From Commercial Fishing To Offshore Wind Career
Editor:
After years of working in commercial fishing in Ocean City, I chose this summer to join Ørsted to lead the company’s outreach to the maritime community in Maryland and Delaware. Ørsted is building Skipjack Wind off the Maryland-Delaware coast.
As a commercial fisherman, I spent six nights a week in the Atlantic, catching and releasing horseshoe crabs for biomedical purposes. When that season ended, we would put our round net on and attempt to catch our federal flounder and striped bass quotas.
Working the ocean at night gives you a deep appreciation for this ecosystem and both its vitality and its fragility. I came to appreciate that sustainable sources of energy, just like sustainable fishing practices, are vital to the long-term health of the ocean and the people who depend on it for recreation or their livelihoods.
I joined Ørsted because the company values the cultural and economic importance of our fishing grounds. I have never seen a company more compassionate for the commercial fishing industry and communities in which we live and work.
I want commercial fishermen to know we will be in constant and transparent communication about the timing and location of our ocean activities as we develop Skipjack Wind. Commercial fishing boats should review our weekly online Mariners Briefings , which can be found at https://us.orsted.com/wind-projects/mariners. The briefings include information on Ørsted survey vessel schedules and maps and are distributed via email to the local fishing community.
We support commercial fishing within our lease area. We want offshore wind survey activities to occur without any interaction with fishing gear and will work closely with the fishing community to achieve that goal.
I encourage local mariners to contact me with questions they have about our plans and schedules for Skipjack Wind.
While we are not conducting ocean surveys at this time, we have and will continue to keep our survey areas as small as possible and to complete surveys as quickly as possible. We have a Fisheries Liaison Officer assigned to survey operations to communicate with commercial fishermen and advise mariners of the location of our activities. Survey activity will only be conducted during daylight hours and in fair weather.
Skipjack Wind will create thousands of jobs in our region, power nearly 300,000 homes with clean energy, and usher in a new American industry in our community. But we are also committed to honoring those who have fished our waters for generations and ensuring their livelihoods remain strong for decades to come.
Dana Nelson
(The writer is the Mid-Atlantic Marine Affairs Specialist for Ørsted, developer of Skipjack Wind.)
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Reasons To Vote Against
Editor:
Worcester County voters who have requested mail-in ballots may start to receive them any day. I encourage all those voting by mail, as well as those voting in person and by absentee ballot to Vote against Question A.
Vote against:
– The use of public funds for the construction and operation of a Sports Complex in the north end of the County
– Traffic congestion.
– A facility with no business plan.
– The disrespect conveyed to the people of Berlin.
– The oversaturation of sports facilities in the mid-Atlantic region.
– A project in which participation rates in most sports have shown a decline.
– A fast tracked sports complex that never appeared in our County Capital Improvement Plan until less than a year ago.
Vote against Question A. Thank you.
Vincent dePaul Gisriel, Jr.
Ocean City
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A Call For Honest Help
Editor:
What do you do when you find something that someone lost? Do you try to find the owner of the item, or do you keep what you found? Well, if you keep it; it is the same as stealing. You don’t know how important that item was to the someone who lost it.
Here is my story. My husband and I shop at the Wal-Mart store off Route 50 in Berlin. My husband has dementia and uses a cane. Well, this past week Sept. 28, he left his cane in the electric chair that the store provides for the handicapped. Like I said he has dementia, which is short term memory loss. I was unloading the shopping cart with groceries into the back of our car. He parked the electric chair in the aisle and got into the car. I didn’t realize he didn’t have his cane until we got home about 10 minutes later. We rushed back to the store and the cane was gone. Yes I checked with the lost and found but it hadn’t been turned in. I continued checking with the store the rest of the day.
So now to the person who has the cane, are you a good person or a thief? You can return the cane to the Wal-Mart, I’ll keep checking to see if it gets turned in.
My husband purchased the handmade cane at a Springfest or Sunfest five years ago, before he started with memory issues. He thinks his father made it for him.
A loving wife.
(Editor’s Note: The name has been withheld due to the letter writer’s security concerns.)