He still works the waters of the West Passage of Narragansett Bay in the Newshell, his bright red Novi (Nova Scotia-style fishing boat) often docked at Ft. Getty in Jamestown.
But he doesn’t look for lobster traps anymore. Now he uses the Newshell to service his oyster farm just south of the Jamestown Bridge.
There are 52 oyster farms in Rhode Island spread out over 176 acres – a little more than half in Narragansett Bay (one as far north as Warwick) with the remaining 82 acres in one of four South County salt ponds.
As recently as the early 1990’s, there were no oysters in Narragansett Bay. Or not nearly enough to make any money harvesting. Then Bob “Skid” Rheault applied for an aquaculture permit with CRMC. “He was the vanguard,” explained Dale Leavitt, an aquaculture expert at Roger Williams University. “It was a three or four year permitting process.”
Since then the industry has boomed, according to state Coastal Resources Management Council data. In 2013, Rhode Island aquaculturists sold more than 6 million oysters.
That means real money for the many restaurants, seafood stores and oyster bars that sell this delectable shellfish.”It’s providing local seafood in an era when most of our fish is imported,” said David Beutel, CRMC aquaculture coordinator. “That’s certainly valuable to us as a state.”
What’s more, Beutel and Leavitt both said oysters improve water quality. The shellfish filter fish-kill inducing nutrients out of Narragansett Bay. An oysters can filter 50 gallons of water daily, according to Leavitt. “They provide an important ecological service,” he said.
The average oyster take about 18 months to mature, said Beutel, and are then sold to local distributors who sell them here in Rhode Island and in 47 other states. Beutel said Alaska and Hawaii were on the list, and he wasn’t certain which two states were not.
They are grown in cages that typically float five or 10 feet below the surface.
“We have an industry that creates more jobs, creates more fresh seafood and leaves the water cleaner than when it started,” said Beutel.
Goerner planted about 400,000 oyster seeds in his first two seasons. This year he’s planting another 300,000.
Today’s chores were an important part of that process. A 4,000 pound anchor in 30-feet-deep water had to be moved into place. This meant Sam Paterson had to go scuba diving to set the chain on the anchor.
Paterson and Goerner were attaching to the 4,000 pound anchor this underwater lift bag – made by a Rhode Island company!
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]]>The state Department of Environmental Management and the URI Graduate School of Oceanography are partnering to produce more – and more efficient – data and analysis about the fishing industry here in the Ocean State.
The Rhode Island Marine Fisheries Institute “will enhance the state’s ability to positively affect marine fisheries research and management,” said Jason McNamee, a DEM biologist. He was speaking to a crowd of scientists, students, bureaucrats, politicians and fishermen at the Mosby Center, the oldest and most waterfront building at the Bay Campus. The group met there to formally bless the effort.
The Institute will focus on both commercial and recreational fishing, which DEM Director Janet Coit said “bring hundreds of millions of dollars and thousands of jobs into Rhode Island.”
Oceanography professor Jeremy Collie said he hopes the collaboration can make the state a hub for research and information. “When people have fisheries related questions, they will come to Rhode Island first,” he said.
And the folks from the fishing industry seem happy with the effort too:
As far as what the Institute will do, “I can think of about 50 projects off the top of my head,” said one fisherman in the audience. Ideas ranged from studying closer the emerging squid and scup fisheries, to the effects of climate change – which include some species, like cod and lobster, moving out of local waters and others, like summer flounder, moving in.
“The fishing industry will drive the agenda,” McNamee said. But Collie added, “the focus will be on research, not management.”
]]>Better known as river herring – or, as the old timers call them, buckies – these small and once-abundant anadromous fish spend their summers, autumns and winters in the Atlantic Ocean and as soon as the weather shifts to warm, they swim into our fresh water streams to mate and hatch their young.
They are silvery, with purplish backs and are only about six inches long. At first they can be tricky to spot in the water. But once your eye picks them up, it quickly becomes evident that a river is flush with them, swimming against a sometimes swift current to get to their spawning grounds.
