Fishermen’s offshore wind work drying up

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For Patrick Walsh, as it is for many fishermen, the trade is in his blood. On the docks, a person qualifies their job with their lineage like a badge of honor, and for him, he’s fifth generation among a father, brother and uncles who farmed the ocean. 

He’s not on New Bedford’s waterfront on this early summer day, but he’s not far. He’s taking classes at a maritime institute, in a quiet Massachusetts town across the harbor, to earn a specific captain’s license. He doesn’t need it to fish, but certifications like it are useful in other maritime industries, like offshore wind, which Walsh entered in 2024.

Around then, Walsh heard “hush hush” talk of jobs with generous starting pay for an offshore wind project south of Massachusetts. It was in an area of ocean he never dredges for scallops. Walsh decided to bite. He took a job filling in for a crew mate for a two-day trip at Vineyard Wind, and he has been chasing the work to multiple offshore wind projects since. 

Walsh is one of hundreds of fishermen and boat owners on the East Coast who have altogether earned millions from offshore wind over the last few years. He and others continue to traverse the Northeast coast to service the few remaining wind farms under construction, catching contracts when they can’t catch fish due to regulations. Several come from New Bedford — the longstanding highest-value port in the country for landings, thanks to the sea scallop. In recent years, those scallop boats have spent more time tied up at the docks. This year, under regulations meant to protect the resource, they’re only allowed 36 days at sea.

“The scallop boats need the extra revenue,” said Walsh. “The worst thing for a boat is to sit.”

With offshore wind work, some vessels are spending more time out on water. Within the turbine arrays, or along the farms’ electrical routes to land, they’re patrolling, looking out for protected species, guarding exposed underwater cable as it’s being laid, and radioing other fishing boats.

Walsh, 37, bought his first house in a nearby town in 2025, a purchase he attributes to offshore wind work: “Fishing would pay bills, and wind was going in the bank.”

But that work will soon dry up. If the Trump administration succeeds in its ongoing efforts to end future offshore wind development in the United States — and by recent accounts, it is succeeding — it will eliminate thousands of current and future jobs on America’s waterfronts from Massachusetts to Virginia. Many of these jobs are located in seaports like New Bedford and New London, where states invested hundreds of millions of dollars in port infrastructure and workforce training to court offshore wind companies.

The resulting uncertainty has led international wind developers to redirect investment towards other countries or even sell back their leases. Meanwhile, the states that invested heavily in offshore wind infrastructure are at risk of seeing their purpose-built piers sitting empty, like New Bedford’s is once again. 

“Trump has been all about more jobs. Do you know how many jobs he’s killed in offshore wind?” said Travis Lowery, who was a fisheries liaison for Vineyard Offshore until the company laid off dozens of employees, including him. 

Waterfront quiets down

Lowery was sitting on the New Bedford side of the harbor at a cafe a minute’s drive from the now-empty wind staging terminal. It was also yards from the fishing vessel he just disembarked after a summer trip to a New York wind farm. 

With a degree in fisheries science from a nearby university, Lowery spent years working with local fishermen to secure them contracts to work offshore. His job, now dissolved, was laying the groundwork for Vineyard Offshore’s next projects. But those went on federal ice in January 2025, when the Trump administration halted all permitting of offshore wind projects and began a review of already-permitted ones. 

Lowery said this summer that he was keeping busy serving as a mate for offshore wind trips. He got a job in the fall.  

“So much talent is just getting wiped out,” he said. “It’s out of our control.” 

When Vineyard Wind first came to town, there was trash talking on the New Bedford waterfront (and at sea) to fishermen who worked for the project, recounted Roderick Murray, 67, a retired New Bedford fisherman who has worked on offshore wind projects for years. 

“Everything you could think of: … traitor… F you… Now I don’t hear it anymore.” Years later, some came around, quietly asking how they could get in on the work, he said. Others still won’t openly speak about it. 

Before construction started, Murray worked on a geophysical survey vessel with a crew of at least 60.

“Hotels were full. Limousine services were down all the time to Boston … seven trucks lined up to put fuel on the boats,” he said. “It really helped the economy. When you talk about trickle down economics, you see it right there.”

New Bedford was in a sweet spot with offshore wind. Its port was supporting a project, Vineyard Wind, that was mature when Trump returned to office. Analysts said it was so close to the finish line that it’d be unlikely for the president to take a swipe at it. They were right, but only for a bit. When the federal government issued the first stop-work orders to permitted offshore wind projects, it targeted those without turbines in the water. New Bedford remained an active assembly line shipping turbine components offshore.

But then the Trump administration came for Vineyard Wind days before Christmas 2025, and some workers were quickly impacted. 

