Top Story: Silver Bay and Alaska Pacific Packing competing to get Sitka’s industrial park site 

News Summary: Both Silver Bay and Alaska Pacific Packing are competing to get Sitka’s industrial park site where a new pier is being built - and both are currently tenants at the site. Silver Bay wants to buy the property outright, but that would leave the public pier surrounded by their land. APP wants to lease a major portion of the facility, and leave the ownership intact with the city of Sitka. A decision may come next month. 

In other news, a three judge arbitration panel vindicated John Lees in the ongoing debacle of lawsuits after he sold Mar-Lees to a Lithuanian businessman, was fired, rehired, and fired again. The panel said Mar-Lees, which lost $5 million in 2013, was run into the ground by incompetent owners who did not understand the scallop business. They said although Lees had technical violations of his non-compete, in each case they benefitted Mar-Lees, as he was trying to salvage an option to sell his remaining stake in the company. Following this ruling, Mar-Lees dropped its RICO suit, and now Lees is preparing counter charges. 

Dogfish are now the most abundant biomass on George’s Bank and the Gulf of Maine, with a spawning stock of around 230,000 tons. But a lack of processing capacity, a lack of markets, and little marketing efforts mean prices are very low and little is landed. If there was ever a case for a foreign processing ship in US waters this is it - New England’s groundfish can only be helped by higher removals of dogfish. 

Louisiana officials are finding that the results of the BP oil spill are similar to the Exxon Valdez in Prince William Sound. Years afterward, fisheries catches remain far below what they were prior to the spill. In the case of Louisiana, tuna, shrimp, blue crabs and oysters are all down far below their averages prior to the spill. 

The live king crab market is expanding in China. In Qingdao, the first bonded warehouse to hold live king crab has opened, allowing buyers to only pay the duty when the crabs are actually shipped to customers. The product is from South Korea, bought from crab vessels. There is no indication as to whether China has signed on to enforce the Russian port state restrictions on king crab. Shippers of Norwegian live crab to China have seen fierce competition from a surge of illegal crab into that market. Now that sales channel may be getting more normalized, but it still says nothing about the origin of the crab. 

Finally, NAFO’s latest meeting showed another cut in coldwater shrimp, with the fishery suspended entirely for 2015, at least as recommended by scientists. Greenland is also continuing to cut its quota, with the upshot that the present downward trend in production appears likely to continue.

John Sackton, Editor And Publisher , Lexington, Massachusetts 

Seafood.com News 1-781-861-1441 

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