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Last November, a group of New Bedford seafood companies crowded into a Zoom conference room hosted by Delaware’s bankruptcy court.
One by one, a trustee listed the assets up for sale: eight commercial fishing vessels and 48 federal fishing permits. It was a fire-sale liquidation for bankrupt Blue Harvest Fisheries — one of New England’s largest seafood companies — and the largest bundle of groundfish permits in recent history to come available on the market.
Bids, the trustee announced, would start at $10 million.
Cassie Canastra was first to act: “$11 million,” she said, without skipping a beat.
There was a brief pause, as a team representing O’Hara Corporation, part owner of New Bedford-based scallop giant Eastern Fisheries, huddled to discuss their options. They raised the bid to $11.25 million.
“$12 million,” Canastra responded, showing no sign of relenting.
For Blue Harvest, the bankruptcy auction marked the final chapter in its aggressive, eight-year expansion. For the New Bedford waterfront, it marked a changing of the guards — ushering in a new captain at the helm of the city’s fabled but struggling groundfish industry.
“We wanted those permits,” Canastra said, speaking in March to students at UMass Dartmouth’s School for Marine Science and Technology, where she received her master’s degree in 2020 researching groundfish market dynamics. Canastra, tall with dark curly hair, speaks fast, with a sense of confidence and insight gained from years of on-the-ground experience. “I’m optimistic,” she added. “We are invested and we are in it for the long haul.”
Canastra, 34, and her family have long been center stage on the Port of New Bedford. She is director of the Buyers and Sellers Exchange (BASE), the city’s only public seafood auction and the main artery through which New Bedford’s half-billion-dollar annual scallop trade is pumped. Each day inside the small, well-lit auction room in the South End industrial complex, Canastra oversees the delicate parlay between buyers around the world and the price fishermen receive for their catch.
“I’m optimistic. We are invested and we are
Cassie Canastra
in it for the long haul.”
She has been involved in the company since her childhood, Canastra said. But in 2021, she officially took the reins at BASE from her father and uncle, who started the auction in 1994. Since then, she has not treaded lightly — embarking on an ambitious plan of expansion that includes investments on land and at sea.
In the last two years, she bought two groundfish boats from New Bedford fisherman Pat Kavanagh and partnered with Canadian seafood giant Cooke to acquire two more scallop and groundfish vessels from Quinn Fisheries. She also partnered with three other New Bedford businesses and MassDevelopment to revitalize the State Pier. Though that project has hit some snags, her part of the deal would include building a waterfront seafood retail market.
Then, in November, amidst this expansion, she partnered with Montauk-based luxury real estate developer Charles “Butch” Payne to buy out all the groundfish vessels and permits from the Blue Harvest bankruptcy. Those assets alone represented about 13% of all groundfish quota — or 250 million pounds of fish this year — cementing her status as the single largest permit holder in New England’s groundfish industry. Blue Harvest was owned by a private equity firm that traced back to a family of Dutch billionaires; the deal returned the region’s groundfish industry to local control.
“It was a blockbuster deal,” said Hank Soule, sector manager for the newly acquired fleet. For months during the bankruptcy process, the boats and permits were frozen in bankruptcy court, locking fishermen out of work during the fall, when prices are traditionally high. “It’s a relief that the boats can go back fishing and people can go back to work,” he added.
Few players on the waterfront are as well-positioned to take over the fishery, local business leaders said. And in some ways, they say, it seems the whole industry is riding on its success.
“The Canastras have played a crucial role in commercial fishing for many decades,” said Gordon Carr, executive director of the New Bedford Port Authority. “Acquiring that groundfish fleet from bankruptcy is just another step. As we have said from the beginning, the most important thing is to keep that fleet in New Bedford.”
But it won’t be easy.
In 2012, regulators declared a federal fishery disaster due to decades of overfishing and poor management. Since then, some groundfish stocks, like haddock and redfish, have rebounded to healthy numbers. But others, like cod and certain flounder, have not. Year by year, quotas have been cut, and the industry has continued to contract. Imports from the North Atlantic, Europe and the Pacific have largely filled in the supply chain — making it even more difficult for the dwindling fleet to compete.
“There are a series of issues in the fishery driven by overcapitalization, overfishing, and now some climate-related effects,” said NOAA economist Chad Demarest. “There is always potential. But at the moment, groundfish does not have the certainty of future profits that other fisheries, like scallops, have.”
Canastra says she’s eager to take on the challenge. She remembers before scallops were the top fishery on the New Bedford waterfront, and “groundfish was everything,” she said. The high price of scallops has made New Bedford the nation’s top-earning port, but the groundfish industry operates on a larger scale, she said, providing more jobs and spreading the value through the port economy. Whereas a million dollars of scallops can fit in one box truck, a million dollars worth of groundfish needs a whole fleet of trucks.
It will be a long road ahead to restore the groundfish to its former glory, she said, and there are many things she can’t control: the climate, quotas and, despite tight regulations, the slow recovery of species like cod and flounder. She also mentioned the looming uncertainty that offshore wind development poses to prime groundfish spawning habitat. But a starting point, as she sees it, is to stabilize the volatile market for local harvesters. It’s a complicated task that will require steady landings, marketing, and competing with foreign imports — all to rebuild domestic supply chains that have grown fragile since the groundfish industry began to buckle over a decade ago.
“Right now, we’ve got imports coming in, frozen and consistent, at a set price,” she said. “We no longer have that consistency. If we don’t have consistency in the market, we don’t have one at all.”
The Canastras have had their eyes on the Blue Harvest fleet since before Blue Harvest bought it. In 2017, New Bedford fishing mogul Carlos Rafael, the “Codfather,” was awaiting sentencing for falsifying federal records, tax evasion and evading fishing restrictions. His settlement with federal prosecutors, which ultimately included a four-year prison sentence, required him to sell his fleet. The Canastras were an early bidder, going as far as reaching a tentative agreement to buy the entire fleet for $93 million, her uncle, Richie Canastra, told WBSM at the time.
But that deal fell through. Rafael sold six scallop vessels to the Quinn family of New Bedford for $40 million and 12 groundfish vessels to private equity-backed Blue Harvest Fisheries for $19.8 million, among other deals. In an interview with The Light, Rafael said he netted about $102 million in total for the sale of his fleet.
The Canastras attempted to block the sale of the Rafael estate through a lawsuit, citing the right of first refusal rule of the groundfish sectors. That didn’t work. But now, Canastra is pulling off what her family set out to do in 2017: buying the vast majority of Rafael’s groundfish fleet — but this time at a discount.
While the Rafael fleet was identified by his signature shade of sea green, and the Blue Harvest fleet by its shade of royal blue, the Canastras’ vessels are each painted baby blue. One groundfish trawler has taken her name — F/V Cassie C.
April marks the beginning of the groundfish year, when the annual quotas are recycled and fishing kicks into high gear. It also marks a new chapter for the groundfish industry and the Port of New Bedford. Canastra says failure isn’t an option.
“It’s all I know,” she said. “It’s a family business, but it’s more than that. It’s about keeping the industry and this community alive. That’s what matters most to us.”
Email fishing industry reporter Will Sennott at wsennott@newbedfordlight.org.
What an uplifting story! It’s great to see so many of the commercial fishing vessels and permits out of the hands of the moneygrubbing Codfather and Blue Harvest hedge fund and into the hands of a local family. Viva Cassie!!!
Nice! This explains why a pound of frozen or fresh local scallops costs $19.99+, while a pound of imported scallops that were flash frozen and shipped half way around the world costs $11.99! Oh, I guess it doesn’t.