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Thursday, 3 July 2014

Atlantic herring - lots of smoke but where’s the fire?

Atlantic herring - lots of smoke but where’s the fire?
Nils E. Stolpe/FishNet-USA
July 3, 2014

To be removed from the FishNet USA distribution list, please reply to this email with "remove" in the subject line. A printable version in Adobe Acrobat format of this FishNet issue will be available at http://www.FishNet-USA.com.
Peter Shelley is a lawyer who works for the Conservation Law Foundation (CLF). Apparently among his duties is providing entries to the CLF website “Talking Fish.”

For those of you who aren't familiar with the groundfish debacle in New England, Mr. Shelley and the CLF, utilizing the court system and a whole bunch of money (according to their IRS Form 990 filed in 2011- the last year available on the Guidestar website – total CLF revenue was $5,800,000, up $1,250,000 from the year before), have been playing a pivotal role in the groundfish fishery management program via the management process and the courts since before it was a debacle.

Evidently the groundfish fishery wasn't enough to fill Mr. Shelley’s plate so he has been involved in Atlantic (sea) herring management as well. Part of that involvement was an opinion piece on the CLF website titled New England’s Fishing Pathology, referring to the participants in and their participation in the Atlantic herring fishery – or at least those people whose participation involves boats bigger than those that Mr. Shelley has decided are too big.

I’m going to start off with a primer on Atlantic herring management. This should make it easier to put Mr. Shelley’s words in their proper context.

The Atlantic herring fishery in U.S. waters is divided into four distinct management areas designated 1A, 1B, 2 and 3. Each year a quota (actually an Area Annual Catch Limit) is determined for each area. Area 1B has by far the lowest quota of all four areas (Area 1A is 33,031 metric tons, Area 1B is 2,878 metric tons, Area 2 is 28,764 metric tons and Area 3 is 39,415 metric tons). Area 1A, adjacent to Area 1B, is primarily populated by the Gulf of Maine herring stock, Area 3 by the Georges Bank herring stock and Area 1B and Area 2 are populated by a mix of herring from both the Georges Bank and Gulf of Maine stocks.

Reporting requirements for vessels engaged in the Atlantic herring fishery are stringent and strictly enforced:

Limited access herring vessels report catch daily via VMS (Vessel Monitoring System), open access herring vessels report catch weekly via the IVR (Interactive Voice Response) system, and all herring  permitted vessels submit VTRs (Vessel Trip Report) weekly. Failure to submit reports, including the requirement to submit a negative VTR for any week when no catch was made, has resulted in vessels being refered to the NOAA Office of Law enforcement for investigation. – From the NOAA/NMFS Atlantic Herring Weekly Reports.

The reports are processed by NOAA/NMFS and when 92% of the quota for a particular area is reached the directed fishery in that area is closed. If it is required that an area be “closed” to harvesting (actually the area isn't closed but the trip limit is reduced to a very low level) it is the responsibility of and is done by NOAA/NMFS. It is intended that this be done in a timely manner to avoid significant overages in harvest. Apparently this is not always possible. If there is an overage in an area in a given year that overage is subtracted from that area’s quota in subsequent years.

The entire directed fishery for herring is closed when 92% of the entire quota (104,088 mt for this fishing year) has been harvested, from all areas, collectively.

There is nothing in the Fishery Management Plan requiring – or even suggesting - that it is a responsibility of the vessel owners/operators to do anything more than or to be in any way responsible for more than their own vessels’ reporting. Once a vessel owner/operator meets the daily and/or weekly reporting requirements he or she has met his or her responsibilities until or if fishing in a particular area is shut down by NOAA/NMFS. If a vessel continues to fish in an area that has been closed or has more than the 2,000 pound trip limit aboard that fact will become obvious to NOAA/NMFS through the VMS and appropriate action will be taken.   
     
Mr. Shelley’s column is based on the fact that in one of the four Atlantic herring management areas, Area 1B, the big boats that he somewhat puzzlingly refers to as part of a commodity-style fleet* exceeded their quota by 60%.
One of the things that he neglected to mention was that with almost 6 months of the 2014 fishery completed the Atlantic herring harvest from all areas was only 30.5% of the quota.

