Commercial fishing in New England is done.

[rideit]

I say we crucify Emeril.

No one will mind, really.

[iceman]

We need to proceed with caution, the sweet bread and chourice and linguica are damn good. The salt cod I could live without.

[grrrr]

The commercial fishing industry has been raping the oceans of the world for as long as it's been in existence. They'll get everything they deserve.
Fuckers.

Don't drag all fishermen into this. Look at the sucess of the salmon and halibut fishermen in Alaska in forcing habitat protection and sustainable quotos. If it was up to the consumer, the fish would be cheaper, but the fishermen have banded together to protect the future.

On the other hand if they were all swarthy, then we'd be eating naught but carcasses by now. (And I'd like to point out that my family came from Ireland in the 17th century to fish cod off new england...but we're at worse medium brown Irish)

[Odin]

(And I'd like to point out that my family came from Ireland in the 17th century to fish cod off new england...but we're at worse medium brown Irish)

So the english, (after getting support from the portuguese, basque separatists, cossacks and.... THE DUTCH) decided to market a fake potato famine idea which in turn made the irish flee to america where the portuguese underground in conjunction with the Italians forced them into the boston area.

I KNEW IT!

[ptavv]

All my grandparents/great-grandparents came from Ireland.

[Free Range Lobster]

Time for the scallopers to take it.


Scallopers could see catches cut in half

Chatham fisherman Bob Keese hopes a compromise can be reached that allows small-boat fishermen to continue scalloping.
By DOUG FRASER
STAFF WRITER
May 21, 2007
It is an ironic twist that closing large areas of the ocean to fishing a dozen years ago, to restore New England's bread-and-butter species like cod, haddock and flounder, helped scallops flourish while the fish populations are still struggling to recover.
Now considered one of the last great wild scallop fisheries in the world, the areas right off Cape Cod, and in the Mid-Atlantic, saw 53.3 million pounds of scallop meat harvested in 2005, worth more than $408 million, and $7.50 per pound paid to fishermen. In 1994, scallop landings hovered around 15 million pounds, and the average price paid to fishermen was somewhere around $4 or $5 a pound.
What's next
The next public hearing is tomorrow at the University of New Hampshire in Durham.
• The New England Fishery Management Council meets June 19-21 in Portland, Maine, to discuss the scallop plans.
• The deadline is June 11 for written public comments. Instructions are at www.nefmc.org.
So, it's no surprise that fishermen have been rushing to convert their small (average size 46 feet) boats from catching fish to dragging for scallops.
It's also no surprise that fishery managers are struggling to limit the number of scallopers so scallop populations remain at healthy levels.
That could spell big economic trouble for Cape and Islands fishermen, who landed $8.5 million worth of scallops in 2005 and could possibly see that halved by the new regulations.
Chatham fisherman Bob Keese, 37, remembers scalloping with his father on a boat out of Wellfleet when he was 12 years old. He's been fishing ever since.
He sits on the council's scallop advisory board and is uneasy about how the new plan could affect him and other Cape scallopers. Under the council's preferred plan, he believes he would go from scalloping 100 days a year to just 20.
That's still better than what Chatham fisherman Ty Vecchione sees as his fate. In 2004, Vecchione paid nearly $200,000 to purchase a used lobster boat and re-rig it for scalloping. He said he was never told that the amount of scallops he landed that year might determine how much he would be allowed to land in future years. He fished for only a couple of months that year because the conversion took too long. "They've got to give you a year to establish landings," he said.
In Barnstable County, 226 boats have scallop permits. Multiday permits for larger vessels have been closed to new entrants since 1994. But permits for smaller vessels, which go out and return the same day, remained open. Known as general category permits, they limit fishermen to 400 pounds of scallop meat a day. When prices started climbing in recent years, so did profitability, and the number of general category scallop permits rose from a little under 2,000 in 1994 to nearly 3,000 in 2006. Even more importantly, the number of boats landing scallops increased threefold from 181 in 1994 to 627 vessels by 2006.
Although landings in the general category were just 14 percent of total landings in 2005, they were nearly triple that of the previous year. New England Fishery Management Council fishery analyst Deirdre Boelke said her agency feared the scallop population could take a much bigger hit if large numbers of the more than 2,000 boats that didn't go out and catch scallops last year decided it was time to use their permits.
Last week and this week, public hearings on three alternative scallop plans are taking place in New England and the Mid-Atlantic regions. The plan identified by the council as the preferred alternative includes allowing only fishermen who landed a specified amount of scallops within a certain time period to be able to continue scalloping. Still to be decided is whether to go with two-, four- or 10-year window from 1994 to 2004 as the qualifying period.
Under the most liberal of those plans, the number of general category scallopers would drop from nearly 3,000 to a little more than 700. Other alternatives cut that number to as low as 143. The preferred plan reduces permitted vessels to 459.
Even more critical will be the quota given to the general category boats. The council has indicated it prefers 5 percent, which would cut general category landings by 55 percent. But it has said it would consider between 2 percent and 11 percent.
Some in the big boat category resent the smaller boats in the general category, thinking of them as refugees from other fisheries who jeopardize the healthy stock status, and cash flow, that scallop fishermen now enjoy.
"There are people saying (the general category quota allocation) should be down to zero," Boelke said.
But Keese remains cautiously optimistic a compromise can be reached that will maintain the scallop stocks and allow dedicated small-boat fishermen to continue scalloping.
"Everyone I've talked to says that everything can change after the public hearings," he said.

[ak_powder_monkey]

another reason to eat wild alaskan salmon, especially pinks!

[nhtele]

Fall River is the Iberian Peninsula of Southeastern Massachusetts.

Well, either Fall River or New Bedford. Maybe both.

SOLID FUCKING GOLD!!!