Walsh’s crew mates from Florida and North Carolina had already flown to Massachusetts. Walsh paid out of his pocket to buy plane tickets so they could return to their families for the holiday, though he was reimbursed. He missed out on expected work for the rest of the monthlong suspension. 

“It wasn’t a long stop, but I did feel like I lost my job and I was going back fishing,” he said.

The next projects in the queue for New Bedford, SouthCoast Wind and New England Wind, can’t even get to the starting line. The Trump administration is trying to take back critical permits that are needed to begin construction. 

Wind developer reps have repeatedly said their goal in hiring fishermen isn’t for fishermen to stop fishing. Wind work is meant to supplement their incomes, while fishing remains their bread and butter. Lowery views it this way, and the conversations he’s had with some fishermen affirm that. Some told him that if offshore wind work ended tomorrow, they’d go to bed happy. Others said they’ll do it as long as they can. 

But some have shifted away, at least temporarily, from fishing to wind.

“I made more money captaining the boats than I was on deck as a fisherman,” said Walsh, who spent as many as 29 days in one month working for wind farms. Lately, things have slowed down a bit with 10 days on, 10 days off. “It went from a supplement to, this is my income.” 

Walsh said he wants to get back to working with his dad’s commercial fishing business, and plans to transition away from wind work after another year or so, enough time to earn more money to pay off some of his house. He said there is talk of offshore wind trips continuing through next summer for Sunrise Wind, an Orsted project south of New York. 

The pull of wind work has been so strong that it has made finding crew for fishing trips harder, said Todd Bragdon, captain and owner of a scallop boat in New Bedford. Though a fishing trip could pay more depending on the catch, it is more physically demanding.

Vessels, crewed by three to four people, earned $6,000 a day from Vineyard Wind (on trips that often lasted 10 to 14 days). As of August, the company paid about $11 million to 55 fishing vessels (most from Massachusetts, but a few from Connecticut and Rhode Island) and an estimated 60 to 70 fishermen in contract work, according to a Vineyard Wind spokesperson. (That estimate includes reimbursement for fuel.) 

“It’s hard to get some of them [back] once they’ve gotten into the wind farm,” Bragdon said. “It’s not like they have to do these long hours of standing and cutting scallops and picking through fish.”

When Bragdon was gearing up for a fishing trip, one potential crewman asked him if the boat would be back by a certain date, when he was scheduled to head out to a wind farm. Bragdon couldn’t guarantee how long they’d be out fishing, so he said the guy passed on the fishing trip.

“The thing that hurts the most is when you get a young guy that’s really good,” he said. “and he’s gotten into [wind], and he doesn’t want to go fishing anymore either.”

Like many fishermen, Bragdon, 62, is critical of offshore wind, worried about the yet-to-be-determined impacts it may have on fishing. But he said even he toyed with the idea of working on a project, before deciding his colorblindness would make it difficult for him to get required certifications.

As of this summer, months after the final turbine went in, Vineyard Wind was contracting with fishermen for fisheries surveys, safety vessel work and crew transfers. An estimated 10 to 15 fishing vessels were working around that time, according to a company spokesperson.  

Equinor and Orsted would not provide project-specific breakdowns on contract work for fishermen in response to requests from The Light. They cited general figures from Sea Services, a company that serves as a sort of middleman between the developers and fishermen. The company estimates that nearly $40 million has been paid to commercial fishing vessels for safety work. It does not discern between projects.

‘The pay is pretty good’

Fishermen have multifarious feelings about offshore wind. Those feelings can be so strong that they make the subject taboo. It’s why Steve Martz is clear at the outset of an interview that he’s speaking as director of Atlantic Capes Offshore Services, which hires fishermen to work for offshore wind projects  — and not speaking on behalf of Atlantic Capes Fisheries, the New Jersey-based fishing company where he also works. 

“I had captains from our fleet that needed the money because our quotas for scalloping had cut down so drastically,” said Martz, who works mostly with fishermen in the mid-Atlantic. 

He said the work pulled a few fishermen out of foreclosing on their homes, and two older captains out of odd jobs amid retirement.

One is Darren Davis, who fished for nearly four decades, mostly catching clams out of Maryland. He retired a few years ago after the owner of his boat relocated. He did a stint running materials for a construction company, but stopped after about a year. Then he “heard through the grapevine” to get in touch with Martz. 

He did, and found himself in Massachusetts for specialized fire safety training, a requirement to work on offshore wind projects. He eventually got a call from Martz about a long-term job at Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind, the biggest offshore wind project in the U.S. at a planned 176 turbines. 

Davis, 64, rounded up some of his old crew for 10-day stints offshore. One crewman, Billy Higbee, 57, spent most of his life on the water, but had retired from fishing and was making a bit of money installing locks at hotels.

