Monthly Archives: February 2022
This Maine fishery owner tries to keep an even keel amid volatile scallop prices
High food prices are hurting households and restaurants alike. Grocery prices for meat, poultry, fish and eggs jumped 12.5% over 2021, according to the consumer price index. Restaurants are fighting inflation by getting creative with menus and portion sizes. But how do you run a business that supplies restaurants when your costs change month to month, week to week or even day to day? That’s what Maine’s fishing industry is dealing with. Togue Brawn, a self-proclaimed “Maine scallop evangelist” and owner of Downeast Dayboat fishery in Bath, said prices for the mollusks have been “through the roof” recently. With fishing quotas, a scarcity in scallops and rising inflation across the country, top-quality scallops cost as much as $38 per pound. >click to read< 12:51
Atlantic Canada seafood sectors surged in 2021
In Riverport on Nova Scotia’s south shore, lobster fisherman Jason Conrad remembers when the pandemic hit in the spring of 2020 and the price of lobster plummeted to $4 a pound — below what it cost him to catch a lobster. Last month, Conrad was getting over $14 a pound — a sign of industry recovery that began at the end of 2020. “It rebounded way faster than I thought it would,” he said. Snow crab increases huge, A Banner year for lobster, More money for repairs, new boats >click to read< 10:25
F/V Bing Bing: “If it wasn’t for this woman”- Fishermen OK after 55-foot boat sinks off Scituate coast
Pam Harght was working from her home in Marshfield Tuesday afternoon when something outside caught her attention. She was on a business call at her desk and looking out the window at the ocean, and she had a clear view of a fishing vessel on the water. She’d recognized the 55-foot boat because she’d seen it before, going up and down the coast. But this time, it appeared to be in trouble. >click to read< Fishermen OK after 55-foot 
boat sinks off Scituate coast– The 55-foot boat was found sinking about a half mile off Humarock Beach and three people, including 50-year-old Joe Rodrick, were found clinging to some fishing gear. They were pulled to safety and transported to the hospital with severe hypothermia. In addition to Rodrick, the boat’s captain remains hospitalized. The third man was released and all are expected to be OK. Video, >click to read< 08:07
Collins criticizes onerous, unfair regulations on lobster industry
At a Senate Appropriations Subcommittee hearing, U.S. Senator Susan Collins questioned Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo about several important issues facing the State of Maine, including the unfair right whale rule as well as the implementation of the bipartisan infrastructure bill’s broadband provisions to expand high-speed Internet. Senator Collins has been steadfastly opposed to NOAA’s flawed Atlantic Large Whale Take Reduction Rule, which is harming Maine’s lobster industry without meaningfully protecting whales. Even though NOAA’s own data show Maine’s lobster industry has never been linked to the death of a right whale, NOAA proceeded to close more than 950 square miles of productive ocean area to lobster fishing this winter. Video, >click to read< 18:29
Oregon Dungeness crab season sets new record for value
The Oregon Dungeness Crab Commission expects the 2021-2022 season to set a new record as the highest grossing season ever. The current record of $74.2 million was set in 2017-2018. This year, the Dungeness crab fleet has already landed $78.1 million, and the season is not yet over. The 20-year average is 17.3 million pounds. As of Tuesday, the fleet had brought 15.3 million pounds ashore, below average, but above last season’s 12.2 million pounds. Video, >click to read< 15:04
F/V Bing Bing: Captain and deckhand recovering in hospital, one released – Vessel to be salvaged
Three fishermen from the Gloucester based fishing vessel Bing Bing are recovering from severe hypothermia after their vessel sank off the South Shore on Tuesday afternoon. Monte Rome of Intershell, the owner of the vessel, said Wednesday morning that the captain remains in the hospital as he swallowed salt water and diesel fuel, as does a deck hand. The other crew member has been released. Rome said none of the fishermen, all in their 50s and whom he did not want to identify, are local to Cape Ann. >click to read< 12:48
Athearn Marine Agency Boat of the Week: 127’10″x 30’8″ Steel Freezer Trawler
To review specifications, information, with 86 photos, >click here<, To see all the boats in this series >click here< 11:50
Lucy The Lobster To Make Virtual Groundhog Day Prediction
It won’t be a groundhog determining if there are six more weeks of winter in southern Nova Scotia. Lucy the Lobster will be crawling out of the Atlantic on February second to make a virtual prediction as part of the Nova Scotia Lobster Crawl festival. Lucy will make her prediction at the Cape Sable Island Causeway. >click to read< 10:14
Maine: Lobstering will get more expensive for fishermen
The cost of lobstering in Maine will get a little more expensive this year with the price of mandated identification tags for traps increasing by 50 percent. The Department of Marine Resources has raised the cost from 50 cents to 75 cents per tag for the 2022 season. While it’s the first time in more than a decade that the price has gone up, it’s the latest rising cost for lobstermen, who also face higher fuel and bait prices. “It’s just one more thing,” said David Horner, a Southwest Harbor lobsterman. >click to read< 09:32
