Slack lines
-
Posts
1846 -
Joined
-
Last visited
Content Type
Profiles
Forums
Blogs
Gallery
Posts posted by Slack lines
-
-
:bigemo_harabe_net-163: 
-
-
The federal government is moving to open up large swaths of coastal waters to fish farming for the first time in an effort to decrease Americans’ dependence on imports and satisfy their growing appetite for seafood.
While federal officials and fish farmers say the new push will create jobs and help allay concerns about importing seafood from countries with weak environmental regulations, conservationists worry that expanding fish farms far offshore will threaten the oceans’ health.
More than four-fifths of the fish, clams, oysters and other seafood Americans ate in 2009 was imported, according to the latest figures from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Those imports have soared in the past decade as U.S. production lagged while other nations ramped up their sea-farming. American seafood consumption, meanwhile, grew from just over 4 billion pounds in 1999 to nearly 5 billion pounds in 2009.
To encourage domestic production, NOAA and the Commerce Department issued new policies last month intended to open up federal waters to fish and shellfish farms. Those waters start three miles offshore in most states and extend out to 200 miles. Most U.S. marine fish and shellfish farms are now in state waters close to shore, and none exist in federal waters.
Michael Rubino, who heads NOAA’s aquaculture program, said expanding the area where fish farming is allowed will boost production, create new jobs and help ease concerns that some imported seafood may be tainted with industrial wastes.
Aquaculture now accounts for half of the world’s seafood production. But in 2009, less than 2 percent of the seafood that ended up grilled, baked or fried on American tables was grown along U.S. coasts or in inland saltwater ponds.
“We’d like the U.S. to take responsibility for our consumption decisions, rather than just importing all this food,” Rubino said.
He said the new policies should help cut the nation’s seafood trade deficit, which reached $10.7 billion last year, and come as the Food and Drug Administration is urging people to eat more heart-healthy seafood.
The new policies establish a framework for allowing marine aquaculture to expand into federal waters. But before that can happen, the nation’s eight regional fish management councils must create aquaculture plans for their regions, NOAA spokeswoman Connie Barclay said. Then federal regulators will craft more specific rules for the farms, with protections for wild species and coastal and ocean ecosystems, she said.
The Gulf Coast has already started work on its management plan, and proposals are in the works to adapt unused oil and natural gas platforms in the Gulf for fish-farming.
Bob Rheault, executive director of the East Coast Shellfish Growers Association, supports the expansion, saying it can take years to get some state permits to start a shellfish farm. His group represents about 1,000 shellfish growers from Maine to Florida who sell about $100 million in clams, oysters and mussels a year.
-
BRITAIN backed radical reform of the EU’s “fundamentally broken” Common Fisheries Policy yesterday.
EU Fisheries Commissioner Maria Damanaki is expected this week to announce international trading of fishing rights and a phased end to “discards” – throwing back fish dead because the trawlers have exceeded their quota. In the North Sea, up to 75 per cent of fish are discarded with disastrous consequences. The reform will come after UK waters have been so overfished they supply the nation for little more than six months a year, forcing Britain to import the rest of its requirement. Fisheries minister Richard Benyon called yesterday for an end to discards and for greater regional control of fisheries instead of “micromanagement” from Brussels.
Ms Damanaki faces opposition from within the industry and from politicians who like using annual fish quotas for hard bargaining. The head of the Scottish Fishermen’s Federation, Bertie Armstrong, said: “This reform ought to be seismic stuff. We are hoping for realistic regionalisation. “The problem has always been the EU’s one-size-fits-all approach controlled from Brussels. We are hoping for proper decentralisation.
-
Britain's coastal waters are so overfished that they can supply the nation's chip shops, restaurants and kitchens for little more than six months of every year, research has shown.
Overfishing has caused so much damage to fish stocks across Europe that the quantity landed each year to satisfy the public appetite has fallen by 2 per cent on average every year since 1993.
So great is demand that next Saturday, 16 July, has been dubbed Fish Dependence Day – the day on which imports would have to be relied upon because native supplies would have run out if only home-caught fish had been eaten since 1 January. Last year it fell on 3 August, almost three weeks later, and in 1995 it was six weeks later.
Other European countries consume fish at an even greater rate and the EU as a whole reached its Fish Dependence Day on 2 July, compared with 9 July last year, with fishermen estimated to have landed 200,000 tonnes less than a year earlier. Spain became dependent on non-EU imports on 8 May, Germany on 27 April, Italy on 30 April and France on 13 June.