They can be found all over coastal Rhode Island this time of year – Nonquit Pond in Tiverton, Buckeye Brook in downtown Apponaug and even the Woonasquatucket River in Providence.
By far the biggest and best-known buckie run has always been on the Mattatuxet River, said Department of Environmental Management biologist Phil Edwards. On Sunday, the caretakers of Gilbert Stuart’s birthplace, a colonial-era homestead 5 five miles upstream from Narragansett Beach, noticed they were back.
For the next several weeks, thousands of river herring will navigate a fish ladder that circumvents the waterfall and swim into Carr Pond to hatch their young. The adults will head back out to sea in May and the next generation will follow when the weather cools down in September.
The buckie runs were once the stuff of legend in Rhode Island. The precolonial Narragansett Indians harvested them for fertilizer and up until the 1950’s hundreds of metric tons were caught annually for bait or for early season fish fries.
As late as the 1980’s and 1990’s kids and adults could collect buckets of buckies with a net. Even in the early years of this century, the tenants at the Shady Lea Mill, less than a mile and a half upstream of Gilbert Stuart had access to all the herring they could eat.
But then the population of river herring in Rhode Island pretty much dried up. The Gilbert Stuart run went from 290,000 in 2000 to just 17,000 in 2004 – a 95 percent reduction. So far this year I haven’t seen one herring at the Shady Lea Mill. The National Marine Fisheries Service listed them as a “species of concern” and imposed a moratorium on their catch.
“We still don’t have a good handle on the cause, and it is probably related to a number of things including water quality, lack of spawning habitat, climate change, predation, and by-catch,” said Rachel Calabro of Save The Bay. She’s written about the river herring here and here.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says the overall population began to drop off in the late 1960’s when “distant-water fleets began fishing for river herring off the Mid-Atlantic coast.” In Rhode Island, the decline quickened in the years after a Russian off-loader boat parked off Jamestown and bought mackerel and herring from local fishing boats.
Glen Goodwin, captains the trawler the Persistence out of Davisville and sells his catch to Sea Freeze, a Quonset-based seafood freezing company that sells seafood all over the world. He fishes for herring, but not the anadromous kind that spawn in rivers. He and other local fishermen catch sea herring, a different species of fish altogether.
“Sea herring has the largest quota on the coast that actually realizes its quota,” he told me.
The problem is the two kinds of herring congregate together, so fisherman have to be much more meticulous about which species they pull up in their nets. “River herring are taken as bycatch in other ocean fisheries in various gear types including gillnets, bottom otter trawls, and menhaden purse seines,” according to NOAA.
Goodwin says fishing boats have sensors that can identify a species before dragging the net, and the two kinds of herring don’t mix together as much during the day as they do at night. “It’s not 100 percent, but in the last ten years we’ve put a lot more effort into avoiding them,” he said.
“I realize that they try very hard to not catch river herring,” Calabro said. “There may be ways to avoid them better, like fishing farther out, because the river fish tend to stay in close waters, but it is a challenge.”
]]>Add it all together and it seems like conventional wisdom predicts a big day for progressives. Congressman David Cicilline will prevail over Anthony Gemma and in State House contests progressives are likely to pick up at least a few seats.
Another important aspect to today’s primary: “This will be the biggest test yet of voter ID,” Chris Barnett of the Secretary of State’s office told the Associated Press.
Big time congrats to Chris Young and Kara Russo … nothing better than when two people find their soul mates in each other. I have to guess this is the case with these two!
The Chicago teachers’ strike, as reviewed by the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post.
There is no industry more important to Rhode Island’s overall economy than commercial fishing, and it’s quickly going the way of the yellowtail flounder, which is to say extinct.
Pay attention to this trial … it just might get politically interesting.
On this day in 2001, we learned just how vulnerable Americans are in a world that is increasingly moving away from the traditional ground rules of geopolitics. It’s the unfortunate and inevitable result of the United States’ global dominance. But that doesn’t mean the 9-11 attacks were inevitable.
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