Monthly Archives: August 2018
Access to justice denied; Labour Board refuses FISH-NL request to live-stream upcoming hearing
“While we’re urging inshore harvesters to attend the hearing in person, the reality is most will not be able to make it,” says Ryan Cleary, President of FISH-NL. “For them, access to justice will be denied as a result of this decision.” Almost 20 months after FISH-NL submitted an application for certification to represent the province’s inshore harvesters — breaking them away from the FFAW-Unifor — and the Labour Relations Board has scheduled an Aug. 20th hearing. Earlier this month, David Goodland, FISH-NL’s lawyer, wrote the Labour Relations Board for permission to live-stream the hearing, and share the recording on FISH-NL’s Facebook page. “The request is made in order to ensure all parties affected by the outcome of the hearing have access to justice and in particular have reasonable access to this hearing,” Goodland wrote, adding if the request isn’t granted the “vast majority” of harvesters won’t be able to observe the hearing. >click to read<14:17
Commercial Fishing Operations Reporting Record Catch Along Lake Superior’s South Shore
Commercial fishing operations near the Apostle Islands of Lake Superior are reporting record numbers of whitefish and a strong recovery of lake trout from a low in the early 2000s. During a presentation to the state’s Natural Resources Board, Craig Hoopman, of Lake Superior whitefish, said he is seeing record numbers of young whitefish and a strong rebounding of lake trout numbers. Hoopman, who chairs the state Department of Natural Resources Lake Superior Commercial Fishing Board, said fishing has been phenomenal so far this year. “We’re averaging between 2,500 and 3,000 pounds of whitefish per day in the traps right now and releasing thousands of sub-legal fish,” said Hoopman. “There’s just multiple year classes of fish.” >click to read<12:38
Pacific Seafood wants to buy Bayfront area properties to house their workers
Pacific Seafood processing is asking Newport City Hall to allow them to create their own worker housing because their workers can’t find affordable housing in Newport. Pacific Seafood will be sitting down with city planning commissioners August 13th to work out some changes to the city code to allow the company to provide workforce housing for its workers by acquiring properties on, or near, the Bayfront so their workers can have a place to live and not have it cost them an arm and a leg. >click to read<10:36
UPDATED – BREAKING: ‘Cold Water Cowboys’ fishing boat catches fire at Newfoundland wharf
Plumes of smoke could be seen coming from the wharf near a fish plant in Twillingate, N.L., this morning after a longliner caught fire. Deborah Bourden, who operates the nearby Anchor Inn Hotel and Suites, says the boat that caught fire is the Sebastian Sails, a fishing vessel that had been featured on the reality television series “Cold Water Cowboys.” She says the town’s fire department responded not long after the fire broke out just before 6 a.m. Bourden says she talked to a firefighter at the scene, and was told that the fire is now under control and no one was hurt. Bourden says there were explosions heard and it’s believed they originated from propane tanks on the boat. >click to read<08:32
Twillingate longliner Sebastian Sails badly damaged in wharfside fire – >click to read< Nature of blaze of ‘Cold Water Cowboys’ vessel being investigated; effort underway to put out wharf fire – >click to read<09:48
UPDATED – Unified command responds to grounded vessel near Santa Cruz
The Coast Guard, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary, California Department of Fish and Wildlife’s Office of Spill Prevention and Response (OSPR), Monterey County, Santa Cruz Fire Department and a representative of the vessel owners have established a unified command in response to a 56-foot commercial fishing vessel that ran aground with a maximum potential capacity of 1,200 gallons of diesel aboard near Natural Bridges State Park, Sunday morning. The captain of the fishing vessel, Pacific Quest, contacted Coast Guard Sector San Francisco watchstanders at approximately 2 a.m. Sunday, reporting that his vessel ran aground with only himself and his dog aboard. >click to read<06:38
Inuit father faces backlash after posting photo of son with hunted beluga whale on Twitter
An Inuit father who posted a photo on Twitter expressing pride in his son’s first beluga whale harvest says he’s received a lot of online backlash from people who don’t understand life in the North. When someone harvests a whale in Rankin Inlet it’s a celebration for the whole community, said Albert Netser. But it’s more special when it happens for the first time. So when his 16-year-old son Nangaat harpooned a beluga whale earlier this week in the Hudson Bay, like any proud parent, he wanted to share the achievement. He shared the photo, showing his son proudly smiling standing on rocks at the edge of the water in front of the dead whale,,, >click to read<22:39
