December 30, 2019 — The following was released by the North Pacific Fishery Management Council:
The NPFMC will meet January 27 – February 2, 2020, at the Renaissance Hotel in Seattle. The AGENDA and SCHEDULE are now available. If you’re planning a flight, you can use the EasyBiz Discount Code: ECMC935. You can submit and review comments through each Agenda Item and the deadline for comments is Friday, January 24, 2020, at 12:00 pm (Alaska time).
November 15, 2019 — More than two decades ago, Makah tribal members killed a 30-foot gray whale in the waters off the Olympic Peninsula amid bitter protests from animal-welfare activists.
The tribal hunt in May 1999 touched off a protracted legal battle that on Thursday took center stage inside a Seattle federal building.
The proceedings over the tribe’s treaty right to hunt gray whales are expected to last more than a week in the courtroomlike setting.
Opponents have raised concerns about the impacts of climate change on the eastern North Pacific gray population, while the tribe hopes Administrative Law Judge George Jordan will recommend a waiver to the Marine Mammal Protection Act.
The Makah, whose lands are on the northwest tip of Washington, have the right to hunt whales through their 1855 treaty with the U.S. government. Tribal whaling advocates hailed the 1999 hunt as an important renewal of a tradition that helps define the Makah. But opponents have so far blocked, through court and regulatory challenges, the tribe from conducting more federally approved hunts.
November 14, 2019 — A federal agency’s April 4 recommendation to allow the Makah Tribe to resume whaling on grounds that killing the animals would not have a noticeable impact on the species’ population will be put to the test beginning Thursday, Nov. 14, in Seattle.
U.S. Coast Guard Administrative Law Judge George J. Jordan will begin reviewing arguments at 1 p.m. on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s decision to grant the tribe a waiver of the Marine Mammal Protection Act. The hearing room is at the Henry M. Jackson Federal Building.
Jordan must make a recommendation “promptly” to Chris Oliver, assistant administrator of NOAA’s National Marine Fisheries Service, according to federal regulations, said Michael Milstein, NOAA spokesperson. The hearing is expected to last through Nov. 22.
An overflow room at the Jackson Building will be provided where onlookers can view today’s proceeding on a monitor, Milstein said.
A 2015 draft environmental impact statement on Makah whaling by the National Marine Fisheries Service generated 57,000 comments, most of which were form letters.
October 9, 2019 — The commercial fishing fleet based in Seattle, Washington, U.S.A. – the home port for many vessels fishing in the Gulf of Alaska, the Bering Sea, and the Aleutian Islands – is aging, but modernization efforts have run into numerous obstacles.
Chad See, the executive director of the Freezer Longline Coalition and a board member of the Washington Maritime Federation, told SeafoodSource restrictive U.S. regulations, a tight credit market, catch limits created by fishing quotas, and the diverse needs of a fleet with varied objectives are hindering progress on fleet-renewal efforts.
July 16, 2019 — A Seattle company called Whooshh Innovations has developed a creative way for fish to swim over hydroelectric dams. This product creates a pressure difference around the salmon, sucking the fish up a long tube and releasing it at the top of the dam.
“We do introduce a little bit of water to keep them moist and keep their gills moist and all those kinds of things for the few seconds it takes them to get through the system,” said Mike Dearan, Whooshh’s chief engineer.
The Whooshh system also takes pictures of salmon and sorts the fish as they travel, dividing up wild and hatchery fish. If there was a constant stream of fish, 86,000 salmon could move through just one of these Whooshh systems every day.
June 4, 2019 — Next time you’re visiting Seattle’s downtown waterfront and gazing out across Elliott Bay toward the majestic Olympic Mountains, look down. You might see a shoal of silvery baby salmon, each about 3 inches long.
You might also see a snorkeler counting fish, because University of Washington researchers are studying habitat improvements built along the city’s $410 million new seawall, which stretches 3,100 feet between the Seattle Aquarium and the Colman Dock ferry terminal.
Their observations are preliminary — yet promising. Since the wall was completed in 2017, the School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences researchers have repeatedly witnessed juvenile salmon swimming under the wooden piers that extend out over the waterfront, where they almost never ventured before.
During the wall’s construction, workers added shelves and grooves meant to help algae grow and critters like mussels take hold. They laid rock beds below the wall because young salmon prefer to forage and hide in shallow-water nooks. They even installed translucent glass panes in a cantilevered sidewalk between the wall and the piers to allow light through, down to the water.
Juvenile salmon prefer swimming and eating in sunlight, and the improvements are meant to act like a migratory highway, complete with rest stations and restaurants. Taken together, they represent what might be the most sweeping seawall habitat-restoration project anywhere.
May 24, 2019 — If not for Alaska’s fisheries, the Port of Seattle would not be what it is today.
How important is Alaska to its bottom line?
An economic report released this month by the Port of Seattle reveals that Seattle is home to about 300 fishing vessels and of those, all but 74 make their fishing living in Alaska. The Seattle-based boats harvest Alaska pollock, Bering Sea crab, flounders, salmon and many other high value species, and they vary in size from huge, 150 crew catcher-processors to much smaller seiners and trawlers.
In 2017, fishing vessels that moored at one of Seattle’s three terminals and operated in the Alaskan fisheries generated gross earnings of more $455 million, or nearly half of the gross earnings from Alaska’s fisheries. That represented 44% of all gross earnings from the North Pacific fisheries.
Boats fishing in Puget Sound and other Washington areas earned $26.6 million at the Seattle docks.