Brexit “fails to deliver Government promises on fishing industry”
Benefits to UK fisheries from Brexit “fall far short of government rhetoric”, a new study has revealed. The report, a collaboration between the University of York, New Economics Foundation, University of Lincoln and marine consultancy service ABPmer, found that while the government promised radical reforms to help the industry take back control of UK waters and increase quota shares (all while minimising trade impacts), this is starkly at odds with the reality of what has been achieved. >click to read< 08:22
3 fishermen rescued after vessel sinks off South Shore of Massachusetts
Three fishermen are recovering from “severe hypothermia” after their vessel sank. Scituate Town Administrator James Boudreau said the town’s emergency dispatch center received a 911 call shortly after 2:35 p.m. Tuesday from a Marshfield woman who reported that she saw a boat sinking as 
she walked along Humarock Beach. “We had three victims clinging for life,” Murphy said. “They were in the water close to 45 minutes to an hour already.” The fishing vessel they were on was a scalloping boat out of Gloucester named the F/V Bing Bing. Video, >click to read< 20:01
Jeffrey Hutchings, advocate for independent fisheries science, dies at age 63
A Canadian ecologist and fisheries scientist who criticized political interference in scientific advice on declining fish populations, particularly the northern cod, has died at the age of 63. Colleagues at Dalhousie University’s department of biology said Jeffrey Hutchings, a longtime professor at the Halifax school, died at his home during the weekend. The cause of death was not released. >click to read< 19:22
Fishery Disaster Assistance: Aid can take years to come through
The designation is supposed to unlock funds to help the communities impacted by those fisheries failures, including communities around Cook Inlet. But it can take years for the money to reach fishermen’s pockets. U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski said the timing is one of the problems with the process. “If you’ve had a disaster that happened in 2018, we’re sitting here in 2022 and you’re saying, ‘Really? You think that that’s going to help me?’ In the meantime. I’ve got a boat mortgage that I’ve got to be paying. I’ve got a crew that I’ve got to be paying. This doesn’t help me at all,” she said. >click to read< 16:49
VMS a ‘perfect storm’ of red tape for small-scale fishermen in England
Vessel monitoring systems are an essential tool towards fully documented fisheries. Across the UK, the devolved nations worked in harmony over the past 20 years to install on vessels first over 24m, then 15m and finally over 12m vessels. But now, small scale fishermen with under 12m vessels in England say the long delayed roll out of the Government’s inshore vessel monitoring system is discriminatory and unfair to their class of vessel and has a timeframe that is impossible to comply with. Felixstowe Ferry fishermen James Whyte said, It’s just another example of the Government putting pressure on us to meet an arbitrary time frame we just aren’t ready for because of their delays and their shortcomings. In our area we often have to book technicians weeks in advance because we have none locally”. >click to read< 13:54
Tragic sinking of F/V Louisa was an ‘unusual and exceptional’ event
Martin Johnstone, 29, Chris Morrison, 27, and skipper Paul Alliston, 42, were asleep when the creel vessel Louisa began taking on water while at anchor near Mingulay, off the Outer Hebrides, on April 9 2016. An inquiry before Sheriff Derek Pyle, at Lochmaddy Sheriff Court in North Uist, has been told how what happened to the stricken Stornoway-registered vessel was “a very unusual and exceptional event”. It heard how the vessel sank by the bow and foundered, probably due to flooding of the hold, with the exhausted crew all in their accommodation and asleep when the incident occurred. >click to read< 12:25
South Atlantic: NMFS accepting input on “ropeless” black sea bass pots
The National Marine Fisheries Service is accepting comments on an application for an exempted fishing permit from Sustainable Seas Technology Inc. The applicant proposes deploying modified black sea bass pots with acoustic subsea buoy retrieval systems in federal waters off North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia and northeastern Florida. Adaptation of “ropeless” systems for this style of pot fishing could reduce risk to these whales and other marine animals that suffer entanglements, according to the applicant. >click to read< 09:56 fixed gear
U.S. lobster set to feed another Chinese New Year as demand booms
The week-long holiday, commonly known as the Spring Festival or the Lunar New Year, is typically one of the busiest times for the U.S. lobster business. Appetite for the crustaceans remains strong in China this year, despite pandemic-related challenges to transportation and logistics, according to U.S. lobster industry members. “I have orders every day. Whether I can get them all on the airplanes every day becomes a question,” Bill Bruns, operations manager at The Lobster Co. >click to read< 08:16
