Saving Seafood

Sen Sullivan to NOAA: ‘Meaningful Changes’ Needed for Marine Sanctuaries and Monuments

September 6, 2017 (Saving Seafood) — In a letter last month to NOAA Acting Administrator Benjamin Friedman, Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-AK) called for “meaningful changes” to marine sanctuary and marine national monument designations, particularly in the form of greater stakeholder engagement.

In his letter, Sen. Sullivan, who serves as Chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Oceans, Atmosphere, Fisheries, and Coast Guard, called the concept of marine sanctuaries and monuments “well-intentioned” but wrote that they had caused challenges for coastal communities across the country, including Alaska’s “robust commercial fishing industry.”

“Fisheries restrictions imposed outside of the process utilized by Regional Fishery Management Councils on these areas are problematic for the communities who rely on access to commercial fisheries,” Sen. Sullivan wrote.

Sen. Sullivan expressed concern that the National Marine Sanctuary Act, while requiring stakeholder engagement, does not require that this engagement be taken into consideration when designating a sanctuary. “This can lead to communities feeling betrayed by the agency when the established sanctuaries are unrecognizable to the localities who spent years working with NOAA to form a mutually beneficial designation and management structure,” he wrote.

Sen. Sullivan also called into question the process by which the president can unilaterally establish national monuments with no stakeholder consultation under the Antiquities Act. He criticized recent presidents for using the national monument process as a “political tool” to “limit access to economically viable resources.”

“This action is often taken at the request of non-affected parties such as environmental groups,” he wrote. “This is problematic when monuments are established without the use of best-available science, absent stakeholder engagement, and inattentive to the economic consequences for local communities.”

On August 24, Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke completed a review of national monuments ordered by President Donald Trump. While Secretary Zinke’s full recommendations have not been made public, the AP reported that they include changes to a “handful” of monuments.

Read the full letter here

 

ALASKA: Science and accountability urged in fisheries management

Behnken: no one wins if the resource loses

September 1, 2017 — Fisheries and conservation advocates for coastal communities are urging that greater accountability and conservation measures be included in reauthorization of the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act.

“Both fishermen and managers understand that in the long run no one wins if the resource loses,” veteran harvester Linda Behnken told Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, during a field hearing of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation subcommittee on Oceans, Atmosphere, Fisheries, and Coast Guard on Aug. 23 in Soldotna. “As Congress works to strengthen the Magnuson-Stevens Act to support community based fishermen, we firmly believe that maintaining productive fisheries through resource conservation is step one in that process …   The heightened emphasis on resource rebuilding that was central to the last reauthorization is still essential to long term resource health and we ask that Congress recommit to conservation goals,” she said.

Behnken, a harvester for more than 30 years, longlines for halibut and black cod and trolls for salmon with her family out of Sitka, which ranks 15th of all domestic fishing ports in the value of commercial landings. She is the president of the Halibut Coalition and executive director of the Alaska Longline Fishermen’s Association.

Behnken also asked the committee to address challenges faced by young fishermen and the growing impact to rural communities of lost fishing access.

Read the full story at the Cordova Times

ALASKA: Stakeholders voice preferred changes to federal fisheries act

August 31, 2017 — SOLDOTNA, Alaska — Sportfishing groups and advocates want to see the federal government separate the management of sport and commercial fishing in the upcoming renewal of the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act.

The act, originally passed in 1976 and co-sponsored by the late Alaska U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens, establishes the management system for federal and state fisheries in marine waters.

Under the law, the state has authority over waters from the mean high tide line out to three nautical miles offshore, and federal government has authority over waters from 3–200 nautical miles offshore, known as the Exclusive Economic Zone.

The National Marine Fisheries Service, a branch of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, oversees the fisheries in federal waters.

Last reauthorized in 2006, the act is up for renewal and potential amendment. Sen. Dan Sullivan, who chairs the Senate Oceans, Atmosphere, Fisheries and Coast Guard subcommittee, chaired a field hearing for the act at Kenai Peninsula College on Wednesday, hearing from more than a dozen witnesses on three panels and discussing potential changes to the act.

The hearing on the Kenai Peninsula was the first of the field hearings on the reauthorization.

Panelists with interests in the sportfishing industry repeatedly emphasized that commercial fishing and recreational fishing are two distinct activities and asked for recreational fishing to be considered in management decisions.

Read the full story at the Alaska Journal of Commerce

ALASKA: Fleet consolidation and loss of fishing jobs a hot topic at MSA hearing

August 28, 2017 — Timed to coincide with the 25th annual Kenai River Classic invitation-only fishing derby, Senator Dan Sullivan brought his Subcommittee on Oceans, Atmosphere, Fisheries, and Coast Guard to Soldotna on Wednesday for a hearing on the reauthorization of the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act.