While an overage of any area is of concern from a management perspective, it’s highly unlikely that the Area 1B overage has significant biological implications. The last Atlantic Herring Stock Assessment, held in January of 2011, estimated the total biomass at 1,322,446 metric tons. The Area 1B overage was between one and two tenths of one percent of that and less than 2% of the total quota for all four areas.
In a somewhat tortured analogy Mr. Shelley equates the overharvest in Area 1B to driving 104 mph in a 65 mph speed zone.” From the perspective of the two areas where Georges Bank and Gulf of Maine stocks of Atlantic herring mix, 1B and 2, and using the same analogy, the under-harvest in the two areas combined would be the equivalent of driving 32 mph in a 65 mph speed zone. That’s hardly the potentially catastrophic picture that he was trying to paint. (I’ve always felt that relevant data should be presented in as comprehensive a manner as is possible. While it might not seem as dramatic, it allows readers to more fully and accurately understand what’s really going on out there.)  

On the following page is a table (from data provided by the New England Fishery Management Council staff) which shows the annual maximum catch (quota) allowed for each of the four management areas, the actual catch from each of those areas, and the percentage of the quota taken from each area in each year for the past ten years.
Note that over the past decade the participants in the herring fishery, participants who Peter Shelley and the CLF have termed “bad fishermen” who are in their estimation suffering from some undisclosed pathological condition, and I guess characterized by a lack of regard for either the fish they harvest or of their fellow fishermen, have caught only 70% of the quota from all four areas. Note also that in Area 1B, the area which went from a minor mole hill in any general herring quota analysis to Mr. Shelley’s supposed catastrophic mountain travelling at 104 mph, the percentage of total quota taken each year has ranged from a low of 19% in 2009 to a high of 158% in 2012, with no apparent trend. Two of the three other areas demonstrate similar swings in harvest percentage with no apparent trend. In fact the only area that demonstrates any consistency is Area 1A, and not coincidentally that is the only area in which the average landings have equaled 100% of the quota.  In this area the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s Atlantic herring plan allows the states of Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Maine to work cooperatively with seiners and trawlers in the Gulf of Maine to tightly manage the 1A quota by limiting fishing days during each week, in order to stretch the quota out through the fishing year and provide a consistent supply of herring to local lobster bait markets.


Year
Area
Catch (metric tons)
Area quota
% of quota

Year
Area
Catch (metric tons)
Area quota
% of quota
2004
1A
60,095
60,000
100%

2009
1A
44,088
43,650
101%
2004
1B
9,044
10,000
90%

2009
1B
1,799
9,700
19%
2004
2
12,992
50,000
26%

2009
2
28,032
30,000
93%
2004
3
11,074
60,000
18%

2009
3
30,024
60,000
50%
2005
1A
61,102
60,000
102%

2010
1A
28,424
26,546
107%
2005
1B
7,873
10,000
79%

2010
1B
6,001
4,362
138%
2005
2
14,203
30,000
47%

2010
2
20,831
22,146
94%
2005
3
12,938
50,000
26%

2010
3
17,596
38,146
46%
2006
1A
59,989
60,000
100%

2011
1A
30,676
29,251
105%
2006
1B
13,010
10,000
130%

2011
1B
3,530
4,362
81%
2006
2
21,270
30,000
71%

2011
2
15,001
22,146
68%
2006
3
4,445
50,000
9%

2011
3
37,038
38,146
97%
2007
1A
49,992
50,000
100%

2012
1A
24,302
27,668
88%
2007
1B
7,323
10,000
73%

2012
1B
4,307
2,723
158%
2007
2
17,268
30,000
58%

2012
2
22,482
22,146
102%
2007
3
11,236
55,000
20%

2012
3
39,471
38,146
103%
2008
1A
42,257
43,650
97%

2013
1A
29,820
29,775
100%
2008
1B
8,671
9,700
89%

2013
1B
2,458
4,600
53%
2008
2
20,881
30,000
70%

2013
2
27,569
30,000
92%
2008
3
11,431
60,000
19%

2013
3
37,833
42,000
90%






Total

908,376
1,293,863
70%


In Mr. Shelley’s words “this incident—and particularly the herring fleet’s response to it—are symptomatic of a deeper pathology in some of New England’s fisheries.”

