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Lobsterman show? What happend to Capt Joel on Exclibur?
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Lobsterman show? What happend to Capt Joel on Exclibur?
Anyone watch the Lobsterman show? kind of a deadliest catch but for Lobi's on the east coast. I watched the last episode (was on Tivo, not sure when it was really on?), and a dragger boat F/V Excalibur had to head for the beach after the Capt got a phone call, said it was a "family matter". Anyone know what happned?
Any of you up there in Patsey "Go for it on 4th and 2 land" know any of those guys on show?
Well since this was tapped last year. Here is some update
04:07 PM EDT on Friday, March 21, 2008
NARRAGANSETT — Fisherman Joel Hovanesian did the unthinkable this week. He told his three-man crew to find other work.
“It’s over,” the 51-year-old captain says.
Hit hard by tightening regulations, a spotty season and soaring fuel costs, Hovanesian recently tied his boat, Excalibur, to a dock at Point Judith, the state’s most important fishing port. He says he can no longer cover his fuel costs while searching for squid or fluke.
He let his crew go after fuel prices, rising for five straight weeks, hit a three-year high on Saturday.
“I said, this doesn’t make any sense,” says Hovanesian, who met with state Department of Environmental Management Director W. Michael Sullivan this week, and who last year urged Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse to find a way to help the ailing fishing industry.
“This is the most dangerous job in America and I don’t want to do it for measly pay,” says Hovanesian, who crawled into the holds of boats to unload fish as a 13-year-old boy.
“There’s a new catchword around the bulkhead these days. It’s a three letter word: bad. You hear it everywhere. How are things going? They’re bad, people say. Bad.”
On Saturday, the price of marine diesel fuel jumped to nearly $3.65 a gallon, up from around $2 a gallon a year ago, says Chris Drew, the owner of Drew Oil Corp. in Cranston. His company delivers fuel to fishermen in Narragansett, North Kingstown, Warren and New Bedford.
“Fishermen have been complaining about the price of fuel since last October and it’s done nothing but go up since,” says Drew.
In past years, fishermen have hunkered down during the bad times. They’ve survived boat fires, oil spills and ocean storms.
When the lobster population thinned a half dozen years ago, many dipped into their retirement funds, and fished for other species.
They stuck with it because they knew it would get better. Now, some are wondering, How long can I wait?
“A lot of people are tying up their boats, waiting for better times,” says Lanny Dellinger, president of the Rhode Island Lobstermen’s Association.
Unlike some business owners, fishermen can’t pass on to the consumer an increase in operating costs, says Dellinger. Fishing is a heavily regulated industry and most fishermen can sell only to licensed fish and lobster dealers. The dealers — not the fishermen — determine the price paid at the dock.
“We can’t cut out the middle man and sell directly to the restaurants,” he says.
Lobstermen are catching as many lobsters this year as last, but they’re getting less for them, he says. “Meanwhile, the overhead has gone through the roof. The price of bait has gone up. The gas we put in our trucks has gone up. All the stuff we use, things like buoys, are made of petroleum, and the cost of those things have increased tenfold. It’s killing our industry coast wide.”
In Point Judith, Jim Thayer has tied up his boat, Luke & Sarah, next to Rhode Island Engine. He needs about $30,000 in engine repairs, he says. Often, he has other work done while his boat is idle, but not this year, he says.
Already, he’s spent $92,000 more for fuel this year compared to early last year, he says.
He can’t even afford to paint his massive black-hulled boat, a 121-foot freezer trawler. Scrapes and rust have erased part of the boat’s name. He shakes his head. “It’s never looked this bad.”
The 64-year-old Wakefield captain had hoped to retire by now, but with profits down, he has to keep fishing, he says. He’s been fishing for 40 years.
The slowdown is hurting everyone.
Barry Barrett, the owner of Point Judith Electronics, says sales have stalled. Fewer fishermen are buying equipment or making payments, which makes it hard for him to buy new stock.
“It’s a trickle down effect,” says Barrett, who relies on a two-person staff, including his bookkeeper. “There are a lot of businesses in this industry that are in extreme danger.”
Captains like Thayer are making only emergency repairs, says Jay Gallup, a third-generation owner of Rhode Island Engine.
“They aren’t making improvements, they’re only doing what’s necessary.” As a result, only about 60 percent of the company’s business is tied to the state’s fleet, he says. More fishermen are falling behind on payments, he adds.
Fuel prices dropped yesterday, but dealers aren’t making predictions. The market is volatile, they say.
Fishermen face other challenges, too, says Chris Brown, president of the Rhode Island Commercial Fishermen’s Association.
