Tuna surprise

The devastating earthquake and tsunami that shook Japan in March 2011 may be over, but its metaphorical aftershocks have reached the United States.

That earthquake damaged the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, triggering radiation emissions that contaminated waters off the Japanese coast. Now a study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences states that bluefin tuna caught near San Diego in August 2011 contained elevated levels of radioactive cesium-137 and cesium-134. 

It’s believed the bluefin swam through the contaminated waters before migrating across the Pacific Ocean.

However, the study also says the radiation levels found in the tuna, while higher than normal, fall well below U.S. Food and Drug Administration health risk limits. At this point, it appears a wasabi bomb may pose a greater immediate threat to sushi lovers. 

But the presence of radioactive materials in the bluefin plus the arrival of earthquake and tsunami-related marine debris upon the coasts of Washington and California concerns Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.). He’s sent the FDA and NOAA letters asking the agencies about their efforts to ensure seafood safety and protect public health.

“The importance of our seafood stocks and the jobs they support require vigilance when monitoring the half-life of radiation present in fish and marine debris,” says Markey, a Natural Resources Committee member and senior Energy and Commerce Committee member, in a press statement. “We need to understand the environmental and human health implications of the Fukushima disaster on Pacific seafood, and I look forward to responses from these two agencies.”

 

 

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Pebble Mine: 'Actions must be taken now'

The following is an op-ed by commercial fisherman Mike Friccero on the EPA’s recently released Bristol Bay watershed assessment. Anyone who is concerned about the Pebble Mine development should check out what Mike has to say about the potential devastation hard rock mining could have on that area's wild salmon and those who depend on it.

Also, please note that beginning tomorrow in Seattle the EPA will be hosting a series of public meetings on the Pebble Mine development. For a list of  locations and dates as well as to view the EPA assessment, visit: http://yosemite.epa.gov/R10/ecocomm.nsf/bristol+bay/bristolbay.  

While economic woes have plagued many industrial sectors in Alaska, the seafood and commercial fishing industry has remained a bright spot in our economy; providing tens of millions of dollars in state tax revenue and employing thousands of workers each year.  Commercial fishing has played a primary role in Alaskan communities for over 100 years, and today it remains the largest private employer in the state. For many families commercial fishing isn’t just a profession, it’s a tradition passed down from generation to generation. This is especially true for the Bristol Bay salmon fishery, which has been a steady source of income every year.

As spring turns to summer, Bristol Bay permit holders from all across the state of Alaska are preparing for yet another successful fishing season. Mothers and daughters, fathers and sons; family members young and old will join in to catch their share of Bristol Bay’s world-famous sockeye salmon. Sadly, as plans for the proposed Pebble Mine continue, the future of commercial fishing in Southwest Alaska is at risk. Without swift action from state and federal officials, this legacy of Bristol Bay could soon be endangered.

Recently the Environmental Protection Agency released a scientific assessment of the Bristol Bay watershed. This independent review examines the long-term viability of our fishery and the impacts large-scale mining would have on nearby salmon populations. Additionally the agency reviewed technologies and practices to mitigate these impacts, determining whether a project the size of the proposed Pebble Mine could be safely developed in the watershed. Ultimately, the EPA came to the same conclusion many Alaskans have already made – Bristol Bay’s fishery is one-of-a-kind and a mine like Pebble could cause permanent damage to salmon populations. While the assessment is a step in the right direction, actions must now be taken to protect Bristol Bay and the people who live and work there.

Since the mid-1800s commercial fishing in Bristol Bay has been a major source of revenue and jobs for Alaska. Today approximately 35 percent of Alaska’s wild salmon comes from these waters, making our industry extremely competitive on the global market. Locally, commercial fishing means higher employment and a stronger economy; amounting to over $330 million in annual revenue and creating 5,500 full time jobs each year. This boasts in comparison to the proposed Pebble Mine, which would provide only 1,000 full time jobs – of which a small number might go to local residents. The Bristol Bay salmon fishery is a model of sustainability and stewardship and contrasts with the short-term benefits and long-term liability of Pebble.  While proponents of the mine will tell you the two industries can coexist, the odds of polluting Bristol Bay’s spawning grounds are just too high to take the risk.

In June the EPA will hold a series of public meetings for Alaskans to weigh in on the risks of hard rock mining in Bristol Bay. Whether you are from Nome, Ketchikan, or Naknek this issue matters to you because every Alaskan community is linked to the seafood industry. Seventy-five percent of modern day mines have experienced some form of disaster or dam failure. If that were to occur in Bristol Bay the reputation of our seafood industry would be permanently damaged. That is why the EPA should use its authority under the Clean Water Act and protect the Bristol Bay watershed from large scale mining. While other mines in Alaska can and have been developed safely, I cannot see a reasonable way forward for Pebble’s development.