The demands made on UK and European fisheries are making them less productive, and unless they are better managed the supply of fish will dwindle and thousands of jobs will be lost, the report shows. Aniol Esteban, of the think tank NEF and the author of the report, said: "Eating more fish than our oceans can produce is playing dangerous games with the future of fisheries and fishing communities. Unless we change course, the jobs and livelihoods of many people in Europe and beyond are at risk.
"Our current appetite is putting our oceans under pressure. It's hard to understand why a country surrounded by potentially rich seas needs to import one out of every two fish that it eats."
As Maria Damanaki, the European Fisheries Commissioner, puts the final touches to proposals to reform the Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) which she will announce on Wednesday, Mr Esteban urged that the long-term health of fish stocks be given priority over short-term gains by fishermen.
"We need urgent action to ensure that jobs, revenues, food and the environment are protected from overfishing," he said. "Policymakers need to look beyond the short-term costs that could result from reform and give priority to the long-term benefits that healthy marine resources will provide for the environment, the economy and society. In a context of finite resources and growing populations, the current EU model is unsustainable."
The report, Fish Dependence, highlights growing concerns that Europe can only feed its craving by exploiting the waters of poorer developing nations – which can leave their fisheries depleted and the human population unable to access a valuable source of nutrition.
-
-
-
How deep is the ocean's capacity to buffer against climate change?
As one of the planet's largest single carbon absorbers, the ocean takes up roughly one-third of all human carbon emissions, reducing atmospheric carbon dioxide and its associated global changes.
But whether the ocean can continue mopping up human-produced carbon at the same rate is still up in the air. Previous studies on the topic have yielded conflicting results, says University of Wisconsin-Madison assistant professor Galen McKinley.
In a new analysis published online July 10 in Nature Geoscience, McKinley and her colleagues identify a likely source of many of those inconsistencies and provide some of the first observational evidence that climate change is negatively impacting the ocean carbon sink.
"The ocean is taking up less carbon because of the warming caused by the carbon in the atmosphere," says McKinley, an assistant professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences and a member of the Center for Climatic Research in the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies.
The analysis differs from previous studies in its scope across both time and space. One of the biggest challenges in asking how climate is affecting the ocean is simply a lack of data, McKinley says, with available information clustered along shipping lanes and other areas where scientists can take advantage of existing boat traffic. With a dearth of other sampling sites, many studies have simply extrapolated trends from limited areas to broader swaths of the ocean.
McKinley and colleagues at UW-Madison, the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University, and the Universite Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris expanded their analysis by combining existing data from a range of years (1981-2009), methodologies, and locations spanning most of the North Atlantic into a single time series for each of three large regions called gyres, defined by distinct physical and biological characteristics.
They found a high degree of natural variability that often masked longer-term patterns of change and could explain why previous conclusions have disagreed. They discovered that apparent trends in ocean carbon uptake are highly dependent on exactly when and where you look – on the 10- to 15-year time scale, even overlapping time intervals sometimes suggested opposite effects.
"Because the ocean is so variable, we need at least 25 years' worth of data to really see the effect of carbon accumulation in the atmosphere," she says. "This is a big issue in many branches of climate science – what is natural variability, and what is climate change?"
Working with nearly three decades of data, the researchers were able to cut through the variability and identify underlying trends in the surface CO2 throughout the North Atlantic.
During the past three decades, increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide have largely been matched by corresponding increases in dissolved carbon dioxide in the seawater. The gases equilibrate across the air-water interface, influenced by how much carbon is in the atmosphere and the ocean and how much carbon dioxide the water is able to hold as determined by its water chemistry.
But the researchers found that rising temperatures are slowing the carbon absorption across a large portion of the subtropical North Atlantic. Warmer water cannot hold as much carbon dioxide, so the ocean's carbon capacity is decreasing as it warms.
In watching for effects of increasing atmospheric carbon on the ocean's uptake, many people have looked for indications that the carbon content of the ocean is rising faster than that of the atmosphere, McKinley says. However, their new results show that the ocean sink could be weakening even without that visible sign.
"More likely what we're going to see is that the ocean will keep its equilibration but it doesn't have to take up as much carbon to do it because it's getting warmer at the same time," she says. "We are already seeing this in the North Atlantic subtropical gyre, and this is some of the first evidence for climate damping the ocean's ability to take up carbon from the atmosphere."
