By Theresa Sullivan Barger, Special to The Day

New London ― After 50 years of fishing out of Long Island Sound, commercial fisherman Gary Yerman has embraced working with offshore wind companies to finish out his career.

Working for the wind industry is controversial among fishermen, with some using it to supplement their fishing income, some avoiding it and others switching fully to working with wind.

Fishermen who oppose offshore wind and environmental groups say that because sound travels faster and farther through the water than the air, they worry about the potentially harmful impact offshore wind farms will have on whales and the entire ocean ecosystem fishermen’s livelihoods depend on.

Yerman, fishing partner Michael Theiler and New London lawyer and businessman Gordon Videll traveled to Kilkeel, Northern Ireland, in 2019 to talk to fishermen there about how they were dealing with the offshore wind farms and how it was impacting the fishing and their community. They saw and heard that supplementing fishing with helping wind companies with navigation and safety, had boosted the local economy, Yerman said.

Yerman, Theiler and Videll formed Sea Services North America to help other fishermen get trained, get their boats upgraded with more safety equipment and work with offshore wind companies to help during wind farm construction. Theiler later left the business. They work out of an office building on Chelsea Street in Fort Trumbull, near the fishing dock.

So far, they’ve trained nearly 90 fishermen to bring “money back to the ports most affected by offshore wind,” Videll said in an interview in Sea Services office June 3, adding he looked at it as “an opportunity to bring money back to the fishermen.”

Through a partnership agreement between Ørsted and Sea Services, Sea Services set up eight fishing vessels to work with Ørsted to provide safety scouting for its Northeast projects, an Ørsted spokeswoman said via email. In addition, “Sea Services has trained 82 fishermen to work for us, and over 50 fishermen have worked for Ørsted through Sea Services so far.”

“Ørsted reimbursed Sea Services for the full cost of upgrades to all eight vessels. All the upgrades were different based on the vessels,” wrote the Ørsted spokeswoman.

Stonington fleet resists call of the wind farms

Meanwhile, no members of the Stonington fishing fleet have signed on to work with offshore wind companies. On a sunny Friday afternoon in July, fishing and lobster boats tied up to the Stonington town dock sat empty. The trawler Tradition flew a “Save Our Seas” flag with a red slash over a wind turbine. The only people around were dockmaster Gary Farrell, third-generation retired Stonington fisherman Manuel “Manny” Rezendes and the staff at Sea Well Seafood.

Some, such as Gary Stone, oppose the idea of fishermen working with wind farms because they are concerned about what the loud noises during construction and afterward what it will do to marine life and the whole ecosystem.

“Any real fisherman is never going to go to work for the windmill. They’re destroying the ocean,” said Stone, who has been fishing for 40 years, starting after school at 13.

Some of the people working with the wind farms don’t fish anymore, he said.

“Anybody who goes fishing year-round is never going to work for the windmills,” he said. “They’d rather go out of business.”

He was fishing off the coast of Nantucket on July 22, shortly after the Vineyard Wind turbine blade broke off and left pieces of debris in the ocean and on the beaches.

“All we hear all day long is, ‘Look out for debris.’ It’s summertime. What are they going to do if we get a hurricane?”

Others, such as Joe Gilbert, 64, said they are equally concerned about the impact offshore wind will have on the ocean ecosystem but they don’t begrudge those fishermen who are supplementing their incomes working for the wind companies “if economics dictate they need it.”

“I hope folks doing this work understand the jeopardy the wind farms are going to have on their livelihoods,” said Gilbert, owner of Empire Fisheries of Stonington.

With some of the constraints on commercial fishing permits, fishermen and lobstermen can’t fish year-round, he said. He worries what will happen to the fishermen who rely heavily on the wind farm income when the jobs dry up after construction ends.

Some have given up fishing, he said. “They are dedicated to waiting around for contracts for the wind farms. It’s disappointing to us. It’s a freight train we can’t stop.”

Partnering with wind companies

In order to work with the wind farms, Yerman said, the cost to upgrade vessels’ electronic navigation and safety equipment, obtain 100-ton marine licenses and to complete fire safety and medical training for themselves and their crews ranged from $35,000-$50,000. Specifically, the upgraded electronic equipment had to have Automatic Satelite Tracking (ASI) so vessels can be in constant communication, he said.

Fishermen with knowledge of local waters help with navigation and keeping nearby fishermen safe during construction.

For example, if it’s foggy or nighttime, the safety scout vessels can identify the boats that are coming and communicate that to the wind farm people.

Generally, the fishing boats monitor the area to keep an eye on conditions so the wind farm installers can focus on their work and so fishing boats are alerted to activity in order to keep a safe distance away.

“It’s much safer doing this wind farm work than fishing,” Yerman said. “Commercial fishing is one of the most dangerous occupations.”

The companies installing wind farms off the coast of Connecticut, Long Island, Nantucket and elsewhere engage with Sea Services to hire fishing boats to help, usually for 30 days at a time, he said.

Through its Ørsted contract, Sea Services pays fishing boats with the necessary equipment, insurance and trained crew $4,500 a day, and the crews typically work in seven- to 10-day stints, Yerman said. Wind farm companies also cover fuel expenses.

Depending upon experience level, out of that $4,500, crew members are paid $240 to $450 per day; the first mate is paid $400 to $500 per day and captains make $600 to $750 a day, he said.

“What the wind farm company pays is negotiated, depending upon the time of year,” he said.

