It was the best single run of longfin squid anyone on the East Coast had ever seen – and it happened fast and was over fast. In two months last summer, June and July, the East Coast-based squid fleet landed approximately 14 million pounds, with Rhode Island landing more than 50 percent of that quota, according to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration landing reports.
“I’ve never seen anything like it. The squid just kept coming,” said Point Judith fisherman Jeff Wise of Narragansett. “I’ve never seen volume and catch rates that high before.”
For those two summer months, the fishing port of Point Judith, or Galilee, was the squid capital of the world, the hub of squid commerce. Shore-side activity went nonstop as processors and others tried to keep pace with the volume of squid the fishing vessels carried in from the sea. Approximately 118 vessels, according to state landing reports, from as far south as Wanchese, N.C., used Rhode Island ports to offload their catch.
Although June and July are traditionally peak squid months, with average summer landings (May through August) fluctuating between 3 million and 19 million pounds, it was the high catch rates for those two months that was unprecedented last summer, which for the season saw 18.7 million pounds of landings.
“Though we’ve been seeing an upward trend in [longfin] squid since 2010, [last year was] one of the strongest we’ve seen since the 1990s,” said Jason Didden, squid-management-plan coordinator for the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council, the agency, along with the National Marine Fisheries Service, responsible for squid policy.
Local fishermen, many of whom depend heavily on squid, enjoyed the bounty but are warily focused on regulatory issues they fear could bring the good times to a premature end.
Landings the past 30 years have shown peaks and valleys, as levels of squid abundance have changed – but there has been no need for quota cuts.
The Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council often works with advisory panels to identify problems within fisheries and to come up with solutions to those problems. It’s a long road, complex and full of red tape, to go from an identified fishery problem to an actual change in the policy. These advisory panels are composed of industry members, recreational anglers, environmentalists and academics.
Three policy issues surfaced in recent months that could affect Rhode Island squid vessels and processors. One concerns managing the number of squid permits allowed, an issue perennially raised by the commercial fishing industry. The other two concern the possible loss of fishing ground – one by proposed wind farms off Long Island, and the other from lobbying pressure for a buffer zone in a key squid area south of Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard.
The buffer-zone issue was raised by a group of recreational fishermen from Nantucket.
“It’s hard to be optimistic right now,” said Wise. “It never seems to stop – we are constantly worried about losing fishing ground [due to] buffer zones, marine sanctuaries and wind farms.”
BOOM OR BUST
Squid are caught year-round by Rhode Island boats, and the fishery is managed in trimesters, a summer, a fall into early winter and winter into spring. The total East Coast quota of all three is 49.5 million pounds. The total quota has never been hit, though 2016 came close with landings at 82 percent of the total.
With squid, it’s hard to know how one season will be compared to the next. Some years the winter harvest is greater than the summer, or it’s the other way around. The animals winter offshore in deep water and then move inshore during the spring and summer to spawn on shallow sandy and gravel bottom.
A large percentage of the 2016 summer landings came 3-6 miles south of Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket Island. This is a traditional summer squid ground, along with the stretch of shoreline down the south side of Long Island. Point Judith is located between these two fishing grounds. That location is one of the reasons, along with shoreside infrastructure and markets, that each year Rhode Island captures between 50-60 percent of the total longfin-squid landings on the East Coast.
Other nearby ports, including New Bedford, focus their attention on codfish, flounder and scallops, not squid.
The possibility of big regulatory changes has the squid fleet on their toes.
“We used to have other options,” Wise said. “Now it’s pretty much all squid. … The only thing that saves us is the squid landings have been fairly strong year to year and so has the price.”
Why the East Coast squid catch has been trending upward remains something of a mystery. Changing climate, ocean acidification and a general movement of animals north are all debated by researchers and fishermen.
“Longfin squid have a life cycle of under eight months,” said NOAA fisheries research biologist Lisa Hendrickson. “They are born, they eat, swim, spawn and die. These animals are incredibly fast-growing and short-lived – which means each year can be a boom or a bust.”
Said Wise, “We all have our theories about this [past] year. No one knows. … I think a lot has to do with weather and water temperature – this [past] year was an El Niño year and that changed our weather.”
El Niño is a Pacific phenomenon that alters the flow of warm and cold currents in the Pacific Ocean that in turn changes the weather over a huge spread of the globe. Whether El Niño drove the huge runs off Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard is anybody’s guess, but it took place at the same time as the voluminous Rhode Island squid trade.
