Haddock ?

[AndyS]

Massachusetts Environmental Police

MEP officers measure Haddock that was offloaded by an offshore dragger to a processer in New Bedford. Over 3000 pounds were found to be below the legal size limit of 16 inches. The vessel Captain will have his day in court and the illegal fish was donated to various food pantries to help those in need.

How often does this take place ?

[Broad Bill]

Crazy part of this story is I thought all commercial boats had specific times they could offload their catch and CO's or F&G was required to be notified in advance so they could check their catch at the dock as it was being unloaded. So either this operator was going to try to offload without following those protocols or the protocols for Massachusetts are different than they are in New Jersey but either way it makes you wonder how an operator could bring in 3,000 lbs. of undersized fish and think they could have it processed at a fish processing house without detection. A 16" haddock is a small fish and what makes this incident worse is that they're taking fish that represents the future of the stock. I don't know what the fine is going to be but the operator in this case should have his license suspended or permanently taken away. This isn't three or four fish we're talking about, it's thousands of fish that were intentionally taken illegally. Absolutely insane that incidents such as this are not met with the harshest of consequences.

[dales529]

https://oceana.ca/en/blog/rise-and-f...hing-criminal/

[Broad Bill]

Carlos Raphael. He made so much money he actually owned the fish processing plants which helped him mislabel and distribute millions of pounds of illegally harvested fush. Most of his catch was actually sold in the New York marketplace and this went on for decades before getting caught and only as a result of a money laundering sting operation by the IRS. God only knows how much other illicit netting takes place every year, not to the scale of the Codfather, but collectively there has to be massive amounts of fish illegally harvested and marketed and we all suffer the consequences.

[AndyS]

I was wondering why Massachusetts Environmental Police are checking commercial boats, I thought that was a job for someone else ???