Buoy Shooting Validates Longheld Distrust

While it is troubling that two local draggers cooperatively ran down and shot the buoys of another fisherman; there is a deeper issue here, and that is the profound lack of respect Kodiak draggers have for other fishermen and by extension, the resources we all depend upon for our livelihoods.

'Talk's cheap' and its corollary 'actions speak louder than words," are perfectly illustrated by this willfull destruction of another fisherman's property. All the well tuned phrases about advocating for fishermen to work together to assure their economic survival seems to have gone overboard since the draggers are now fairly certain of their share of the Gulf of Alaska fisheries resources through sector splits and the 'tools' they hope to secure through NPFMC action beginning in October.  Now that their slice of the fish pie is assured, and apparently the 'restructured' observer program will not increase the coverage of this the dirtiest and most destructive gear type or put an end to the rampant cheating on bycatch, high grading, PSC overages, and waste by the dragger fleet; draggers now feel they can maliciously and brazenly destroy others' property and livelihoods.  Actions do speak louder than words.

At the Council meeting in Anchorage, we will hear the arguments, the assurances, the promises, the 'boot strap' statistics, and the good and righteous testimony by the advocates of economic growth and stability, all couched in such earnest and heartfelt words, while on the fishing grounds, far from the prying eyes of neutral witnesses, the drag fleet will pursue their destructive behaviors against the resources and now, apparently, other people's gear.

The only assurance that will protect Gulf of Alaska fisheries resources is 24/7 observation of Kodiak's drag fleet.  Nothing less will do, especially when the Council is now going to give the resource to them, lock, stock and smoking barrel.  Add this latest witnessed behavior to a long and tired litany of abuses by the drag fleet, and you have the inevitable destruction of our livelihoods, which the Council steadfastly refuses to recognize. 

Pay to play.  Either afford the 24/7 observer coverage on the draggers which we need to be assured that compliance to law, reason, and civilized behavior are followed, or turn that destructive gear type into one which has healthier long term consequences.  Anything less spells the end of us who depend upon the health of the oceans.

Keep yer head down and yer flippers wet.

Breaking News...Local Draggers Gun Down Cod Pot Buoys

Overheard on VHF channel 16...

 

Seems like the bad old days again when local draggers decimated my brethren sealions with semiautomatic weapons, only this time it was two local Kodiak based draggers (your good neighbors and mine) gunning down the buoys of a couple of local cod pot boats.  Yes indeed, those good intending, clean fishing, contribute to community foodbanking, bycatch avoiding, give us our rightful share of the GOA groundfishing fellas caught red handed cooperatively blasting the buoys of two different Kodiak pot boats.   Anybody out there got further details?   Sector Anchorage, did you copy that?

Just like your good neighbors, "Whitefish Draggers Are There."

The rest of the story is available in the 'comments' section, so read on.

Keep yer head down and yer flippers wet.

The Spectre of Gulf Ratz Arises Again

Gulf Ratz is on the move again.  As you may be aware, Gulf Ratz, a close, but more invasive political cousin to the common wharf rat,  is being revived under the guise of a tool for the draggers to control their appetite for wasting the resources of the Gulf of Alaska in the form of PSC (Prohibited Species Catch).  No mention of other bycatch.  The NPFMC will be taking this up at its October meeting.  It is widely expected that there will be the usual shrill and carefully planned call by Bonney and Co. for a rationalization program to award ownership of Gulf of Alaska groundfish to the draggers so they will act as better stewards of the resource.  The logic of "If you own it, you will take care of it" as championed by the NMFS (National Marine Trawler Service) and greenwashed environmental groups will rear its ugly head again.  No mention of any further independent observation of bycatch compliance is evident.  The abject failure of observer restructuring is apparently simply going to produce migraine headaches, economic stress, and out and out business failures for smaller operators of other gear types by denying them electronic monitoring options and forcing them to fish as scheduled regardless of weather and perhaps re-employing the Coast Guard once again as a rescue service rather than as a police force.  Amazing how the manipulation by powerful players can twist up well intended suggestions to their self serving best advantage.