On years when El Niño does not occur, the squid landings in California and Argentina can be massive, flooding the world market. Last year, however, those landings were way down and that opened up the market for East Coast squid.
“We got paid full price,” said Glenn Goodwin, director of Seafreeze Ltd., a Rhode Island seafood processor based in both Narragansett and North Kingstown. The ex-vessel price (what the boat is paid at the dock) for longfin squid hovered between $1.10 and $1.50 per pound. This is about a 10-15 percent increase over 2015 and a 50 percent increase from the 1990s. Last June, on average, each boat returning from a four-day fishing trip had between 30,000 and 90,000 pounds of fresh product aboard.
All the talk about squid – the high price, the demand, an increasing trend in squid abundance the past four years – has gotten the commercial-fishing industry’s attention, and that has many Point Judith fishermen worried.
Point Judith is more reliant on squid now than at any other time in the port’s history, and the increase in revenue for 2016 was not celebrated for long. Fishermen live in a constant worry about losing their fishing grounds; they worry over changing policy and the uncertainty of finances from one year to the next. A vessel used to be able to jump from one fishery to the next, from cod to fluke to squid to herring. That no longer occurs. The consequence, for Point Judith, is overly high dependence on a single species, squid.
“We used to do other things,” Wise said. “In the spring we’d go to Georges Bank and chase codfish and flounder. In the winter we’d go after fluke. But the allocation we got from groundfish [cod, flounder, haddock] when it went into catch shares was too low for us to make a living on, so we basically sold off our allocation.”
Donald Fox, manager of Narragansett-based The Town Dock’s fleet of seven fishing boats, says that in 2016, between 65-75 percent of the boats’ revenue came from longfin squid.
“Squid drives the port,” Wise agreed. “And the past four years I’m seeing guys out there that I’ve never seen before. Guys from the groundfish and scallop industries are seeing an opportunity with squid. We can’t get into their fisheries because of entry cost and resource-allocation issues. But they can come into ours.”
One of the reasons is that squid permits once were easy and cheap to get. Many New Bedford and Cape May, N.J., groundfish and scallop vessels obtained them, even if they landed zero pounds of squid a year. And as the New Bedford groundfish fleet contracts, through policy and quota reductions, those vessels can enter the squid fishery. But the reverse rarely happens, because groundfish permits and scallop permits are locked up. Anyone who wants to enter those fisheries would need to spend considerable capital. A scallop permit can run $2 million or more, not including the vessel.
The more those once-unused squid permits get dusted off, the more competition exists for local fishermen already dependent on large hauls.
“Right now, everyone wants to be a squid boat,” said Hank Lackner, a Montauk, N.Y., fisherman who often unloads in Point Judith.
That’s why historic participants – those who have been targeting and landing longfin squid since the ’80s and ’90s, want protection. “Most of us want some form of capacity control” on the number of permits, said Fox. “If we don’t, and more and more [squid boats] come in, then each vessel will get less of the pie.”
The council “has to make a move on this and protect the historic participants,” Lackner said. “If you want into the squid industry, then you have to buy an existing permit, and a permit with good history [of landings] should be worth, I think, a lot more than a permit with none.”
LOSING GROUND
Another real concern the squid fleet has is losing fishing grounds. The ocean resource is different than land: Who owns what? Who decides? Conflicts abound when it concerns fishing bottom: Lobstermen get pitted against trawlers, sport fishermen against commercial fishermen, state management versus federal, wind farms and shipping. Sorting out the varied interests is a constant challenge for regulators.
And no one knows what restrictions or policy changes the expansion of wind energy will have on the fishing fleet, but fishermen are leery about it. Their concern is with the loss of ocean bottom and access to it. A huge section of the coast, from Nantucket down to Cape May, is slotted for possible wind leases, mostly being driven by DONG Energy, Statoil and Providence-based Deepwater Wind. Some of the leases, such as one crucial for the Rhode Island squid fleet off New York in a squid-fishing area called Cholera Bank, are being fought with lawsuits from the fishing industry.
“We don’t trust the process,” said Meghan Lapp, fisheries liaison for Seafreeze Ltd. “Decisions about fisheries are being made prior to our input. The main concern is losing fishing ground – and the squid industry can’t afford that. Rhode Island Democratic U.S. Sens. Jack F. Reed and Sheldon Whitehouse have voiced their concerns about this.”
Reed and Whitehouse, in two letters signed by each written to the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management in September 2016 and January 2017, expressed their concern about a proposed wind-farm site off Long Island and its impact on the Rhode Island squid fleet. They recommended re-siting the wind-farm location, but Statoil won the lease on this site in early December 2016.
