Saving Seafood

Monterey Bay campaign targets new lawmakers, but MSA bill not only focus

November 2, 2018 — The Monterey Bay Aquarium, one of multiple ocean conservation groups opposed to a bill that would update the Magnuson Stevens Act (MSA), won’t waste any time in its efforts to influence new US members of Congress. It has launched a chefs-oriented campaign intended to begin reaching lawmakers the day after the Nov. 6 election, Undercurrent News has learned.

The advocacy group, which runs the Seafood Watch sustainability initiative, held a meeting on Oct. 24 in Portland, Oregon, where it got chefs to discuss, finalize and sign a “Portland Pact for Sustainable Seafood”. The document calls on “the new Congress to prioritize the long-term health of US fish stocks by protecting the strong conservation measures of the [MSA]”, reveals an email sent by Sheila Bowman, Seafood Watch manager of culinary and strategic initiatives, a copy of which was obtained by Undercurrent.

The email requested recipients to sign an attached copy of the document before Nov. 1, joining “other Blue Ribbon Task Force chefs”, but not to share it with anyone until Nov. 7. By signing the letter, the chefs would be agreeing with Monterey Bay Aquarium and its #ChefsForFish campaign that US commercial fishing policy would be best served by:

  • “Requiring management decisions be science-based;
  • “Avoiding overfishing with catch limits and tools that hold everyone accountable for the fish that they remove from the ocean; and
  • “Ensuring the timely recovery of depleted fish stocks.”

“On November 7: We will send another email asking you to help spread the word so that we can gather more chef signatures,” Bowman instructs in her email. “Our hope is to have hundreds of chefs representing all 50 states!”

Read the full story at Undercurrent News

 

OREGON: Kitz for the kill: Ousted gov. back to fight gillnets

October 26, 2018 — Oregon’s former Gov. John Kitzhaber apparently loves to hate Columbia River commercial fishing.

In 2012, the Coastal Conservation Association successfully wooed Kitzhaber, convincing him propose that the state ban salmon gillnetters from the main stem of the Columbia River with the hopes that despite years of testing to the contrary, they would miraculously find seine nets to be more selective than gillnets in taking wild salmon (as opposed to hatchery salmon).

Before he resigned from office in 2015 (an investigation led to citations from the Oregon Ethics Commission for using his office for personal gain and failure to disclose potential conflicts of interest), Kitzhaber championed a ban and struck a deal in 2013 with the joint commission that has managed the river with Washington’s fisheries counterparts for 100 years.

In 2017, the Oregon Fish & Wildlife Commission threatened to withdraw from the joint agreement but ultimately compromised to bring the states back into co-management.

Five years after the 2013 agreement, the joint commission is conducting a comprehensive review, and Oregon officials are threatening again to make a (gasp!) data-based decision to allow the use of gillnets on the main stem of the Columbia River.

Enter Kitzhaber: drumming up support for his ill-advised and poorly implemented plan of old with PSAs on gillnetskill.com.

The flip side of the Kitzhaber deal — as is often the case with CCA plans — was to transition the commercial quota to the recreational fleet. The result was a high mortality rate among the fish they had hoped to conserve by reallocating those “protected” fish to the sport sector. Imagine that!

Data gathered over several years indicate that gillnets do not have the effect on fish that advocates of the Kitzhaber plan estimated, or that other types of gear were more selective.

Yet here we are again, dodging the mudslingers in another fish fight. Science is on our side, but the lobbying dollars may not be.

This story originally appeared on National Fisherman, it is republished herewith permission.

U.S. Coast Guard will help researchers track whales along the West Coast

October 24, 2018 — The Oregon crab industry is putting up money to launch a new research study on where whales swim and feed along the Pacific Coast. The study stems from growing concern West Coast-wide about whales getting tangled in fishing gear.

Many of the confirmed entanglements in the last few years involved whales snagging crab pot lines.

The Oregon Dungeness Crab Commission voted unanimously Tuesday to underwrite the first year of a three-year aerial survey of humpbacks, gray whales and blue whales off the coast. Oregon State University researcher Leigh Torres said the Marine Mammal Institute, which she leads, and the state Department of Fish and Wildlife hope to win a federal grant to cover years two and three.

“One of the best known ways to reduce whale entanglements is to reduce the overlap between where fishing gear is and where whales are,” Torres said. “In the state of Oregon, we have pretty good information about where the fishing gear is, but not that great information about whale distribution in our waters. So that is really the knowledge gap that this project wants to fill.”

