Overheard at a recent get together; a greenhorn crewman was explaining why he thought crewing on a trawler was such hard work...
"I average four hours a day just throwing over the halibut we catch. That's a back breaker!"
More like a heart breaker.
Keep yer flippers wet.
3 comments:
The groundfish of the Pacific are doomed. Commercial havesting will kill the most fertile grounds on earth. Hard to have faith in a system that is so corrupted by greed and gluttony.
Well, as a sealion, I guess I have a dog in this fight, as do you. If we are going to go down, I for one am going to go down swinging. I hope you will join us. We can make a difference, but it is going to be a struggle. Commercial fishing does not have to destroy the sea anymore than commercial farming has to destroy the land. But we have to have solid controls that work and are enforced! We have to jail the outlaws and put them out of the business.
It's no coincidence that 100 million(it was more) went missing in the same years that most of the bigger boats put sorting belts on deck. These belts aren't for just sorting halibut either. To avoid incidental bycatch overages of Cod (throw the smalls out, keep the bigs! SORT FASTER!), Flathead Sole (common overage in deep water sole fishing), skates , baby pollock every trawl captain in the fleet will tell his crew to throw them overboard if he thinks he might get a ticket. Arrow Tooth (its not a turbot in the gulf)and rockfish are also caught and thrown over in abundance during sole season. This is commonly recorded by observers. They see the big red bag back their during sole season and record it but NOTHING has ever happened to any of the operaters of these vessels. And its up to the Captains to record this data if there is no observer on board. So they come to town with 200,000 straight sole + their incidental limits (probobly a little less just to be safe, if they have good sorters) after fishing for 3 days on a pile of shit tooth, halibut, Cod [lots of juveniles and usually way too many to keep without getting an overage] the occasional whole fucking school of rockfish (happens alot in both deep water and shallow). How do you stop this? I'm here for the debate.
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