She stresses the need to improve available datasets and expand this type of analysis to other oceans, which are relatively less-studied than the North Atlantic, to continue to refine carbon uptake trends in different ocean regions. This information will be critical for decision-making, since any decrease in ocean uptake may require greater human efforts to control carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere.
-
For over 75 years, Blau Oyster Co. has relied on Washington state's cool clean waters to grow the plump oysters that are as prized in the Northwest as salmon and orcas. But too much pollution from animal and human waste has been washing into Samish Bay in north Puget Sound, prohibiting shellfish harvests 38 days already this year.
"If the water quality isn't good, we can't be open," said Scott Blau, whose family has been farming in these tidelands 80 miles north of Seattle since 1935. Most of the harvest from the small business is shucked and ends up in stews or can be ordered pan-fried or raw at local restaurants; some oysters are sold in the shell as far away as Hong Kong and Singapore.
Washington state is the nation's leading producer of farmed oysters, clams and other bivalves with about $100 million in annual sales. The recent downgrade of 4,000 acres of shellfish beds in Samish Bay because of fecal contamination means more days when shellfish beds can't be harvested, hurting the local economy and jeopardizing the much larger, decades-long effort to clean up pollution in Puget Sound, the nation's second largest estuary. It also was set back in the state's goal to increase 10,800 acres of harvestable shellfish beds by 2020.
Gov. Chris Gregoire earlier this year said the state has failed in Samish Bay, and directed agencies to fix the problem by next September. "We're not going to flush, literally flush 4,000 acres down the drain of prime shellfish growing area in the state," she told managers at an April meeting.
In response, state and local officials last month released a plan for more inspections and enforcement on all fronts, including septic tanks, livestock operations, small hobby farms, dairies and others, as well as more education and help for landowners. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency this summer plans over flights to determine likely pollution sources, such as muddy fields where rain is more likely to wash mud manure into waters.
The problems of Samish Bay highlight the greater challenges facing Puget Sound, Chesapeake Bay and other distressed watersheds, where cleanup is complicated by pollution from many varied and diffused sources, called nonpoint pollution, including farmland or stormwater runoff, agricultural activities, urban development, failing septic tanks, toxics and even pet waste.
"If we can't fix it in Samish, we're in trouble," said Bill Dewey, who owns a clam farm in the bay and is a spokesman for Taylor Shellfish, which also has a farm there. "This is as classic as it gets for nonpoint pollution. (The governor) has put a stake in the ground here and said this is going to be an example."
Officials say the fecal contamination comes from many sources, including farm livestock waste, wildlife, pets and humans. The bacteria level is especially high when heavy rains cause additional runoff into the Samish River, which flows into the bay. Shellfish can accumulate bacteria or other harmful pathogens; eating contaminated shellfish can make people sick.
Last year, Samish Bay shellfish areas were closed 14 times for a total of 63 days. This year's six closures, mostly after rain events, have pinched Blau Oyster Co., which has 10 full-time employees.
"It's hard to keep a crew busy. It interferes with the cash flow when we're not producing," 70-year-old Paul Blau said one morning at the family's bayside oyster shucking facility, tucked in a residential neighborhood on a picturesque sliver of land that juts into Puget Sound like a crooked finger. The air smells of saltwater, seaweed and mud. The tides are receding, revealing some of the family's 200 acres of tidelands. Inside the facility, several workers wearing rubber gloves and bibs coax oyster meat from the hard shells of Pacific oysters that were harvested earlier that morning. Along one side of the plant, several barrels of live oysters are packed with ice, waiting to be shipped to British Columbia.
Steven Blau, 42, said dairy farms get a bad rap but there's enough blame to go around. "It's a combination of everything," he said, noting septic tanks and human impact. "It's not just one thing."
There's an effort underway to trace sources of the fecal contamination. But one focus of inspections will be landowners with animals, from commercial livestock operations to small hobby farms with a variety of animals such as pigs, goats or alpacas.
"Animals generate manure. If that's properly managed, everything is fine," said Tom Eaton, the EPA's Washington operations director. "If they're allowed access to streams and creeks or the ground is not grassland but a muddy field, it's a lot more likely that it will get washed into the stream."
Eaton said EPA inspectors will look for animals with direct access to streams or properties that don't have sufficient buffers near streams.