Of this supposed pathological condition Mr. Shelley wrote “the herring fleet has blown past the quota in that same area several times before.” He could as easily, and perhaps more accurately, have written that the herring fleet has significantly under harvested the Area 1B quota in seven of the past ten years (it looks like 90%, 79%, 130%, 73%, 89%, 19%, 138%, 81%, 158% and 53% since 2004). Some pathology!  

In spite of what seems to be from a conservation perspective an overall stellar performance by everyone associated with this fishery, particularly in the face of a resource base that seems to be bouncing all over the Northwest Atlantic from month to month and from year to year, Mr. Shelley picks out the performance in this particular area that contributes less than 3% to the total quota, an area in which the quota had been off in two of the last ten years by at least as much as that which precipitated the current episode of strum und drang, and with an overage that will be deducted from the future area quota.

He then takes another stab at the participants in the fishery in general and on Mid-Atlantic and New England Council Members associated with the fishery in particular, writing I have yet to come across an ounce of mea culpa or even regret from the herring fleet, its representatives, or any of the seafood industry bloggers.” Maybe because neither they nor I (I assume I was included as a seafood industry blogger), being aware of the whole fishery rather than of the cherry-picked bit that he focused on, saw any necessity to publicly gnash our teeth, tear our hair, rend our garments or do anything else that would satisfy his seeming need for some public display of guilt and remorse on our collective and individual parts. The people in the herring industry followed the rules, and followed them in a timely manner. If the management system broke down none of the culpa for that belongs with any of us. With only a sixth of the quota being taken from the coastal stock complex of Atlantic herring to date this fishing year about the only regret I can feel is for the beleaguered fishing communities – beleaguered, I might add, in large part due to the efforts of groups like the CLF and people like Mr. Shelley – that are going to have to forgo the income that those uncaught herring would have generated.

I’ll leave it for you to decide whether all of the smoke surrounding the Atlantic herring fishery has been generated by an actual crisis or by the well-oiled, foundation supported smoke machines that have become increasingly prevalent in fisheries/oceans governance for most of the last two decades. 

*A commodity is defined as anything that is bought or sold. While whether Mr. Shelley thinks that fish and shellfish should not be sold by commercial harvesters is not clear here. I’ll assume that he doesn’t, that he couldn’t find the right word or words that would be suitable so took a wild stab.

Looking for a gaff cutter sail boat - around 13 metres - do you know of one for sale?

I have received this request from a couple in France who are in the process of selling their 7m classic yacht and are looking to purchase a gaffer around 13m on which to live, sail and provide educational trips. I have used their text as provided!



"In the beginning there was a right-hand drive Porsche, then I decided to live during some months in Paris where no car is needed — just a flat. So I sold my Porsche. My beloved wife had then a good idea to book the last mooring available in the Arsenal Port, just between the 4th and the 11th arrondissement of Paris. The thing was done, so we needed to get a boat — the future Crevette Rose (Pink Shrimp) was found in Cherbourg, a sloop of 7 meters by the architect John Westell, an Englishman, built in La Rochelle in 1963 in one single piece.

Their current boat, Crevette will be returning to her spiritual home!

And here we are in Cherbourg with a suitcase of linen, some cash and ready to live in a piece of mahogany furniture. After ten days of sail training with the seller, we head for Paris ! Since then we had adventures and lived in Normandy, Paris, Moscow, Palermo, Kiev and Le Havre, where our little treasure is actually moored. This year we are going to say goodbye to Crevette Rose because we would like to donate it to an English foundation so that it returns to England. Crevette Rose is not a prawn, and we need a bigger vessel. We definitely decided to live aboard with our daughter Rose but also to organise trips for people with modest means.
To be specific about our request, we are searching for a gaff cutter of 13 metres or more, in good condition or no — it will depend on its qualities. We are looking for a boat as original as we are."

If you can help in any way please contact them here - email arnaud trambouze

Wednesday, 2 July 2014

How do ICES scientists count all the fish in the sea?