Congress periodically reviews the Act, giving lawmakers a chance to fine-tune or make changes where needed. One theme was addressed by many of the dozen invited experts who testified.

Fleet consolidation is a predictable outcome of limited access privilege fisheries, or LAPs in the acronym-filled parlance of the Magnuson-Stevens Act, or MSA. A limited access fishery is one that has been privatized in some way. For example, in the Bering Sea, the crab fishery was rationalized more than 10 years ago, resulting in a fleet today that is just a fraction the size it was before privatization. That’s because when the owners of boats also became the owners of crab quota, they could buy or lease that quota, and one boat could do the fishing of many. Some put the loss of crewman and skipper jobs from the year before rationalization to the next at over 900.

“In Alaska, the problem is now too few fishermen, not too few fish,” Linda Behnken of Sitka said. Behnken testified on behalf of the Halibut Coalition and the Longline Fishermen’s Association.

Read the full story at Alaska Public Media

ALASKA: Sen. Sullivan presses to re-approve law governing federal fisheries

August 25, 2017 — ANCHORAGE, Alaska — Sooner or later, Congress will have to start wading through dozens of fights that go along with re-approving the key law that governs federally managed fisheries.

Sen. Dan Sullivan is pushing for sooner, pressing the Commerce Committee to start advancing a revisit of the Magnuson-Stevens Act, historically brushed up in Washington every decade or so, but not since 2007.

As part of Sullivan’s effort to advance MSA to re-authorization, the Republican senator on Wednesday convened a meeting in Soldotna for a subcommittee that deals with fishery policy to hear testimony from a variety of industry leaders.

State and federal government leaders were among the 14 panelists, and so were commercial and sport fish business owners.

One view expressed by many stakeholders on the panels at Kenai Peninsula College was actually not directly related to MSA approval: The belief that the federal government needs to invest more money to improve quality of the data used to monitor escapement goals, bycatch, and other fishery benchmarks.

Read the full story at KTUU

ALASKA: Sen. Sullivan Welcomes NOAA Marine Debris Director to Alaska

August 22, 2017 — ANCHORAGE, Alaska — U.S. Senator Dan Sullivan (R-AK) this week welcomed Nancy Wallace, director of the NOAA Marine Debris Program, to Alaska. The Senator and Director Wallace joined a roundtable discussion with Peter Murphy, Alaska regional coordinator of the NOAA Marine Debris Program, Chris Pallister, director of Gulf of Alaska Keeper, and Molly McCammon, director of the Alaska Ocean Observing System, on the topic of marine debris and the Senator’s Save Our Seas (SOS) Act, which passed the Senate in early August.

“I appreciate Director Wallace for taking the time to come to Alaska, a state with a massive coastline that is disproportionately impacted by trash entering the ocean,” said Senator Sullivan. “Director Wallace’s visit sends a strong signal that the federal administration has its attention on Alaska, and is engaged with stakeholders and those on the ground working to keep our shores clean. I also appreciate the efforts of Alaskans, like Chris and Molly, who do such amazing work raising public awareness and helping to clean up Alaska’s coastal ecosystems and prevent further debris from reaching our shores.”

Read the full story at Alaska Business Monthly

Congressmen hear pitches on how to open up Alaska’s natural resources

August 18, 2017 — Alaska Rep. Don Young has spent the week guiding some of his fellow Republican members of Congress around some of Alaska’s natural resources, and the group said they’re ready to act to make drilling and mining more accessible in Alaska.

Young and four other members of the congressional Western Caucus joined with representatives of oil, gas, timber, fish, Alaska Native corporations and other industries in Anchorage on Thursday to discuss just what Congress could do to encourage more production in Alaska.

The industry representatives and Republican lawmakers agreed on the overall plan: Get the federal government out of the way. For the lawmakers, that meant naming names of troublesome bureaucrats.

The industry groups spoke of reforming regulatory programs and paring back the power of agencies and environmental groups.

Young convened the group at the Dena’ina Center downtown after travels to the North Slope to check out facilities run by ConocoPhillips and BP, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and Pump Station No. 1, start of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System.

The group also visited the Fort Knox Gold Mine outside of Fairbanks. Afterward, some of them headed south for a fishing trip this weekend.

Read the full story at the Alaska Dispatch News

Sitka Tribe of Alaska’s Traditional Foods Program nourishes families

August 18, 2017 — It’s a cloudy Tuesday in July. At 4 a.m., it’s already light out, and Jeff Feldpausch and Mike Smith are preparing for a trip up to Sitkoh Bay to harvest sockeye salmon and halibut. It’s just another day in the office for them: a boat trip to a remote area of Southeast Alaska to harvest food for the Sitka Tribe of Alaska’s (STA) Traditional Foods Program.

Every year, about 300 households receive food provided by their work, with food being distributed first to elders and then the rest of the community. In order to be eligible to receive food, one must be a resident of Sitka, Alaska, and a citizen of the Sitka Tribe of Alaska.

