Monday, January 7, 2008 

To the editor: Mid-water trawl bycatch is low

Recently KMXT ran a story about a proposal by the Kodiak Fish and Game Advisory Committee to close Deadman’s Bay to all trawl fishing.

 As Casey Kelly reported, local trawlers fish pollock in Deadman’s Bay using mid-water trawl gear. A basic look into trawl gear will show you that the reason they are called “mid-water” trawl nets is that they are designed specifically to be fished in the middle of the water column, not on the bottom.

 Walt Sargent, who supports a trawl closure of Deadman’s Bay, told KMXT “Call over to Near Island, one of the places over there — NMFS places — and they’ll tell you that over 80 percent of the time some part of that mid-water trawl is on the bottom.”

 We did call over there and were told by NMFS biologist Tom Pearson that he can’t think of anyone at NMFS who would have made such a statement.

 Sargent seemed particularly concerned about king crab stocks in Deadman’s Bay and suggests that there is no bycatch data. This is not true.

 A draft report by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game shows that for the years 2004 to 2007, 55 percent of the tows in the bay were covered by observers. The same document shows that the average annual king crab bycatch was 59 pounds. Just 59 pounds for the entire trawl fleet!

 Blaming the state of the king crab stock on trawl fleet bycatch is ridiculous. King crab stock abundance has more to do with the hatching and survivorship of king crab larvae and juveniles.

 Studying climate, currents, predation impacts, and acidification of the ocean does not necessitate a trawl closure. If Sargent is truly concerned about crab mortality, then let’s talk about all sources — pots, longline, trawl, subsistence and personal use — instead of singling out one gear type.

 Kodiak’s trawl fleet is proud to bring in 50 percent of the total volume of fish that lands in Kodiak. It’s important that people know that just because someone says something is true about trawl fishing, it doesn’t mean that it is true. --    Alvin R. Burch writing to the Kodiak Daily Mirror

New float coming to Seward marina

Earlier this year the city was awarded a $1 million Denali Commission grant to help fund an additional float, part of the Seward East Harbor Expansion Project.

 On Dec. 10, Seward City Council appropriated $226,724 from the grant money to fund the continuing services of Tryck Nyman Hayes, the engineering firm that has been managing earlier phases of the project.

 The resolution authorizes City Manager Phillip Oates to enter into an agreement with the firm and adds an amendment, or change order, to the Tryck Nyman Hayes contract to begin engineering, design and contract management for construction of the Z float in the small boat harbor.

 Z float will be a long float along the east breakwater. How long it will be is yet to be determined. – Seward Phoenix Log

Crew lifted from foundering vessel aground near Kodiak

KODIAK -- Three crew members were hoisted off a fishing boat late Sunday afternoon when their longliner ran aground at Japanese Bay on the southwest side of Kodiak Island.

 Two other crew members -- the master and the engineer -- stayed aboard and hoped to refloat the boat overnight at high tide, Coast Guard Lt. Herbert Law said.

 The Clyde, a 59-foot longliner, sent a Mayday around 2:30 Sunday, Law said. The boat wasn't taking on water and the helicopter hoisting of the three crew members was not considered a rescue, he said. "We're just taking them in," Law said.

 The boat ran aground about 67 miles from town, he said. – Anchorage Daily News

Charter guide faces loss of license

The commercial fishing license of Bodega Bay skipper Rick Powers is on the line.

 Powers, skipper of the New Sea Angler and proprietor of Bodega Bay Sportfishing, could lose his commercial passenger vessel and commercial fishing licenses in light of fishing law violations.

 The California Fish and Game Commission is conducting a closed-door review and is expected to decide next month whether to revoke his license, suspend it or take no action.

 Powers was among sport fishing captains targeted by wardens in a sweep of ports from San Diego to Fort Bragg in 2002 in which 13 skippers were cited in nine counties.

Powers and a deckhand were busted by wardens posing as fishermen during the undercover investigation called "Operation Near Shore."

 Among allegations lodged against Powers were encouraging passengers to use more than two hooks when fishing for rockfish, distributing illegal four-hook rigs, overlimits, taking undersize fish, wanton waste of fish, failure to file fishing trip logs with the state, perjury and filing false documents.

 Powers faced a felony conspiracy case, reflecting the number of violations officials called the "most egregious" they encountered in the sweep. Initial charges could have sent him to prison for seven years.

 But a new prosecutor authorized a lenient deal in which 11 felonies were dismissed and Powers pleaded no contest to four misdemeanors, including using too many hooks for rockfish, unlawful taking of salmon and filing false fishing reports.

