Plumbing the Depths

The ‘70s disco hit “Stayin Alive” by the Bee Gees played as a parade of bay scallops quickly jetted, hopped and tumbled into a trap equipped with lights, the maritime version of a disco ball.

“We had a lot of fishermen contact us about this,” said Thomas Day, who was zooming in from England at a recent talk at the Cape Cod Maritime Museum.

The fishermen who reached out were not fans of ruffled shirts and platform boots or Studio 54 devotees; they were interested in harvesting scallops in a more sustainable way. Instead of traditional dredging up the bivalves, lights could attract scallops.  

To help explain why dredging approvals can be arduous and lengthy, look at a partial list of agencies involved:  
US Army Corps of Engineers, Environmental Protection Agency, United States Fish and Wildlife, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection, Coastal Zone Management, Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries, Massachusetts Fish and Wildlife…
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Dredging projects require sign-off from all of those, and within each agency there often are approvals required from more than one division.

The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) published a Draft Wind Energy Area that extends across approximately 3.5 million acres of ocean off  Maine, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire.  Most of the area is off the coast of Massachusetts.

A number of commercial fishermen, fishing industry organizations and others have commented on the Draft Wind Energy Area, which begins 23 miles east of Wellfleet. As the final wind energy area and proposed sale notice for interested companies will be published in the new year, we thought we would share some comments submitted for the draft.

Winslow Hallet Crocker was standing in a crowd gathered at Nauset Marine East in Orleans relishing a grilled scup taco.

While others clustered around Chef Tyler Hadfield, who was serving the mild white fish with sumac-cucumber salsa piled on lavish bread, Hallet Crocker confessed this was his first taste of scup. A recreational fisherman, he had seen the muted silver fish (also known as a porgy) for decades, but he always focused on cod, flounder and black sea bass.

“I throw them back,” he said, thinking they are too difficult to fillet. “I know a lot of people love them.”

When people talk about the poster fish of warming waters, black sea bass surfaces. The shimmery, tasty fish is also on the tips of tongues when people talk about flaws in the management system. 

“Populations are really surging off the Northeast, likely related to climate change,” said Hannah Verkamp, research biologist with the Commercial Fisheries Research Foundation in Rhode Island.

Since 2010, landings in the southern Atlantic are down 50 percent. In the mid-Atlantic and New England, landings are up 249 percent and 260 percent respectively.