Alaska Fish Factor: Outlook is Bleak for Halibut Catches

A coast wide catch of 31 million pounds was approved on Friday by the International Pacific Halibut Commission, a decline of 7.5 percent from last year, and far better than the 30% cut that was widely anticipated. Alaskas share of the Pacific catch is 23 million pounds, down 2.5 million pounds across the board.

The IPHC commissioners, three from the US and three from Canada, each said the 2013 annual meeting last week was the toughest one ever. I vote for the fish, said US Commissioner Ralph Hoard at the close of the meeting via webinar. Many questions remain about halibut bycatch and migration. While I am extremely sympathetic about the impacts on fishermens economics, I am equally concerned about their future in this fishery. We dont want to end up like the East coast halibut fishery. There is none.

Along with setting the catch limits and fishery dates (see below), the IPHC addressed several regulatory proposals, none of which were approved.

A recommendation for less invasive circle hooks to be the only legal gear was tanked due to regulatory difficulties. Circle hooks do less damage to the fish as they are hauled aboard.

The commissioners are anxious at any possible time to reduce damage to fish and prevent needless mortality. So we are going to ask the IPHC staff to work on a public outreach mode, and to develop materials working with fishing groups to provide education on how circle hooks might be used more efficiently and more broadly through the industry. We have problems regulating it so we are going to focus on that for the time being, said Commissioner Jim Balsiger, who also is director of NOAA Fisheries in Alaska.

Halibut charter operators, who often remain out for a few days with clients, again proposed that frozen fish held on board should not be part of the possession limit. Balsiger said he agreed that the regulation does provide some hardship for that sector, but added: Unfortunately we have not been able to find a way to deal with the enforcement issues, so we have asked staff to continue working on this.

The eight hundred pound gorilla in the room remains the millions of pounds of halibut taken as bycatch in other fisheries. While the halibut fleets have seen their catches cut by 70 percent over three years, and the sport sector is now limited to a single fish in Southeast Alaska (two in the Central Gulf), the allowable bycatch limit tops five million pounds a year just in the Gulf of Alaska. (Bycatch limits are set by the North Pacific Fishery Management Council, not the IPHC.)

The halibut managers outlined four bycatch objectives to be undertaken by a project team - examining current amounts, better understanding of bycatch on the fishery and the resource, looking at options to reduce bycatch, and exploring options for mitigating the impacts of bycatch on downstream areas. Seven longer term options will be explored as to feasibility and practicality, and a report will be available this summer.

Paul Ryall, a commissioner from Canada seated at his first meeting, pointed out that bycatch mortality is the second largest source of removals coast wide, after the directed halibut fishery.

At a time of low halibut abundance in the North Pacific, and at a time when the stock assessment warns of low recruitment coming at us, we do think bycatch mortality of all halibut, and in particular juvenile halibut, is critical, he said. I urge all stakeholders to keep the pressure on their respective governments and management agencies to adopt the best practices and the newest technologies, and I know that we can bring bycatch mortality down substantially in the next few years.

Bycatch aside, Commissioner Balsiger put the industry on notice that the outlook for future halibut fisheries is quite bleak. We made a small step in a conservation direction this year and reduced the catch by some 2 million pounds but I dont think it is likely that we will be able to retain those small steps towards conservation into the future, Balsiger said. The likely risk in a one year period with these long lived animals is not that great, but in multiple years that risk gets greater. So we have some difficult years ahead of us.

The 2013 halibut fishery will run from March 22 through November 7. Here are the Alaska catch limits by region in millions of pounds. (Last years catches are shown in parentheses.)

Area 2C (Southeast) -- 2.97 (2.62m - the only area getting an increase)
Area 3A (Central Gulf) -- 11.03 (11.98)
Area 3B (Western Gulf) --4.29 (5.09)
Area 4A (Alaska Peninsula) --1.33 (1.56)
Area 4B (Aleutian Islands) --1.45 (1.86)
Area 4CDE (Bering Sea) 1.93 (2.46)

Cruise crud Discharge laws for cruise ships will be watered down if Governor Parnell gets his way. Senate Bill 29 and House Bill 80, introduced by Parnell, would delete a statutory requirement for the ships to meet Alaska Water Quality Standards at the point of discharge. Current law requires that the vessels cannot discharge untreated sewage, treated sewage, gray water or other wastewaters in a manner that violates limits under state or federal law. According to the Cordova Times, the proposed legislation would allow cruise ships to discharge their wastewater into mixing zones, which would be allowed in any area through which the cruise ship is traveling.

The Parnell bills would overturn the provision of the cruise ship discharge law passed by popular vote in Alaska in 2006, Gershon Cohen of Haines told the Times. Cohen co-sponsored the 2006 Cruise Ship ballot measure that created the current rules.

The governor is going after the initiative to undo what the people of Alaska put in place, and simply has no concern for the democratic process that created the existing statute, Cohen said.

Weakening the regulations comes at the request of the cruise ship industry, according to international maritime attorney Jim Walker of Miami.

"The cruise industry bullied Alaska, threatening the state with pulling ships from Alaska if the wastewater standards were not relaxed," Walker wrote on his blog www.cruiselaw.com . "The real issue has always been the issue of whether the cruise industry would permit a state like Alaska to regulate it," Walker wrote. "Cruise lines don't pay any federal taxes on the $35,000,000,000 they collect on fares each year from tax paying Americans. They don't want to set a precedent of allowing states to impose standards to protect their natural resources. It's cheaper to pollute."

Gershon Cohen added that fishermen should be outraged by the cruise ship crud proposal, as it will besmirch the wild and natural/taken from pristine waters brand for Alaska salmon, which the industry has worked tenaciously for decades to create. If I were in the farmed fish business, I would be posting photos of cruise ships discharging into waters where these fish are caught," he said.

The 2011 cruise season was expecting 27 ships to visit Alaska, cruising 447 voyages and carrying 887,000 passengers, according to the latest data from the Resource Development Council.