Tightening federal regulations have shortened the time they can spend at sea. And catch limits have reduced what captains and crews can take home.
As an example, the amount of yellowtail flounder fishermen can catch in a day has dropped from 750 pounds to 250 pounds, says Brown.
“I can catch that much in an hour,” he says. “But it’s a three-hour ride out and a three-hour ride back. In years gone by, we’d fish from dawn to dark. Now we’re in by noon.”
Brown says he understands the need to stop overfishing, but many species are rebounding, he says. However, the federal government can take years before it relaxes a law, he says.
Fishermen like Dellinger have another concern. If fuel prices remain high, fewer fishermen will need dock space.
Waterfront dealers and other marine-related businesses could falter or fail. That, in turn, could put pressure on companies to sell to developers, he says.
Hovanesian, meanwhile, is trying to sort it all out.
“I always prided myself on looking for fish,” he says.
“But you can’t do that now. You have to know where the fish are. If you roll the dice and lose now, you go so far backwards you can’t come back.”
Will local fisherman survive with new regulations Wednesday, 11 November 2009 Being pushed out of business is a realistic threat for Galilee fishermen.
By CARL CRITZ
POINT JUDITH - On Friday, Oct. 30, Joel Hovanesian joined the captains and crews of nearly a dozen vessels out of Point Judith to protest pending changes to the way fishermen and their catch are regulated. They joined thousands of others from across the northeast outside the National Marine Fisheries Service in Gloucester, Mass. to educate the consumer and to send a united message to elected officials.
“This day is long overdue,” read an e-mail statement from the collected fishermen, “Today we gather as a united front: Scallopers, Shrimpers, Lobstermen and Groundfishermen from MD, RI, NJ, NY, MA, NH, ME in a way that may have never before been seen. We are hard working men and women that supply our nation with a healthy and sustainable source of protein.”
Hovanesian echoed a sentiment that is well known: fishermen are fed up. But with the economic climate stifling chances for some fishermen to make ends meet, new regulations mean more fishermen may not be able to survive.
The current administration, under the helm of Jane Lubchenco of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), unveiled a new sector-based catch share system that replaces the present “Days at Sea” measure.
The new system is slated to go into effect on May 1, 2010. The Days at Sea system had been in place for about 15 years, during which haddock, Gulf of Maine cod, monk fish, and other species, once threatened, have rebounded to historic levels, according to the statement.
“NOAA and the National Marine Fisheries Service has decided, without any comment, or public referendum, or an economic and social impact statement has decided that we need to be managed under a completely different mechanism than the Days At Sea system for which we invested our livelihoods.”
The new system proposes to look at catch histories of each vessel from 1996 - 2006. Then each vessel is given a specific allocation of that quota. From there, fishermen are expected to either form a Sector (groups to fish within) or remain in the Common Pool, using the Days at Sea scheme.
According to the statement, rules were given for the two choices, a deadline was drawn, and choices were made.
However, after the deadline had passed fishermen claim NOAA altered the Common Pool Rules in a manner that is slated to wipe out an estimated 55 – 75 percent of the remaining industry.
Government regulators call the catch share program a fair management of a common resource. Fishermen say that the effort is aimed at making that resource private.
“We were up there protesting the catch share plan because they know the data they are planning on using is basically flawed and they admit it,” Hovanesian said.
According to Hovanesian, the data pool being used is missing hundreds of thousands of pounds of landings. “It’s also the whole attitude of the NMFS and their interpretation of the law, and their seeming unwillingness to bend and flex and mitigate some adverse effected of laws forced down our throats,” Hovanesian said.
“This scheme of sectors will create ungodly unemployment, huge bad debt loss, damage if not crush infrastructure, certain smaller ports will not exist,” read the statement.
“The consolidation that will occur as a result of sectors will put the fish in the hands of a chosen few. Prices will inflate. Distribution of fish will also consolidate as this system will not support all the existing port, and hence, communities.”
Joining the fight in Rhode Island is Dana Neugent, a professor at the University of Rhode Island, who for the past year and a half has been working with Point Judith fishermen Brian Loftes, Jimmy Ruhle and Sig Hansen from Discovery Channel’s “Deadliest Catch” on a feature-length documentary called TRUTH: Fishing Crisis of Government Mismanagement.
The documentary details many of the unjustified problems caused by big government, it’s agencies and environmental groups.
“It is my hope that the fishing industry gain copies of this movie, show it to their friends, neighbors, Congressmen and educate the masses.”
“We under-harvested 154,000 metric tons of fish on George’s Bank this year,” Hovanesian said. “That’s flounder and haddock and cod that could be turned into landings and it wouldn’t be nearly as bad for these guys.”