Prince Edward County fisherman hands family business to Syrian refugee
A veteran fisherman from Prince Edward County is handing the reins of his company over to a 21-year-old Syrian newcomer in an effort to keep the only fish processing operation left in the county alive. Kendall Dewey, 66, was desperately looking for someone to take over the commercial fishing business that had been in his family for four generations. If Dewey Fisheries closed, shops and restaurants in the area could be left without a source of local seafood. So Dewey contacted employment agencies and scouted people locally who might have an interest. His search was falling short until he met Slieman al-Jasem, a refugee from Syria who’d never cleaned a fish before — but had a knack for learning quickly and a desire to run his own company. >click to read<20:53
The fisherman and the government observer – Tuna by the ton: two tales of fishing
Tom Crivello is a tuna boat captain and owner of two large seiners, both of which carry helicopters that are used in hunting for tuna. Crivello’s two boats are the Rose Ann Marie, which is 220 feet long with a capacity of 1050 tons of fish, and the Marla Marie, which is 151 feet long and holds about 500 tons. They are both registered in the U.S. and are based in San Diego, along with about 125 other boats from the American tuna fleet of nearly 140 boats. About a year ago, after fishing for twenty-one years — since the age of sixteen — Crivello decided to retire and try to sell the Rose Ann Marie, which is valued at about five million dollars. He was feeling the effects of relentless pressure and he was determined to do something about it while he still was capable. Others had reached the limit, pressed on, and ended up with drinking problems or even nervous breakdowns. >click to read< 8 pages from May 13, 1982 18:35
Gulf shrimp industry reeling from labor shortage
Nello Cassarino needs about 150 workers to dehead, peel, sort, package and freeze nearly 60,000 pounds of shrimp each day at his processing plant on Harborside Drive. And finding laborers is particularly difficult right now.,,, The industry has challenges from imported shrimp, but the labor shortage is the biggest issue commercial fishing faces, she said. Processing work typically pays about twice the minimum wage, which would be about $14 an hour, although it depends on the amount of shrimp being processed, Hance said. Pay for boat crews is more difficult to break down into an hourly amount because workers live aboard the boat for 30 to 45 days at a time. But workers may receive about $5,000 for a month at sea, depending on the catch, Hance said. >click to read<15:45
New Jersey – Governor Murphy signs bill for marine fisheries management
A bill to provide an extra $1.2 million to the state Bureau of Marine Fisheries for shellfish and fisheries management was signed into law Friday by Governor Murphy. It’s an increase to the $2.468 million allocated in the Governor’s proposed FY2019 budget, said bill sponsors, bringing the total appropriation to $3.668 million for the coming fiscal year. New Jersey has 6 major commercial fishing ports which this law would primarily affect, although the law would affect other ports as well: Atlantic City, Barnegat Light, Belford in Monmouth County, Cape May, Point Pleasant and Port Norris. New Jersey’s commercial fishermen catch more than 100 million pounds of seafood each year, worth more than $100 million, the sponsors said. >click to read<13:48
North Carolina Fisheries Association Weekly Update for Aug 10, 2018
>Click here to read the Weekly Update<, to read all the updates >Click here<, for older updates listed as NCFA >click here<11:12
Alcohol Consumption Involved in Deckhand Drowning
The U.K. Marine Accident Investigation Branch has released it’s report into the November 2017 death of a deckhand on the fishing vessel Illustris. He had spent the afternoon and evening ashore and had just returned to the vessel. His fall was not witnessed, and he was not missed until the following day. The postmortem examination report indicated a probable cause of death as drowning, with a contribution of acute alcohol toxicity. >click to read<10:07
Bay State Wind alters proposal to allow more distance between turbines
According to Lauren Burm, the head of public affairs for Bay State Wind, after speaking with “key stakeholders including the fishing community,” the company altered its proposal in terms of spacing between turbines to a nautical mile in rows running east to west.. “Based on their helpful feedback we have adjusted our layout to better accommodate fishing patterns and vessel transiting through the wind farm, while also maintaining efficiency and maximizing power production,” Burm said. Those within the industry disagree that the adjustment by Bay State Wind, a partnership between Orstead and Eversource, helps fishermen navigate.“There’s no way a mile spacing would result in a safe transit,” New Bedford scalloper Eric Hansen said. >click to read<08:48
Book to be published! PORT BLISS – Five men, one woman, each going to sea seeking answers.
