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About The daily Astorian. (Astoria, Or.) 1961-current | View Entire Issue (Nov. 30, 2019)
A3 THE ASTORIAN • SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 30, 2019 Dark Arts: Named best beer festival in state Downtown: City Council will take up recommendations early next year Continued from Page A1 Fort George continu- ally fi ne-tunes the event to keep it enjoyable in the con- stricted space. It began rent- ing out the The Ruins at the Astor, an event space across Duane Street in former hotel lobby of the John Jacob Astor Hotel building, for a third concert venue and oys- ter bar. In 2020, the brewery plans to close Duane Street between its campus and the Astor building to provide a larger experience. About 40% of the attend- ees at Dark Arts come from the Portland m etro area, compared to about 10% from Astoria and a smattering of others from around the U.S. and Canada. But Fort George also recruits around 120 vol- unteers to help its staff put the festival on. “A lot of the regulars and locals are volunteer- ing,” Harris said. “They’re kind of going to the festi- val, but they’re going to it as volunteers.” Fort George provides ear- lier volunteers entry, a tasting glass and several tokens for pours. Later in the day vol- unteers can’t attend before- hand, but the brewery gives them a gift card and, for the Continued from Page A1 Fort George Brewery Fort George Brewery’s Festival of the Dark Arts brings more than 2,000 attendees to downtown Astoria each February. closing shifts, a 32-ounce fi ll of any Dark Arts beer. As of Friday, later volunteer spots were still available at tinyurl. com/DarkArtsvolunteers Other business owners like the surge of more than 2,000 winter visitors, Harris said. “The streets are full all weekendlong in Astoria,” he said. “It is a big bump for everybody at that time of the year.” Fort George developed an unticketed event the Sunday after Dark Arts called The Aftermath, when the brew- ery releases variants of its bourbon barrel-aged stout series, Matryoshka, and sells stouts that didn’t run out the day before. Crowds line up around the block at the Lovell Building, buying hun- dreds of cases of beer to go. In addition to Dark Arts, Harris is an architect behind Stout Month, a dark beer appreciation running throughout February. The brewery releases three or four stouts a week through- out the month, the crescendo being Dark Arts. Fort George plans to expand Stout Month with more events throughout the region. Dark Arts has been named the best beer festi- val in the state the last sev- eral years in a row by Willa- mette Week’s Oregon Beer Awards. The Oregon Brew- ers Guild recently named February Oregon Craft Beer Month. “They even cited the Fes- tival of Dark Arts and what we do with Stout Month as a reason,” Bovenizer said. The proposed zone changes in the downtown core included the conver- sion of nearly 14 acres of tourist-oriented zones to more general commercial. The city has argued the tourism-promoting zones were instituted during recessionary times and are no longer necessary. Steve Fick, owner of Fishhawk Fisheries at the foot of Fourth Street, con- tinued his argument Tues- day for more fl exibility on his property. A brick building Fick is turn- ing into a distillery at the foot of the pier would be rezoned into general com- mercial, not allowing him to process seafood there. Planning c ommissioners made a last-minute rec- ommendation to allow fi sh processing on land north of the Astoria Riverfront Trolley tracks. They decided to allow medical and professional offi ces in new and old buildings over water after receiving a letter from the Astoria Downtown His- toric District Associa- tion calling for fl exibility. An argument is that such uses would bring in high- er-paying jobs downtown. The proposed devel- opment rules would pre- serve an 80-foot-wide swath of land along the Astoria Riverwalk and a 70-foot view corridor along streets. Planning commissioners agreed on a 35-foot building height limit on land within 100 feet of the Riverwalk cor- ridor and 45 feet farther inland, essentially nix- ing a recommendation for affordable housing in four-story buildings. The City Council will take up the Planning Com- mission’s recommenda- tions in January. New crab pot could help reduce whale entanglements By CASSANDRA PROFITA Oregon Public Broadcasting Oregon’s Dungeness crab season is coming up, but there’s a problem looming over this fi shery. The ropes and buoys that allow crabbers to collect their crab pots from the sea- fl oor can injure and even kill whales when they swim into them. Last year, 46 whale entan- glements were reported off the West Coast, and crab gear was responsible for about a third of them. According to Derek Orner, a bycatch reduction program coordinator with the National Marine Fisheries Service, this is a growing problem in the spiny lobster and Dunge- ness crab fi sheries. “Were seeing increases in whale entanglements with a number of species that are listed under the National Marine Mammal Protection Act, in particular with hump- back whales, gray whales, and blue whales,” he said. His agency recently announced grants for several ropeless fi shing gear proj- ects, including a new kind of crab pot developed by Coastal Monitoring Associ- ates of California. Bart Chadwick, the com- pany’s president, said when crabbers drop their pots in the ocean, the ropes and buoys can remain in the water col- umn for days. “The entanglement risk becomes high as you have ‘THE ADVANTAGE OF THIS SYSTEM IS REALLY THAT IT CAN SUBSTANTIALLY REDUCE THE RISK WITHOUT BEING SO EXPENSIVE AS A LOT OF THE SYSTEMS THAT HAVE BEEN TRIED IN THE PAST.’ Bart Chadwick | president of Coastal Monitoring Associates of California, developer of a new kind of crab pot hundreds of these traps in the water,” he said. “We feel like it’s just really import- ant both for the environment and for the fi shermen, fi nding a way to solve this problem in a way that allows people to keep fi shing and do their jobs.” His company is devel- oping a crab pot that would keep the offending ropes out of the water column until the crabber is ready to pull the pot. The pot allows crabbers to set a timer for the release of the rope and buoy based on when they expect to be back to collect their catch. The goal is to reduce the time the gear poses a risk to whales by 75%, Chadwick said. Chadwick’s company has developed retrieval systems for other types of equipment, and he said the challenge, in OREGON CAPITAL INSIDER Get the inside scoop on state government and politics! this case, is keeping the cost down. Other ropeless tech- nologies that have been developed cost thousands of dollars, he said. “The advantage of this system is really that it can substantially reduce the risk without being so expensive as a lot of the systems that have been tried in the past,” Chadwick said. “What we’re trying to do is get the unit cost down into the range of a couple hundred dollars, which is in the range of fi sh- ing gear itself right now.” The company received a federal grant for $119,746 to develop a prototype and work with fi shermen to test it. Chadwick said the ini- tial tests will be conducted in California, but then he plans to deploy some of the pots on boats in Oregon and Washington. Orner said other proj- ects his agency is funding are exploring geolocation and acoustic technologies, including a completely rope- less option that would use compressed air to send pots to the surface when the fi sh- ing boat arrives to collect them. “We’re looking at a num- ber of different approaches,” Orner said. “We’re look- ing for technologies that are cost-effective and easily usable by the fi shermen. If we can reduce the amount of time that those lines are in the water, obviously, that’s going to reduce the entanglement possibilities.” Luke Whittaker/Chinook Observer Stacks of crab pots fi ll the Port of Ilwaco parking lot. 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