COVID Shows the Need for New Risk Management Tools in Fisheries

COVID Shows the Need for New Risk Management Tools in Fisheries

Much of the crucial aid distributed to fishing families in response to the COVID-19 emergency this year has been provided using the regulatory machinery from the NOAA fishery disaster program . Forty years ago, Congress included the fishery disaster program in the Magnuson-Stevens Act in order to protect fishing communities from rare and unpredictable environmental […]

Mid-Atlantic Fisheries: Time To Abandon the Past, And Embrace the Future

Mid-Atlantic Fisheries:  Time To Abandon the Past, And Embrace the Future

“Them that’s got shall get Them that’s not shall lose…” Billie Holiday, from “God Bless the Child“ When jazz singer Billie Holiday belted out the words to “God Bless the Child” back in 1941, she certainly wasn’t thinking about fisheries. But some of the words of that song still apply, as fisheries managers, reflecting fishermen’s […]

Linda Behnken Describes the Economic Toll of the Coronavirus Pandemic on America’s Fishermen

Linda Behnken Describes the Economic Toll of the Coronavirus Pandemic on America’s Fishermen

Top photo: Linda Behnken Straight from the waters off Sitka, Alaska, Linda Behnken describes the hardships that the coronavirus pandemic has brought to America’s fishermen. 2020 has been a hard year for her and her fishermen peers, just as it has for all fishermen, coastal communities and many others across country. Fishermen provide our country […]

Pebble Mine Update: What the Army Corps Did and Didn’t Do

Pebble Mine Update: What the Army Corps Did and Didn’t Do

Top Photo: Fly-fishing in Bristol Bay, via World Wildlife Fund If you are following the saga of the proposed Pebble Mine in Bristol Bay, Alaska, you would be forgiven if you thought recent action by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) was the death knell for the proposed mine. On August 24, the USACE […]

My New Pellet Smoker Upped My Seafood Game

My New Pellet Smoker Upped My Seafood Game

Photo: Sockeye Salmon Candy Contributors to this blog often write about fishery policy and the love they share of catching fish. Every so often, there’s a discussion of the culinary delights that drive most of us to the sea and fuel our love for seafood. I’ve cooked a lot of fish in my life, but […]

Fishermen Are Putting Food on the Table for Those in Need

Fishermen Are Putting Food on the Table for Those in Need

Photo: Fishermen in Alaska. Photo courtesy of National Fisherman, from the Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute. What good can come of a pandemic that has killed hundreds of thousands of people worldwide? I suppose it is a rhetorical question, isn’t it? The simple answer is, not much. So, as I sat down to write this, the […]

ASMFC Holds Eventful Summer Meeting

ASMFC Holds Eventful Summer Meeting

The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC) held its regular summer meeting on August 3-6, when it addressed a number of issues that will impact anglers in New England and the Mid-Atlantic. Big decision on Atlantic menhaden The biggest news to come out of the meeting was the Atlantic Menhaden Management Board’s (Menhaden Board) decision […]

Rockfish Recovery in More Ways than One

Rockfish Recovery in More Ways than One

Top: Shortraker rockfish, photo via NOAA Fisheries A lifetime ago, on the day after Christmas last year, the Associated Press published a news story about West Coast fisheries that tens of thousands of Americans read, and you may have read it too. Calling the recovery of rockfish stocks off the West Coast “the biggest environmental […]