Imagine if you will, a paraplegic who traded his position as captain of a commercial shrimping vessel for a wheelchair at the tender age of 22 – now in his 60’s. For Bill Allen, a spinal cord injury from 40 years ago was life changing to say the least…”Why God?” Along came Faye Passanisi, who accidentally joined a commercial fishing group. A few months later, she was noticed by Bill for her inspirational daily posts on social media – as well as the fact that she grew up in the oldest seaport in America. Bill saw all the right emotions in her and invited her to co-write PORT BLISS, along with another fantastic story teller – JW Gooding. John has authored a book, Pack your Seabag and has many years working in and on the water with lots of stories to tell. And he tells them well, keeps you wanting more.PORT BLISS is the writing debut for both Bill Allen and Faye Passanisi. This was a dream of Bill’s for several years and has finally come to fruition. >click to read<19:29
Local fishermen like to clean up on the water. This certainly wasn’t what they had in mind.
Red tide is still hanging around Manatee County’s coastline, making waters murky and beach conditions unpleasant. There are a lot fewer dead fish floating in the water, though. That is thanks in part to local fisherman Nathan Meschelle, who operates a commercial fishing operation called Inseine Fish Harvest out of Palma Sola. Knowing that he would be temporarily out of work when red tide arrived, Meschelle called Manatee commissioner Carol Whitmore and offered to help clean up in the aftermath. Dean Jones, public works manager for the city of Anna Maria, reached out right away.>click to read<16:43
Fisheries and Oceans quietly cancels plans to award Indigenous surf clam licence
The federal government says it has cancelled plans to issue a controversial clam fishing licence to a First Nations company with ties to the Liberal party and several sitting Liberal MPs — including the former fisheries minister. A news release from the Department of Fisheries and Oceans says the process to issue a fourth licence to harvest arctic surf clam off the coast of Newfoundland and Labrador and Nova Scotia was cancelled in early July, and that it won’t be issued this year at all. That multimillion-dollar licence was supposed to go to the Five Nations Clam Co., a company court documents suggest did not initially meet key eligibility requirements spelled out in the government’s tender process. >click to read<15:16
The Blessing is more than the race
I have been a commercial fisherman in and out of Point Judith for going on 50 years. I was there in 1972 for the first Blessing Of The Fleet, and I’ve hardly missed one since. In those 40 odd years I’ve watched Galilee and Point Judith both undergo radical transformation. We went from being a small fishing port where Captains lived along the docks, to a massive powerhouse in the 80s, to the near collapse in the early aughts and now back to something of a revival. And of course, in that time, we became a parking lot for Block Island. But the one thing that has remained constant has been the tight knit community of fishermen and their families. I am writing because I feel that the fishing boats, the basis of the entire event, are slowly falling by the wayside in the media. >click to read<11:19
‘Gorgeous fish’: Steveston fishery workers haul in sockeye salmon bounty
