Saving Seafood

Alaska’s Dungeness crab prices double, halibut and blackcod also on the rise

July 16, 2021 — Catches for Dungeness crab at Southeast Alaska are going slow so far for 163 boats, but prices of $4.20 a pound are more than double last year’s. The crab fishery will run through mid-August and reopen in October.

Kodiak crabbers were getting $4.25 for their Dungeness, also more than double.

Norton Sound opened for king crab on June 15 with a 290,000-pound catch limit. Concerns over the depleted stock resulted in no buyers and only one participant who is selling crab locally.

Prince William Sound’s pot shrimp fishery remains open until mid-September with a catch limit of 70,000 pounds. A lingcod fishery opened in the sound on July 1 for a catch of nearly 33,000 pounds.

Ling cod also opened at Cook Inlet with a 52,500-pound catch limit. The Inlet also opened July 1 for rockfish with a 150,000-pound harvest.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

Off the hook: Slinky pots revolutionize Alaska’s blackcod fishery

May 4, 2021 — When Shawn McManus, skipper of the F/V Vansee, left Seattle in the spring of 2020 to longline for blackcod in Alaska, the outlook was not good. The burgeoning pandemic had injected uncertainty into a fishery that was already struggling with flagging prices and crippling whale depredation.

On the grounds, McManus and his colleagues estimated half their catch, sometimes more, was being snatched off hooks by orcas and sperm whales. Fishermen with bigger boats and more powerful hydraulics had long ago switched to whale-proof rigid pots, but they were not an option for smaller operations like the Vansee, a 107-year-old halibut schooner with limited deck space.

Veteran fisherman Buck Laukitis was among those who had switched to rigid pots. He looked on in dismay as depredation threatened not just individual boats but the fishery at large.

“We needed 75 or 80 percent of the fishing done by pots, or we were going to kill the resource off by feeding whales,” Laukitis said.

In a last ditch attempt to save his season, McManus threw in 50 so-called slinky pots before he left Seattle’s Fishermen’s Terminal. To him, it was a new and virtually unknown product, a lightweight collapsible pot that would fold flat and stack on deck, giving boats like his a chance to get off hooks and into pots.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

Carryover frozen halibut brews competition in Alaska

June 20, 2018 — As the fleet fished on a halibut quota of 16.63 million pounds, dockside offers ranged from $4.25 to $5.50 per pound for fish 20 pounds and under to 40 pounds and up. That’s down significantly from the 2017 spread of $6.40 to $6.90 per pound when the fleet fished on a quota of 18.3 million pounds.

This year’s pricing trend flies in the face of market dynamics of years past, when diminished supplies translated to higher prices all the way through the distribution chain.

Whether the volume of supplies and price point have reached the equilibrium of what consumers will pay for a slice of halibut on their plates remains to be seen. In the meantime, Bob Alverson, manager of the Fishing Vessel Owners’ Association in Seattle, noted that processors have reported carryover inventories of frozen Pacific halibut from 2017 are competing with volumes of fresh Atlantic halibut funneling into markets along the East Coast.

The fall in ex-vessel prices for blackcod tells a slightly different story. The 2018 quota has been set at 25.8 million pounds, up from the 22.58 million pounds of 2017. Alverson noted that strong year classes of fish spawned in 2014 and 2015 have begun recruiting into the fishery — good news in the health of the resource.

However, the extra quantities of the 2- to 3-pound fish coming across the docks has precipitated decreased pricing in export markets to Japan and throughout Asia.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

In Their Own Words: Sablefish Gear Switching in the West Coast Trawl Quota Program

October 23, 2017 — SEAFOOD NEWS — The West Coast trawl catch shares program (individual fishing quota/IFQ program) was implemented in 2011 for the groundfish fishery — but it’s not without its problems. One provision rose to the top during the current five-year review as the most controversial: gear switching.

Sablefish is the most valuable groundfish, on a per-pound basis, on the West Coast. It is often graded on quality and at least five different sizes. Most sablefish is sold to Japan and a few other countries, but domestic markets have been in expanding for a few years. Whereas most other groundfish species have ex-vessel prices of cents per pound, sablefish frequently goes for dollars per pound. Better quality fish, i.e., those that are caught by longline or pots, typically fetch higher prices.

