ROCKPORT, Maine — For fans who missed Capt. Keith Colburn at the 2014 Maine Fishermen’s Forum, they will get another chance to catch him this week.
Colburn, one of the featured captains on the Discovery Channel reality television show “Deadliest Catch,” drew more than 100 people at the forum two years ago when he spoke about the Alaskan crab fishery and having a television crew on his boat.
He’s coming back to Maine this week for the 2016 version of the three-day commercial fishing conference, held each year in late winter at the Samoset Resort in Rockport.
The forum starts the morning of Thursday, March 3, and runs through the evening of Saturday, March 5.
The captain of the 156-foot crab boat Wizard first came to the conference in 2014 after meeting and befriending Port Clyde fisherman Gerry Cushman while vacationing in Maine in 2013.
Colburn is scheduled to be a panelist at a session scheduled for 1 p.m. Thursday along with fishermen from Maine and beyond, scientists, and Weather Channel meteorologist Keith Carson, formerly of WCSH in Portland.
“The forum board is delighted to welcome back Capt. Keith Colburn from the series ‘Deadliest Catch,’” officials said in a statement on the forum’s website. “He will be participating in the Thursday forum seminar ‘Questioning our Changing Oceans,’ and plans to be in attendance for the entire three-day event.”
There are about three dozen sessions scheduled for the forum, most of them seminars on fisheries management, science and economics. There will be health screenings, safety trainings, sessions on seafood preparation and, as usual, a trade show for vendors.
Seminars geared toward drawing larger crowds include:
— A day-long slate of shellfish topics scheduled for Thursday.
— Annual meetings for the Maine Lobstermen’s Association and the Maine Elver Fishermen’s Association.
— A session Friday on new methodology used by the Maine Department of Marine Resources to estimate the size of the Gulf of Maine lobster population.
— Habitat protection and restoration projects involving the Penobscot River and coral concentrations in the gulf.
— An overview on Maine’s scallop fishery, which has enjoyed a resurgence in value since landings plummeted in the 2000s.
DMR plans to release estimated 2015 catch totals for state fisheries in conjunction with the forum, including landings for Maine’s iconic lobster fishery.
The annual catch volume for Maine lobster surpassed 120 million pounds in each of the prior three years — 2012, 2013 and 2014 — after having topped 100 million pounds for the first time ever in 2011.
The estimated value of the statewide lobster haul in 2014 was $457 million, a record buoyed by increased demand that resulted in the highest average per-pound price paid to Maine fishermen since 2007, before the onset of the Great Recession.
Maine fishermen have said that though they believe the statewide catch volume in 2015 is lower than it was the prior year, continued market demand and resulting high dockside prices in 2015 are expected to result in another record revenue year for the state’s lobstering fleet.