The program

Feldpausch, the Resource Protection Department Director, and Smith, the Traditional Foods Specialist, work together throughout the year to ensure that tribal members who may not have the resources to gather, hunt, or fish themselves have freezers and pantries stocked. While it varies per year, Feldpausch said that, on average, STA distributes between 12,000 and 20,000 pounds of food per year to the community.

The season starts off with a big herring egg harvest and then moves to salmon, with sockeye being the primary goal. There are sockeye salmon runs in several places on Baranof and Chichagof islands and STA makes it a priority to harvest sockeye sustainably by harvesting in multiple locations.

“You name it, we go there,” Feldpausch said. “We go as far north as Klag [Bay] for sockeye, as far south as Redfish for sockeye…if we’re out and about, we always try to throw a skate into the water to make the program as efficient as possible. We try to harvest away from town. A lot of folks who are private citizens who have boats may not have as big of boats so they harvest closer to town, so we try to harvest away from town. We try to stay further away from town so that we don’t impact those subsistence users.”

Read the full story at the Juneau Empire

ALASKA: The F/V Akutan’s sad, failed season in Bristol Bay

August 17, 2017 — Fiasco. Disaster. Nightmare. These are words used by those involved with the floating processor Akutan to describe a fishing season gone terribly wrong. The Akutan, owned by Klawock Oceanside, Inc., was supposed to custom process up to 100,000 pounds of Bristol Bay salmon a day for a small fleet of fishermen under the banner Bristol Bay Seafoods, LLC. After July 25, it was bound for the Kuskokwim to give local fishermen their only salmon market.

Nothing went right. The owners, the fishing fleet, the lender, and the crew have gone unpaid or lost big sums of money. Onboard the vessel sits 130,000 pounds of headed-and-gutted sockeye salmon, the only bounty other than the vessel itself that may eventually compensate the parties involved. The owners, fishermen, and other parties filed liens against that fish as the 180-foot floating processor Akutan and a skeleton crew limped out of the silty, shallow Nushagak Bay Sunday to seek repairs at a blue water port.

“We’re in peril,” Captain Steve Lecklitner said Saturday. “We know we cannot stay in this river. It’s breaking down our systems. The owners have basically abandoned the vessel. The mortgage holders and the lenders have not established contact. I’m trying to get parts for our generator, and as soon as that’s done, it’s our intention to move the vessel to Dutch Harbor.”

Best laid plans

After last season a group of about 15 Bristol Bay drift boat fishermen decided to again pursue their own market. These fishing families are members of an Old Believer community in Homer and are commonly, and not pejoratively, referred to as the “Russians” in Bristol Bay’s fleet.

Skipper Kiril Basargin, a leader of this group, has been vocal about his frustration with the “mega corporate seafood buyers” that process 99 percent of Bristol Bay’s catch, faulting them for catch limits and low prices. In 2015 he brought his concerns to the state’s board of fisheries, telling them that Bristol Bay’s seafood companies promise “every year that they are going to keep up, and not holding there [sic] promises. Holding on, the commercial fisherman loses money every minute while they sit. We finally got tired of sitting and losing our seasons. The huge corporations control the markets and commercial fisherman. Finally in Bristol Bay in 2014 Wild Legacy Seafoods was born,” he wrote.

What happened to Wild Legacy Seafoods is unclear. But ahead of the 2017 season, Basargin and others formed a new company, Bristol Bay Seafoods LLC, to be their own “buyer”. They hired Klawock Oceanside to be their processor.

“And really they’ve lost their whole season to mismanagement and mis-operation of the F/V Akutan,” said William Earnhart, an attorney for the Bristol Bay Seafoods fishermen.

Read and listen to the full story at KDLG

ALASKA: NOAA to Offer Fishermen Option for Electronic Monitoring in 2018

August 9, 2017 — Beginning in 2018, Alaska fishermen, some of whom may not have the space on their vessel or life raft capacity for a NOAA Fisheries observer, will have the option to use an electronic monitoring (EM) system instead.

NOAA Fisheries is integrating EM into the North Pacific Observer Program for the 2018 fishing year. An EM system uses cameras and associated sensors to passively record and monitor fishing activities-work traditionally accomplished by human observers placed onboard commercial fishing vessels to collect data.

Information collected by observers while aboard commercial fishing vessels is crucial to sustainable management of Alaska’s multi-billion dollar fishing industry. NOAA Fisheries restructured the North Pacific Observer Program in 2013 to-for the first time-place fisheries observers on small boats between 40 and 60 feet, and boats harvesting halibut in Alaska.

Some small boat owners and operators identified unique issues with carrying an observer.

They advocated for the choice to use an EM system instead of carrying an observer.

Read the full story at Alaska Native News