Commercial fishing has been a booming industry in Bristol Bay for hundreds of years, and I hope it continues to boom for hundreds more. While we look over these waters today, it’s our duty to hand them off responsibly to the generations of tomorrow. By working together, we can protect and preserve this fishery — and its benefits — in perpetuity. Future Alaskans deserve nothing less.

A long time Alaska resident Mike Friccero makes a living from his home on Kodiak Island in the fishing and construction industries. Mike has fished in Bristol Bay for the last thirty years with his family including wife Gina, four children and extended foster families.

 

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Lingering pain in New England

The headline on NF’s March 1997 cover declared, “More pain ahead for New England.” Who knew back then that the headline would still be relevant 15 years later?

According to the March ’97 cover story, the crash of the region’s groundfish stocks had brought harvest cuts totaling an estimated 35 percent in recent years. And the New England Fishery Management Council’s Multispecies Monitoring Committee was recommending that fishermen’s harvests be cut another 41 percent to help return groundfish stocks to healthy levels.

“Everyone knows what that means,” wrote NF Executive Editor Clarke Canfield. “More regulations. More pain. More boats going out of business.”

The statement still rings true today. Northeast groundfishermen are wrestling with a 22 percent cut in the Gulf of Maine cod catch limit, set at 6,700 metric tons for this year, brought on by the surprisingly low 2011 cod stock assessment.
 
Then in late April groundfishermen learned that the health of Georges Bank yellowtail flounder has been deemed equally dire, if not more so. Consequently, groundfishermen face an 80 percent cut in the Georges Bank yellowtail catch limit for this year.

That's a real problem for groundfishermen. It's difficult to catch the more valuable fish species without nabbing yellowtail, too. Once the meager yellowtail catch limit is reached — and it'll likely be reached quickly — the groundfishery will, by law, be shutdown for the year, pushing more fishermen to the brink of financial disaster.

Hence, the New England council seeks a way to mitigate the yellowtail cut. One possibility being explored is transferring yellowtail quota from the thriving scallop fishery to the groundfish fishery. Another possibility is negotiating with Canada for a greater slice of the yellowtail quota the United States and Canada share. 

Meetings held this week here in Portland, Maine, and in New Bedford, Mass., yielded no easy answers. The New England Fishery Management Council’s Groundfish Committee meets next week and will likely address emergency measures for this year’s fishery. 

But even if groundfishermen receive yellowtail quota from the scallop fishery or Canada, it won't fully alleviate the pain that the massive cut is bringing to a fleet whose ranks have already been thinning. Regardless of the solution regulators devise, there’s still more pain ahead for New England. 

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Meting out the meager

Listening to the New England Council's Groundfish Advisory Panel talk about how that industry is going to pay for monitoring costs is kind of like trying to figure out how to pay your bills when you've just lost your job (I've been there). Scary.

When the GAP met today in Portland, the first item on its agenda was to come up with some ideas to help defray at-sea monitoring costs for 2013. That year New England groundfishermen will be forced to swallow drastic cuts — possibly 80 percent — to the Gulf of Maine cod quota. They may also be facing a similar reduction in the yellowtail flounder quota. (More on that to come.)

More than 9,000 sea days were monitored in the sector program last year, according to panel member Maggie Raymond. You multiple that by each trip costing $800 and you've got a price tag upwards of $7.2 million.

To help pay for this, the panel approved a motion to recommend compensating fishermen who take on the added expense of observers with extra fish. The mechanism would work the way the scallop set aside works for scallop monitoring. The motion also stated that any of the monitoring costs charged to the industry would not exceed 3 percent of total landings.

Where those "extra" fish are going to come from is still uncertain. They might be able to find some fish in the portion of the annual catch limit that is already set aside for uncertainty. However, whether that can be used is also uncertain since it's only a 5 percent buffer. The fish may have to come out of the actual ACL.

Though monitoring is important to reduce bycatch and keep fishing boats in the water, keeping costs down looks to be just as critical for this fleet. As panel member Gary Libby pointed out, "If we had 100 percent monitoring we probably wouldn't have an industry."

Sometimes it's all you can do to break even.

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Weighing in on salmon

Big ups to Weight Watchers for extolling the benefits of wild salmon to its weight-conscious membership.

I know this because I am a member of Weight Watcher Nation. I joined in January through a group here at the office, hoping to shed the infuriating number of pounds that have crept on over the years. Unfortunately, tapping away at a computer keyboard each day doesn’t quite burn off enough calories to offset the amount of fast food that I was consuming all too often.

Hence, rather than look like a tuxedo-clad Oompa-Loompa when I get married next summer, I decided to start exercising more and eating less. And I figured I’d make better nutritional progress in Weight Watchers than I would if left to my own devices. If the organization is good enough for Charles Barkley, the legendary Round Mound of Rebound, then it’s good enough for me. 