An estimated 7,200 jobs were directly associated with commercial fishing at the Port of Seattle in 2017. Of that, 5,100 jobs were on fishing vessels, of which all but just 200 operated in Alaska fisheries.
April 28, 2019 — From the deck of his 106-year-old halibut schooner, undergoing a seasonal overhaul at Fisherman’s Terminal in Seattle, skipper Wade Bassi has better insight than most into what’s happening at Amazon-owned Whole Foods Market, at least as pertains to the product he knows best.
While he doesn’t buy halibut much — he’s got a freezer full of it — Bassi, 43 years a fisherman, keeps an eye on how it’s handled and presented in the grocery stores and fish markets.
“When you look at nice halibut, I mean it is pure white,” he said. “And it is flaky-looking, and it is beautiful. It’s translucent. If you’ve got that in the fish market, people are going to buy it.”
A few days earlier, Whole Foods touted a rarely seen promotional price for halibut as part of its ongoing campaign to revise the grocery chain’s high-cost reputation while maintaining its image for quality and sustainability.
“Whole Foods is one of the better ones, to be honest with you,” Bassi said. “But you know, Whole Foods, whole paycheck. … They usually do charge way more for everything than anywhere else. Which really surprises me that they’re selling this for $16-something a pound, because they’re not making anything on it.”
Whole Foods’ halibut deal opens a window into Amazon’s grocery strategy as it seeks to combine the defining characteristics of each brand, leverage its juggernaut Prime membership program and take a larger share of the grocery business from competitors such as Walmart, Kroger and Costco.
March 26, 2019 — The following was released by the Global Sustainable Seafood Initiative and Seattle Shrimp & Seafood:
The Global Sustainable Seafood Initiative is pleased to announce that Seattle Shrimp & Seafood Company has joined the GSSI Global Partnership as a Funding Partner.
Seattle Shrimp & Seafood Company is a global supplier of shrimp and shellfish. Seattle Shrimp & Seafood Company works with GSSI recognized schemes BAP and MSC.
“Seattle Shrimp & Seafood Company is proud to be partnering with the Global Sustainable Seafood Initiative and its supporters as an acting member and Funding Partner. We are extremely excited for the opportunity to collaborate with organizations from industry and NGO sectors that are committed to the long-term preservation, sustainability and growth of global fisheries,” said Atsushige Amano, President of Seattle Shrimp & Seafood.
January 9, 2019 — SEAFOOD NEWS — A recent report by KING-5 TV News in Seattle picked up on NOAA Stock Assessment Scientist Ian Taylor’s recent Tweet about his frustration with the government shutdown and how it could affect the Pacific hake fishery.
“I love my U.S. federal job at @NOAAFish_NWFSC but it’s immensely frustrating to have #shutdown be such a common disturbance,” Taylor said in a Dec. 21, 2018 tweet. “Last time it was short, science got done, and U.S. #pacifichake catch was ~300,000 tons in 2018. Now 2019 assessment needs to happen yet here we go again.”
The U.S. whiting fishery caught more than 266,000 mt last year for a value of close to $50 million, about half of the overall West Coast groundfish fishery value.
Taylor is one of the U.S. scientists who works collaboratively with Canadian scientists to develop the hake stock assessment, scheduled for a draft release and review by Feb. 6, 2019. Without the stock assessment on which to base 2019 regulations, a number of options could occur: the season could be delayed or it could be managed very conservatively. The assessment may rely solely on the Canadian scientists’ work, with limited input already done by U.S. advisers. It’s unclear at this point exactly how the season will proceed, but the treaty process is continuing without the scientific input from the U.S.
However, the series of dominoes that make the whiting fishery work starts with getting the assessment done.
Sarah Nayani, Director of Compliance for Arctic Storm Management Group LLC, based in Seattle, said she’s watching the issue closely.
“We are concerned about the impact the government shutdown may have on the hake assessment and the timing of the Pacific Whiting Treaty process,” Nayani said in an email. “We hope that the U.S. scientists and managers may resume their work soon so that our 2019 fishery won’t be impacted or delayed.”
Taylor and other scientists discussed the pending assessment during a Joint Management Committee conference call in early December. The JMC includes industry and managers from both countries. On the call, U.S. scientists told participants that NMFS was prioritizing other species for stock assessment work; Pacific hake was just lower on the list at the time but still scheduled for completion. It’s likely nobody suspected a government shutdown would happen two weeks later, or that it would drag on into the New Year.
The predicament now is that the only new data for an updated stock assessment from the U.S. side is fishery-dependent data, such as age classes, length-at-age data, volumes, etc. Fishery-independent data, in the form of a NOAA Fisheries acoustic research survey, is done once every two years (2018 was an off year). Therefore, complete data from the 2018 U.S. fishery is essential to developing a scientifically-robust stock assessment for managing the 2019 fishery. This data is currently incomplete because of the government shutdown.
Beyond the stock assessment, the seafood industry frequently relies on preliminary scientific data to make business plans and update customers on volumes and product availability.
“What do we tell our markets?” Pacific Seafood’s Mike Okoniewski said. “Our customers want to know that as far in advance as they can. It can have a detrimental effect on our business side, too.”
For Okoniewski, Nayani and others involved in or watching the whiting process, the politics of the government shutdown are frequently secondary to their business considerations. It’s more frustrating to not have access to scientific information that affects the bottom line.
“They’re [scientists/researchers] considered to be nonessential, but they compose the bulk of the work force that we consider essential,” Okoniewski said.
This story was originally published by SeafoodNews.com, a subscription site. It is reprinted with permission.