Let a newly published brochure explain it for you.




​It is, of course, impossible for scientists to count every single fish in the sea. Instead, they collect as much information as they can from three main sources: landings at ports, fishers, and research vessels surveys.

The collected data is then used to estimate the size of commercial fish populations such as cod, haddock, and hake, and the estimates are used by ICES to give advice to international commissions and governments on the sustainable exploitation of these fish populations.

Our newly published brochure "Fish stocks: counting the uncountable?" explains how fish stocks are assessed in the Northeast Atlantic and gives insight into the types of science and information that goes into scientists' stock estimates. It also describes the ICES advisory process and sheds light on the efforts in integrating ecosystem considerations into fisheries advice.

ICES at Science in the City festival

ICES were at the Science in the City festival in Copenhagen on Sunday, 22 June, where Advisory Programme Professional Officer Anne Cooper gave a presentation on this very topic. 

The presentation How do scientists count the number of fish in the sea? took place in Dance Halls in Carlsberg City at 13:00 and at 15:00.

Unique Newlyn Copper #Pizza oven #forsale


For sale - an opportunity to buy a unique Newlyn Copper gas and/or wood fired pizza oven...


for more details please contact 01726 364098.

Wednesday's fishy action




Shining John Dory always look so good...


and this time of year is megrim time...


these little red gurnard will keep a few crab pots baited...


just a reminder that this shark needs to stay whole for a while yet...


Twilight time on the slip...


another foreigner, this time from Poole...


same kind of boat, same kind of fishing - just 20 years in boat design have changed with the introduction of transom (square) sterns found on most fishing boats today...


the Alphaver is still in port today awaiting a decision over her trawl mesh...


along the green Cormac have kindly created a chart to show the public just how much concrete is being used to create the new sea defenses on Newlyn Green - a total of 2000m² is needed and at 6m² a orry load that's a whole lot of lorries!...



easy to see why when the size of the footings is seen, the bottom of the pit must be twenty feet below high water...


the concrete is pumped in like icing a giant cake.

Another French trawler detained for technical net infringement

It seems it is not only the visiting French trawlers falling foul of the law with their nets this week - in another incident the Roxy was escorted in to port by a French fisheries patrol - though not before the rest of the fleet took action and protested over a technical infringement sounding similar to the case with the Alphaver - maybe the same trawl manufacturers is involved? 



Translated for the article in Le Telegramme:

Roxy trawler Guilvinec was controlled by customs yesterday, 15 miles offshore. The size of some of its trawl mesh was considered less than legal size. "A normal effect with the effort," says the skipper.

Fish landing took place earlier than expected yesterday afternoon at Guilvinec. A big twenty trawlers returned to port to 15 h 30, in solidarity with the Roxy, controlled by the Customs boat a few hours earlier. Control to 15 miles off the coast that goes wrong in all skippers. "They sought to criticize laments Kevin Coïc, owner of Roxy. They were allowed to board when another boat had refused, they checked the papers, lobsters, codend ... Everything was in order. Then they measured the square mesh panel, and felt that the size was below the legal size. "Customs then wanted to enter the fishery. They relented seeing all trawlers present in the area begin to circle the Roxy to force to stay on board.

"It's not even an error on our part"

"The mesh knots move and become rectangles, this is normal with the effort. It was enough to pull up to the back properly ... It's not even an error on our part. "A plausible version Fanny Faure, head of the Department of Maritime Affairs Guilvinec. "It may happen that the mesh hardens with sediment accumulation. Here, we must ensure that it is wear and not an offense. "Once in port, Kevin Coïc made ​​new measures, consistent, these, regulation, a new part to support. "There ras-le-bol! Every day we are at sea, we are not criminals. It gets up early every morning, it is in port every night ... Why do not they come to check us when we land? At least we would not lose our time, not our money! "Says Nicolas Le Berre, sailor on the Roxy. Last night, Kevin Coïc had not yet received the minutes of apprehension. He faces up to € 1,500 administrative penalty and penalty points on his license fishing master. In the meantime, he was forced to remove and change the panel square of its trawl power returning to sea this morning meshes.