Trung Nguyen, selling sockeye off his boat at the Steveston Pier for $8 a pound, has been waiting four years for this moment. Nguyen and other commercial fishery workers returned to the Richmond harbour Thursday with coolers full of salmon after being allowed out on the Fraser River Wednesday to catch salmon. The 2018 run is expected to be the biggest since 2014 and fishery workers had 24 hours to take advantage of the bounty. Strong runs come in four-year cycles and this year’s could eclipse 20 million fish. “Nice and firm. Gorgeous fish,” Nguyen said, showing a potential buyer an example of his haul. “We haven’t had an opening for four years, so this is a big year.” >click to read<09:46
New England/Mid-Atlantic – Illex Squid Directed Fishery Closes August 15
Effective at noon on August 15, 2018, vessels are prohibited from fishing for or landing more than 10,000 lb of Illex squid per trip per calendar day in or from federal waters through December 31, 2018. Landings information analyzed by NOAA Fisheries projects the Illex squid fishery will meet 95 percent of the annual quota for the 2018 fishing year by August 15, 2018. NOAA Fisheries is closing the directed fishery in federal waters through the end of the fishing year, December 31, 2018. >click to read<09:18
Large pogy catch good news for Maine lobstermen who feared bait shortage
All of the landings have yet to be counted, but officials say it is likely that an unusually large pogy fleet will have caught almost 7 million pounds of the fish, which is more than double last year’s landings. This comes as especially good news for Maine lobstermen, who use pogies to bait their traps when the herring supply runs low, as it is expected to this year. “Every pogy used was herring not used,” said Kristan Porter, a Cutler lobsterman and president of the Maine Lobstermen’s Association, which has been working with its members to prepare them for the herring shortage. >click to read<07:09
Marshallberg man builds new shrimp boat
Down East native Zack Davis hopes his recent boatbuilding project will help keep the tradition alive in the area. A teacher at East Carteret High School, Mr. Davis recently built a shrimping boat with some help from friends, family and students. “It’s named the Addie and Dallas,” Mr. Davis said about the boat, which is 56 feet long and 18 feet wide. “That’s after my daughter and little boy.” Although Mr. Davis describes the boat as mid-sized, he said he used a relatively new method of boat construction called cold molding. “It’s really a new style,” Mr. Davis said. >click to read<18:51
Senate Bill 1309 – There’s a compelling case for more transparency in California fisheries.
Figuring out who owns the right to fish commercially on the Pacific Coast is typically easy: In fisheries managed by the states of Alaska, Hawaii, Oregon and Washington, as well as the federal government, all you have to do is ask. California is an outlier. Here, the names of individuals and companies that own the right to fish in state-managed fisheries are confidential.,,, Through my investigation I found the wording of the confidentiality provision hadn’t been changed since 1933, even though at that time, there were no fishing rights to own. Times have changed, but the law hasn’t. Now commercial fishing rights, or limited-entry permits as they’re known in the industry, are worth more than $100 million and bought and sold on an open market. Consumers – as well as fishermen – don’t have the right to know who owns what in state-managed fisheries. >click to read<16:26
Framed?