Hovanesian and acting DEM Fish and Wildlife Director Bob Ballou are both affected by a problem not of their doing, the poor reporting of landings. Holding the bag for this discrepancy, seemingly, are the dealers of seafood who buy landed fish from the docks.
By law, dealers are required to submit the numbers for their take every Monday and Thursday during respective seasons. Yet during a recent round-table discussion between commercial fishermen and DEM officials on Friday, Nov. 6 at the new University of Rhode Island Graduate School of Oceanography building in Narragansett, it was determined that dealers have often delayed their reporting of summer flounder landings. The delay is partly responsible for the closure of the summer flounder season this year.
Summer flounder is one venue in Rhode Island that is under a pilot program testing sector allocation or catch share regulation. Overages in the common pool of over 146,000 pounds by the end of the winter 1 season on April 1 reduced the allowable catch numbers for the summer, with the DEM eventually closing the fishery on August 9. Ballou said that late reporting was to blame for DEM and the industry’s mismanagement of its quota.
“We get handed violations all the time,” Hovanesian said. “If the dealers are not reporting then why aren’t they getting violations?”
In a Sept. 11, letter to over 100 licensed Rhode Island seafood dealers, Ballou stated that only 2.8 percent of landing reports were recorded on time. 32 percent were entered one to five days late, and 46 percent were handed in six to ten days later. Eighteen percent were handed in more than ten days late.
In the letter, Ballou said that in addition to being a management imperative, complete and timely dealer reporting is a regulatory requirement and warned that “recurring or egregious incidents of late dealer reporting will be referred to DEM’s office of Law Enforcement for investigation and potential enforcement action.”
“We need dealers to work with us and provide info,” Ballou said. “We don’t want to be coming down hard unnecessarily, but in this case there is good reason to say its one thing to be a day or two late, but another to be in some cases weeks late with that important response from dealers that helps fine tune our end to better manage the fishery.”
Hovanesian blames the inflexibility of the NMFS and other government groups for their “passing the buck” on regulations by citing the inflexibility of the law.
“What they’re saying is that congress wants to put us out of business. I’d like to think that that’s not true.”
The protest also comes on the heels of a September grant awarded to Rhode Island Fishermen to help support their industry by Senator Jack Reed. The Commercial Fisheries Research Foundation (CFRF), located at the University of Rhode Island, will receive a total of $6.5 million in federal funding through two awards from NOAA. CFRF will receive $3.5 million to engage in research and outreach activities designed to help local fishermen address the challenges facing the industry. The Foundation will also receive $3 million to administer a whale rope exchange program for lobstermen.
CFRF will be working over the next few weeks to finalize the process by which fishermen can apply for funding under the program.
Hovanesian also said that government officials have perennially overlooked the observations of fishermen, calling it anecdotal information.
“The government says there’s no winter flounder. I just got off the phone from a guy on the docks, he says he can’t get clear of them to fish for other species. So what does he have to do? Steam away, steam away from the fish. That’s all we do now, and you know what? Our small boat fleet here is starving to death.”
For decades they've overfished using cheap fuel. Not a lot of sympathy. Regs are going to be tough, but if the market wants fish then the prices will have to go up to cover the costs.
__________________ -Bill Kearney, 34' Four Winns 348 Vista
Another dragger bites the dust. Sounds good to me.
It just ain't right to get regulated out of business. Some of the regs are even a farse. Sheer stupidity! It ain't right to ruin a industry that supplies a great food source. Lets hope we never have to depend on people like this for a major food supply in a hurry because you will have starving to death people. It should be mandated the fishing industry stay healthy by the government. Not wiped out!.
Geezzzz...all that reading and the OP's question wasn't answered....
wasted time...
My thoughts exactly! We've been edumacated on fishing, regulations, different fisher populations, working relationships on fishing boats, migrant workers and the fishing industry.... among other things.
Anyone watch the Lobsterman show? kind of a deadliest catch but for Lobi's on the east coast. I watched the last episode (was on Tivo, not sure when it was really on?), and a dragger boat F/V Excalibur had to head for the beach after the Capt got a phone call, said it was a "family matter". Anyone know what happned?
Any of you up there in Patsey "Go for it on 4th and 2 land" know any of those guys on show?
Go ahead rub it in with the 4th & 2 crap
I dont know anything about the guy you are asking about, but I believe Captn Terry Handrigan and I were neighborhood friends growing up.
I remember his family being in the business. It was 30 years ago anyway. I
Lobsterman show? What happend to Capt Joel on Exclibur? 
know any of those guys on show? 