The crew ensures the wind farm site is safe, communicates with other vessels, and does light inspections of the wind turbines at night. They eat well while at sea. It’s “not one of them frozen food boats,” Higbee said.

“There’s people for it, people against it. I can’t say I’m either way,” Davis said of offshore wind. “For somebody my age, it’s a good job… the pay is pretty good, and you don’t have to kill yourself physically.”

Higbee said he hopes the industry keeps going and that there’s more work after the Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project finishes. 

“For a lot of these guys, it’s fish until you drop dead on the deck of the boat, living off of medication just to get out of bed, because their bodies are so beat up,” Martz said. “You can come work for offshore wind on a fishing boat … You’re not beating yourself up and you’re earning a really good living.”

Over about three years Atlantic Capes has employed about 25 fishermen and six fishing vessels on Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind off Virginia and Skipjack Wind off Maryland. Martz estimates millions have been paid to fishermen for this work. 

‘Everyone is kind of caught in the middle’

The relationships between fishermen and the offshore wind industry can be fraught. Some fishermen have lost their gear, or had it damaged, as a result of construction or pre-construction activity by wind developers. The companies set up compensation funds to address their impacts, but they’re not all created equal. 

There’s been at least one possible close call between a boat and a wind farm. A squid boat lost control due to an engine issue while transiting just south of Vineyard Wind in June. The boat was adrift with the steel turbine structures nearby creating a collision risk. However, another boat was able to tow it away. 

It will also take time for researchers to determine what impacts the turbine arrays will have on commercial fishing operations and the species fishermen catch (some studies will take years). Fishermen worry about loss of historic fishing grounds, harm to fish habitats, increased insurance costs, and longer trips (so increased fuel expenses) if they decide to navigate around the wind farm instead of transiting through it. 

Similarly, uncertainty imbues most conversations about the future of offshore wind job opportunities.

“The sad reality is we don’t know,” Martz said. “The Trump administration is working really hard to stop it. They’re very creative, I gotta give them that.”

His best guess is “maybe a year” is left before an indeterminate pause. Atlantic Capes Offshore was in talks about work on other projects, but some of those developers sold their leases back to the federal government, news that Martz said was “a little disheartening” to read about.   

“I have to support, and will support, fishing above all else,” he said. “But offshore wind is a great opportunity we’re taking full advantage of right now… It gives you options when fishing is bad.” 

Martz said revenue from offshore wind work has helped the company avoid layoffs amid tough economic conditions. The fishing community as a whole is a supporter of the Trump administration, he noted, and on the one hand, fishermen understood what was going to happen to offshore wind if Trump was reelected.

“Everyone is kind of caught in the middle,” Martz said. They appreciate the added income, but also have reservations about how it will affect fishing: “We don’t know what the full impact will be.”

It “kind of sucks that how I vote would affect my job security,” said Walsh, a Republican. Still, he’s said he’s flexible and will always have work outside of offshore wind. 

What comes next in offshore wind — if anything does — depends on politics and economics. Getting stalled future projects restarted would require a pro-wind presidential administration to take office in 2029. But even then, their economic viability could be in question, given offshore wind projects’ long lead times and their proven political vulnerability. 

New Bedford fishermen will continue to fish. But the financial boost they’ve gotten from wind will deflate. Waterfront activity from wind, and the business that it brought, will also go away.

SouthCoast Wind, which is supposed to be the next project to bring work and investment to New Bedford, still doesn’t have an agreement with the utility companies to purchase the power it proposes sending. The parties have delayed signing a contract several times since Trump returned to office, with state officials citing “federal uncertainty.” 

The administration has effectively taken back a key construction permit for SouthCoast Wind, which the federal government issued after years of review. The federal regulator said it needed to review things again, a process that could result in the revocation of the permit. That review has been going on since November 2025. In September, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, which has been absorbed into the Marine Minerals Administration, would not provide information on the status, with a spokesperson emailing that the agency does not comment on pending litigation. 

“The gap between projects now is indefinite,” said New Bedford Mayor Jon Mitchell. “We don’t know when the next one will be.”

Though the New Bedford wind terminal is quiet, opportunities for the fishing boats continue. Walsh stood in the air-conditioned wheelhouse of the Brittany Eryn in August a day after the boat came in from a 10-day stint at Sunrise Wind.

Below, crew in rubber boots and well-worn T-shirts fitted the scalloper with its dredge. One man operated a blow torch, repairing the gear’s metal chains. Each scalloping boat has fewer than 40 days to fish for the year, and now it was Brittany Eryn’s turn to catch some scallops. 

Walsh would hop on another fishing boat for his next wind trip.

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