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3 days ago | 
nationalfisherman.com | Paul Molyneaux
Working on the breakwater of the fishermen’s harbor in Pictou, Nova Scotia, Ben Anderson cuts the twine out of rim-racked gaspereaugillnet. “It got hooked up when I was setting it, and I didn’t stop it in time,” Anderson says. “Fortunately, I have another one at the house, so I’ll put that one on. We sometimes get a good run of gaspereau in late May.”Anderson’s boat, the Just Splashy, a 44-foot, 11-inch fiberglass vessel, rigged for gillnetting, is tied to a float just inside the breakwater.
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3 days ago | 
nationalfisherman.com | Paul Molyneaux
My first time at Portland Yacht Service (PYS) and Portland Shipyard surprised me. Up on the hard was the late Barry Matthews’s 110-ton seiner the Ocean Venture. It seemed like a lot of boatto get up on blocks in a yard, but in fact far below the capacity of the PSY’s 330-ton travellift. Looking around more, I saw the yard was full of everything from 100-foot schooners to 40-foot tuna boats and a couple of acres of small pleasure boats.
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5 days ago | 
nationalfisherman.com | Paul Molyneaux
Amid looming trade wars and uncertainty about the price of wood, Supercede, a Phoenix, Arizona company, is offering boatbuilders an alternative to traditional marine plywood. “Our Marine Board comes in ½-inch, 5/8ths, and ¾-inch thickness,” says Supercede owner Sean Petterson.
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1 week ago | 
nationalfisherman.com | Paul Molyneaux
The idea of offshore aquaculture has been floatedsince the passage of the National Aquaculture Act of 1980.
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1 week ago | 
nationalfisherman.com | Paul Molyneaux
A few Cook Inlet setnetters thought that a type of beach seining would allow them to harvest abundant sockeye stocks without killing Chinooks. But at its March 2025 meeting, the Alaska Fisheries Board (ABF) refused to let them utilize the gear without more testing. "They’re moving the goal posts on us,” said Lisa Gabriel, who, along with her husband Brian, has been developing and testing the gear.
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2 weeks ago | 
nationalfisherman.com | Paul Molyneaux
The U.S. fishery for elvers, glass eels returning from the sea to ascend the rivers of the East Coast, has been going on since the 1970s but really took off in the late 1990s, with Maine leading the way. Up until 2023, almost all the elver harvest went to buyers in Asia, who grew the elvers to market size and then shipped them back to the U.S. and other markets.
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3 weeks ago | 
nationalfisherman.com | Paul Molyneaux
It’s mid-April, and Quinn Phillips steers the Channa Sea north, loaded with black cod pots. “We use coffin pots,” he says. “They’re six feet long by three feet by two feet high.”Phillips will fish 300 pots on 50-pot long lines. It’s far less than the Channa Sea can hold. “We can only fish 300,” he says. “Five hundred when we fish Dungeness, and we can fit them all aboard and still have room.”That was not always the case. “The boats started as the Ingot,” says Phillips.
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3 weeks ago | 
nationalfisherman.com | Paul Molyneaux
The search for critical minerals could put deep-sea mining and commercial fishing on a collision course. In 2023,astudy published in Nature Magazine predicted a collision between Pacific tuna fleets and deep-sea mining interests as both converged on the Clarion Clipperton Zone (CCZ), a 1.7 million square mile region between Hawaii and Mexico.
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4 weeks ago | 
nationalfisherman.com | Paul Molyneaux
Boats and fishermen have qualities that capture the interest of artists. While providing subject matter for masterpieces like Winslow Homer’s painting of a dory fisherman, Fog Warning, used as a cover photo for the Commercial Fishermen Only page on Facebook, the painters and photographers who focus on fisheries also tell stories that seafood consumers need to understand. They speak to the value of fishermen and working waterfronts.
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1 month ago | 
nationalfisherman.com | Paul Molyneaux
For the past several decades, the state of Maine has been removing dams and building fishways intended to restore alewife runs, and it has paid off. "In October 2024, the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Council (ASFMC)approved five new commercial river herring [alewife] harvest sites in Maine. Quite a rarity in today’s fishery management landscape,” says Bailey Bowden, executive director of the Alewife Harvesters of Maine.
