bill to kill sea lions gains traction
A measure backed by U.S. Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler, R-Camas, allowing for the killing of sea lions to protect endangered fish, is gaining momentum in Congress. The Endangered Salmon and Fisheries Predation Prevention Act, co-sponsored by Oregon’s Democratic U.S. Rep. Kurt Schrader, was approved by the U.S. House Natural Resources Committee on Thursday. The bill allows tribal members and fish managers to remove California sea lions from specific areas to protect salmon, steelhead and other native fish that are considered threatened. “Salmon are central to our way of life in the Pacific Northwest, but right now sea lion predation is posing a serious threat to our salmon populations,” Herrera Beutler said in a statement. “Significant resources are invested to ensure their survival, but we’re being poor stewards of these resources if we don’t also manage the threat of an exploding sea lion population.” Read the rest here 14:35
Bill to limit presidential powers to designate monuments
Key US Senators are trying to limit presidential power to designate sweeping national monuments on land and water—an issue that hit home with American Samoa’s fishing industry in the last few years. Senate Energy and Natural Resources Chair Lisa Murkowski and Arizona Senator Jeff Flake have introduced separate bills to curb presidential power under the 1906 Antiquities Act. The law gives the president, sweeping power to designate hundreds of thousands of square miles of ocean and millions of acres of land, as national monuments. President Obama established in 2009, and expanded in 2014, the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument—the largest marine protected area in the world…covering 370,000 square nautical miles, and encompassing important fishing areas for American Samoa’s fishing industry. Read the rest here 13:57
Tasmania’s rock lobster fishermen fight a wave of red tape
Tasmania’s rock lobster fishermen are a hardy bunch, weathering everything from wild storms to toxic algal blooms, but they have been blindsided by a wave of costly red tape. Third- and fourth-generation rock lobster fishermen who have built an $85 million-a-year trade, mostly via exports to Asia, say new regulations at both state and federal levels threaten chaos. Changes to state regulations proposed from March next year will force rock lobster fishermen to unload their catch in the same area it is caught. While designed to prevent fishermen taking extra lobsters from capped catch areas on their journey home, fishermen say the rule will force them to unload hundreds of kilometres away from their home ports and buyers. Like other fishing industries, they also face massive hikes — up to 116 per cent — in marine safety compliance fees, due to a federal takeover of the role by the Australian Maritime Safety Authority. They believed the state change was a lazy means of making policing easier for fisheries management. “We are not criminals and we shouldn’t be treated like criminals,” said Mr Parker’s brother and fellow rock lobster fisherman, John Parker. A submission by the Tasmanian Rock Lobster Fisherman’s Association describes the state changes as “overly bureaucratic, burdensome and punitive”, as well as unjustified, given there was no evidence of a compliance problem. Read the rest here 11:11
The government wants more offshore fish farms, but no one is biting
Off the coast of San Diego, America’s eighth largest city, commercial fishermen harvest about 1,100 metric tons of seafood from the Pacific every year. That sounds like a lot. But it isn’t much to Don Kent, who says he can do better with just one fish farm. If Kent gets his way, he would raise 5,000 metric tons of yellowtail jack and white sea bass in a grid of net pens measuring about a square mile, anchored four miles off San Diego in federal waters. The species are prized in Southern California sushi restaurants, which now serve their customers imported fish almost exclusively, most of it from China, Japan, Greece or Chile. The US imports about 91% of its seafood. Whether consumers know it or not, about half of that is farmed in aquaculture facilities much like the one Kent wants to build. While the federal government has permitted shellfish farming for years, it didn’t allow farming of finfish such as bass and salmon until earlier this year. Read the story here 10:41
Satellite beams to remote clinic in Dutch Harbor
The only clinic in one of the nation’s busiest commercial fishing ports is so remote that even conventional telemedicine for emergencies has been impossible for its limited staff – until last week. A new partnership with an Anchorage hospital is virtually beaming critical care doctors 800 miles away to the emergency room on the island that holds Dutch Harbor, the operations base for the Bering Sea crabbing fleet made famous by the Discovery Channel show “Deadliest Catch.” But instead of transmissions with fiber-optics, which are nowhere near isolated Unalaska Island, the team putting together the system is relying on satellite technology in what is believed to be a first in the country for telemedicine. The new connection is expected to boost outpatient care as needed by clinic staffers, including its two non-emergency doctors. The clinic, Iliuliuk Family and Health Services, brings to nine the number of providers served by the electronic intensive care unit at Anchorage’s Providence Alaska Medical Center. Read the story here 10:03
Save wild salmon, support Bill C-228
Early this year, Bill C-228 – a private member’s bill, was introduced to amend the Fisheries Act (closed containment aquaculture) to require finfish aquaculture for commercial purposes, in Canadian fisheries’ waters off the Pacific Coast, be carried out in closed-containment facilities. It also requires the Minister of Fisheries and Oceans to prepare, table in Parliament and implement a plan, to support the transition to the use of closed containment facilities, and to protect the jobs and financial security of workers in that sector. Click here to read Bill C-228 The bill is expected to go to second reading in the House of Commons this fall. Show your support for Bill C-228. Add your name to the e-petition. Link 08:55