 Powers, who apologized in court for breaking the law, received two years' probation, a 90-day suspended sentence and an $8,000 fine, and agreed to make $30,000 in restitution through community service.

 Powers said this week that he paid his dues, including restitution by taking marine scientists out on research trips, and is surprised that his plea bargain in Sonoma County Superior Court didn't end his Operation Near Shore nightmare.

 Department of Fish and Game officials want his commercial licenses revoked, and in a certified letter last August, the Fish and Game Commission, citing his convictions, told him to appear before its hearing officer. The letter noted the commission suspended his license for other violations in 1985. – Marin Independent-Journal, California 

Today’s read: Salmon farming doomed?

The December issue of Science magazine ratcheted up the pressure on salmon farming to move further afield.

 In the first study to examine population-level effects of salmon farms on wild salmon runs researchers found that sea-lice emanating from salmon farms had killed 80 per cent of pink salmon runs on British Columbia's Broughton Peninsular.

 In four years, they predict, entire river systems could wave goodbye to pink salmon forever. Rather than just a nuisance, parasitic sea-lice from salmon farms are identified as potentially lethal. Bcause the decaying bodies of pinks, whose runs can be in millions, form a linchpin winter diet for other fish, bears and big cats this species disappearing could alter an entire ecology.

 Salmon farmers have been on red alert since July when Norwegian oil and gas billionaire John Fredriksen, himself the principal shareholder in the world's largest salmon farming company Marine Harvest, whilst standing on a Norwegian river-bank holding his fishing-rod told a reporter that salmon farms should be in places without wild salmon.

 Christened a “wild salmon saviour,” Fredricksen was inundated with messages of delight from the numerous angling and wildlife bodies which have been decrying marine pen cage salmon farming plonked in salmon migration routes for nearly 30 years.

 Salmon farming has attempted to improve its tattered image, but not fast enough to duck what is becoming an avalanche of evidence about its unfortunate footprint.

 As mechanisation and industry contraction have demolished its importance as a significant employer on Scotland's remote peripheries, the industry has assayed neighbourliness with wild fish interests. One method has been fallowing, or leaving a site to clean up naturally on the tides before recommencing operations.

 Another improvement was the use of a sea-lice antidote administered with food.

 Experiments in Ireland showed that treated young fish survived sea-lice assaults better. Recently, however, sea-lice in the west Highlands have started to develop resistance to the chemical.

 Some salmon farms undertook to rear young wild fish for sport fishery managers' restocking programmes, to compensate for the losses of wild fish due to sea-lice. The number of smolts going to sea were meant to swamp the saltwater sea-lice waiting at river-mouths for young bodies to attach to.

 However, the Canadian researchers found that local populations of sea-lice were generating up to a billion larvae, presenting an impossible gauntlet for vulnerable young fish to run.

 All along the costlier modifications to salmon farming were sidestepped. The greatest anxiety to scientists from farmed salmon is their escapement. Farming salmon on land using pumped sea-water water is a secure system, but costs more. Farming salmon in the open sea circumvents most problems, at any rate superficially, but also costs more.

 Every year in storms, and sometimes in calm weather, the cages in estuaries are broken. Reared fish swim out to mingle and interbreed with their wild cousins. Famished seals burst through the nets like foxes into a chicken-run, or storms overturn pens releasing all the occupants.

 In 2007 twelve Scottish farms reported significant losses, in one case a single salmon farm losing some 50,000 inmates.

 Escapement could be prevented by double-walled nets, but there has never been pressure sufficient to force the change. Consequently Scottish anglers report more and more farm fish in their bags, identifiable because of their abraded extremities.

 Farmed salmon are now being found on east coast rivers as well as west coast ones. The consequences for the survival of the wild salmon gene pool are unknown.

 Today salmon farming is shrinking in the UK. The industry is shifting to the unpopulated Chilean coast where costs are lower, and where wild salmon and vituperative critics do not exist.

 Despite the bizarre efforts of rookie politicians in the new Scottish government still trying to attract investment into salmon farming it is likely we are at a turning -point.

 Scotland has its EU obligations to protect wild salmon through the Habitats Directive.

There are powerful internationally-effective lobbyists for wild Atlantic salmon such as the charismatic leader of the Iceland-based North Atlantic Salmon Fund, Orri Vigfusson.

 His efforts have reduced commercial salmon netting to a shadow of its former self.

