September 5, 2018 — Cell phones are being used by fishermen to bounty hunt for lost fishing gear for pay.
California fishermen created the retrieval project last year along with the Nature Conservancy to get ropes, buoys, pots and anchors out of the water after the dungeness fishery so they wouldn’t entangle whales, and Washington and Oregon quickly followed suit.
“They are using their cell phones and its GPS to take a picture of what the gear looked like, tell when they found it, and any identifying markings on the buoy – the vessel, the ID number, and also the latitude and longitude of exactly where they found it,” said Nat Nichols, area manager for groundfish and shellfish at the Alaska Dept. of Fish and Game office in Kodiak. He added that gear loss rates in different fisheries can be “anywhere from 3 to 23 percent.”
Under a special permit, the West Coast bounty hunters head out two weeks after the dungeness crab fishery closes to search for derelict gear.
“Dungies tend to be in shallower water and that means there is more wave energy and the gear can get lost or rolled up on the beach. A lot of it has a tendency to move around because it’s in the tidal surge,” Nichols said.
The fishermen get paid $65 for every pot they pull up. The gear then goes back to the original owners who pay $100 per pot for its return.
Saving whales was the prime motivator for pot retrievals on the West Coast. In Alaska’s crab and pot cod fisheries, it’s ghost fishing and gear conflicts.
Read the full story at the Anchorage Daily News