Some think authorities have been too lax. "The greater problem is lack of adequate enforcement and regulation," said Larry Wasserman, environmental policy manager for the Swinomish Indian Tribal Community. "Voluntary approaches aren't going to solve these problems."
Carolyn Kelly, manager of the Skagit Conservation District, supports a voluntary approach and incentives. "You can't really send the militia in to clean up Puget Sound," she said. The district helps landowners install pump systems to water livestock away from creeks, composting systems, fences and buffer plantings, among other measures.
"The landowners are really coming together to and working really hard to address the situation," she said. Like elsewhere in Puget Sound, more development and population growth are also straining natural resources, she added.
Dan Berenston, natural resources manager for Skagit County Public Works, said the county and a coalition of agencies and groups have been inspecting septic tanks, monitoring water quality, and educating the public, as well as installing pet waste containers and portable toilets for birders, hunters, fisherman and other recreational users. The county got a $960,000 grant from the EPA last year to find and fix sources of fecal contamination.
"I would not call it a failure," he said. "We are making progress. We just aren't making progress as quickly as we like."
-
Buried deep beneath the sediment of the North Atlantic Ocean lies an ancient, lost landscape with furrows cut by rivers and peaks that once belonged to mountains. Geologists recently discovered this roughly 56-million-year-old landscape using data gathered for oil companies.
"It looks for all the world like a map of a bit of a country onshore," said Nicky White, the senior researcher. "It is like an ancient fossil landscape preserved 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) beneath the seabed."
So far, the data have revealed a landscape about 3,861 square miles (10,000 square km) west of the Orkney-Shetland Islands that stretched above sea level by almost as much as 0.6 miles (1 km). White and colleagues suspect it is part of a larger region that merged with what is now Scotland and may have extended toward Norway in a hot, prehuman world.
History beneath the seafloor
The discovery emerged from data collected by a seismic contracting company using an advanced echo-sounding technique. High pressured air is released from metal cylinders, producing sound waves that travel to the ocean floor and beneath it, through layers of sediment. Every time these sound waves encounter a change in the material through which they are traveling, say, from mudstone to sandstone, an echo bounces back. Microphones trailing behind the ship on cables record these echoes, and the information they contain can be used to construct three-dimensional images of the sedimentary rock below, explained White, a geologist at the University of Cambridge in Britain.
The team, led by Ross Hartley, a graduate student at the University of Cambridge, found a wrinkly layer 1.2 miles (2 km) beneath the seafloor — evidence of the buried landscape, reminiscent of the mythical lost Atlantis.
The researchers traced eight major rivers, and core samples, taken from the rock beneath the ocean floor, revealed pollen and coal, evidence of land-dwelling life. But above and below these deposits, they found evidence of a marine environment, including tiny fossils, indicating the land rose above the sea and then subsided — "like a terrestrial sandwich with marine bread," White said.
The burning scientific question, according to White, is what made this landscape rise up, then subside within 2.5 million years? "From a geological perspective, that is a very short period of time," he said.
The giant hot ripple
He and colleagues have a theory pointing to an upwelling of material through the Earth's mantle beneath the North Atlantic Ocean called the Icelandic Plume. (The plume is centered under Iceland.)
The plume works like a pipe carrying hot magma from deep within the Earth to right below the surface, where it spreads out like a giant mushroom, according to White. Sometimes the material is unusually hot, and it spreads out in a giant hot ripple.
The researchers believe that such a giant hot ripple pushed the lost landscape above the North Atlantic, then as the ripple passed, the land fell back beneath the ocean.
This theory is supported by other new research showing that the chemical composition of rocks in the V-shaped ridges on the ocean floor around Iceland contains a record of hot magma surges like this one. Although this study, led by Heather Poore, also one of White's students, looked back only about 30 million years, White said he is hopeful ongoing research will pinpoint an older ridge that recorded this particular hot ripple.
Because similar processes have occurred elsewhere on the planet, there are likely many other lost landscapes like this one. Since this study was completed, the researchers have found two more recent, but less spectacular, submerged landscapes above the first one, White said.
-
TOKYO: Small tsunami waves reached the Pacific coast of northern Japan on Sunday after a major quake hit the region heavily damaged by the March earthquake and tsunami, the Japan Meteorological Agency said.
