Coalition Formed to Fight Ottawa on Temporary Foreign Workers’ Dispute
A winter which didn’t seem to want to end created all sorts of problems for the lobster fishery in northern Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island and parts of New Brunswick.
The opening of the fishery in these parts was delayed almost two weeks due to persistent ice conditions, brought on by strong northeasterly winds.
The first week to 10 days of the season are usually crucial to the success of this fishery due to the high quality of the product.
When the fishery finally opened, market ...
Back to the Future: Return of the Cod
Cod are increasing in abundance off the northeast coast of Newfoundland and Labrador and on the Grand Banks, in NAFO zone 2J3KL.
That is either good or bad news for people in our industry, depending on their individual circumstances. I thought it might be worth considering some of the implications of this development.
Why Are Cod Increasing in Abundance?
The main reason seems to be climate change. Temperatures around the world have been increasing over several decades, mainly due to ...
Lucrative Spring Fisheries Finally Underway
Weather Created Major Delays in Starting Lobster and Crab Seasons
In the week leading up to Mother’s Day on Prince Edward Island, there seemed to be one overarching topic of conversation around the coffee shops.
Was mom going to get her traditional feed of fresh lobster?
In this part of the country, May 10 is the first big sales day of the year for fish markets. But with copious amounts of ice still clogging the North Shore, setting day kept being pushed back from its original May 1 ...
DFO is Over-Regulating the Newfoundland Fishery
It saddens me to write this sort of letter. People talk to me from all over Newfoundland and I hear the complaints from so many people on the way the Department of Fisheries does business in its enforcement role.
Every year the court dockets in the Newfoundland region are getting more names for violations under the Fisheries Act.
Since DFO started to micro-manage the fishery, many Newfoundland harvesters are getting into trouble with the thousands of regulations in the Fisheries Act. Most ...
Draggers Caused Irreparable Damage to Fishery
I was listening to the Fisheries Broadcast recently about an interview with Mike, a professor from Scotland stating that the European Union was banning the dumping of unwanted fish in the North Sea and that this fish had to be brought ashore.
Unwanted fish is something they are not targeting, such as lower price species and fish that are of smaller size of the same kind they are fishing for. This has been going on since the invention of the dragger fleet.
This fleet fishes by dropping a ...
On the Waterfront – June 2015
2015 Prices Set for Shrimp and Crab
The Newfoundland price arbitration panel selected the harvesters’ offer of $1.40 per pound for a blended price for coldwater shrimp, rejecting the $1.28 offered by the province’s shrimp processors, Seafood.com reported.
The price represents a significant increase from last fall, when the blended price was $1.08 per pound.
With little global production yet and a dry market, shrimp prices heard at the Brussels Seafood Show continued to be very high, ...
Twine Loft – June 2015
Passed On: Ben Francis — Port-au-Bras, N.L. Mariner
Francis sailed the oceans of the world for more than 46 years, first, with the late Skipper Lloyd Bugden aboard the Topsail Star and the Duke of Topsail. Later, he worked with Maersk offshore supply vessels. He was known far and wide in Newfoundland seafaring circles as a good engineer, a great shipmate and a better person. All of Ben’s hard work at sea was to provide for his family in Burin; Mary, his loving wife of 41 years, and his ...
Cod Management Conundrum
There were very clear lessons to be learned from the Newfoundland and Labrador groundfish moratorium of the early 1990s, as well as the overfishing of cod in the North Sea during the same period.
For Atlantic cod stocks to be sustainable in the future, sensible management and harvesting practices must take place in order to avoid the need for drastic measures, such as the infamous 1992 moratorium. At the time, it seemed Newfoundland and Labrador’s harsh reality would be the only example ...
