RYE, N.H. — An incredible video captured the moment a whale off the coast of New Hampshire capsized a boat, sending two men flying into the ocean. Two teenagers nearby, who captured video of the incident, came to their immediate rescue.
Two men thrown overboard
“You know the risk when you come out here, it’s really unusual what happened to us this morning,” said Greg Paquette, who was thrown overboard.
Paquette and his friend Ryland Kenney were fishing off the coast of Rye, New Hampshire, when a whale suddenly breached and knocked over their boat.
“Thankfully it was slow enough that I could kind of swim my way out away from it before it completely capsized,” Paquette said.
It took Kenney several frantic moments before he could even find Paquette in the water. “Not much time to react,” Kenney said. “So I took a few steps off and basically did a superman off the boat.”
A whale slammed into a boat off Rye, New Hampshire in July 2024.
Colin Yager
Two teens, Colin and Wyatt Yager, were fishing nearby when it happened. They said they saw the whale breach a few more times afterwards.
Colin had his rod in one hand and a phone in the other. “It’s just unreal. Completely unreal,” he said.
The whale leaped out of the water, cresting over Paquette and Kenney’s boat. Paquette said the whale had a mouthful of fish and crashed down on the back of their boat, sending them flying.
A Coast Guard crew from Station Portsmouth reported that the whale appeared to not be injured. The incident was reported to NOAA.
“This is their home”
Fortunately, the men were only in the water for a minute when the two boys came to their rescue.
“We are grateful to the good Samaritans for taking such quick action to rescue these two individuals. Bravo Zulu!” the Coast Guard said on X.
The men made it out safely — but their belongings not so much. Paquette lost his iPhone. The boat was salvaged, the Coast Guard said.
“That’s the one thing we got to realize, that this is their home. This is their ocean, so we’re in their way,” Kenney said.
The Coast Guard asked boaters to report whale sightings to a local USCG command center.
Mike Sullivan is a multimedia journalist for WBZ-TV. He returned to his home state of Massachusetts after reporting in the Midwest for more than ten years.
In Connecticut, we meet the preservationists who are giving dilapidated lighthouses new life. Then in California, we learn about the efforts to restore an iconic fishing boat. Watch these stories and more on “Eye on America” with host Michelle Miller.
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Shem Creek, South Carolina — Off South Carolina’s coast, shrimper Rocky Magwood has a jumbo problem: plummeting prices for his catch.
“It’s worse right now than we’ve ever seen,” Magwood told CBS News. “…I mean, people are dropping like flies out of this business.”
The cause is cheap shrimp imported from Asia, grown in pond farms and often subsidized by foreign governments. It’s idled many of this state’s roughly 300 shrimpers.
“I would love to be out here at least six days a week,” Magwood said.
Instead, he’s shrimping only two or three days a week because, as he explains, there’s “no market.”
Last year, local shrimpers received $5.73 per pound for their haul, according to data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. This year, it’s down to $3.39 per pound, a decrease of just over 40%, which shrimpers say barely covers their costs.
Patrick Runey’s seafood restaurant, T.W. Graham & Co. in McClellanville, South Carolina, serves only locally caught shrimp. He pays more because he says local shrimp tastes better.
According to Runey, his restaurant could go with a cheaper alternative, “but that’s not what people want.”
What many U.S. shrimpers do want is a tariff on foreign competition. In November, the U.S. Department of Commerce announced that it would launch an investigation into whether antidumping and countervailing duties should be imposed on fish imported from certain countries, including Ecuador, Indonesia, India and Vietnam.
Magwood is afraid for the next generation of shrimpers.
“I have a son that’s five right now,” Magwood said. “He won’t be able to do this the way it’s going right now. There’s no way…This is just the facts.”
Guillermo Otta Parum has been fishing in the Bolivian Amazon his whole life, for more than 50 years.
At first, Guillermo was catching native fish, such as the various kinds of catfish which inhabit the river.
But then a giant freshwater fish arrived, known locally as paiche or Arapaima gigas, to give it its scientific name.
“I thought this creature was a water snake, that it would attack everything, that eating it would be bad for you, that it might be poisonous,” he recalls.
In fact, it is one of the biggest freshwater fishes in the world, growing up to 4m in length and weighing 200kg (440lb) or more.
Guillermo Otta Parum has been a fisherman for 50 years
It is estimated that every year, the paiche spreads another 40km deeper into the rivers of the Amazon basin.
Federico Moreno, director of the Beni Autonomous University’s Centre for Aquatic Resources Research, says its size and appetite make it a serious threat to native fish stocks.
“It is a territorial fish, it takes over a body of water and scares off the native species. [That] is one of the serious problems. The other species flee from the predator and enter other bodies of water much further away, more remote and difficult to access.”
No one really knows the exact year that the paiche first appeared in Bolivia.