The port towns of Soma and Ofunato saw 10-centimeter tsunami waves triggered by the 7.3-magnitude earthquake that struck off the main island of Honshu at 9:57 a.m. (8:57 a.m. in Manila), the agency said.
No damage was reported from the tsunami and quake, which was strong enough to sway skyscrapers in Tokyo, located some 400 kilo-meters from the epicenter.
The Japanese agency and the United States Geological Survey originally estimated the quake’s magnitude at 7.1, hitting the same general area as the 9.0-magnitude quake of March 11 which triggered a massive tsunami.
While Japan upgraded the quake to 7.3, the US agency lowered it to 7.0, centered 212km east of Sendai City in Miyagi prefecture, at a depth of 34.9km.
The Japanese agency lifted the tsunami advisory at 11:45 a.m.
“Changes in sea level may occur [in] the next few hours. Please use caution when conducting activities near the ocean, such as swimming and surf fishing,” a Japanese weather agency official said during a news briefing.
Television footage of Ofunato and Soma did not show any visible sign of the tsunami, with the water surface seemingly calm and flat.
Tokyo Electric Power Co. (Tepco) said that the latest quake did not cause fresh problems at the crippled Fukushima Daiichi (No. 1) nuclear plant; and the nearby Fukushima Daini (No. 2) plant.
“We have received reports that there has been no significant impact at the Fukushima Daiichi and the Fukushima Daini nuclear plants,” a Tepco spokesman said during a news conference.
Cooling of crippled reactors at Fukushima Daiichi continued, although the company told work crews near the water to seek higher ground during the tsunami advisory.
The Japanese weather agency originally expected a small tsunami of up to 50 centimeters along the affected region.
Communities along the Pacific coast issued warnings and advisories for local residents to seek higher ground or to leave areas near the water.
The devastating March 11 and tsunami left about 22,000 people dead or missing and triggered an atomic crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant
-
A sperm whale has been reported off the south Devon coast in almost exactly the same place one was spotted in 2010.
The mammal was spotted by the skipper and passengers of a pleasure boat near Brixham on Saturday.
The Sea Watch Foundation said the 9m (29.5ft) long mammal could be the same whale that was spotted in the area in June and July 2010.
It said having a sperm whale sighting in the same place two years running was "interesting".
The pleasure boat had just passed Sharkham Point when the skipper, Ashley Lane, saw the whale between 100yd and 150yd (about 100m to 150m) away.
Mr Lane, who also saw the whale in 2010, said: "This was a chance in a lifetime sighting for our passengers, a rare and beautiful sight.
"They were astounded. The animal was about 9m to 10m long, and was moving ahead of us so we held back and gave way to it."
Sea Watch Research Director, Dr Peter Evans, said: "Sightings of sperm whales in coastal waters around UK are rare.
"The species normally occurs far offshore in waters of 1,000 to 3,000m (0.6 to 1.9 miles) depth.
"To have a sighting in almost the same location at about the same time two years running is very interesting.
"We've not seen any photos as yet but the chances are it could be the same individual."
-
A new approach to containing invasive aquatic species is gaining favor: Eating them.
From the lionfish ravaging reefs off Florida to the Asian carp advancing toward the Great Lakes, exotic creatures are devouring and outcompeting native ones, disrupting ecosystems.
"Humans are the most ubiquitous predators on earth," Philip Kramer, director of the Caribbean program for the Nature Conservancy, told The New York Times. "Instead of eating something like shark fin soup, why not eat a species that is causing harm, and with your meal make a positive contribution?"
"We think there could be a real market," said Wenonah Hauter of Food and Water Watch, whose Smart Seafood Guide, for the first time this year, recommends invasive species as a "safer, more sustainable" alternative.
But few restaurant menus feature lionfish, Asian carp or European green crab.
"What these species need now is a better, sexier profile, and more cooks who know how to use them," Hauter said.
Food and Water Watch has joined with the James Beard Foundation and Kerry Heffernan, chef at the South Gate restaurant in New York City, to devise recipes for Asian carp ceviche and braised lionfish filet in brown butter sauce.
-
I wondered when you would spot that Barry
Ian
-
Inshore fishermen in Devon and Cornwall are warning that plans to introduce quotas could force them out of business.
Owners of boats under 10m (33ft) said they were worried the new system would be too restrictive.
The quotas will be based on records of what each boat has caught annually between 2007 and 2010.
Richard Benyon, fisheries minister, said fishermen should be able to catch more fish under the reforms.