Torres said the best way to track whales is typically from the air.

“But hiring a plane to fly regular surveys monthly over a long period can be quite costly,” Torres said in an interview Tuesday. “So we were trying to brainstorm about ways to do that more cost effectively. And we had the idea to reach out to the U.S. Coast Guard.”

Torres said she was uncertain if the Coast Guard would let whale spotters ride along on routine helicopter patrols twice per month. She was delighted when her request was greeted positively.

Read the full story at Spokane Public Radio

 

RAMONA DENIES: Should Oregon Kill Sea Lions to Save the Salmon?

October 18, 2018 — Used to be, they’d show up at Willamette Falls around late November—beefy males here to bulk up and loll on the docks. Call it sea lion winter break; time off from California’s Channel Islands rookeries, beaucoup steelhead to eat, zero problems. (No pups, no ladies, no predators.) When it was time to head back south, a 400-pound sea lion might have doubled in size, having chowed down on, at minimum, three 15-pound Pacific Northwest salmonids a day.

Nowadays, these party boys are arriving earlier and staying later. And they’re not just loitering in Oregon City. They also mob the Columbia River, particularly around January, for chinook on their way to spawning grounds—eating, by one report, as much as 45 percent of some salmon runs, a feast season that now draws out through June.

“They’ve learned that in April and May there’s a pretty good buffet,” says Robert Anderson, a fishery biologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “Particularly over the past four to five years, there’s been a good uptick in the California sea lions that go to Willamette Falls.”

The result, warned Oregon’s Department of Fish & Wildlife in a 2017 study, is a 90 percent chance some of the Columbia River’s already struggling salmon populations will soon go extinct. And that’s causing some Northwest legislators to take aim at sea lions.

The irony here? Both species are protected by federal law—salmon (steelhead, chinook) by the 1973 Endangered Species Act and sea lions (California and Steller’s) by the 1972 Marine Mammal Protection Act. That means state, federal, and tribal agencies’ hands are tied when it comes to lethally removing hungry sea lions from river systems—like the mid-Columbia—where historically they’ve never been. According to Charles Hudson of the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission, that’s the choice we have to make: do we kill one species to save another?

Read the full opinion piece at Portland Monthly

OREGON: State compensation for gillnetters trickles down

October 11, 2018 — Money local commercial salmon fishermen will soon receive as compensation after reform policies pushed them off the Columbia River is “not nothing.” But it’s not quite something, either.

“It means a little bit of a paycheck,” said David Quashnick, a gillnetter who has been fishing since he was a teenager and now has two sons who run their own boats. “It’s not enough. I would rather be fishing and not having to worry about free money.”

Clatsop County informed 129 commercial gillnetters in September that they were eligible for a cut of the $500,000 set aside in the state’s Columbia River Transition Fund to compensate them for direct economic losses and reimburse them for gear.

This month, county officials said 124 fishermen had responded and applied for around $460,000 worth of the pot as of last week.

The Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife will give final approval for how the county intends to distribute the funds, but Theresa Dursse, executive assistant and clerk for the Clatsop County Board of Commissioners, said the county hopes to start cutting checks to fishermen soon. Fishermen who applied for compensation for economic losses will receive checks ranging from a mere $56 to the maximum $8,750. Fishermen who applied for reimbursement for gear will receive up to $2,750.

Gillnets, which hang vertically in the water and catch fish by the gills, were phased off the Columbia River main stem after former Gov. John Kitzhaber introduced a harvest reform plan in 2012. The plan, commonly referred to as the Kitzhaber Plan or Columbia River Reform, was pitched as a way to protect wild salmon and steelhead runs by replacing gillnet gear with more selective types of equipment.

The remaining gillnet fishermen were shifted to off-river, or “select areas,” like Youngs Bay.

Read the full story at The Daily Astorian

Netflix’s ‘Battlefish’ follows the adventures of tuna fishing boats off the Washington-Oregon borde

October 5, 2018 — Tuna is the new gold. Well, it’s worth its weight in gold anyway; pole-caught albacore tuna is one of the world’s most sustainable wild fisheries, with premium fish on demand for sashimi and high-end canned tuna. And the men and women who catch it are the subject of a new, bingeable Netflix docuseries called, adorably, “Battlefish.” 