Already struggling financially and facing unhappy neighbors in Alaska’s Kachemak Bay, the Cook Inlet Aquaculture Association (CIAA) now finds itself being drawn into a public-relations mess with four board members charged in an explosive case of illegal fishing. And one of the men charged believes CIAA efforts to grow more salmon is at the heart of the issue.“This is all about politics,” commercial seiner Mark Roth said Thursday. Fishermen regularly fish too close to open-closed lines, stray across and get ticketed. As Mark noted, those cases almost never make the news. ,, For the 64-year-old Mark, sons Paul, 35, and Robert, 39, and friend Eric Winslow, a 61-year-old Alaska fishermen whose home is in Florida, it was different. They this week made the news in a big way,,, >click to read<14:46
Double murderer’s cocaine case likely headed for trial
A man sentenced to life in prison in December for killing a Florida Keys couple in the fall of 2015 has so far rejected a plea offer for a cocaine trafficking conspiracy charge connected to the same case. If Jeremy Macauley, 35, doesn’t take the plea deal prosecutors offered him in May, the drug case will go to trial next month, and the names of others possibly involved in bringing more than a dozen kilos of cocaine to shore the summer before the murders will likely be discussed during testimony. Macauley was a charter boat mate on a fishing vessel docked at Whale Harbor Marina in Windley Key at the time of the slayings. Detectives and prosecutors say the cocaine was found offshore by Macauley and his charter boat captain boss, Rick Rodriguez >click to read<
Lobster boats race at Winter Harbor this Saturday, on Sunday at Pemaquid Harbor
Whether summer is at its peak or is beginning to wind down may be open to debate, but there’s no question that the Maine lobster boat racing season is entering its final phase. On July 29, racing returned to Harpswell for the first time in five years and drew a fleet of nearly 50 boats to the seventh event on the Maine Lobster Boat Racing Association calendar. This Saturday, weather cooperating, a substantially larger number of entries is expected for the eighth event on the calendar — the 53rd annual Winter Harbor Lobster Boat Races, held in conjunction with the Winter Harbor Lobster Festival. On Sunday, racing is scheduled for Pemaquid Harbor where the 32nd Merritt Brackett Lobster Boat Races will be a feature of the annual Old Bristol Days celebration. >click to read<11:19
Kristjan Loftsson’s company is the last one in the world still hunting fin whales. His credo: “If it’s sustainable, you hunt.”
Mr. Loftsson, 75, is the world’s last commercial hunter of fin whales. He has been denounced by environmental groups and his boats have been sunk by radical activists, but his business is legal here because Iceland doesn’t recognize the international moratorium on commercial whaling. Mr. Loftsson likes to say that whale blood runs in his veins. For Mr. Loftsson and his supporters, whaling is no different than agriculture or fisheries. “If it’s sustainable, you hunt,” he said. >click to read<10:48
They’re big, they’re fat and thankfully there are finally a whole lot of ‘em!
It’s early, but the Fraser River sockeye salmon run is looking strong for fishermen in U.S. waters. The season started earlier this week for commercial fishermen, with salmon coming in large numbers through the Strait of Juan de Fuca and heading toward Canadian waters. There are a lot of the fish, and they are fat, said Riley Starks, of Lummi Island Wild. The company does reefnet fishing near Lummi Island. On Monday the crew had its best one-day catch ever, he said. >click to read<09:00
Louisiana shrimpers consider strike as prices plummet
Louisiana shrimpers vowed this week to go on strike if shrimp prices take yet another tumble. About 200 shrimpers gathered in Houma on Wednesday (Aug. 8) to vent their frustrations about foreign imports that have driven shrimp prices to levels not seen since the 1980s. They also fumed over a lack of political support for tariffs and other measures that could shore up an industry they say is heading toward extinction. “We can’t make it on cents. We need dollars,” said Dean Blanchard, a Grand Isle shrimp distributor. “There’s no way this can continue.” >click to read<21:59
Saugus lobsterman is trying to put his life back together after losing his home and his job
An orange lobster boat “Dependable” sits patiently in the Saugus River. Its captain, George Mabee, is healing from wounds sustained in a house fire two weeks ago and is unable to work. “The season is just starting to kick off now, it’s just picking up,” said Mabee. “Unfortunately, I’m not allowed to be there to do anything because I’m too prone to infection right now. Lobstering is my whole business.” July 29 started off as a normal day for Mabee, a commercial fisherman. But by the end of it, he found himself lucky to be alive. >click to read<19:29
A Fundraiser for Saugus Ma. Lobsterman George Mabee – >click to read<
A Fundraiser for Saugus Ma. Lobsterman George Mabee
George is a local fisherman that lost everything he owned in a devastating fire at his home in Saugus on July 29th. He managed to escape, suffering third degree burns. He is staying with family during his recovery. George has a long road ahead of him and we want to make his recovery comfortable so he can focus on healing. Any amount is appreciated and will make a difference. Please, if you can, >click to donate<19:20
Saugus lobsterman is trying to put his life back together after losing his home and his job – >click to read<