Fishermen may work with multiple wind farm construction projects, so there’s plenty of work, he said. Each company has different requirements for the fishing vessels they work with, so Sea Services acts as the gatekeeper to ensure the boats sent have met each company’s standards.

If the fishermen are scheduled to work and the ship’s captain decides the sea’s conditions are too dangerous, they are able to make that final call, Yerman said. His son captained one of Yerman’s vessels that went out on a 10-day wind project in July.

Yerman said there are a “couple of fishermen who don’t have the wherewithal” to borrow the money to bring their rundown vessels up to the higher standards to do the wind farm work. He declined to provide their names or let them know a reporter wanted to interview them.

He and other fishermen credited State Sen. Heather Somers, R-Groton, for her legislative work on behalf of commercial fishermen. Somers introduced policy, later passed into law as S.B. 385, which supports the hiring of Connecticut fishermen for offshore wind contracts.

“This law not only boosts local employment, but also ensures that the expertise and knowledge of our fishermen are utilized in developing sustainable energy solutions,” Somers spokeswoman wrote in an email.

Will wind farms take another cut out of fishing?

Gilbert’s company fishes for squid, but this spring, the squid didn’t return to their typical grounds near Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard.

“A lot of fishermen rely on this for their summer money, starting in May and petering out about now,” he said during a mid-July interview. “The only factor that’s different from other years is wind construction noise.” Even when the wind construction ends, fishermen worry the noise of the rotating blades will keep the squid away.

He referenced the use of “bubble curtains” to muffle underwater wind farm sounds from marine life, such as whales, dolphins and porpoises, sensitive to the underwater noise caused by using a pile driver to anchor the steel foundation to the sea floor. In a draft report by two federal agencies, researchers cite noise as a potential factor in the endangered North Atlantic right whale’s decline.

“There’s a lot of issues here that are being breezed over,” Gilbert said. “We have no science, we have no data, but we’re going to go ahead and do this anyway.”

In aerial photos, the silt plumes extending for a half a mile past the turbine pole can be seen, he said. He worries that by the time any problems caused by the wind farms are recognized, the fisheries will already have been damaged.

“We believe if we stick with science, we don’t always get the answer we want, but if it’s good science, it should produce good policy,” he said.

Another concern relates to the placement of the wind turbines at the point where the warm waters of the Gulf Stream reach the cold Atlantic Ocean waters. Having the warm water on top and the cold water on the bottom drives the ecosystem; it’s the beginning of the marine food chain and it’s rich with marine life, he said.

The wind field creates a vortex in the water column, he said.

“Our concern is it’s going to mix and homogenize the water.” Fishermen urged federal officials not to allow them to be placed in the midst of their fishing grounds, Gilbert said.

The federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) “is leaving us to deal with the wind industry by ourselves,” Gilbert said. “I try to read the environmental impact statements. These are enormous documents I have to read in order to stay on top of my industry. … I expect my federal government is going to protect me; I’ve been permitted to provide a food supply to our nation.”

Compensation fund

As a recognition of the potential harm offshore wind farms can have to fishermen, the Fisheries Compensatory Mitigation Program is at varying degrees of completion, with some wind companies such as Vineyard Wind already having one in place and others under discussion.

However, Vineyard Wind’s program was open for 90-days, and commercial fishermen from impacted states, including Connecticut, had to apply for eligibility for potential compensation by June 17, 2024. On its website under “Programs for fishermen, ” Ørsted provides information about compensation economic losses incurred during the construction, operation and decommissioning of its wind farms. But the link only offers compensation to fishermen from Massachusetts and Rhode Island.

“Critically, this 90-day timeframe is the only opportunity that fishermen will have to qualify for compensation over the life of the program. Fishermen will not need to demonstrate economic impacts from Vineyard Wind 1 to qualify for the program or receive compensation payments,” according to the Vineyard Wind website statement.

Nine Atlantic Coast states, including Connecticut, advanced an initiative to establish a regional fund administrator to compensate commercial fishermen for economic loss from offshore wind development. This effort supports implementing the BOEM’s draft Fisheries Mitigation Framework for “impacted Atlantic Coast fishing industry members and offshore wind developers,” according to a December 2022 press release from Offshore Wind.

Radar Interference

Massive wind turbines like those being built off the North Atlantic coast may interfere with marine radar systems, creating a risky situation for large ships passing near offshore wind farms and smaller vessels fishing and navigating around them, according to a report by The National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine.

The turbines’ steel towers can reflect electromagnetic waves, interfering with ships’ navigational radar systems, potentially obscuring the presence of a nearby boat.

In addition, the spinning blades can create a type of interference similar to the Doppler effect, in which sound waves shorten as a moving object approaches the observer. When the rotating blades shorten and distort the passing ships’ radar signals, it can produce a “blade flash” on a ship’s radar screen, the report said.

If a captain loses power and damages his vessel crashing into rocks, Gilbert said, after the first issue, his insurance company will not insure him if he fishes near the turbines. But, he said, that’s where the fish are.

“I will have so many targets on my screen, I will not see the real targets,” Gilbert said. “It creates an impossible situation fishing in a wind field.”

Captain Scott Yerman gives a tour of the fishing boat New Horizons as it is docked at the Fort Trumbull Marina in New London Monday, Aug. 5, 2024. The ship now provides safety scouting for Ørsted’s Northeast projects with Sea Services (Sarah Gordon/The Day)