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About Me
- Wiglaf
- A local rock-perching observer of Gulf of Alaska fisheries who is fed up with the lies and deceptions rampant in Kodiak regarding the world's dirtiest fishing gear type, trawling. Unless bycatch and benthic damage are brought under control, the short term profits of trawling will result in the death of the Goose that lays the golden eggs...the Gulf of Alaska. Join us in our fight to overthrow the corporate oligarchs and democratize Alaska fisheries for long term sustainability.
Popular Posts
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Between the Bering Sea and the Gulf of Alaska, at least 5300 metric tons of halibut get legally wasted by draggers. This is sanctified by ...
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Review of “King Crabs of the World” Review by Braxton Dew NMFS, Ret. The Elephant In the Room Alaskans who pick up Brad Steve... -
The Peggy Jo has for a number of years been a scandalously dirty trawler. During a cod season a few years back she was responsible for shut...
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Waste on a Grand Scale Just when the Kodiak trawl fleet is announcing their "celebration of groundfish," dock talk includes ... -
- As we have argued before, incomplete science, cherry picked data, bum projections, and plain old fashioned dishonesty are a problem in th... -
Photo: Braxton Dew, NMFS (Ret.) "I thought you might like these slides, which show the obvious connection between red king crab behavi... -
TRAWL BYCATCH EFFECTS EVERYONE Subsistence, Sport, Charter, & Commercial Fishing Families Need A Stable Future Too! ... -
http://www.alaskajournal.com/Blog-Fish-Bytes/Blogs-2013/Non-pelagic-trawlers-hit-halibut-limit-in-Gulf-BSAI-plaice-TAC-achieved/ Keep ... -
Just when it looked like draggers like the Golden Fleece were cleaning up their act, an examination of the Vessel Specific Bycatch figures ... -
Here are the top halibut destroyers for the Gulf as of September 21st. There must be a new regime in the dragger processors, as only the Va...
1 comment:
How trawl halibut bycatch could be lowered, more arrowtooth and flatfish harvested, more processing jobs created all without council action starting tomorrow and why it hasn't happened.
Remember how the Bering Sea factory longline fleet formed a co-op all on their own? They had license limitation, sector split for cod and about 20 participants. They didn't need no stinkin' NPFMC, they bought out the bad actors and made their own rules. They set quotas and bycatch quotas on their own.
What does this have to do with groundfish in the Gulf and halibut bycatch? Oh, we can't do that, we have over 120 plus Gulf trawl LLP's, we can't get them to all agree!
But, there are only 7-8 Gulf processors.
In the Kodiak salmon fishery there are over 350 seine permits but only a little over 100 fish. You can't fish without a market and the processors decide who can and can't fish. The processors also dictate where and when seiners fish.
Why hasn't a NPFMC member asked Julie Bonney or Glen Reed why their processors buy fish from the high bycatch draggers?
Curt Waters, a trawl skipper, testified that if he was able to fish where and when he wanted to for arrowtooth he could catch 100,000 lbs in a 1 hr tow with almost no bycatch.
The processors could dictate who, when and how the trawl fleet fishes.
So the processors could say, we will buy no arrowtooth unless you have 100% observer coverage and fish when you can catch arrowtooth when they are segregated from the halibut. They could do something similar with flats and cod.
So why aren't they? And why have we gone 20 plus years with millions of pounds of excess, unnecessary halibut, crab, salmon, etc bycatch???
All I can come up with is that they think they can hold us hostage, by destruction of the resource until we cave in and give them processor shares or whatever it is they want.
All this talk about jobs for Kodiak is disingenuous. They have had the tools to lower bycatch, create jobs AND increase trawl catches all along. They prefer destruction of the resource and habitat to achieve their ends to working for the common good.
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