Wiglaf is not the only fisherlion concerned:
 
"Several fishermen expressed concerns that if small boat fleets don’t survive, communities won’t survive. Many are also concerned about how the proposed program would affect the next generation of fishermen. Overall, no one at the meetings said they favor rationalization. But all expressed the need to protect the traditional fleets and the communities. The overall goal of rationalization is to avoid bycatch while still obtaining optimum yield."  Read more from Aleutians East Borough's Fish News.

Of course NMFS loves rationalized fisheries, and south of us, along the west coast of America, the fisheries are rationalized:

"West Coast Groundfish Catch Shares began in 2011 for the Shorebased Individual Fishing Quota (IFQ) Fishery. Over ten years in the making, it is one of the most transformative strategies in this fishery's management history. NOAA Fisheries, the west coast groundfish fleet, the Pacific Fishery Management Council, Pacific States Marine Fisheries Commission, and the west coast states have worked together toward a common goal of healthy, sustainable fisheries and fishing communities. In addition to catch share quotas, the West Coast Groundfish IFQ Fishery includes a vastly improved monitoring system—using 100% observer coverage at sea and 100% monitoring of landings on shore. This refined monitoring system allows the fishery to be managed on an individual vessel basis, rather than via fleet-wide measures.  While the results presented in this report reflect only one year of data, a picture is emerging that is indeed positive for the groundfish resource, the fishermen, and their communities."

 

All the happy words are there so it must be okay, right?

Keep yer flippers wet.

European Union Proposes Trawling Ban

http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2012/07/european-commission-proposes-pro.html

Keep yer flippers wet.

Draggers Found to Damage Environment

Is this news?

http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2012/0906/Bottom-trawling-wrecking-ocean-floor-study-finds

Only in Alaska, where we still live in an illusion that we can "foul our nest  and move out West."

Keep yer flippers wet.

Editorial: Council gets it right on bycatch, more work to do

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The Journal of Commerce

“Glacial” is the word most often used to describe the North Pacific Fishery Management Council process, but that’s actually unfair to glaciers.

Not even time-lapse photography would reveal much movement on reducing halibut bycatch in the Gulf of Alaska until the council’s vote June 8 in Kodiak to cut it by 15 percent starting in 2014.

The only previous cut in trawl halibut bycatch was a 27.4 metric ton reduction for the rockfish program passed in 2010 that represented about 1.4 percent of the 2,000 metric ton, or 4.4 million pound, trawl halibut bycatch allotment in place since 1986.

Rather than compromise on the amount of the reduction, as many expected, the council compromised with the trawl fleet on time by phasing in the maximum cut under consideration over three years.

We applaud the council action as an important first step, and encourage the members to continue pushing toward more meaningful measures to reduce bycatch even further.

The trawl fleet made [a] series of self-defeating arguments against cutting halibut bycatch, taking the position the move was more allocation than conservation, pointing fingers at discards in the commercial halibut fishery, suggesting trawlers are balancing the ecosystem by removing arrowtooth flounder and juvenile halibut, and even attacking the International Pacific Halibut Commission.

A majority of the council — namely, the Alaska delegation — didn’t buy any of that.

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For more, follow the link to The Alaska Journal of Commerce.

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Rollback PSC BY 6% For The Next Ten Years

This is the incremental approach and will give draggers all the time they need to get their house in order.  Most all the valuable species that bottom draggers (NPT-non-pelagic trawlers) catch can be caught by other more selective gear types.  Convert or go out of business.  We cannot afford to lose the ocean's productivity because draggers won't change. Just because they have been doing it wrong for a long time doesn't mean they should be allowed to continue.  Biomass fisheries are unsupportable.

KYFW

Dragger Halibut Bycatch Reduced By 15%!

AMCC Press Release:  Fishery Managers Lower Halibut Bycatch Limit in Gulf of Alaska

Kodiak, AK- Federal fishery managers took important action today to protect the health of the halibut population in the Gulf of Alaska. Members of the North Pacific Fishery Management Council (the Council) voted to reduce bycatch of halibut in the Gulf of Alaska trawl fisheries by 15%. The bycatch cap of the hook and line fleet was also reduced.