Ted Chapel, an inshore fisherman, told the BBC Politics Show: "One day we might fish for three or four different species in a matter of three hours.
"Some of them don't come under the quota system at the moment and some do.
"What we're terribly concerned about is that for the [2007 to 2010] reference period being taken some of us won't have enough of the species which come under the quota to actually make a sustainable living when these quotas come in."
'Highly sustainable'
Mr Benyon said inshore fishermen had been encouraged to diversify away from catching fish whose stocks were under pressure.
He said: "We want to make sure they are not penalised for this system.
"We have a very difficult calculation to make but if we get this right we believe that the under 10m fleet will be able to access more quota, more fishing opportunities."
Terry George, from the Lands End Inshore Fishermen's Association, said: "We believe that the way fishing is carried out... is highly sustainable.
"We see absolutely no reason for quotas to impinge on small boat fishing like this.
"What's in question is a way of life for a community and all that means to people here and in similar places around the country."
Inshore fishermen use a hand-line method and small boats to catch fish within a short distance of the shore.
St Ives MP Andrew George is hoping to take a delegation of concerned fishermen from his constituency to see the fisheries minister.
The Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) is currently evaluating the responses to a recent consultation on the changes, with a view to introducing them in 2012.
-
SHOALS of mackerel off the Lincolnshire Coast have attracted the tope to come in and feed.
Several boats were out last weekend and some of them had success with tope up to 60lb being caught.
There seems to be lots of joey mackerel about at the moment – these are perfect for using as bait for the tope.
I also enjoy fishing for the mackerel on the lighter tackle as they give fantastic sport.
Tom Marshall and Mark Taylor had several runs but never landed one tope.
They had runs that took several hundred yards of line but the tope dropped the bait.
Several years ago there was a debate in the angling press about whether you strike on the first run and it was split.
I have tried both and it seems to work with the first run on the smaller fish.
The circle hooks have made a lot of difference to the percentage of hook-ups you achieve.
The lads came into the river and at the moment it is smooth hound city – you can't use two rods as one will disappear over the side.
The bait does not even get to the bottom of the sea bed and the hounds will grab the bait and off they go.
If you get the chance, and want some real fun, take a spinning rod and fish in the shallower water; they go absolutely mad.
I have previously mentioned about the Angling Trust and the Yorkshire division of the sea anglers having trouble and that the committee had resigned. Well, the Angling Trust has asked for its AGM to be put on hold so the meeting in July has been cancelled. It will now be held in either September or October .
The Yorkshire region has, from last week, been declared inactive – this has been requested by the Angling Trust.
This is a shame as over the years the Yorkshire division has done a lot for sea anglers and also looked after the interest of all sea anglers in the area.
Here is the report from Chas Tibble for the Skegness area:- After a recent spate of good catches, anglers found it hard going in the latest Skegness Pier Angling Club (SPAC) match held at Wolla Bank, Chapel.
Wrangle's Paul Cridland decided not to fish with peeler crab at distance for smoothounds, but instead targeted smaller fish close in with lugworm and ran out the easy winner with four flounders and a small bass for 3lb 2½oz.
His bass weighed in at 11oz to also take the heaviest round fish prize.
Chapel Beach Angling Club member Paul Kennedy used his local knowledge to come in second with three flounders and a weever weighing 2lb 3½oz.
His best flounder tipped the scales at 1lb 2oz and won the heaviest flatfish award.
Boston's Mo Fendyke continued with his recent run of good form to take third place with two flounders for 1lb 2oz.
-
Mark Rowan of Broken Bow carries his prize-winning catfish back to his truck after weighing in at the 12th annual Okie Noodling Tournament in Pauls Valley on Saturday. Rowan took first place overall in the natural category with the biggest fish, weighing in at 60.06 pounds
Pauls Valley is a long haul from the north end of Grand Lake, especially when it's 100 degrees and you're carrying more than 100 pounds of live catfish in the back of your truck.But the final highway sprint to the weigh-in stage at Oklahoma's annual Okie Noodling Tournament is just one more challenge among a host of obstacles for the growing number of fishermen statewide who use their bodies as bait.
Saturday's 12th annual tournament saw a record entry of 181 teams of noodlers from across the state and even some from Minnesota, New York and Japan. The sign-ups, however, represent an untold number of participants. Only one person from each team has to register and sometimes there are five or eight or even more people on a team.
