Vineyard commercial fishermen scored a key win in the struggle keep them from being squeezed out of the groundfish industry yesterday when the New England Fishery Management Council voted to adopt the sector system, granting the Vineyard its own sector.
The vote came after three days of meeting in Portland, Me. The meeting was attended by a small group of Vineyard fishing activists.
An uninvited guest named Bill was the talk of the waterfront on Wednesday afternoon.
No, this was not former President Bill Clinton, for he is welcome.
The concern was Hurricane Bill, spinning in the Atlantic as a category four hurricane, more than a thousand miles away. While forecasters appear confident the storm will stay safely at sea through the coming weekend, the storm’s significant size and power still are of concern to local mariners with big or little boats.
The Vineyard’s four popular freshwater ponds were stocked with more than 1,100 trout on Wednesday. Officials from the state Division of Fisheries and Wildlife came over with a special truck filled with bubbling water, loaded with rainbow, brown and tiger trout.
Steven Hurley, fisheries manager for the state, said the fish were delivered to Duarte’s Pond, Old Mill Pond and Uncle Seth’s Pond in West Tisbury, and Upper Lagoon Pond which is shared by the towns of Tisbury and Oak Bluffs.
Ravaging of the river herring population by midwater trawlers and an absence of round-the-clock environmental police protection were the hot topics at a meeting between Cape and Islands Rep. Tim Madden and members of the newly formed Martha’s Vineyard Dukes County Fishermen’s Association Friday.
Local fishermen landed more than 100,000 pounds of fluke this summer at Menemsha. The landings by 10 small draggers and about five handline fishermen represents one-seventh of all the landings made in the state. The state quota for fluke was 702,614 pounds.
The report on local landings came out of a state fisheries public hearing held in Tisbury on Monday afternoon.
The Island’s big fishing event for youngsters, the Martha’s Vineyard Trout Tournament, is into its 35th year. Each year hundreds of our young Island fisherman vie for the many prizes and gifts that are made available to the winners of the various fishing categories. This year, it’s May 9, and as always it’s at Duarte’s Pond.
Island recreational anglers can now land fluke without breaking the law. The recreational season for fluke opened on Wednesday and the word along the shore is encouraging. Commercial fishermen have been dragging for fluke for weeks with positive results.
This is the first summer recreational fishermen were restricted from catching fluke at the start of the fishing season. They are pretty salty about it, but commercial fishermen have been dealing with openings and closings for decades.
The question of what is a harvestable sized bay scallop will be the subject of a public hearing next week on the Cape. The state Division of Marine Fisheries is hosting the hearing at 3 p.m. on Jan. 6 to gather input, following emergency action they took last fall to quiet a dispute between fishermen and regulators.
The hearing will take place at the Barnstable Senior Center, 825 Falmouth Road, Route 28 in Hyannis.
Barry Clifford plans to be back in Vineyard waters. The celebrated underwater explorer, who has spent decades uncovering shipwrecks almost forgotten and who got started here on the Vineyard, has his eyes on a wreck four miles east of Cape Pogue.
His firm Vast Explorer Inc. filed papers in U.S. District Court in Boston seeking exclusive rights to salvage the Semiramis, a 120-foot, three-masted ship, one of the first of the China traders. Mr. Clifford said he wants to start diving on the wreck later this fall.
The effects of climate change and commercial fishing on the marine ecosystem will be the focus of this year’s Menemsha Fisheries Development Fund’s series of programs at the Chilmark Public Library.