On the West Coast, sablefish — or blackcod — are caught in a mixed species fishery by trawl and are targeted by longline and pots. The species is an important component of the trawl “deepwater complex” that includes Dover sole, thornyhead rockfish and sablefish. Dover sole is a low price/high-volume species for trawlers but access may be limited if a trawler has insufficient sablefish quota.

Proponents of the trawl catch shares program in the late 2000s included an option to be able to switch gears to catch sablefish. That is, a trawler could use any legal groundfish gear, including pots and longline, to catch the valuable species if they so desired. Some fishermen say this was intended to allow trawlers to catch smaller amounts of sablefish that may be leftover from harvesting their deepwater complex. Other fishermen say it was intended to allow a switch to what some claim is an environmentally cleaner harvesting method. Because a single provision may have multiple purposes, both may be correct.

Regardless, the effect of the provision was that some fixed-gear vessels purchased trawl permits and quota and are now harvesting sablefish. Sablefish quota prices increased to the point where some trawlers could not afford to buy or lease it on the open market in order to access their Dover sole quota. Others may have simply chosen not to buy or lease the quota. A limited supply of sablefish quota overall may also have been the culprit for some trawlers not being able to access their Dover sole. In some years, the quota went quickly and less than five percent was available by year’s end. At the same time, fixed-gear vessels have made significant investments in gear and equipment to access trawl sablefish quota. Processors are concerned blackcod will continue to act as a choke species, limiting access to the volumes of groundfish necessary to keep processing crews working.

But there’s another wrinkle. Sablefish quota is available in two distributions: north or south of 36 degrees N. Latitude — near Point Conception in southern California. A handful of fixed-gear vessels using trawl quota have traveled from Oregon and Washington to fish the southern area. Southern California fixed-gear fishermen found themselves with new entrants on their traditional fishing grounds.

The Pacific Fishery Management Council in September took the first step at making the gear-switching provision work for everyone. One of the proposals includes eliminating the management line at 36 degrees north latitude, thereby creating one coastwide pool of quota. The Council also proposed mitigation measures to limit gear switching.

Seafood News talked with four people representing the major factions concerned about the sablefish gear-switching provision:

  • Jeff Lackey, a trawl vessel manager from Newport, Ore.
  • Michele Longo Eder, whose family members are fixed gear fishermen who have made investments in the trawl program
  • Mike Okoniewski, who works for a processor that depends on trawl groundfish
  • Chris Hoeflinger, representing Southern California traditional fixed-gear fishermen

Seafood News will run their perspectives, in their own words, of the gear-switching issue this week. The Pacific Fishery Management Council will be wrestling with this issue over the coming months.

— Susan Chambers

In his own words: Jeff Lackey, trawl vessel manager from Newport, Ore.:

The trawl catch shares program that began in 2011 has some positive elements. However, it has also led to operational difficulties that have significantly decreased catch for bottom trawlers.

The unintended consequence of the catch shares program was that a significant fixed-gear fishery for sablefish sprang up almost literally overnight within the trawl fishery. Hundreds of thousands of pounds of sablefish quota a year were going to fixed gear vessels and then coming to the dock without the associated catch of other groundfish species.

So by 2016, five years later, the species that trawl catch of sablefish helps get to the dock had seen their coastwide annual catch drop by about a third compared to pre-catch shares capacity. That’s roughly 14 million pounds a year in lost catch and corresponding seafood available to the consumer. This translates to dozens of lost full time jobs in the processing sector alone, as well as dozens of trawl vessels that left the fishery.

In 2011, some trawlers left the fishery altogether and some switched to the shrimp fishery rather than compete with fixed gear boats that were buying trawl permits and entering the trawl individual fishing quota (IFQ) fishery. It is difficult to generalize the business plan of each individual trawl vessel as each has a different set of circumstances, such as the amount of quota they have and the other fisheries they participate in.

However, when you match the individual stories of difficulty in executing a viable fishery given sablefish limitations with the overall data of a diminished fishery, a clear picture emerges. The lost yearly bottom trawl catch is about what one would expect for the amount of sablefish that has been lost from the trawl fishery. To return the fishery to pre-IFQ program catch levels and allow the stability the program affords to make even more gains, the coastwide sablefish quota allocated to the trawl IFQ program would need to be caught by trawl vessels to facilitate the catch of other groundfish species.

This story originally appeared on Seafood News, a subscription site. It is reprinted with permission