Newer noodlers enter the tournament sometimes as thrill-seekers, but many enter to see how their skills stack up in this long-held Oklahoma tradition. Spectators come by the thousands - organizers say more than 6,000 - for the day's festivities with vendors, food, bands and lots and lots of big fish tales.
Although he was unseated in the final hour, Tom Lane of Jay had the big fish tale for much of the day Saturday with a 59-pound flathead catfish pulled from the north end of Grand Lake.
He comes from a long line of noodlers.
"Me and my dad and grandpa and his father, my great-granddad, they all noodled. You grow up hearing the stories and you've got to try it," he said. "I've been doing it more than 25 years."
As big as it's grown, the tournament still only scratches the surface of Oklahoma noodling, Lane said. "A lot of them (noodlers) are just more reserved about it," he said.
Lane has entered twice and he's not sure he'll continue.
"My dad never did like the idea of (the tournament)," he said. "I had to do it at least once. I'll always noodle but I might not always do the tournament."
His team, with cousins Juke and Terry Morrow and Rusty Williams, all played a part in catching their 59-pounder. Their first challenge was making sure the blue-green algae threat on Grand was not a problem where they planned to go.
Noodlers feel around rocks, ledges and in holes in muddy banks to find the nesting holes catfish use to lay their eggs. The fish are protective so invading fingers, hands, elbows or even heads or feet can be quickly and viciously attacked.
The noodler uses this opportunity to grab the fish by the jaw, wrestle it under control - if possible - put it on a stringer and get it to the boat. Usually more fish are lost than caught.
At the weigh-in, Lane's right elbow looked like he'd suffered a bicycle accident in a briar patch.
"That's a bite there, and that's a bite, that's a scrape," he said pointing at marks on his arm like someone describing elements of a work of art. "I told these guys to get their feet down and don't kick me, but block the hole and don't let him out," Lane said of the big fish catch.
While the team stood firm, Lane dove down to the hole, about 9 or 10 feet under water, like a defensive tackle.
"My elbow's going to be feeling it for awhile," he said. "He came from the back of the hole and slammed it, I guess, into the rocks on the ledge there, but I had to hold on because I knew I could never look these guys in the eye if I let him get by me."
The fish have incredible speed and power, and it takes time to learn techniques for blocking and catching them and working with team members. Lane, who noodles "natural" when he can but makes no apologies for using SCUBA gear when fish are deep and big, said he's had big flatheads break SCUBA masks with their impact.
Getting hold of the fish is only part of the battle.
"I have brought them out of the water when I was younger and dumber and stouter, but when you get them to the surface that torque is ungodly. Now I try to hold them under the water and let them calm down, maybe 20 seconds, and then try to string them up while they're still in the hole."
And even though Lane wore gloves this year, he had distinct bite marks and skin ripped through and showing exposed layers on one wrist. "Yeah, he got up over my glove on that one," he said.
He also had scabbed scrapes on his shin from a few days ago. "I can't lie, on that one I came up to the surface and screamed," he said. "That one hurt."
-
-
-
The Government is calling for serious reform of the "fundamentally broken" rules which govern fishing in the EU, ahead of new European Commission proposals on the policy.
The commission is publishing its plans for reforming the Common Fisheries Policy this week, with protracted negotiations over the proposals expected in the next two years.
Fisheries Minister Richard Benyon has said he wanted to see different parts of the EU given more control over fisheries to reflect regional differences across Europe and an end to "micro-managing" by Brussels.
-
PARIS - MILLIONS of tonnes of plastic debris dumped each year in the world's oceans could pose a lethal threat to whales, according to a scientific assessment to be presented at a key international whaling forum this week.
A review of research literature from the last two decades reveals hundreds of cases in which cetaceans - an order including 80-odd species of whales, dolphins and porpoises - have been sickened or killed by marine litter.
Entanglement in plastic bags and fishing gear have long been identified as a threat to sea birds, turtles and smaller cetaceans. For large ocean-dwelling mammals, however, ingestion of such refuse is also emerging as a serious cause of disability and death, experts say. Grisly examples abound.
In 2008, two sperm whales stranded on the California coast were found to have a huge amount - 205kg in one alone - of fish nets and other synthetic debris in their guts. One of the 15m animals had a ruptured stomach, and the other, half-starved, had a large plug of wadded plastic blocking its digestive tract.
