Civil Eats
May 15th, 2025
By Meg Wilcox
The dismantling of the once expansive agency will not only affect fisheries but also the oceans and weather forecasting. Across the U.S., fishers are already feeling the impact.
On a cold, bright April day, Sarah Schumann and Dean Pesante are painting the bottom of their fishing boat, the 38-foot Oceana, to prevent barnacles and weeds from attaching. They’re almost ready for the spring fishing season at Point Judith, Rhode Island, New England’s second most valuable fishing port.
Schumann and Pesante harvest bluefish, dogfish, scup, and bonito using gillnets that they set daily at the mouth of the Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island Sound.
“Our income and catch have dropped about 30 percent over the last four years,” Pesante told Civil Eats. They’ve caught fewer bluefish in the summer season and found far fewer bluefish during the fall run out of the bay. “We didn’t even reach the quota with what we were landing,” he said.
There are multiple factors that likely contribute to the declining bluefish catch, including rapidly warming ocean waters, which affect fish migration and behavior; dredging to lay cables for offshore wind turbines, which disrupts fish habitat; and a reduced quota for fishers, which explains some but not all of the lowered catch.
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