It is generally believed its arrival was the result of a breach of a paiche fish farm in Peru, where the fish are native. From there, they spread into Bolivia’s rivers.
Biologist Fernando Carvajal has spent years studying the Paiche
Fernando Carvajal is a biologist and expert on the paiche. He says they are a ravenous species.
“During the first years of life, the paiche grows at the rate of 10kg a year. That means the paiche is eating a lot of fish.”
Unlike other predatory fish like piranha, it only has small, not particularly sharp teeth.
But its lack of impressive teeth does not stop it from eating piranha and a host of other fish, along with plants, molluscs and birds, all of which it hoovers up like a giant vacuum cleaner.
It also frightens off any fish which tries to eat the paiche’s young.
Fernando Carvajal says there is no firm data about the impact of the paiche, but he says that anecdotally, fishermen are reporting that the numbers of some native species are dwindling.
“In the next one or two decades, the paiche is going to spread to all the potential areas where this species can live,” he warns.
“We know that around the world, most invasive cases are bad for nature. Invasive species are considered the second-biggest reason for the loss of biodiversity after habitat destruction.”
However, for local fishermen, the arrival of the paiche has been a boon. Having been initially afraid of it, it did not take long for fishermen to realize its potential, says Guillermo Otta Parum.
Paiche fishing boat on the Yata River in the Bolivian Amazon
“When I brought the first fish, I would give the customers small pieces as a gift for them to try so they would get a taste for it.”
Some fishermen even pretended it was a type of catfish to overcome people’s suspicions about eating such a huge specimen.
Now paiche are eaten across Bolivia.
Edson Suzano runs a paiche-processing plant in Riberalta, a town in north-east Bolivia close to the Brazilian border.
Edson Suzano (left) says the paiche is affordable
“We sell it everywhere – supermarkets, markets. There are different cuts, so it is affordable. We buy and process around 30,000kg per month,” he says.
The challenge for the fishermen is trying to find the paiche in the huge expanse of the Amazon.
The fish has a lung-like organ and has to come up for air regularly to breathe and so likes calmer water. It prefers to live in lakes and lagoons, but migrates when it feels it is in danger.
The paiche migrates when it feels it is in danger
Most of the fish Edson Silvano processes used to arrive by boat.
Now the fishermen travel to ever more remote areas to catch the paiche and have to transfer from boats to canoes, on journeys of up to two weeks. This is putting them in conflict with indigenous communities.
These communities have been given land titles to many of the remote lagoons where paiche are now to be found and have themselves started fishing for and selling the fish.
Paiche being prepared for sale at Riberalta’s fish market
Now commercial fishermen have to obtain special licences to work in these areas. But fishermen like Guillermo Otta Parum say that even when they have the correct paperwork, they are often turned away.
The indigenous communities argue that they are only trying to protect the resources which the Bolivian government has recognised they have a right to control.
Juan Carlos Ortiz Chavez is a paiche fisherman who belongs to the Alto Ivon Tco Chacobo indigenous community:
Juan Carlos Ortiz Chávez belongs to the Alto Ivon Tco Chacobo indigenous community.
He says that in the past, indigenous people were scared of commercial fishermen. “But this new generation of young people has changed, because we have made our rules so that people can’t come and take from us any more,” he explains.
Scientists such as Federico Moreno hope that fishing generally, whoever is doing it, will keep paiche numbers in check.
“Keep hunting them, keep fishing for them all the time and that could keep a balance between the different species.”
Roughly 1,000 pounds of illegally caught shark was seized by the U.S. Coast Guard in Southern Texas on Sunday, authorities said.
A South Padre Island Coast Guard crew spotted four Mexican fishermen alongside the coastline in a lancha, a slender speed boat often used to fish illegally during the day, the Coast Guard said in a news release on its website. U.S. Coast Guard crews often seize illegal captures of red snapper, sharks and other types of fish. At night, the lanchas can be used to traffic drugs between Matamoros, Mexico, and Texas, according to research conducted by the Southeast Fisheries Science Center and the Coast Guard.
Video taken by the U.S. Coast Guard aircrew showed the four fishermen wearing fluorescent green waders pulling sharks from the side of their boat. When authorities pulled over the men, in addition to the sharks, they found fishing gear, radios, GPS devices and high flyer fishing poles on board, authorities said.
The sharks were seized and the fisherman were transferred to border enforcement agents for processing, the Coast Guard said.
Sergeant James Dunks, a game warden with the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, told NPR in 2011 that people from Playa Bagdad, a small fishing village south of the border, come across searching for fish.
“They have just pretty much claimed that they have fished all their fish out of their end of the water, so that’s why they’ve been coming across,” Dunks told NPR.
A 2021 study showed humans are to blame for the 70% decline in shark and ray populations around the world. If overfishing isn’t stopped the species could soon be wiped out completely.