Hence, every Tuesday, I head to a WW meeting for a weigh-in and communion with the other group members. And in one of the weekly handouts we received this week, we learned why the organization lists wild salmon, but not farmed salmon, as a Power Food.

Power Foods are those that are deemed the most filling, yet have the lowest values in Weight Watchers’ points system (everything you eat is given a points value) while having the most positive impact on health.

Weight Watchers gives wild salmon the nod because they get more exercise than the farmed variety. That makes wild salmon much leaner with a higher proportion of protein and less fat. “Thus,” the handout says, “wild salmon have lower energy density than their farm-raised cousins.”

That’s just another arrow in the quiver of the health benefits omega-3-rich wild salmon offers consumers. And I can happily chow down on a tasty source of protein that will help whip me into tuxedo shape.  

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Disappearing act

NOAA has long championed science as the foundation upon which the health of our nation’s fish stocks must be based. But last week, it appeared that NOAA believed that a little magic would be helpful to help motivate employees at an upcoming leadership training session.

According to the Washington Post, NOAA had placed a $5,000 solicitation on the FedBizOpps.gov website on Wednesday. It sought someone who would create a “unique model of translating magic and principals of the psychology of magic, magic tool, techniques and experiences into a method of teaching leadership,” during a one-day session for 45 employees, part of three-day conference for mid-level managers in June at NOAA’s Silver Spring, Md., headquarters.

But news media criticism prompted NOAA to withdraw the ad on Thursday, the paper says. Critics panned the idea of hiring a magician for the training session just weeks after hiring of a mind reader for a 2010 conference came to symbolize a General Services Administration spending scandal that caused heads there to roll.

Now industry members chafing under the groundfish sector management program might say they understand NOAA’s fascination with magic tricks. They believe the agency would like to make the region’s small-boat fishermen disappear. 

The Post notes that the $3,200 the GSA spent to hire a mind reader/motivational speaker was among the transgressions in an $823,0000 spending scandal for a 2010 conference in Las Vegas that cost the GSA its director and more than a dozen managers.
 
No doubt the GSA enjoyed performing magic tricks, too —it liked to make taxpayer dollars disappear. But the problem with magic tricks is that eventually, somebody pulls back the curtain and figures out what’s really happening.

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Taking the hits

Back in the late 1960s, the Los Angeles Rams defensive line was known as “The Fearsome Foursome.” Hall of Famer Dick Butkus, the Chicago Bears middle linebacker, reportedly called the Rams’ line of Rosey Grier, Merlin Olsen, Lamar Lundy and Deacon Jones the most dominant defensive line in football history.

They left plenty of NFL quarterbacks bruised and battered. These days, another Fearsome Foursome — cod, yellowtail flounder, Atlantic sturgeon and harbor porpoises —is causing New England fishermen plenty of pain.

Increasingly stringent regulations driven by cod’s stubborn refusal to meet federal population thresholds have long been a thorn in fishermen’s side. And thanks to a controversial 2011 stock assessment, fishermen must contend with a 20 percent catch limit reduction for Gulf of Maine cod stocks for 2012. Even greater cuts may loom in 2013.

Meanwhile, fishermen must also deal with an 80 percent slash of the total allowable catch for 2012 for Georges Bank yellowtail flounder, which swim along with more valuable commercial species. Recent data indicating diminishing yellowtail numbers fueled the decision to cut the catch limit from the 1,140 metric tons given last year to 218 metric tons for 2012.

Add to the cod and yellowtail cuts NMFS’ announcement of a shutdown of prime Gulf of Maine pollock grounds in October and November to gillnets to reduce harbor porpoise deaths. Bycatch rates for the federally protected porpoises exceed thresholds set under a 2010 management plan, the agency says, thus triggering the two-month closure.

Last but not least is the prospect of restrictions that would aim to protect Gulf of Maine Atlantic sturgeon stocks, which NOAA designated as “threatened” earlier this year. The New England council discussed the possibility of developing sturgeon protection measures this week that could impact sink gillnet operations.

Like many a great quarterback, New England fishermen keep getting knocked down by formidable opponents, but they find it within themselves to keep getting back up again. The trick will be for them to continue to find a way to stay in the game.

 

 

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Unhappy anniversary

Two years down the road, how do we measure the impact of the massive Deepwater Horizon oil spill upon Gulf of Mexico commercial fishermen?

Well, for one thing, the fact that we’re still talking about the 2010 spill indicates the region is still recovering. Here’s a sampling of spill-related stories we’ve seen in the week leading up to Friday’s unhappy anniversary:

• The FDA says consumers shouldn’t be alarmed by photos of Gulf of Mexico finfish bearing sores and lesions. Diseased fish aren’t allowed to be sold, the agency says, and the percentage of diseased fish found is low. Furthermore, testing by state laboratories of more than 10,000 fish and shellfish for traces of certain chemicals found in oil occurred before commercial fishing was ever allowed to resume, the agency says, and the testing showed levels are far below amounts that could make anyone sick.
 
