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Alaska commercial fishing news and notes
About me
- Deckboss
- I'm a journalist covering Alaska's commercial fishing industry. My real name is Wesley Loy. Reach me at wloy61@gmail.com.
Alaska commercial fishing news and notes
7 comments:
nothing new
Damn, great letter. Hopefully this will light a fire under the asses of the AK Council members because the WA, OR (and NMFS?) seats aren't gonna do shit.
Sure its a well written letter, but imagine the letters that Trident's attorneys put out. These guys are just criticizing. An attorney would be threatening legal action.
want less halibut bycatch
start catching pacific cod with fucking pots.
its really that fucking simple boy
everyone knows that
Well Written
but the key here is how do we reduce bycatch.
by catching cod with pots instead of trawls and factory freezer longliners.
In the past 5 years the total Bering Sea castch of Under 60 Pot Cod has grown from 2% to 10% total.
Largely this has been spurned on by the new 2014 state waters pot cod fishery.
It began as 3% of the Bering Sea TAC and is now at 6%.
Elsewhere in the state it runs from 25% -35%.
Why not in the Bering Sea.
Are the halibut and salmon up there not as important.
Studies have shown that those halibut and king salmon migrate all over Alaska, Canada, Washington and Oregon (the kings)(we consider all the halibut Alaskan)
So we go on killing tens if not hundreds of thousands of king salmon, some documented crudely, others not.
We go on killing more halibut than the entire state produces in numbers of individual fish.
And yet we CHOOSE to keep the Bering Sea State waters fishery at 6% instead of the 25-35% in the rest of the state.
This is INSANE.
We could save millions of pounds of halibut and tens of thousands of king salmon by changing gear types up in the Bering Sea
So if the issue is that the big Japanese, Norwegians and Bundrants own it all, then at least have the common decency to force them to fish their quota in a fish friendlier fashion and quit killing all the king salmon and halibut.
The state must take action.
btw
we sat next to a trawler last year that the whole crew took off flew to the bush company and left several hundred dead halibut and king salmon sitting on deck, rotting and getting eaten by birds
the state needs to take action due to their nexus to the bycatch species.
the industry needs to take action.
the cod fleet was shut down two months early.
we could have saved a couple million pounds of halibut for the rest of Alaska.
at least.
And the other running joke is the crabbers.
the crab grounds continue to get ripped to shreds while they sit back and catch shit for cod.
they could take 100 million pounds with pots yet they're so lazy or making too much money on crab that they catch around 20 million pounds and only fished 19 days this year.
19 days with no bycatch.
and the state waters was only about 33 days.
both fleets could fish 90 days and avoid millions upon millions of pounds of bycatch.
WAKE THE F>>K UP alaska
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