 If Scottish politicians desperate for a solution to the unique problems of the far-flung Scottish Highlands had not kept pumping the balloon of Scottish salmon farming with cash tipping from their sporrans, it would have relocated elsewhere long ago. (We pause now for an editorial interlude from Pacific Fishing magazine. We had no idea what a “sporran” is, so we looked it up. Turns out, a sporran is the purse of a traditional Scots kilt. We now return you to the article.)  There has been a weird blinkered refusal to face the towering dossier of damning studies.

 The jobs issue, long after only a handful of jobs was actually at stake, was permitted to defeat rational argument. A sustainable migratory fish resource blessed with amenable geography, and beloved of sportsmen, was disregarded in favour of an intensive form of food production which would not have survived a week if protracted in a publicly visible location. Salmon farming, surreally, was allowed to parade as Scotland's post-oil solution.

 Wracked with health scare revelations, lambasted by food writers, anathema to marine environmentalists, and now condemned by wildlife biologists, salmon farming's paradise for parasites and its soupy effluent continue to disfigure west Scotland's estuaries. But maybe not forever. Allowing these regions to remain disengaged might be more sensible. – Michael Wigan, writing in The Telegraph, U.K.

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Tuesday, January 8, 2008

Fishermen should aim higher in the market

Aquaculture, which includes fish farming, will dominate the future world seafood industry, but there will be increased opportunities for wild products in the upper end of the market, a professor of economics says.

 The forecast for increased demand for seafood is good for Alaska but fishermen must remember they are competing against other proteins, said James L. Anderson, chair of the Department of Environmental and Natural Resource Economics at the University of Rhode Island at Kingston, R.I.

 In the long run, all significant commercial seafood supplies will come from three sources: fish farms, aquaculture-enhanced fisheries and wild fisheries that adopt sustainable management systems, Anderson told participants at the recent Alaska Young Fishermen's Summit II in Anchorage.

 Wild fisheries will thrive if harvesters adopt management systems that clearly define rights and responsibilities; stop fighting over access and allocation; emphasize economic and environmental sustainability; improve quality; understand markets; and adapt to meet consumer demands and reduce bureaucracy and waste, Anderson said.

 To enhance the sale of wild products, he told the fishermen to create a message of diversity. Sell the "sauce," sell the "image," Anderson said, but also meet the demand for consistent availability and quality, stable or declining costs and other consumer demands.

 The industry should also expect to see continued rapid growth in markets for cod, cobia, tilapia, pangasius, channel catfish, flatfish and barramundi. The tilapia market has experienced very rapid growth, and many environmental nongovernment organizations are positive about tilapia, he said.

 Anderson said in the competition for seafood consumption, shrimp, tuna, salmon, Alaska pollock, catfish, tilapia, crab, cod, clams and flatfish ranked in the top 10 in 2005, according to a survey of fisheries of the United States completed in 2007. The survey information did not specify whether the seafoods were wild or from aquaculture sources.

 The biggest issues facing the seafood industry today are aquaculture, international trade, the rising influence of China in the market and large retail and restaurant entities concerned about ecolabeling and sustainability, Anderson said.

 Continued growth in aquaculture imports will continue, with per capita seafood consumption in the United States concentrated on fewer species produced primarily in aquaculture facilities, he said.

 Despite criticism from environmental groups, aquaculture will not go away. Attempts to curtail aquaculture development will be circumvented by new technology and product substitution, he said. The growth in aquaculture parallels a shift in the market toward value-added products that enhance consumer convenience.

 Still, there will be increasing opportunities for wild products in such upper-end market segments as natural food retailers and luxury restaurants, he said.

 Anderson's research in fisheries and aquacultural economics began in 1980 with a study on the bioeconomics of salmon ranching in the Pacific Northwest. Salmon "ranching" involves raising young salmon fry in hatcheries and releasing them to mature in the open ocean.

 Anderson has also been involved in numerous research projects related to fisheries and aquaculture management, seafood marketing and international trade, and seafood price forecasting. His recent work has focused on analysis of salmon and shrimp markets and evaluating how aquaculture development and rights-based fisheries management are changing the global seafood sector. – Anchorage Daily News

Fishermen die in Kodiak plane crash

KACHEMAK SELO, Alaska -- The young fisherman's body came down the treacherous switchback trail in a snowstorm Sunday. Andrian Reutov completed his last trip home from the fishing grounds on Russian Christmas Eve.

 For several decades, the men of the three Old Believer communities at the head of Kachemak Bay have made their living from the sea. Lately, the commercial-fishing routine has included longlining for cod in the Gulf of Alaska. Several dozen Russian boats dock in Kodiak during the winter so their crews can make frequent trips home via charter flights.