“This action will help protect the health of the halibut population and the jobs of thousands of commercial and charter halibut fishermen in our coastal communities who rely on halibut,“ said Theresa Peterson, fisherman and Kodiak Outreach Coordinator for the Alaska Marine Conservation Council.

Halibut are caught incidentally by the millions in groundfish fisheries, especially trawl fisheries, that are pursuing species such as arrowtooth flounder, yellowfin sole and Pacific cod. The halibut caught are often dead and are required by law to be discarded back into the ocean. The trim in bycatch is taken off the top of the currently allowable cap of about 5 million pounds and will be effective in 2014.

“On behalf of our organization and the over 1500 sport, commercial, subsistence harvesters and other halibut users across Alaska who called for reducing waste, we thank the Council for taking meaningful action to protect our halibut resource “ said Linda Behnken, Executive Director of the Alaska Longline Fishermen’s Association.

Science by the International Pacific Halibut Commission has shown that reducing bycatch is important to the short and long-term health of the halibut population.  The Council’s action to curtail bycatch will contribute to rebuilding halibut population in the Gulf of Alaska.  

“We applaud the Council for taking this important first step and we look forward to the future action by fishery managers to further limit bycatch for the long-term health of the halibut resource,” said Peterson. 

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From Andrew Jensen, of the Alaska Journal of Commerce:

In speaking in support of his motion to address the trawl industry arguments that this debate over bycatch is about allocation and not conservation, Hull pointed to the analysis that stated a bycatch limit is not an allocation.

"Instead," the document stated regarding bycatch limits, "it reflects the maximum removal amount of the designated species that society is prepared to tolerate, before it takes punitive action to curtail further (prohibited species catch) losses. Because PSC must be avoided, to the extent practicable, it cannot be regarded as an asset of fixed quantity, but instead as an upper-bound threshold, the farther below which the total PSC mortality level, the better, all else equal."

Based on the massive volume of public comment and written submissions seeking a bycatch cut, Hull noted, society's willingness to tolerate halibut bycatch in an environment of declining abundance of catchable fish has clearly reached its limit.
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From Margaret Bauman of The Cordova Times:

Jonathan Warrenchuk, an ocean scientist with Oceana, a conservation group dedicated to protection of the world’s oceans, said the phased in approach was a bit of a surprise. “It is pretty clear, this is just a Band Aid,” he said. “The halibut resource looks like it is in trouble and managers are making big cuts, but the cuts were needed now. They weren’t even considering a large number to begin with. This is too much of a compromise.”

Still, Warrenchuk calculated that when fully in place in 2016, the action would result in a reduction of over 300 metric tons of halibut annually.

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Democracy is not entirely dead at the North Pacific Fisheries Management Council.  Thank you to everybody who helped.  Many people came to Kodiak at their own considerable expense to testify, and it made a difference.  This should be seen as a good start.  We still need to build momentum to roll back dragger destruction of our Gulf.  Halibut are hardly the only species under duress by careless and wasteful fishing practices.

Keep yer flippers wet.

"Trawl Bycatch Could Be Lowered" Guest Contributor

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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More public testimony tomorrow.  Pretty hard to predict where this public melodrama will go. While the majority of the testimony was for 15% reduction in the PSC of halibut, there were moments of preposterous craziness, as when one trawler skipper claimed that the trawlers were rebalancing the ecosystem by cleaning up the ocean.  Moments of drama included Julie Bonney and Curt Waters coodinating a reading of scripted testimony by processor workers claiming that they will lose six weeks of work if the trawlers get cut back 15% on halibut PSC. Too bad the exact same script was read minutes earlier by another processor worker.  That these irresponsible elements, the draggers under Julie's direction, can control the Council and the Gulf of Alaska is a national tragedy. 

Doom Angel #1 by Brendan Harrington

All rights reserved by Rasmuson Foundation

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Tomorrow NPFMC Will Decide...

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