Sometime this summer, Vineyarders will have another opportunity to buy freshly-harvested blue mussels from Vineyard Sound. The forecast is even better for the year 2012, if all goes according to plan for Menemsha fishermen Alec Gale and Tim Broderick.

The two men have big plans. They have been working with the town of Chilmark, the Martha’s Vineyard Shellfish Group and others on an experimental blue mussel farm off the north shore of the Vineyard.

Far from the Island's shoreline lies a harbor in the woods. Edgartown's innermost harbor has all the elements of a waterfront, minus the water, the swift-moving currents and high-priced real estate.

Vineyard fishermen have joined a federal lawsuit against the National Marine Fisheries Service and the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission over the lack of management of river herring and shad in federal waters. The lawsuit targets offshore industrial large-scale fishing boats working the Gulf of Maine and waters south of the Vineyard as culprits in the sharp decline of the fish.

Among all the species taken by fishermen in this part of the world, horseshoe crabs have, until now, enjoyed a dubious distinction: they were the only ones targeted while in the act of reproducing.

The easiest way for many to catch them was to walk the beaches at the times of the full and new moons in May and June and simply pick them up as they came into the shallows to spawn.

Striped bass, one of the most prized fish swimming in Vineyard waters, the focus of fishing tournaments and the dish on many dinner tables, is in decline here, that much is agreed. But what to do about it? That is not, and the divided opinions are lining up around new restrictions proposed to protect the fish.

The bottom has fallen out of the wholesale lobster market, which is bad news for the lobstermen and good news for consumers.

The price being paid to lobstermen at the dock is at a 20-year low, according to Bill Adler, the executive director of the Massachusetts Lobstermen’s Association. He said the problem is tied to the economy and an oversupply of lobsters.