 As fishing communities, the Old Believer settlements near Homer know what it is like to have family members never return. But the crash of a charter flight in Kodiak Saturday, which took the lives of five local fishermen, was something new.

 "There was tragedies all along, but nothing like this. This was big," said Sergei Reutov, a former mayor of Kachemak Selo, the village along the tidal flats at the head of the bay. "They were all coming home for Christmas."

 Orthodox Christmas will be marked today with long early-morning church services in all three communities: Voznesenka on the bluff at the end of East End Road, 23 miles from Homer; Razdolna, another three miles beyond; and Kachemak Selo, at the foot of the icy switchback road negotiated in winter by trucks with chains.

 The communities were established by different family groups in the early 1980s when conservative Old Believers split from the area's original settlement, at Nikolaevsk near Anchor Point. Today, the combined population at the head of the bay is well over 500, said Sergei Reutov, who is not closely related to Andrian.

 The Old Believers are an Orthodox sect that split from the Russian Church in the 17th century over matters of religious practice. Spread around the world today, they tend to live in isolated, tightly-knit communities, speaking Russian at home and rejecting certain trappings of the modern world while embracing others.

 The Kachemak Bay communities lost two pairs of brothers to the air crash in Kodiak.

Zahary Martushev, 25, and Iosif Martushev, 15, lived near Kachemak Selo but outside the village. Iosif, also known as Joe, was in ninth grade in the village school.

 Stefan Basargin, 36, and his brother Pavel Basargin, 30, lived in Razdolna. Both died in the crash. Stefan had a large family, villagers said. A third Basargin brother and a cousin were among the four survivors.

 Andrian Reutov, a Cook Inlet driftnet fisherman in summer, was the youngest son in a family of six boys and four girls. He was 22 and got married last May. Andrian had recently converted his boat for longlining cod and was fishing late into the season to pay off his investment, said an older brother, Alexander Reutov. – Anchorage Daily News

Charter boat owner named to North Pacific council

The Commerce Department today announced the appointment of Robert E. Dersham, of Anchor Point, Alaska, to the North Pacific Fishery Management Council.

 The North Pacific Fishery Management Council is one of eight regional bodies established by the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act that prepare fishery management plans for marine fish stocks in their respective geographical areas of responsibility. NOAA’s Fisheries Service submits the management plans to the Secretary of Commerce for review and approval.

 A charter boat operator for more than 23 years, Dersham has been an active participant on the Alaska Board of Fisheries for more than eight years, is a fisheries coordinator with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, and is co-owner and operator of a fishing lodge on the east side of Cook Inlet. Dersham represents the recreational sector. Under this appointment, Dersham will serve on the Council until Aug. 10, 2009 – Press release

 Council members represent diverse fisheries’ interests. Their combined knowledge and experience represent commercial and recreational fishermen as well as environmental, academic, and other interests from each geographical area concerned. They are selected from nominations submitted by governors from the areas served by the eight councils and are appointed by the Secretary of Commerce. – Anchorage Daily News

Kathy, Ed Hansen named Fishermen of the Year

The United Fishermen of Alaska Board of Directors, composed of 37 fisheries trade organizations and four at-large members, have named Kathy and Ed Hansen as "Fishermen of the Year" for 2007, based on the Hansen's tireless work helping to forge long term solutions to the issue of fisheries allocation between the traditional commercial and emerging sport charter sectors of the industry.

 "Usually just one person wins this award," said UFA President Joe Childers, "but in this case we had to make an exception. Where Kathy goes Ed goes, and vice versa, and wherever they go and whatever they do they complement and support one another."

 The Hansens are the fisherman's version of a "Power Couple" and are well known, having fished together throughout the southeast region for over 23 years. Kathy and Ed are Juneau residents who longline for halibut and troll for salmon out of Hoonah and Sitka.

 They also are recognized in meeting halls throughout Alaska for their work in regulatory forums at the local, state and national levels. Kathy has been Chair of the Juneau-Douglas Fish and Game Advisory Council since 2000, and is also the Executive Director of Southeast Alaska Fishermen's Alliance (SEAFA).

 Her participation on the North Pacific Fishery Management Council's Halibut Charter working group is deeply appreciated because she is one of only two commercial fisherman's representatives. The working group was formed in 2005 to pursue long-term solutions to the controversial Gulf of Alaska halibut allocation issues between rapidly expanding commercial charter fisheries and the traditional commercial longline fisheries. Kathy is also the only commercial representative on the State taskforce on charter limited entry taskforce. – Press release

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