“Battlefish,” a coproduction of Netflix and the reality powerhouse Pilgrim Media Group (“Dirty Jobs,” “Ghost Hunters,” “American Chopper”), follows five tuna fishing boats — the Judy S, the TNT, the Intrepid, the Oppor-tuna-ty and the Ashley Nicole — as they sail in and out of Ilwaco, Washington, on the Washington-Oregon border at the mouth of the Columbia River with their catches. And while the fisheries of Alaska and New England have had their day on the screen, “Battlefish” is the first show to highlight the fisheries of the Pacific Northwest.

“Battlefish” executive producer Mike Nichols is a fishing-show veteran; he also produces the reality show “Wicked Tuna” about bluefin tuna fishermen off the coast of New England.

“On the East Coast, it’s a very generational thing. It’s handed down in the family, and they catch the bug,” Nichols. “It’s not that way out west.” In the Pacific Northwest, Nichols posits, people come tuna fishing from all walks of life, maybe drawn by the primeval lure of the ocean, but certainly because there’s money to be made — like a gold rush, where one’s ability to pull money out of mother nature depends partially on luck and partially on preparedness and method.

Read the full story at The Seattle Times

U.S. Secretary of Commerce Declares Commercial Fishery Disasters for West Coast Salmon and Sardines

September 28, 2018 — The following was released by NOAA:

Today, Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross announced that commercial fishery failures occurred between 2015 and 2017 for salmon fisheries in Washington, Oregon, and California, in addition to the sardine fishery in California.

“The Department of Commerce and NOAA stand ready to assist fishing towns and cities along the West Coast as they recover,” said Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross. “After years of hardship, the Department looks forward to providing economic relief that will allow the fisheries and the communities they help support to rebound.”

Between July 2016 and March 2018, multiple tribes and governors from Washington, Oregon, and California requested fishery disaster determinations. The Secretary, working with NOAA’s National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), evaluated each request based on the available data, and found that all but one (the California red sea urchin fishery) met the requirements for a fishery disaster determination.

The determinations for West Coast salmon and sardines now make these fisheries eligible for NOAA Fisheries fishery disaster assistance.  The 2018 Consolidated Appropriations Act provided $20 million in NOAA Fisheries fishery disaster assistance. The Department of Commerce is determining the appropriate allocations of these funds to eligible fisheries.

Read the full release here

Disasters declared for salmon fisheries along West Coast

September 26, 2018 – SEATTLE — Federal officials have determined that commercial fishery failures occurred for salmon in Washington, Oregon and California, making those fisheries eligible for federal disaster assistance.

U.S. Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross on Tuesday also announced a commercial fishery failure for the sardine fishery in California but not for the state’s red sea urchin fishery.

The governors from Washington, Oregon and California and multiple Native American tribes had requested the determinations between July 2016 and March 2018. Their requests noted unusually warm and poor ocean conditions that affected fish.

Read the full story from at the Associated Press

 

Tentative deal reached on renewal of Pacific Salmon Treaty

September 21, 2018 — American and Canadian negotiators have successfully brokered a deal to renew the Pacific Salmon Treaty. The compromise agreement has now been sent to Ottawa and Washington, D.C., to be approved and ratified by their respective national governments.

The Pacific Salmon Treaty is renegotiated every decade between the two countries to govern salmon catch, research, and enhancement in Alaska, Oregon, Washington and British Columbia. The treaty expires on its own terms on Dec. 31, 2018. The current negotiations have taken place over the course of two years by two teams seeking to renew the treaty for the next decade, from Jan. 1, 2019, through Dec. 31, 2028.

Aspects of the expiring plan will carry over. Among them, the use of an abundance-based management regime for king salmon, as opposed to hard caps. This should result in harvest rate indices and quotas that will rise and fall depending on abundance of the fish.

Pacific Salmon Commission Executive Secretary John Field praised the negotiators for working out amendments to the treaty, including harvest rate reductions of king salmon when it comes to mixed-stock ocean fisheries.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

 

Salmon preservation plan to impact Alaska and Canada over 10-year span

September 19, 2018 — PORTLAND, Ore. — Alaska and Canada would reduce their catch of endangered Chinook salmon in years with poor fishery returns under an agreement that spells out the next decade of cooperation between the U.S. and Canada to keep various salmon species afloat in Pacific waters.

Members of the Pacific Salmon Commission recommended a new 10-year conservation plan to the U.S. and Canadian governments Monday that would run through 2028 and involve Canada, Alaska, Washington, Oregon and a number of tribal nations in both countries.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at KTUU