Texas has long been a hot spot for shark fishing and trade. In 2015, Texas banned the trade of shark fins after the state emerged as a “trading hub” when the practice was banned elsewhere, said nonprofit Oceana in a press release.
Anglers can fish for sharks in Texas waters and can catch one shark daily, according to Texas Parks and Wildlife. Anglers are prohibited from catching 22 specific shark species but can catch 16 other species, said the Texas Farm Bureau. These restrictions are “for consistent enforcement within state waters,” said Dakus Geeslin, TPWD deputy director of Coastal Fisheries in the news release.
A federal regulatory group voted Thursday to officially close king salmon fishing season along much of the West Coast after near-record low numbers of the fish, also known as chinook, returned to California’s rivers last year.
The Pacific Fishery Management Council approved the closure of the 2023 season for all commercial and most recreational chinook fishing along the coast from Cape Falcon in northern Oregon to the California-Mexico border. Limited recreational salmon fishing will be allowed off Southern Oregon in the fall.
“The forecasts for Chinook returning to California rivers this year are near record lows,” Council Chair Marc Gorelnik said after the vote in a news release. “The poor conditions in the freshwater environment that contributed to these low forecasted returns are unfortunately not something that the Council can, or has authority to, control.”
California had already last month issued a salmon fishing ban for the remainder of the season. According to CBS Bay Area, it marked only the second time in state history that California had canceled its salmon fishing season, with the last ban taking place between 2008 and 2009, also due to drought conditions.
Biologists say the chinook salmon population has declined dramatically after years of drought. Many in the fishing industry say Trump-era rules that allowed more water to be diverted from the Sacramento River Basin to agriculture caused even more harm.
A Chinook salmon leaps from the water in a holding pond at Coleman National Fish Hatchery on Jan. 19, 2022, in Anderson, California.
Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
The closure applies to adult fall-run chinook and deals a blow to the Pacific Northwest’s salmon fishing industry.
Much of the salmon caught off Oregon originate in California’s Klamath and Sacramento rivers. After hatching in freshwater, they spend three years on average maturing in the Pacific, where many are snagged by commercial fishermen, before migrating back to their spawning grounds, where conditions are more ideal to give birth. After laying eggs, they die.
The council is an advisory group to the U.S. Secretary of Commerce, which makes the final decision, but historically has followed the council’s rulings. The secretary’s decision will be posted in the Federal Register within days.
Experts fear native California salmon are in a spiral toward extinction. Already California’s spring-run chinook are listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act, while winter-run chinook are endangered along with the Central California Coast coho salmon, which has been off-limits to California commercial fishers since the 1990s.
Recreational fishing is expected to be allowed in Oregon only for coho salmon during the summer and for chinook after Sept. 1. Salmon season is expected to open as usual north of Cape Falcon, including in the Columbia River and off Washington’s coast.
Though the closure will affect tens of thousands of jobs, few are opposed to it. Many fishers say they want to take action now to guarantee healthy stocks in the future.
They hope the unusually wet winter in California that has mostly freed the state of drought will bring relief. An unprecedented series of powerful storms has replenished most of California’s reservoirs, dumping record amounts of rain and snow and busting a severe three-year drought. But too much water running through the rivers could kills eggs and young hatchlings.
In a major blow to America’s seafood industry, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game has, for the first time in state history, canceled the winter snow crab season in the Bering Sea due to their falling numbers. While restaurant menus will suffer, scientists worry what the sudden population plunge means for the health of the Arctic ecosystem.
An estimated one billion crabs have mysteriously disappeared in two years, state officials said. It marks a 90% drop in their population.
Freshly caught snow crabs sit in containers on a fishing boat at Mikuni Fishing Port in Mikuni, Fukui Prefecture, Japan, on Friday, Nov. 6, 2015.
Buddhika Weerasinghe/Bloomberg via Getty Images
“Did they run up north to get that colder water?” asked Gabriel Prout, whose Kodiak Island fishing business relies heavily on the snow crab population. “Did they completely cross the border? Did they walk off the continental shelf on the edge there, over the Bering Sea?”
Ben Daly, a researcher with ADF&G, is investigating where the crabs have gone. He monitors the health of the state’s fisheries, which produce 60% of the nation’s seafood.
“Disease is one possibility,” Daly told CBS News.
He also points to climate change. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Alaska is the fastest warming state in the country, and is losing billions of tons of ice each year — critical for crabs that need cold water to survive.
“Environmental conditions are changing rapidly,” Daly said. “We’ve seen warm conditions in the Bering Sea the last couple of years, and we’re seeing a response in a cold adapted species, so it’s pretty obvious this is connected. It is a canary in a coal mine for other species that need cold water.”
Prout said that there needs to be a relief program for fisherman, similar to programs for farmers who experience crop failure, or communities affected by hurricanes or flooding.
When asked what fishermen can do in this situation, with their livelihoods dependent on the ocean, Prout responded, “Hope and pray. I guess that’s the best way to say it.”