The squid fishermen fear that Statoil’s ownership of that bottom will cause conflict unless a new lease area is found. Statoil has up to four years to develop their assessment and impact statements. After that, if cleared, the building of turbines can commence.
Also causing consternation among fishermen is a conflict over a productive piece of fishing ground, the 45-mile stretch between the west end of Martha’s Vineyard and the far eastern end of Nantucket.
Local sport fishermen are voicing their concerns over the concentrated effort of the squid trawlers. The charter fishermen, targeting striped bass and bluefish for paying clients, are complaining that the increase in squid trawlers is disrupting the ecosystem and therefore their catch.
“The [number of squid fishermen] is getting to be too much,” complained Pete Kaizer, a Nantucket charter fisherman. “Squid are a forage fish, striped bass and bluefish feed on them. If the squid get caught, the stripers and blues move elsewhere. We want the squid boats to be outside of 6 miles [from the coast]. These squid come here to spawn. You need to protect that. If you don’t, then you could lose the fishery. Getting the boats outside of 6 miles would protect the squid but also would still give the squid fleet a fishery.”
Each piece of fishing bottom is an asset, like an oil field. The winter squid fishery covers a huge area, from the Hague Line off Georges Bank to Cape Hatteras. But winter fishing is dangerous, with winter gales, and the travel and trip lengths can be large, as a boat covers hundreds of miles searching. The summer runs of longfin – either off the Vineyard and Nantucket or Long Island – are currently what the bulk of Rhode Island’s squid fleet counts on to make a big chunk of their revenue.
“I’d lose over one-third of my yearly income, maybe more,” said Wise, if he were denied access to the summer squid ground off Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard, as the sport fishermen proposed.
The pending amendment concerning management of squid permits is scheduled for a hearing before the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council on May 8 at the University of Rhode Island Bay Campus in Narragansett. A final rule on the squid amendment will come in December.
There are several possible alternatives, including one favored by many local fishermen that says that a fishing boat with a squid permit has to have landed at least 10,000 pounds of squid between the years 1997 and 2013. That also means that any vessel coming into the squid fishery after 2013 would not be permitted to land squid and would lose its squid permit.
Also on the table in the squid amendment is the possibility of stricter quota rules for the crucial summer fishery, trimester two, that would not allow the rollover of quota from the winter/spring trimester into the summer. If this policy went through, it would essentially close the summer fishery when it hit approximately 10 million pounds.
The buffer-zone issue was recently dropped from the amendment but could raise its head again.
“The council may consider the buffer zone as a separate action later this year or in 2018,” Didden said.
The wind-farm issue, which also involves an important squid-fishing ground, will be handled by the Department of the Interior and the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management.
Many in the local industry, along with state officials, are proud of Rhode Island’s long connection to squid – evidenced by the official state appetizer, calamari – and eager to protect it.
“Squid have a Rhode Island ex-vessel [dockside] value of $20.3 million, and that doesn’t include any additional economic activity [such as] processors, restaurants, truckers,” according to Mark Gibson, deputy director of R.I. Division of Fish and Wildlife. “We have to pay attention. However, squid are managed at the Mid-Atlantic council, where the policy is made, and Rhode Island does not have a seat on that council. … People are trying to remedy that. It’s a very important resource for us.”
Said Chris Lee, director of Sea Fresh USA, a North Kingstown processor and wholesaler, “We want people to see ‘Rhode Island’ squid on menus in out-of-state cities. We want them to see and taste the quality. Our business in the ’80s and ’90s was largely export, now it’s mostly domestic. The domestic market has grown for us.”
Even though Rhode Island squid processors such as Sea Fresh USA, Seafreeze Ltd. and The Town Dock do sell most of their Rhode Island squid out of state and overseas, a lot stays local too.
“We have Rhode Island squid on our menu year-round,” said Al Forno Restaurant executive chef David Reynoso. “It doesn’t matter if landings are high or low – I can get it and the quality is excellent; I can order it and pick it up every week. Our calamari pizza is very popular, along with the fried calamari with spiced tomato sauce.”
The fishermen who deliver the product are hoping they can continue to afford to do so.
“This has been one of the best years I’ve ever had,” Wise said of 2016. “But that can go away quickly. This [past] winter and spring – if the herring or the squid don’t show – I can lose what I’ve made.
“I don’t think any of us are banking on the 2017 squid run to be as strong as 2016,” he said. “We’ll see. It’s the kind of thing you figure out … when you’re actually out there, fishing.” •
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