• Still, a recent study conducted by Wes Harrison, a Louisiana State University professor of agribusiness marketing, reveals that 70 percent of people in the United States remain wary about the region’s seafood, and 30 percent nationally say they won’t eat gulf seafood because of the spill. Consequently, a nationwide Gulf of Mexico seafood marketing effort will strive to dispel those negative consumer perceptions. BP is donating $50 million for the campaign.

• The Justice Department has announced that more Gulf Coast residents harmed by the spill but whose claims with BP’s compensation fund were wrongfully denied will receive more than $63 million in additional payments.

• A federal judge is pondering a proposed class-action settlement plan crafted by BP and lawyers representing more than 100,000 people and business that aims to resolve billions of dollars in spill-related claims.

The stories offer a glimpse of the oil spill’s impact upon commercial fishing in the gulf. But even two years after the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon well, which claimed the lives of 11 oil rig workers, we still don’t know the extent of the damage to the marine environment and its fishy inhabitants, nor how long it will take the region’s fish and fishermen to be made whole. We can only hope it will be soon.

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Fo’c’sle Library: Exploring the ‘fishing fever’ phenomenon

“This book tries to explain the fishing fever phenomenon by examples of how the infection gets into one’s blood,” writes Dennis Sperl, a Petersburg, Alaska, fisherman in “Living to Fish, Fishing to Live”. His book’s stories and poems, Sperl writes, offer examples of “a life-long affliction that has no cure.”

Sperl, 68, who fishes for salmon, halibut and shrimp on his wooden 58-footer, the Saga, caught the fishing fever as a youngster. On the book’s back cover, Larry Lindstrom tells a story that illustrates how the fever still grips Sperl, whom we profile in the upcoming June issue of NF.
 
Lindstrom writes that once in the middle of a shrimp trawl, he asked Sperl if the excitement and anticipation of pulling in a net full of shrimp or hauling in a line full of salmon or halibut ever lessens with time.

“As we awaited the beam trawl to break the surface,” Lindstrom writes, “he said, ‘It might, but I have only been doing this for 50 years, so I’m not sure.’ (His huge smile and pumping fist when he saw a good haul of shrimp in the net, proved that 50 years of experiences did not dampen his enthusiasm.)”

I’m betting all commercial fishermen can relate. Ultimately, Sperl’s stories and poems illustrate the concept of loving what you do. You become so completely absorbed in what you’re doing, hours pass and you hardly notice. And like Dennis Sperl, commercial fishermen are truly, fully, madly, deeply in love with their craft.

Living to Fish, Fishing to Live
Life and Trials of Fishing Fever in Alaska
By Dennis Sperl
Ensign Group International, 2011
Softcover, 404 pp., $12.95
dwsperl@hotmail.com

 

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Fo'c'sle library: "I want to be like those guys."

In Marblehead, Mass.’s lobsterman hierarchy, few were tougher or cooler than Ed Hawkes. One day in the 1940s, the state game warden approached Hawkes' boat, the Lizzie H, with a bust in mind. An officer began waving a pistol in Hawkes' direction, but Hawkes, known for having a temper, kept his cool, telling them: “I just got back from where there were a lot of guns, and some of them were fired at me. Now either you put yours away or it’s going to find its way to a delicate part of your anatomy.” He later said the substantial fine was worth it.

Hawkes was one of the World War II veterans who fished and caught lobster from Marblehead’s Little Harbor after the war. Though Marblehead is better known as a destination for yachters, this small group of tenacious and creative men kept the fishing industry alive there through the 20^th century. Hugh Peabody Bishop and his sister and co-author, Brenda Bishop Booma, tell their stories in the new book, “Marblehead’s First Harbor.”

As a child, Bishop felt out of place at Marblehead’s elite clubs that were frequented by his parents’ social circle. Instead, he remembers thinking, "I want to be like those guys” — guys like Ed Hawkes and the other fishermen and lobstermen he grew up admiring. Bishop followed in his heroes’ footsteps and fished for 37 years hook-and-line from Marblehead's Little Harbor.

He and Booma deserve much credit for collecting so many stories from the children of these "Greatest Generation" fishermen and weaving them through a narrative that follows Bishop's own story as a fisherman. Filled with old photos of boats and fishermen, the book is a fond remembrance of a place and and time on the sea. — Melissa Wood

Available on Amazon.com:

Marblehead's First Harbor: The Rich History of a Small Fishing Port
By Hugh Peabody Bishop & Brenda Bishop Booma
The History Press, 2011

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