Seven male sperm whales stranded on the Adriatic coast of southern Italy in 2009 were stuffed with half-digested squids beaks, fishing hooks, ropes and plastic objects. In 2002, a dead minke whale washed up on the Normandy coast of France had nearly a tonne of plastic in its stomach, including bags from two British supermarkets.
'Cuvier's beaked whales in the north-east Atlantic seem to have particularly high incidences of ingestion and death from plastic bags,' notes Mark Simmonds, author of the report and a member of scientific committee of the International Whaling Commission (IWC), which meets this week from July 11-14 on the British island of Jersey.
-
Wild-caught Pacific salmon is more myth than reality on some Puget Sound restaurant menus, a study at the University of Washington Tacoma has found.
About 38 percent of samples from Tacoma-area restaurants showed a menu was promoting farm-raised Atlantic salmon as wild-caught Pacific salmon, or calling a coho a king. Grocery stores and fish markets got better scores, with only about 7 percent of store samples mislabeled.
"I'm shocked at the number of substitutions that we encountered," said Erica Cline, an assistant professor in the university's environmental program who was one of two biology instructors leading the study.
Cline wanted to give her students some hands-on experience using DNA to distinguish species and thought this project would make the learning more fun. She decided to look at salmon after another study conducted in New York City found many restaurants were serving farm-raised Atlantic salmon and saying it was the wild Pacific fish.
She was hoping that the results would be better so close to the waters where the wild salmon are caught but Cline said she was disappointed.
The students discovered that the most often mislabeled fish were served at inexpensive sushi and teriyaki restaurants. Most of their samples came from establishments near the university and for the most part did not include the fancy, cloth napkin places.
But despite the lack of diversity in the sampling and that salmon from fewer than 50 restaurants and stores were tested, Cline said the results were still significant and point to the need for further study.
A peer-reviewed journal for biology teachers will publish an article by Cline and her fellow researcher Jennifer Gogarten in an upcoming issue. They are waiting to hear from another journal that focuses on food research.
She's hoping other biology teachers at colleges and high schools will duplicate the study in their communities and then they can work together to create a national database on salmon mislabeling. Cline noted that the DNA testing revealed which species the fish was, not where it was caught. Since Atlantic salmon is farm-raised, the results are the same: Pacific salmon is wild and Atlantic is not.
It's difficult to tell wild Alaska salmon from farm-raised Atlantic salmon when it's cut up and cooked, so most restaurant-goers would never know if they were being fooled, Cline said, but she hopes her study and others like it could lead to stronger enforcement of federal laws that prohibit false labeling of fish and other animals.
"It's consumer fraud," she said.
It's also a practice that has hurt the fishing industry and made environmental efforts to maintain fisheries that much more difficult, said Janis Harsila, manager of the Puget Sound Salmon Commission.
Over the years, as farm-raised salmon have entered the market in larger numbers, the price of wild salmon has dropped.
"It's been an ongoing problem for years," she said of the mislabeling. Fishermen take an especially negative view in the Pacific Northwest, where consumers prefer wild salmon and even ask for it. Pacific salmon swim in the waters off Alaska, British Columbia, Washington, Oregon and California, but most are caught from Oregon north.
Harsila said she's seen salmon mislabeled but doubts the average person would be able to tell the difference.
Consumers do have some tools they can use to make sure they're not being sold farm-raised fish when they prefer wild caught salmon, said Kirsten Wlaschin, director of marketing for Ivar's Restaurants, a Washington seafood icon for 73 years.
Chefs can tell by the feel of the fish and its oil content but consumers can ask their server what region the salmon is from, what species it is and if it's fresh or frozen.
"They should be able to answer or find someone to answer," Wlaschin said. If they can't, then they may want to take their business elsewhere.
-
Space shuttle's final countdown marks end of an era in Florida
A silent blast of white smoke shot out from under the colossal main engines, the briefest whimper came from the crowd, and the final flight of the world's most famous spaceship had begun. An intense orange light came next, as Atlantis rose impossibly fast from the ground, sending waves of heat and a chest-thumping staccato sound for miles in every direction......................... -
bcc
in Sea Fishing
captured a fish of 72 lbs 7 ozsThat's a big fish in my books! Well done Kim Bowden
Hilarious.
in Non-Fishing Chat
Posted
Brilliant
:bigemo_harabe_net-195: I'm still trying to master "Gockle of geer"! 
:headhurt: