ALASKA CAFE

It's way past time for Nome fisheries enhancement to begin

2012-01-22T21:42:00.000-08:00

"The spirit of cooperation, leadership, open communications, respect, supportiveness and can do attitude"

Tim used this headline on his letter because it is a quote by Charles Faegerstrom of the local Native Corporation whose outfit helped squander millions of federal dollars and then stifled publication of results, or non-results. And refusing to cooperate with other local fishing leaders, dissing them under Color of Lignt, (see Wikipedia) wouldn't support any other efforts in fish enhancement, and of course got nothing accomplished. Wow! And where was the Alaska Dept. of Fish and Game in their oversight of mucho dinero fisheries enhancement funds?

The reason Tim writes this today is that Fish and Game Deputy Commissioner Dave Bedford flew to Nome today to have a closed door session with all these buckaroo fish ranchers, prior to tomorrow's closed door session of more local buckaroos. And guess who is uninvited. You may have guessed by now: the author of the letters below and the one in my previous post, the one who should be running the show, the State sanctioned President of the Norton Sound area fisheries enhancement program. (See title of letter below again)

This is the framework for the failed runs, discounting the trawl salmon bycatch by these same buckaroos through the local Community Development Quota Program - owned Bering Sea trawlers. The other little sleight of hand out of the bucharoo play-book is described in this article. Enjoy the enlightenment.

Isn't this a test of manhood, or womanhood, and leadership, that is, "study that you may be approved." Ask yourself, who do you think should be in fisheries enhancement leadership in this very needy situation in Western Alaska? There isn't another twenty years to waste doing the same old thing. Hear that Cora?

"The spirit of cooperation, leadership, open communications, respect, supportiveness and can do attitude"

Tim Smith, President

Norton Sound/Bering Strait

Regional Aquaculture Association

"Does anybody remember the Norton Sound Salmon Research and Restoration Program? NSSRRP spent $5 million dollars of federal money administered by the State of Alaska during 2000-06 researching and restoring Norton Sound salmon. If you don’t remember NSSRRP, it is not too surprising since the results were never published.

On October 15, 1999, ADF&G met behind closed doors to talk about NSSRRP in the Sitnasuak Native Corporation building. In attendance, representing Kawerak, were Loretta Bullard, Roy Ashenfelter, Eileen Norbert, Don Stiles and Jacob Ahwinona; Representing Sitnasuak Native Corporation were SNC President Robbie Fagerstrom and Irene Anderson. ADF&G officials were Commissioner Frank Rue, Subsistence Division Director Mary Pete, Commercial Fisheries Division Director Doug Mecum, Research Supervisor Larry Buklis and biologists Charlie Lean and Peter Rob.

Except for the seven individuals listed above, all Norton Sound salmon users were locked out of this meeting that was not advertised and held in a privately owned building.

Prior to the meeting, I called SNC President Robbie Fagerstrom and asked if I could attend. He said no.

The outcome of this meeting was a plan to divide up the NSSRRP funds through a Steering Committee controlled by local special interest groups and ADF&G but closed to most Norton Sound stakeholders. About half the money was spent on counting fish and the other half was spent on research projects that apparently were not good enough for publication.

Very little of the Research and Restoration money was used for restoring salmon runs or increasing salmon harvesting opportunity and the runs continue to be unrestored. We have failed by a long shot to achieve the modest salmon harvest goals set in the Norton Sound/Bering Strait Regional Comprehensive Salmon Plan signed by Commissioner Rue in June 1996. We failed because we never seriously tried to increase Norton Sound salmon runs using methods that had any chance of success. There are no data showing that counting fish more accurately has significantly increased returns to Norton Sound rivers.

One thing we should learn from past failures of Norton Sound salmon restoration efforts is that: 1) closed door meetings between ADF&G officials and local special interest group representatives have not resulted in actions leading to significantly increased salmon harvests and; 2) excluding stakeholders from meetings between ADF&G officials and local special interest group representatives does not foster a spirit of cooperation, leadership, open communications, respect, supportiveness and can do attitude. What it does is create hard feelings for no reason.

George Santayana is often credited with saying, “Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” If he didn’t say that, he should have."

Tim Smith

PO Box 478

Nome, AK 99762

(907) 443-5352 phone

(815) 364-2565 eFax

Here's a recent letter TIm wrote in complete bafflement as to why a Department of the State of Alaska would flout State statutes so blatantly. Yes, Mr. Bedford, we are waiting.

"Dear Mr. Bedford,
As you are aware, Norton Sound/Bering Strait
Regional Aquaculture Association is the registered
name of an Alaska nonprofit corporation in good
standing.

The department has never explained why Oscar Takak
should be able to call his organization by that
name without violating AS 10.35.040 or
alternatively why he is entitled to violate a
statute that prohibits Oscar from doing what you
say he is doing.

We would appreciate an explanation."

Tim Smith, President
Norton Sound/Bering Strait
Regional Aquaculture Association

Color of Money trumps Color of Light

2012-01-21T16:10:00.000-08:00

Commentaryon the judgment in Smith vs.

Norton Sound Economic Development Corp.

ByTim Smith

The only reasonNSEDC ever held elections for its board of directors is because they were courtordered to do so following the complaint I filed in 1994.

On January 9,this year, another court issued a ruling that means NSEDC is no longerobligated to elect board members in fair and open elections. The judge heldthat as a privately owned nonprofit corporation having no individual members, theNSEDC board and not the residents of the 15 NSEDC communities will get todecide who will sit on the board in the future.

NSEDC wasfounded in 1989 beforethe CDQ program existed. Its articlesof incorporation andbylawcontained the following provisions, “membership in this corporation shallbe available and open to all persons interested in the goals and purposes ofthe organization as stated in the bylaws. The corporation recognizes and admitsto the principle that

all persons areequal and that this corporation does not discriminate against anyone on thebasis of race, color, ethnic origin or religion.”

After the CDQprogram came along in 1992 and brought millions of dollars of fisheries revenueto the region, things changed radically as they often do when money isinvolved. The individuals who seized control of NSEDC in 1992 locked out thepeople who were formerly members to maintain exclusive control of their newlycreated hoard of cash. They didn’t hold elections for their board of directorsand all of their financial and other records were kept secret.

Today, NSEDC’sgoverning documents contain the following passage, “communities satisfying therequirements

set forth inthe bylaws are eligible for membership in the corporation. The individualresidents of those communities or any other community are not eligible formembership.” That’s a major departure from the way things were with respect tothe rights of regional residents in NSEDC.

Prior to 1992,as with most nonprofit corporations in America,NSEDC’s members owned NSEDC. The members were the people living in Norton Sound communities. We are no longer the owners.Now, NSEDC management says they represent us, but how they represent us is upto them.

Even thoughNSEDC agreed to the 1994 judgment in order to end litigation, the people incontrol never really went along with the concept of fair and open elections.Things got out of hand in 2006 when Nome’sNSEDC election had to be overturned because of election fraud and a new oneheld. NSEDC was making up election rules as they went along.

Following the2009 election, I asked the court to again review the rules governing NSEDCdirector elections and tell us what rights Norton Sound residents have when it comes to choosing ourCDQ program representatives. Judge Jeffery ruled that the NSEDC bylaws control howour representatives are chosen and the NSEDC board of directors

unilaterallydetermines the content of the bylaws. Norton Soundresidents don’t have any say in it.

Judge Jeffery’sdecision confirms that the rules for CDQ group governance are inadequate forprotecting the rights of the people living in the 65 CDQ eligible communitiesthat the program was supposed to benefit. I am hoping that this judgment willserve as a wakeup call to Congress and the Alaska Legislature about the needfor additional lawmaking

to codify therights of the residents of our communities to participate meaningfully indecisions about how CDQ program resources will be used. If we don’t enact laws detailinghow NSEDC and the other CDQ groups are supposed to be governed, we shouldn’t besurprised when we find that we have no voice in what happens to our CDQ programmoney.

Contrary to whatNSEDC is saying, this case was never about who can or can’t vote for NSEDCboard members. What it was about is determining who, under the existing laws,gets to make the rules for how the residents of our 15 Norton Sound communities participate in NSEDC governance.Now that we know, it is time to talk to the lawmakers about making thenecessary changes to ensure that community residents are fairly andmeaningfully represented

in this important program.

Case study of a lost salmon resource

2011-12-08T05:04:00.001-08:00

"I never did give anybody hell. I just told the truth and they thought it was hell.”

------ Harry S. Truman

This quote by Harry Truman reminded me of a situation that is unfolding, as we speak, in Western Alaska. I can't say it as well as the folks out there tell it, so I'll just preface it and then paste on what they've said in the last few days. Some of what is being said is in the 'Nome Nugget' newspaper on-line. I started to be really concerned after hearing that the Mayor of Teller, Alaska, the legendary sled dog racer, was attempted to be barred from attending a North Pacific Fisheries Management Council Meeting by management of the Community Development Quota group he is a Board Member of.

Joe had a right to attend as a member of the public, but the Norton Sound Community Development Corporation is acting more like a feudal lord and doesn't want it's constituency learning the truth about it's involvement in the fishing business: where all the money is going, why their salmon runs are drying up, and why they can't get any salmon enhancement going.

The following correspondences explain it better. I think it is shameful on the part of Governor Parnell that this is going on on his watch. If any other force of law wants to step in, feel free. When you have the leaders of these CDQ groups making in the hundreds of thousands of dollars in annual salary and villagers are getting on the radio and saying they are cold and hungry, something is rotten.

Some folks in Western Alaska have been speaking up lately and are also being threatened by their own economic development group with legal action. The economic development folks have just been buying toxic assets of the fishing industry. For what? It seems, just their own salaries. Under CDQ federal rules, they aren't obligated to respond to their constituency, the villagers of the region. Is there no humanity left amongst the regulators?

What is economic development? The Knight Foundation just released the findings of a study on what promotes the general welfare of the public, which is the definition of economic development. And that is, attachment to community was found to be the most important thing. And that the drivers of attachment are the underlying key variables. Those would certainly include, in this case, the continuation of the historically important food supply of Western Alaskans, the salmon runs. And freedom from fear of retribution for speaking up about injustices in the region. Without further ado, here's some letters that have come across my desk lately. Not the whole of it by any means.

"The three public RPT (Regional Planning Team) members identified in the message from Sam Rabung to David Bedford below: Charlie Lean, Wes Jones and Simon Kineen are all NSEDC (Norton Sound Economic Development Corp.) employees. All three are former ADF&G (Alaska Department of Fish and Game) Commercial Fisheries Division employees who worked in the Nome office.

Charlie Lean retired as an ADF&G Commercial Fisheries Area Management Biologist in Nome and now is the Director for the NSEDC Norton Sound Fisheries Research and Development Program.

Wes Jones was an ADF&G Commercial Fisheries Assistant Area Management Biologist in Nome and was hired as a Fisheries Biologist by NSEDC.

Simon Kineen was an ADF&G Commercial Fisheries Technician in Nome and is now the NSEDC Chief Operations Officer.

Kawerak is an ex officio member of the RPT and the Kawerak RPT representative is Roy Ashenfelter who also works for NSEDC.

Putting the owners of pollock trawler companies in control of Norton Sound salmon enhancement is ridiculous. The last thing the trawlers want is more salmon in the Bering Sea. More salmon means more bycatch and they are already under salmon bycatch limits which reduce their profits. Marked salmon from enhancement projects can be used to determine the impact of trawl bycatch on specific salmon stocks of concern for the first time and the most threatened stocks in Alaska are in Norton Sound.

This incestuous relationship between ADFG and NSEDC creates a conflict of interest for both entities with lots of money changing hands. ADF&G headquarters may not care about the amounts obtained from NSEDC but the area management staff and the region sure do. In addition, CDQ groups provide a cushy second career for ADF&G employees who play ball.

Gene Sandone was a former ADF&G Commercial Fisheries Regional Supervisor for the Arctic-Yukon-Kuskokwim area which encompasses most of the CDQ eligible communities. He now works for the CDQ group Coastal Villages Region Fund.

6 AAC 93.015. CDQ Team; Responsibilities; Lead state agency.

(a) To carry out the state's role in the CDQ program under 50 C.F.R. 679, a CDQ team shall perform functions as directed in and under this chapter. The CDQ team consists of

(2) the commissioner of the Department of Fish and Game, or one or more of the commissioner's representatives from that department; and

(3) make recommendations regarding CDQ allocations and changes to allocations;

5) monitor the performance of each CDQ group in achieving the group's milestones and objectives in its CDP;

A reasonable person would conclude that the money NSEDC gives ADF&G and the high paying jobs it provides for cooperative ADF&G employees will buy favorable recommendations on its CDQ allocations and superficial monitoring by ADF&G as a member of the State of Alaska CDQ team of its nonperformance in delivering CDQ program benefits to its member communities."

And this just came in today:

"It needs to get out there. There was a criminal conspiracy, leading to an illegal break in and theft at our communities hatchery, by highly placed ADFG officials. The State Corporations office stated formally that Tim is president of our aquaculture association. ADFG is doubling down in criminal behavior, really retaliating, and violating Tim's civil rights, by putting a bunch of ex ADFG mercenaries, employed and orchestrated by the trawl industry, to once more rob him; this time of a rightful place at the table.

And any slim chance of future involvement in salmon restoration. And ensuring the slum dog millionaire salmon famine of Western Alaska is prolonged indefinitely."

And this:

"The stuff with Joe got interesting. A few weeks ago, NSEDC Chairman Dan Harrelson wrote the city of Teller to demand Joe's resignation from the NSEDC Board. A familiar pattern of doubling down in retaliation, when remotely challenged. No board authorization to do so. A retaliatory, racist action. Little white VPSO Dan has been trashing natives & getting paid for it so long he feels it a human right. He's been corroding the legal system here long enough they basically condone or ignore every misdeed.

I'm hearing through the grapevine too that Eric Olson confronted him, in a blatant conflict of interest at the current Council meeting in Anchorage, warning him not to try to break away and form a new CDQ group that actually represented his people. That he, Olson, wouldn't allow it. The bought and paid for Council Chair, knows that such an idea would spread like wildfire to all the groups.

The best performing group per capita, Central Bering Sea, is the result of such a breakaway. Not a bad precedent?"

The State of Alaska is abrogating it's constitutional responsibilities to protect these salmon resources that are being lost. Who do you pin it on though? Well, certainly the Governor. In the least, don't let him and his appointees have four more years to trash more of Alaska's resources.

Turning the Tide on Cronyism; a Landmark

2011-11-10T12:31:00.001-08:00

Viewpoints: Letters / Opinions

State Commission’s Rejection of S. 730 Merits Praise
By Myla Poelstra

November 10, 2011
Thursday

On October 28, 2011, the State of Alaska Citizen’s Advisory Commission on Federal Areas held a public meeting where testimony was taken on S. 730 and HR. 1408, the Sealaska Land Bills, now before Congress.

The Commissioners, appointed by the Governor and State Legislature, voted unanimously to nix this legislation.

CACFA rejected these bills after two years of fact finding that included discussions with Congressional staff, meetings with Sealaska, and review of public testimony and letters.

After a thorough evaluation, CACFA reached the same conclusion that USDA Undersecretary Harris Sherman made during the Senate hearing on S.730: “The selections identified by Sealaska within the original withdrawal areas are more than sufficient to meet Sealaska’s remaining ANCSA entitlement.”

The Commission’s comments further echoed Sherman’s view that, “neither S.730 nor HR.1408 will accomplish [completion of the entitlement] in a manner that is fair and equitable to all of the residents and communities who depend on the resources of the Tongass National Forest.”

The heart of the issue is that Sealaska needs to finalize the selections it requested from the BLM in 2008, which are in the area they asked Congress for in 1976 through the testimony of John Borbridge, Sealaska’s President.

Thirty five years is too long for Sealaska to come back and upset the apple cart by going hundreds of miles from the 1976 areas. The USFS Tongass Land Management Plan and Transition planning would be thrown out the window by this bill.

In order for Sealaska to receive their current legislative selections, families and businesses that have lived and worked in the region for decades would, in fact, be thrown to the wolves.

Rather than “jobs protection”, the consequences of this legislation are the destruction of jobs and the ruin of communities.

I am grateful to CACFA for voicing the same valid concerns the Nine Towns most affected by the bills have raised: NO NEW LEGISLATION IS NECESSARY to settle Sealaska’s land claims.

Passed in 1971, ANCSA was and is a fair, just, and equitable settlement of all claims. CACFA has taken a position based on true facts and their conclusions are valid.

Hopefully, Governor Parnell and our Congressional Delegation will respect CACFA’s letter by encouraging Sealaska Corp. to move forward and get their just entitlement by dropping this unfair legislation.

Myla Poelstra
Kosciusko Island
Edna Bay, AK

Received November 07, 2011 - Published November 10, 2011

Passage of Lands Bill Not Supported by Governor's Citizen’s Advisory Commission on Federal Areas - In a letter to U.S. Senator Lisa Murkowski, Rep. Wes Keller, Chairman of Alaska's Citizens' Advisory Commission of Federal Areas said the Commission has concluded that Sealaska Corporation's land entitlement under Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA) can be met with the currently selected lands in the existing withdrawals and that neither S. 730 nor H.R. 1408 will accomplish this in a manner that is fair and equitable to all the residents and communities who depend on the resources in the Tongass National Forest. In the letter, Keller included detailed reasons why the Citizens' Advisory Commission of Federal Areas cannot support passage of S. 730 or H.R. 1408. - More...
SitNews - Nov. 10, 2011

Hang onto your bottom

2011-09-12T11:12:00.000-07:00

This article about sinking a U.S. destroyer off the Delaware coast reminded me of bottom habitat off the coast of Alaska. How is that you ask? First, ask yourself, why sink a lot of ships and old subway cars out on the continental shelf anyway? The story is that these artificial reefs are better served as habitat for fish than cutting them up and using them to make a new ship. Must be real valuable in that regard, because in my mind steel and all the other metals in a ship has real value compared to the rock it came from. So propagating fish must be real valuable. And the reason for this is that the bottom on the East Coast must not be good for that purpose.

How did the East Coast bottom get so unproductive anyway, and how does that relate to the bottom off Alaska? As for the first question, consider what researchers said at Oregon State University, a major marine biology research center, about fishing practices for bottom-fish. They said, and I quote, "bottom trawling extinguishes 30% of the species complex of bottom affected by dragging trawls across it."

Next, recall those accounts of people putting string around one square foot of open meadow and counting all the different species of flora and fauna in it. It is a staggering amount; dozens and dozens of different things. Ok, maybe you can't imagine little Bobby from fifth grade doing that to the bottom of the ocean in a hundred fathoms, but try to wrap your mind around the fact that there are LOTS of different things that live down there. And lots of them are food and habitat for the few higher life forms that we like to whack up and put in the frying pan.

Some of the things down there that are crucial to the survival of our food fishes are VERY long-lived. And they are VERY delicate in relation to bottom trawls designed with heavy chain and heavy rollers made out of truck tires. These bottom trawls don't hang up on the bottom like you'd think and cause all sorts of consternation to the fishermen, and the fish get away. No, these 'Canyon Busters', as some of them are called, just flatten the bottom structures the juvenile fish need for habitat, or bring the whole mess to the surface.

I've related this story before; how a Japanese fish egg technician told of dragging up a deck load of rocks off the coast of Africa and then waiting for all the octopus to crawl out to be pitchforked into the hold. Fishermen have been trawling the East Coast of the U.S. for hundreds of years, don't you think the bottom has gotten pretty flat and unproductive by now?

There are statistics galore on the accidental catch of human-food fish, that other fishermen are allowed to catch, but those fishermen aren't, so they throw them back dead. And the federal management system wasn't designed properly by Congress to prevent any of this. I don't want to cloud the simple truth though that bottom trawling will eventually lead to the need for artificial reefs to produce any amount of fish to catch. Is this what we want for the coasts off Alaska.

Some people in the Southeast Alaska region saw this coming in the early days of the commercialization of the new 200 mile Exclusive Economic Zone in the late '70s. I don't know for a fact what happened, because my father never told me straight out what they did. BUT. 1) My father had a degree in fisheries from the University of Washington, 2) he was the manager of one of the first two bottomfish plants installed in Alaska, 3) he was used by the State of Alaska to lecture and represent the fledgling whitefish industry from the Pribilof Islands to Denmark, 4) he did say that such a industrial machine as trawlers and bottomfish plants were hell on the fish stocks, 5) they wiped out the pollock in Frederick Sound in Southeast in a year or so, 6) and when the dust settled, the coast of Southeast Alaska was closed to trawling, bottom or midwater, from the Canadian border to almost Prince William Sound, out to 200 miles.

I don't know how much clearer I can say this, the bottom trawlers are wiping out the halibut. Somehow, this isn't getting into the discussion of longliner vs charter operator. Well, that's their problem. The real problem is outside of that tussle, like the mob boss who owns both boxers. And you can go to the Tholepin blog to see pictures of the carnage.

The real problem is the relentless decline of wild Alaska fish stocks, irregardless of the hype you will see from the Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute, (with a board consisting of representatives of the biggest fish companies) the North Pacific Fisheries Management Council, (with a membership comprised of lobbyists for the biggest fish companies) the United Fishermen of Alaska (whose board doesn't query their membership and whose leaders have gotten into processing plants with sweetheart deals from politicians they supported), and the media (who consolidate and refuse to believe 'the Jews are being held in concentration camps', or don't want anyone to know.)

This situation will probably just roll along as it is. No other area of the world could stop the inexorable demise of their fisheries. The Eastern Canadians couldn't prevent the demise of their vast and iconic cod stocks, which was what first drew Europeans to North America. Or the Pacific Coast Canadians in their attempt to rein in industrial fish farming as it destroys the wild stocks of salmon. Human nature is the same all over.

What can be done, though, is to not throw good tax money after bad in support of this fisheries industrial complex until these human factors are brought under control. The fish on the bottom aren't the problem, the regulations aren't the problem, it's the way men interact with each other to direct the fishery that is the problem. Not individuals themselves, but the structures certain fish companies use as wealth building tools and exclusionary devices. Especially, don't subsidize new vessels for this industrial trawl fleet, like they are lobbying for. Hint, keep an eye on the pollock stocks, they can't seem to find them this year. Oops.

Wherever the fleet, don't let the bottom be abused any more, it's very delicate. The sea whip and coral forests down there protect juvenile fish from the larger fish (a vital function that seems to get overlooked by our best 'science') (the NPFMC did protect one area of coral, an area way out in left field) We can go directly to the folks in charge that hand out subsidies to these fish companies, to educate them and encourage them to hang onto the bottoms under their purview. I'm pretty sure there aren't enough old destroyers in the world to replace the habitat that is being lost in Alaska to bottom trawling.

Alaska's fisheries management and crony capitalism

2011-08-29T07:53:00.000-07:00

By Victor Smith

Ever since 1998, when former Sen. Ted Stevens introduced his rotten American Fisheries Act (AFA), the United Fisherman of Alaska (UFA) and their allies on the North Pacific Fisheries Management Council (NPFMC) have been carving off for themselves the choice pieces of the fisheries resources of the Gulf of Alaska and Bering Sea. Stevens started it by giving the extremely lucrative pollock fishery to a handful of fishing companies and, in so doing, set off a vicious "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" national stampede for privatization. Why? In large part because no restrictions were placed to keep profits from pollock from being used to dominate all the other fisheries AFA companies participated in.

Proponents of catch shares have cleverly obfuscated their greed, jealousy, and crude survival instincts with high-minded baloney like the yarn that private ownership fosters good resource stewardship. Arne Fuglvog, the UFA's and Sen. Lisa Murkowski's pick to head NMFS, recently disproved that smarmy nonsense when he got busted for criminally underreporting his own catch while simultaneously parroting that bull at the Council.

There's nothing high-minded about divvying up the loot in the Gulf; it is dirty business, and all of a sudden it looks like Murkowski and UFA were pushing a "Manchurian Candidate" to head the National Marine Fisheries Service.

In his May 2009 email to the UFA, ex-Petersburg son John Enge gave a respectful and specific heads-up that Fuglvog was a crook and his appointment to head NMFS would backfire. Now that Enge's warning has proven true, the UFA is in the unenviable position of trying to convince everyone that they didn't know what everyone knows they knew all along -- that while Fuglvog may have been a good choice for the UFA, he was a thief and a poor choice for everyone else. To cover their asses the UFA is trying to make the story all about how Enge was "not credible," and claiming "(Enge) was in the practice of writing things that were untrue and denigrating our association and our industry."

Well boo-hoo for the poor UFA. Enge never denigrated the industry, just the UFA; and they deserve it. Does anyone believe that the UFA executive board (and Murkowski) were "all surprised as anybody" and didn't know about Arne's fishery violations? Sounds like time to subpoena some hard drives because as sure as dead fish stink, the UFA knew about Fuglvog and was white-knuckling it, hoping that everyone would keep their traps shut and their puppet-on-a-string candidate would squeak through.

Here's the story the UFA doesn't want anyone to hear:

After the AFA put everything on the table, a cabal of fishing industry insiders hatched a plan to rig the game by hijacking the much-revered UFA. They realized that fishermen were perceived as Alaska's soul, and if they could steal their voice by controlling the UFA they would wield a lot of power in Alaska. It would be a twofer: fishermen in opposition could be muzzled and their apparent support could be thrown behind almost anything.

As soon as they took it over, the UFA was used to boost Frank Murkowski into the governor's office. Not even apologizing to critics who pointed out that the UFA's membership had never been polled, UFA's new executives crowed about how they had worked for more than a year behind the scenes to link arms and make deals with nearly every other business sector in Alaska to get Murkowski elected.

But the deals came with a steep price for fishermen. The UFA's first deal was to quickly defend -- again without prior membership approval -- Murkowski's scuttling of the Alaska Department of Fish and Game's (ADF&G) Habitat Division, the division actually responsible for the good stewardship of the habitat of the very fish that UFA members' livelihoods depended on.

The second deal the UFA made was to back, one after the other, two rotten Murkowski picks for ADF&G Commissioner. UFA's first supported commissioner, Kevin Duffy, signed off on icing the Habitat Division with admonishments to "not look back." Duffy also gave the state's approval to Congress for the BSAI Crab plan, which gifted even more exclusive rights, this time for crab, to another handful of fishing companies.

Inexplicably, the UFA's second pick for ADF&G commissioner was McKie Campbell, a guy who had spent the bulk of his career working for the mining industry to reduce standards for mine runoff into salmon streams. And the UFA didn't just grudgingly back Campbell; members of the UFA Executive Board actually traveled the state to make a slick promotional video to tout his appointment. (Campbell now works on Sen. Lisa Murkowski's staff, as Republican staff director for the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.)

The third deal the UFA made was to exploit what seems to have been a crisis manufactured to bankrupt and drive half their competition out of the State. Even after dropping the price of pink salmon to 5 cents a pound (the price now is 42 cents!), fish companies claimed they were losing money on every pound of fish they bought, and half the salmon fleet was informed they would have no place to sell their fish in the 2002 season. That vicious threat of losing markets was used to bludgeon fishermen's opposition to all of the UFA's deals.

A couple of years later Rob Zuanich, the UFA executive who made the promotional video for Campbell -- the same guy who had spent so much time in Gov. Murkowski's office “managing the crisis" in the spring of 2002 -- was given a very favorable $1.2-million loan from the Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority to start a fish company, thereby profiting mightily from the market conditions he helped create. Like Zuanich, Fuglvog, and Campbell, everyone who's ever packed water for the UFA has been given ever more lucrative and influential positions.

That's the opposite of the fortunes for everyone else -- and by design -- because when the loot's split up, it's best split the least number of ways. That's why the fisheries council process has been one of rigged exclusion; that's the way the ersatz democratic council process works.

Unless there is a thorough fumigation, the UFA and the councils will continue stealing national fisheries treasures and fencing them off to their own little networks, just as they've been doing for the last twelve or so years. If you run a small, honest business, that won't be good for you.

Victor Smith was born in Juneau and grew up in Petersburg. He has fished commercially all over Alaska on several of his own boats, mostly for salmon and herring, and he was a founding and long-time stockholder in NorQuest Seafoods.

Where have all the halibut gone? Long time passing.

2011-08-22T10:21:00.000-07:00

The marvel of fisheries management in Alaska is that the 'official' position is that there is not a official position of any kind. I've been saying this for years; that it's a buffalo hunt out there. Some new reporters are 'getting it,' and that's refreshing. Many people are applauding that longtime Anchorage Daily News reporter Craig Medred, for delving into the morass that is halibut fishery management. Read this article first: Alaska Dispatch article here.

Read the second article here.

These articles should be read by anyone with the slightest interest in fairness in fisheries. I would hope, and yes, pray, that the Commissioner of the Alaska Department of Fish and Game will cut the average low-budget Joe angler some slack to get some cook fish, relative to multi-millionaire halibut longliners.

Craig has a habit, from not reporting on ocean fishing management much, to use the term 'commercial fishing interests' when defining the competition for fish. On some battle fields like halibut, there is really a consortium arrayed against the cook-fish types. That includes the UFA political action group, not the people they CLAIM to represent. And it includes the bottom trawlers who have a massive by-catch problem of small halibut they are trying to cover up(see the Tholepin blog). And the factory trawl contingent has their own by-catch of salmon, squid, herring, crab, sea mammals and birds they try to hide. So they all ban together on everything in NPFMC meetings. If the halibut longliners want to snuff out the charter guys, then that's all right with the rest of them.

The charter guys, and the public, (maybe one or two go to the major rule making meetings) should not fight this on the council's own turf. They will lose and don't say I didn't warn. They need to go to the real problem of a lack of halibut that the longliners want to ignore, "the missing 100 million pounds of halibut" that the International Pacific Halibut Commission itself iterated. And with each new five year period, it happens again.

What we are witnessing is a repeat of the crash of the Eastern Canadian cod. Much hand wringing by the politicians, silence by the local government officials like Commish Cora Campbell, and a massive rush to get-it-while-they-can by socially callous big boat owners. And this is only the tip of the reef the 'people's fish' are running up on. I know the family Cora came from and I know they wouldn't approve of her ignoring the pleas of 'the least of these.'

Time for UFA to fess up

2011-08-12T16:06:00.000-07:00

Even with overwhelming evidence of wrongdoing, I've heard a reporter say, "what if this isn't true," and, "don't you have a problem with privatization efforts?" Wow!! Even the LA Times took this tone, mentioning his "critics." Is a peace officer a "critic" of the criminal caught in the act?

Well, lots of folk just have a hard time calling the kettle black. And for other reasons that the media doesn't seem to think is important, the coastal communities in Alaska are drying up. Just this week I saw an article talking about the flight of permits from Bristol Bay, yanking the economic rug out from under those communities as well. Welcome to the world of privatization and consolidation of the fisheries resources.

Now one of the key players in the facilitation of the goal of complete consolidation has been brought to justice. See below. And after so many years in the works. Now, influential parties that swear on a stack of Bibles that they 'care' about the fisheries resources, are struggling clumsily to explain why they took no action earlier themselves in the matter. All will be revealed in the end, as they say.

Hopefully, the culprit himself will see his life in a new light, that culturing a rounded personality and moral compass are two of the legs of the three legged stool of the complete man. The other being sagehood, which Arne can undoubtedly demonstrate in Washington D.C. in the fisheries realm. In Alaska he is just another fisherman. We wish him luck in his quest. Below is more information on the train wreck that seems to be making more cars teeter on the tracks all the time.

"Assistant U.S. Attorney Steward said in an interview that Fuglvog is not considered convicted until the sentencing is complete and the judge has accepted the plea agreement. She declined to answer questions about the investigation of Fuglvog or the addendum to the plea agreement, except to say that it's usual to have a sealed addendum as part of any plea deal.

Fuglvog was Murkowski's fisheries adviser from 2006 until July 31, when he resigned the day before he was formally charged and his plea agreement went public.

Murkowski has said that Fuglvog, despite having signed the plea agreement on April 8, did not tell her about it until June 29.

Fuglvog's plea deal says he falsified records of his commercial catches several times between 2001 and 2006, a period during which Fuglvog helped regulate fishing off Alaska as a member of the North Pacific Fishery Management Council.

He admitted that in one 2005 incident he "covered up his illegal fishing" by claiming more than 30,000 pounds of sablefish, also known as black cod, were caught in the Central Gulf of Alaska region, rather than an area known as Western Yakutat.

The value of those illegally caught fish was about $100,000, according to his plea agreement.

News of Fuglvog's crime astonished many in the fishing world. John Sackton, president of industry information service Seafood.com, described Fuglvog as "the most important fisheries staffer in Washington."

Fuglvog came close two years ago to taking over as head of the National Marine Fisheries Service, the highest government position in the country that is focused solely on fishing. He was widely reported in fishing industry journals as being one of two finalists to take over the position.

The United Fishermen of Alaska on Saturday emailed a letter to its members, saying that the Fuglvog developments have cast a negative light on commercial fishing and stressing the need "to represent ourselves in a positive and forthright manner." The organization represents more than 30 commercial fishing industry groups throughout the state.

"UFA had no knowledge of fishing violations throughout Mr. Fuglvog's time of service on the NPFMC and his work for Senator Murkowski," wrote the group's president, Arnie Thomson, and its executive director, Mark Vinsel. "UFA's support for Fuglvog for the top ranking fisheries position in the U.S. in 2009 was based on his record of accomplishment and comprehensive knowledge of fisheries issues nationwide."

John Enge, who grew up in Fuglvog's hometown of Petersburg and created a fishing industry blog called "Alaska Café," confirmed this week that he had emailed UFA director Vinsel about Fuglvog in May 2009. Enge wrote in 2009 that "there is an effort to bring to light the log books of Arne's that document under-reporting of landings to NMFS Ram Division. ... Apparently there are plenty of people whose testimony of at least a ten year period of falsifying federal documents would hold up in court."

Vinsel said this week that Enge's email had seemed to him at the time like just one of the rumors that constantly swirl around the fishing industry. Vinsel said that he simply deleted the email and that UFA did not take any action as a result of his receiving it.

"UFA groups had already supported Fuglvog for the NMFS position two weeks prior to my receiving this message. I did not feel that this second hand rumor was credible, in light of the extensive background check that is performed on all regional fishery management council appointees," Vinsel said."

Read more: http://www.adn.com/2011/08/11/2010441/ex-murkowski-aide-pleads-guilty.html#ixzz1UrJ3DFgL

I have to add that of the thirty odd fishermen's organizations that UFA lists as members, quite a number of them aren't fishermen's organizations, lest anyone think that this emperor does wear clothes. Many of them are aquaculture associations. This may sound impressive, but in fact they are salmon hatchery operations with only a few employees, none of which are fishermen.

I could go on and on pointing to the elephant in the room, but if the media are operating with blinders on they will never see this industry for what it is. Peeling the onion, another way to look at it, would however provide exciting reading for many, many months and probably pull some newspapers out of their funk.

Health Issue No. 1

2011-06-11T09:20:00.000-07:00

Several people have asked me to write on various aspects of living in health and/or avoiding ill health and/or assaults on our well-being that I know something about. In this endeavor I started writing on the radiation drifting over from Japan, since I do have a dog in that fight. Namely my son who is a CBRN Marine over there, who responded to the emergency immediately. And ended up taking the 'blue pill.' He may receive an award for that, but making heroes out of folk may be stopping short of properly warning the rest of us. And I certainly wouldn't do anything to jeopardize his career in the U.S. Marines.

I am sensitive to this since other of my sons are in equally sensitive positions. I waited to write about my oldest son's involvement in capturing Saddam Hussein until I saw a segment on the History Channel about it. And even then I got a routine call from the DOD. But scrutiny of my writing by government is characterized by assistance with issues by the FBI.

Today I deviate to simply pass on to you the opportunity I found to better understand why we are having so much trouble curing cancer. I've heard of tumors shrinking rapidly by just juicing and drinking everything in the organic section of the grocery store. But this link to a video about a cure will explain a whole lot more. Watch this first before buying a pink magnetic ribbon to stick on the back of your car.

Thanks to those folk who pass on this kind of thing. My computer glitched after 51 minutes of it, but before then, I saw a link to send in thirteen dollars to get the whole movie on CD. The inventor's name was in the URL so you should be able to search it.

So far I haven't given out any information, have I? Whew, I'm safe.

A trawl crewman's story of Prohibited Species Catch

2011-05-14T20:14:00.000-07:00

The West Coast Hake fishery historically has had problems with the catching of endangered rockfish species. These problems are a result of incidental catch and unreported by-catch. The West Coast trawl fleet, which is heavily dependent upon the Hake fishery, prosecutes this fishery in a manner that results in catches of rockfish that are biologically unacceptable for the existence of some species. This resulted in management tactics to reduce by-catch and encourage cleaner fishing.

The tactics used to reduce this by-catch were the removal of the at-sea observer program and the implementation of Cameras with the goal of 100% retention and recording of by-catch. The result of these tactics were the reward of the most criminal of fish processors and their fleet and the harm of those who honestly did business. To illustrate this I will take you through a trip.

We untied from the dock, headed for the grounds, our gear in the trawl alley ready to set. After steaming North and West to a suitable edge we began the search for fish, the Captain expertly finding them. The gear was set and several passes were made, our goal for the tow being 150,000lbs. This volume ensured that any endangered rockfish were sufficiently diluted within the haul. After the Cod-end trigger mechanisms indicated it was full we began to haul. A short time and a few minor details later and the net was aboard, the sausage shaped cod-end hanging out the stern-ramp of the boat. Hatches were removed from the hold and winches attached to the Cod-end.

As it came into the trawl alley a "zipper", a special row of meshes held together with a "zipper knot" that when pulled would release a large hole horizontally across the section, on the cod-end was pulled. Then the Cod-end was brought further aboard until the zipper aligned itself with the open hatch and fish flowed from the Cod-end. This was done in an expedient manner and after the popping of several zippers the remainder of the bag was dumped on deck and we prepared the net to set again.

After filling the boat in this manner we would make haste to align ourselves with the pump. Upon arrival the hatches would be removed and the processor would begin offloading the catch. This was done through the use of a pump and conveyor system, the fish being moved from the boat and onto a sorting belt. As the fish moved across the belt By-catch and weighbacks was removed into totes and the Target species continued on into the processing facility to be processed. Totes of Bycatch were seen to be moved by fork-flit to a grinder, where they would be disposed of unrecorded.

So...Pretty dangerous testimonial for me to come out with, but it's what went on and to what degree or extent I couldn't even guess. I think the only hope for the Hake Fleet and those who want documented bycatch is the anti-trust lawsuit against Pacific Seafoods...As far as the King Salmon bycatch, which was horrendously underestimated and exploited by foreign processors before the AFA, maybe an at-sea observer could chime in? If they even have those anymore.

Glad to hear that I can be of service. That first hand account I sent you is pretty much the bulk of my personal experience involving hake- leave town, fill up, offload, repeat. The workings of the plant are the big mystery due to lack of Data. I recall a Wildlife Trooper from Washington (or whichever agency they use for enforcement) hanging about the plant in search of violations, not sure if he was ever able to uncover any infractions. I know that the anti-trust lawsuit against Pacific Seafoods isn't going excellent, so that gives me a gut feeling that there isn't much hard evidence against Pacific Seafoods involving the rockfish. I do know of some rather interesting news reports of incidences involving Pacific Seafoods and Rockfish though, so maybe I'll actually do some real research and put together a collaboration to add to my *
'controversy'.

The following paragraph is from the NPFMC website.

"While the Council is formulating a comprehensive rationalization program for all groundfish in the Gulf of Alaska to address similar problems in other fisheries, a short-term solution is needed to stabilize the community of Kodiak. Kodiak has experienced multiple processing plant closures, its residential work force is at risk due to shorter and shorter processing seasons and the community fish tax revenues continue to decrease as fish prices and port landings decrease. Congress recognized these problems and directed the Secretary in consultation with the Council, to implement a pilot rockfish program. all aspects of the economic portfolio of the fishery needs to recognized for the fishery to be rationalized. All the historical players – harvesters (both catcher vessels and catcher processors) and processors need to be recognized in a meaningful way. The demonstration program is designed as a short-term two-year program for immediate economic relief until comprehensive GOA rationalization can be implemented."

I feel as if this battle has already been lost. During my tenure as a drag hand I have witnessed the worst of the worst when it comes to Halibut bycatch. The sad thing though is there were plenty of other gantries on the horizon doing it the same way, passing in close quarters. When they rationalize all of this and hand out the Quota and group everyone into co-ops it will no doubt be the end of any hope for Kodiak. As I know it now it is a drug infested varmint hole with boat owners reaping profits at the expense of these worthless varmints(crew), stealing from them too easily and discarding them when they're used. These people have no ethic or regard for the resource or the destruction that has occurred.

If you follow the Tholepin blog, which I'm sure you are familiar with, you may have heard that there is 100 million pounds of Halibut that has gone "missing" in 4 years, this is according to the IPHC. Where this missing Halibut has gone is common knowledge among the drag fleet. The observer and data gaming goes to the highest levels, starting with individual boats and ending with lobbyists and corrupt politicians, allowing for the illusion that large volumes of groundfish are being harvested cleanly while in fact it comes at a cost of PSC(prohibited species catch) many many times higher than what is extrapolated. I am able to illustrate in complete detail how this gaming takes place as I have witnessed it in full effect, though I am still puzzled as to where all that data goes and who's behind the doors crunching the numbers. 'cough' Groundfish Data Bank 'cough' 'cough' corrupt politicians 'cough.'

According to NPFMC:

"One of the keys to successful fishery management is incorporating diverse views into decision making through a transparent public process......The Council system was designed so that fisheries management decisions were made at the regional level to allow input from affected stakeholders."

So public transparency is key to the process. Let's me and you work on some of these transparency issues as I know of quite a few things that are behind elaborate smoke and mirrors guarded by snake pits and scorpions. Having worked with a few snakes and scorpions I have somewhat of an immunity so I'll work on that end if you help bring people through the smoke and mirrors.

This is where I'm headed with this, it's about 100 million pounds in 4 years, John, and that's just what was admitted to and only considering Halibut. The real cost is far greater than even these numbers. A f*cking heartbreaker.

anon

Al Queida boogymen or North Pacific trawlers

2011-05-06T09:31:00.000-07:00

Which should you be more afraid of, the threat posed by shadows or the real ongoing destruction of our food supply? I've always been more concerned about the latter. The subsistence users of salmon in Alaska are even more worried, because I can always go to the store. I don't want to detract from this thread too much, because it's a real eye-opener and needs to be read carefully, and because you won't read this anywhere else. The theft and cover-up in the trawl fisheries off the coasts of Alaska is astonishing and reaches to the highest levels. X,Y, and Z do not intend to go quietly into the night.

Clever fish resource management and allocation programs were put in place, largely by the late Sen. Ted Stevens, that are almost cast in stone now and need citizen involvement to remedy the rush for the last fish. Please read to the end, to the letter from 'X.' You'll wonder if the Norton Sound Economic Development Corporation, which bought heavily into the factory trawl realm, is even from the same planet. Is there a movie called 'Spawn II'? Their enabling legislation will have to be changed to give the villages salable stock certificates so they can opt out of this madness so. The whole CDQ mess is the anti-thesis of community development as long as the villagers are unable to control the monster who rules them(and has all their money).

Dear John,

Sorry for being a douchebag, just a young punk here that's frustrated with whats happening and has seen some sh#t happen. Wouldn't it be nice if they would allow jig fishermen to expand to viable fisheries such as POP and perhaps even Pollock. Seems as if even Jig gear will soon be limited entry, though. Then we will see larger boats/less new entrants. Perhaps I will no longer be frustrated then as I will have no job prospects to be frustrated about. Look forward to your next piece.

I wrote you an article on the Rockfish Trawl fishery that segways nicely into Arrowtooth fishing and Sole fishing.

Would you be interested in helping me get it viewed?

On Sun, May 1, 2011 at 9:36 AM, John Enge <careliftchairs@yahoo.com> wrote:
Roger that, over. Remember, there is a backlash going on against catch shares in the country. Even talk of taking quota away from the king crabbers and spreading it around. The meeting the king crabbers are putting on to encourage crab crew to BORROW money to buy crab shares should be boycotted. Why should they buy back what was stolen from them in the first place? It is being called an 'industry' function, with only the robbers as organizers. Hardly representative of the 'industry.' But then you guys can't even get letters in the Kodiak Daily Mirror anymore, or any media attention for that matter. A printed fish newsletter needs to be started up there on behalf of the small guys, and the downtown businesses. You would be surprised how much you could do by just starting to do it. Looking around there, you won't find many people doing much to save Kodiak.

JE

My boots on the ground opinion of the situation in Kodiak (have only spent 4-5 days there this year during Comfish, but have a liaison) is that the "opposition" to such devices as IFQs and shares intermingle heavily with those who own IFQs, or are pushing for rationalization in their fisheries. Stopped in for a jig meeting and was discussing the horrendous bycatch of undersized and unreported halibut in both the trawl and long-line fishery only to be stopped mid-sentence by a long-liner who was jigging in the offseason. It is hardly a united front to reduce waste or stop privatization, mostly just people either trying to make a living or continue to expand their large scale operations. Dismal hopes for independents who know that unreported bycatch in any fishery will result in it's eventual collapse, no matter how much they cut the quotas or shrink the fleet. Currently in the works of writing stuff right now but my mind is very unorganized and most of my stuff is just anecdotal and also very personal, perhaps I will keep writing and stumble upon something useful.

Respectfully,

Z
PS I know a few dudes with backbones and intestinal fortitude. They were the only ones standing with me at Senator Begich's introductory speech at Comfish armed with questions on bycatch and catch shares issues. Pretty much reamed the crabbers and trawlers a new one as they weren't there listening to Senator Begich to defend themselves.

soo...Rockfish is rationalized but we still have Sole and Arrowtooth proceeding in the same manner....Currently the shallow-water sole complex has similar allowable bycatch to the Rockfish program and it wouldn't surprise me if in the next few years it was rationalized and they put 100% coverage on for it....Then they could actually fish clean and stop towing at night/grinding on sh#tpiles without losing "their" share of the fishery. Those larger boats that have been arriving in Kodiak or are rebuilt from smaller vessels are most definitely the problem. In the case of Arrowtooth fishing this is painfully apparent as the boats only have about 24 hours to fish before they need to head in. With the price of fuel these boats *must* fill up with 250-300tho or they won't make any money. So, they fish close to town if they can and run any bycatch over the sorting belt. Anyways...It's f#cked

Here's a little about rockfish-

I'd like to tell a little story about trawling for rockfish, my side of the story, as I witnessed it. The side of the story you won't read in newspapers or hear about in fisheries meetings. The one about a young deckhand trying to learn a trade and earn a living that would sustain him throughout his life. The story began for me as a young teenager spending the summer for the first time commercial fishing with my dad. His job at the time being engineer aboard a local Kodiak trawler/long-liner. When I arrived in Kodiak for summer vacation the vessel was gearing up for Rockfish season.

Back in 2002, when I first experienced it, the fishery was derby style. This meaning that the eligible vessels would race to the grounds, whoever most efficiently and swiftly harvesting the largest volume of target species and allowable by-catch making the most profit. Allowable catch was as much target Rockfish species as one could harvest as well as an additional allowance of 30% Pacific cod, 5% Black Cod, and smaller percentages of "idiot" Rockfish and other species that make up the groundfish complex. Might need to fact check exact %'s

The way these vessels typically went about prosecuting this fishery was to find a sizable chunk of rockfish in the first few days of the trip and rather then continue and fill up with straight rockfish they would save enough room for bycatch. After catching ~2/3 of a boatload of target rockfish they then had enough target species to fill 1/3 of the boat with "bycatch". Additional tows would be made on schools of Pacfic Cod and Black cod to finish the trip. During the derby this type of fishing resulted in large catches of unwanted and prohibited species.

To illustrate in chronological order the discards that occurred during these trips I will begin with the Rockfish portion. During the harvest of the target species, which was only valued at 5-6 cents per pound in 2002, it was common for amounts that exceeded 2/3 of hold capacity to be cut over the side or discarded. This was to ensure that a maximum amount of high value bycatch could be retained on the subsequent tows. Discard of target species in a directed fishery is illegal and these actions typically went unobserved and unnoted in logbooks. The majority of the fleet, which is in the 60ft-124ft range, is only required observer coverage 1 out of every 3 days and therefore these actions went on unenforced.

After the catching of the target species attention was then shifted to the harvesting of Pacific Cod and Black Cod. These two species, like Rockfish, are schooling fish that live close to the bottom. Typically, a school of Pacific Cod or Black Cod would be located and a tow would be made. Due to the high catch rate when Cod encounter a trawl net this sometimes resulted in the catching of volumes over what would be acceptable as bycatch, any overages finding their way to the shit-shoot. As evidence of this sequence occurring a witness only has to remember the deckloads of Pacific Cod and Black Cod that were brought to town, separate from the Target Rockfish in the Tank. Boats arriving at the dock with tanks plugged full of Rockfish and Deckloads of straight Cod.

To add to the problem, the bycatch species, being highly sought after, tows would be made on areas that did not contain the density of allowable species required for clean fishing. This meant that after the catch of Target Rockfish there was large incentive to make the allowable bycatch tows, regardless of catches of species such as Halibut, Skates, and Dog Sharks. This further added to the problem of discard in this derby fishery.

The management solution to these problems, which grew as the fishery saw increasing interest from eligible vessels, was rationalization. This set in place private ownership of shares of the fisheries as well as limitations on prosecution. It also fully allowed the harvesting of non-target allowable bycatch to continue, unchanged.

The result of this solution and it's limitations, which took affect in the 2006 rockfish season, is a quota and cooperative system that gives complete ownership of the fishery to a few individuals while allowing vessel operators to harvest the Target and Allowable By-catch species separately. While this has greatly increased harvest efficiency it also acknowledges that the allowable bycatch system is a mechanism to allow the harvesting of high value bycatch during the prosecution of a low-value fishery. This has resulted in many foreseeable but unaddressed problems such as fleet consolidation, private ownership of a public resource, and many new hurdles to entry into the Rockfish Fishery.

I liked the trawl crewman"s account. One thing tho. He used the term rockfish for the several hundred thousand pouunds put aboard so that the bycatch would be credited. A change l'd make and think he'd agree is that they weren't rockfish, the vast majority was POP cuz you gotta scrape for all the other RF class. The effort being greater so less trips. At the density of the POP you can get a ioo,ooo lb tow if your good. You should have seen Oscar Dyson's boat (Peggy Jo) --(we called it the Piggy Jew) operate, he was way high boat (fished during strikes too) among the very few boats that did that fishery, so l'd say Trident will reap 10 to 20% of the Gulf quota for that vessel alone A common practice by many boats was to take ice in totes on deck, steam to the nearest POP (35 miles from Kodiak), quickly fill the hole with POP, steam to the Blackcod grounds and fill the deck, and steam for the dock with the crew out on deck carefully butchering and icing the $3 per lb fish. The POP was 5 cents at the time. This must be 8 years ago by now. l made a stink about it and Trident doubled the price, 2 years later they doubled it again. You can see why they wouldn't have wanted to pay much, the POP was mostly junk, recovery costs are huge, long lines of women messing with tiny fillets. Today you can buy a sandwich in Galveston that has between 3 and 6 tiny POP fillets in it for $3. The fillets are the normal 1/2 fish. My friend says the locals like it better than red snapper. Any fisherman other than a dragger would never set his gear on small fish in the first place, it's easy to see the difference on their color machine. Then they'd bleed the fish while still alive and ice it careful. Pass this on if you want.

The POP is the dog and all the rest of the fish and us too are the tail. That's the future for the next couple decades if they get away with it.

Well...It's a first hand account of Allowable By-catch in action and how it leads to By-catch of non-target and prohibited species...leading to the need for rationalization which fully acknowledges that the problem was caused by allowing the harvest of multiple target species during the same trip, which encourages dirty fishing.

Y

Yes, those fisheries are little known of in the Alaska public and augur seriously in the halibut stocks debacle, as well as black cod, through that bycatch as well. A key issue is the trawler's, as well as NOAA's, use of the bogus theory of 'economic efficiency' being akin to 'economic utility.' Using the largest possible trawlers to harvest the ocean's resources doesn't meet any standards of good to society. It destroys vastly more of the ecosystem by accident, (some on purpose), to sell, after they allowed themselves that privilege through the council process, small local fleets have been shown to actually burn less fuel, use less labor and equipment than distant-water trawl fleets, the economic multiplier to the local economies are short-circuited by non-resident and other unconscionable trawl practices, etc.

JE

A recent meeting, in Unalakleet of the CDQ group NSEDC, produced a remarkable strategy. The gloves came off as Board Chairman Dan Harrelson outlined a strategy of slander and defamation to be directed at perceived enemies of NSEDC. ( About 12 years ago, while on more cordial terms with Mr. Harrelson, I found myself offering him consolation.
At the time he was resigning as Chairman of the NSEDC Board. Even though he was a Village Public Safety Officer he was charged with 3 major charges by a State Fish & Wildlife Trooper. It's said the trooper told him he was a disgrace to his uniform. If he could he'd cut it off Dan himself. But lacked the authority.
A major defamation suit was simultaneously filed against NSEDC. They ultimately lost and
paid $300,000 for smearing a competitor.
Dan resigned or was booted out. Endeavoring to cheer him I said, "Dan, Don't worry, youll be back. Some time in the future, in a moment of crisis, you'll spurt to the surface like a case of Herpes, and once again lead NSEDC.
It's Deja Vu all over again for Chairman Harrelson.)

What makes resident fishermen, and according to Dan, one resident fisherman in particular, worthy of destructive predatory plotting?
Freedom of speech. Advocacy of clean fishing practices by the At Sea Processors, who have turned virtually every fish, crustacean, and marine mammal in the Bering Sea into "bycatch" of the Pollock Trawl fishery.
The board, frightened, impoverished, unsophisticated men, who subsist on per diem checks from meetings such as this, remained cowed and submissive now, as they have always been to such malice. To speak truth, to be brave, is political suicide.
The checks will stop, the shopping sprees at Anchorage meetings stop. The booze catered to your hotel door in Unalakleet by staff who wish to curtail serious thought will end. The ultimate curse of a communal society is to be shunned.
That the streams in most of their communities have been raped of salmon by their industry does not register. That they are committing cultural genocide of their own way of life is too abstract, or the greed, craving and denial too vehement.
The only way to overcome the ecological destruction, and the corrupt matrix of greed that politically sustains this self destruction is for the average American to step in. Boycott all Pollock products. Every mouth-full you take comes at the expense of an Eskimo or Indian family eking out a harsh living in some of the most remote and harsh places on the continent. Buy a wild caught Alaska Salmon steak instead. Make McFish as extinct on shelves and under the arches as dinosaurburgers.
Say no to the McDonalds Fishwich, no to fish & chips. Yes for free range salmon. You might think the power of one shopper is minimal. But it was shoppers who saved dolphins from Tuna Trawls in one of the greatest boycotts in American history. The tuna boycott. Same type of documentation that triggered and sustained that boycott are all over the internet documenting Pollock bycatch.
" Consuming" is for fires and plagues, not mankind. To buy thoughtlessly is to purchase unforseen consequences for our civilization and oceans.
Shop with the wisdom of our great natural inheritance of the sea always in mind.Walk a little taller.
X

The Pacific ocean perch blues

2011-04-09T10:51:00.000-07:00

Once in awhile you have a chance to connect the straight scoop with folks seriously looking for the straight scoop. I think now is that time in Alaska fisheries. The Obama Administration is now asking the North Pacific Fisheries Management Council to revisit all it's privatization programs; king crab privatization, the halibut and black cod individual quota systems, etc.

The President should look at everything the NPFMC has done, because little of their work helps the resource, the Alaska economy or the ecosystem as a whole. Except for providing a bunch of very low protein and eventually highly breaded and greasy fish sticks, the 'industry' is fouling it's own nest for short term profits.

There isn't time to beat around the bush. International treaty with Canada is being violated as well as violating care of the public common resources. But don't count on the issue with Canada being deprived of king salmon in their part of the Yukon River. Their government had no qualms over fishing their iconic cod stocks on their East coast into oblivion and putting tens of thousands of Canadians out of work. Corporate political influence in the North Pacific uses the same blunt instruments to get what they want as Canadian corporations.

Enter someone who the President really should talk to: John Finley of Kodiak. John was king crabbing when Kodiak was truly the King Crab Capital of the World. And crewed with that iconic and successful big boat owner, Ole Harder. Ole was prescient when it came to threats to the Alaska fisheries and wrote the Bill that has kept disease riddled and 'strange' DNA farmed salmon out of Alaska's salmon streams and coastal waters.

John fished with Ole for eight years. Two men who thought alike about protecting Alaska's fishing industry. John was equally as prescient as one of the first Kodiak fishermen to target halibut, as the author of the Bill that gave the small boat fleet in the Gulf of Alaska a crack at the Pacific cod in State waters, since the NPFMC wouldn't give them any in the much vaster Federal waters.

So when John stays on a fisheries issue, folks need to listen. His top of the list issue now is Pacific Ocean Perch, aka, POP. What's so great about POP? For one thing it is in huge demand by the Japanese for it's flamboyant red color. But it also is a very fine textured and flavorful rockfish, even compared to Yellow Eye rockfish, aka, Red Snapper. And with the fishing closure for 'the other red snapper,' those in the Gulf of Mexico, demand for POP in those markets has grown.

And POP is maybe the most numerous fish in the North Pacific, including salmon. You can't fish on them very hard, because unlike salmon who live a couple of years, POP, live for decades. They were what the Japanese were mostly after when they were trawling prior to 1976 in the GOA. And they caught a load of 'em. Now you can't find the catch data on POP in public documents, or that self-professed expert on trawl catches, the Groundfish Data Bank.

When you think about how valuable POP is as a resource, and the fact that the public isn't hip to this resource, you can figure the trawl fisheries/NMFS complex wouldn't want the catches divulged. What is the President going to do about that? We can figure what Alaska Governor Parnel is going to do: nothing at all.

But John says it doesn't end there. He says, "Why trawl for them at all and destroy the habitat when you can take them with no harm to the environment with hooks and pots?" I know a lot about both these methods of fishing even though we never saw many POP in Southeast Alaska where I come from. As for hooks, I spent a couple of years researching hooks and hooking methods and developing a low cost self-baiting machine for the Alaska Fisheries Development Foundation. And I procured blueprints of a double-tunnel, collapsible trap for fin-fish for the first use of such a device in Alaska. Longlining pots for black cod became so efficient that the practice was outlawed. That shoots down the argument that trawling is so efficient, even though this is a non-issue when you consider that salmon nets and boat size are limited in size to rein in efficiency.

Lets just cut the crap, the trawlers just have more political power. These are bigger operations by a magnitude of many hundreds. The drive and the money behind trawling can open doors like crazy. Even cut doors into solid walls. But lets just be honest. The POP should be harvested by smaller boats that can take care of the resource better. Pots don't have any bycatch that can't be returned alive to the sea. The bycatch is miniscule even compared to longlining hooks. And the bottom habitat is left intact.

The Pacific Ocean perch lives closer to shore when it is young, and they can get so thick that they have mass die-offs. You're talking a very abundant species. Then they move out to the edge of the continental shelf where the upwelling is strong and the living is good. There are many other species that recognize the good life there too, like black cod, king salmon, halibut, etc. You think bycatch is a problem now, just turn the trawlers loose on POP big time and see what happens.

One door the trawlers have carved out of the stone wall of ecosystem protection and sound fisheries management through their NPFMC is 'allowable bycatch.' An actual quota share of other fishermen's target species that they get to keep and sell. Like Pacific cod and black cod. Why do you think they even go out for arrowtooth flounder, which is a totally inedible species; for all the cod they can keep, irregardless of the millions of pounds of small halibut they kill and have to throw back.

I understand how these practices can continue: blinding greed and political ambition, and an apathetic public. Even some fishermen who have made deals with the devil, and don't know there are consequences of appeasement. Britain found that out in the '40s. Or at least hope they can retire before everything hits the fan like Eastern Canada experienced. Some people don't think there is any way to fish out the ocean. They thought that on the Grand Banks, especially when the early explorers had trouble rowing to shore through solid cod up shallow. Or on the Amur river when Captain Cook's ship was "stopped by a shoale of salmon." The 50% drop in halibut quotas in the last five years in the Gulf of Alaska is just the start of the pain.

The NPFMC has been having talks on the salmon bycatch problem, now that nobody can find much on the spawning grounds anymore. But the rhetoric is the same. "Oh, we don't know where they come from, so lets just not do anything except just enough to keep from being hung in effigy." The trawlers council will delay until the bycatch of salmon drops off to very little, problem solved. Although every other fisher and consumer of king salmon will really have a problem then. The problem with Eastern Canada is that they discovered that the vast cod stocks were actually hundreds of genetically distinct stocks, and even with no fishing on them at all for a decade, many small stocks are totally gone. And the overall stock will never come back no matter what they do.

Corporate Khans

2011-04-01T05:17:00.000-07:00

"(Florida Governor)Scott says the cuts are necessary to address a $170 million deficit in the Agency for Persons with Disabilities — but at the same time, he is also proposing $1.5 billion in corporate tax cuts and $1.4 billion more in property tax cuts."

The question is, what comes after the five year - $6 billion tax cut for the oil companies in Alaska? There is no corresponding performance bond type language in the Governor's bill, which just passed the House of Representatives. Fortunately, I took my two children with developmental disabilities out of Alaska. This might get ugly for folks like my children there. The ones who have the least ability to protest get targeted for government funding cuts. Alaska Governor Parnell is smarter than that Florida hack though. Sean isn't proposing the cuts in corporate taxes and cuts to vulnerable citizens in the same breath.

Let's recap the corporate agenda for a second. Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker is so blatantly against the middle class he had the police eject teachers' representatives from a press conference on education. What?

The Governor of Maine ordered a huge mural of working folk removed from a government building saying, "You don't see anything honoring business here, so we can't have anything honoring the workers." What? Who does he think makes up a business if not workers? I realize the owners of the businesses aren't chopped liver, but hey, give respect where respect is due, not start down a road of marginalizing folk.

The Palmer, Alaska State Representative introduced and then pulled a Bill to yank collective bargaining rights. I was fortunate, I started paying my way through college working in a cold storage in Alaska that was unionized. The plants got rid of the unions and you can't work your way through college working in a fish processing plant anymore. Some unions have survived and I'd hate to see what would happen to Alaskan's quality of life without the ability to talk to managers about their wages.

In Ohio, the Republican controlled Legislature struck over 60,000 comments from citizens from the record, just because they could. Maybe there is a loophole that allows them to, but is this democracy? Really and truly?

The reasons I've seen given for cutting the taxes on the wealthiest corporations in Alaska are hollow indeed. No substance at all, if not outright lies. In the least, dangerous presumptions. Isn't there an old saying about the sin of presumption? The republicans(how can you capitalize the word these days?) presume that enriching the already rich will somehow help. Help who? Please explain in detail. What part about the failure of 'trickle down economics' don't they understand. Unless they just don't care to understand. Which sure seems to be the case.

Hopefully the Alaska Senate has more integrity than just saying "let's just give it a whirl and see what happens." Whew, I personally know a kid who figured he'd drive as fast as possible over those deep potholes in asphalt hoping he could sail over somehow. The damage is just worse with that kind of reckless abandon.

The damage to folks who need the government's help is not fixable by a trip to the auto parts store. Giving to the rich and taking from the poor will catch up with those responsible. This can't go on forever and when it stops, names are going to be remembered.

Bycatch Blues Redux

2011-03-25T16:35:00.000-07:00

"This is the same general area where the joint ventures back in the 1980s killed off thousands of sealions, mostly females and junveniles. Too much money interferred with controls, like now with king salmon."

From the Tholepin blog. Thousands of king salmon being killed and dumped again in the pollock trawl fishery behind Kodiak Island. One load of 150,000 lbs of eulachon and squid, what the king salmon are feeding on. And the devastation goes on and on. You gotta read this stuff unless you have no stake in the fisheries, or don't like to eat fish, or care about the economy, taxes, jobs or want to get your head out of the sand.

Observed 30 plus percent bycatch of halibut by one trawler. You'd think the like-to-eat-what-you-catch sector, or the Southeast Alaska longliners would be jumping up and down. Politics ya think? Look at the comment by the East coaster in Kodiak about trawling being resorted to after other methods are no longer productive enough. Then everything gets beat down so bad they have to run out 200 miles.

Except in Alaska where they went right into trawling after the foreign fleets were pushed back. Except in Southeast where they recognized right away that trawling would cripple the other fleets and outlawed the practice all the way up the Gulf of Alaska to Kayak Island. Well, the trawl lobby is just too powerful to stop, but you can demand they leave the whole ecosystem somewhat intact.

There is all this talk of which part of the food chain they target: fishing up the food chain or down it. What? In Alaska they catch the whole food chain in one pass because it's all mixed together like it is in fairly healthy ecosystems. But it's getting unhealthy fast. The halibut quotas have been halved and you can hardly find a king salmon in the mighty Yukon River anymore. Welcome to Waterworld where the might makes right, not the other way around.

We still like to believe that our 'more right' system of government has made America great. But when you consider the treatment of the First Nations, and the buffalo they relied on, and the forests, passenger pigeons and fish stocks, it doesn't look like such a good system. I'm not even counting the Federal Reserve, which isn't federal at all. We're mostly a nation of slackers in our personal responsibilities to help uphold democracy, so that it devolves into plutocracy. It's amazing that it hasn't happened sooner. It was a good try though.

One more pot-shot at the draggers though. I saw some frozen arrowtooth flounder fillets for sale recently at Win-Co, so I figured I'd try 'em out. I knew they were going bad before they could even get them to the dock in Kodiak because of some weird chemical reaction unique to them. The Fish Tech center in Kodiak has been working like mad for decades trying to figure that one out. So in the oven it went, with all the caution I could muster. And like I suspected it came out mushier(by far) than a stewed tomato.

The reason I mention it here is that this inedible fish has a directed fishery for it, and guess what, the trawlers get to keep bycatch. How convenient. Not halibut though, they get to be discarded with no penalties or limit. Too bad the Kodiak Daily Mirror newspaper doesn't take letters to the editor on anything more controversial than jaywalking, as of two years ago.

Big holes in Alaska not needed

2011-03-17T09:07:00.000-07:00

This is the first time I've agreed to post something by another writer on my this blog, but it feels OK. I'm a little flattered that someone wants to use my platform. Nicholas is an aspiring environmental journalist, and Alaska could use more of them to, well, keep Alaska Alaska. How would it feel if history books referred to Alaska as "that state with the big hole in the ground where the fish used to be so abundant."

And for what? To make some rich folks even richer in a world awash in metals, but sorely lacking in untainted food? Look up the FAO and WHO CODEX program. Where is the overriding necessity for changing the way Alaska will be looked at from now on. The acid test should be whether proponents of Pebble Mine are willing to put their names and their family's names on a huge bronze plaque alongside the miles wide hole in the ground out in Western Alaska.

The Pebble Mine and Its Consequences

by Nicholas Scott

Right now, Alaskans are facing one of the most crucial decisions in their state’s environmental history. The Pebble Mine prospect in the Bristol Bay region of Southwest Alaska gravely endangers not only the entire Bristol Bay watershed ecosystem, but it could also have equally damaging effects on one of the area’s strongest economies by killing off the salmon runs and decimating the charter fishing industry.

The mine prospect is aimed at excavating an extremely large porphyry copper, gold, and molybdenum mineral deposit. Unfortunately, the plan involves impounding large amounts of mine contaminated water, waste rock, and environmentally toxic mine tailings in one of Alaska’s richest and most biodiverse ecosystems.

Proponents of the Pebble Mine argue that the environmental risks involved with the mine are well-worth the economic trade-off. They claim it will significantly increase state tax revenue, create high-paying jobs, and provide domestic resources of raw materials that the US currently relies on foreign sources for. However, it’s highly debatable whether or not the mine would even provide significant tax revenue to the state, seeing as Alaska’s tax structure allows for mining to return only 1.5% of its resource value to the state. Furthermore, if Bristol Bay’s salmon runs become contaminated, it could have disastrous consequences for some of the largest industries in the area: commercial and charter fishing. This would seriously damage Southwest Alaska’s economy and endanger a huge number of jobs for native Alaskans. A majority of the high-paying jobs provided by the mining are likely to be given to out-of-state workers who are already trained and employed by Anglo-American PLC, the company who will own and operate the mine.

Anglo-American PLC’s environmental track record is another reason why Alaskans ought to be dead set against allowing the Pebble Mine to open. Not only does mining itself have an abysmal record for releasing toxins into headwaters (76% of all modern large hard rock metal mines similar to the Pebble Mine have fallen below quality water standards), Anglo-American PLC has an atrocious record itself. Anglo-American PLC has been severely criticized for worker safety, public health, and environmental problems at their mines across the world. In South Africa, Anglo-American PLC has been involved in mesothelioma cancer lawsuits for exposing their workers to dangerous levels of asbestos, a toxic material. If a company is brash enough to expose its workers to the risk of one of the deadliest cancers (the average mesothelioma life expectancy is under two years), then there is no reason to believe that they will be concerned with the public health concerns of contaminating Bristol Bay. In fact, Anglo-American PLC has already demonstrated their commitment to the environmental and public health around Bristol Bay by nearly wiping out the world’s largest stockeye salmon fishery by attempting to build a massive dam at its headwaters.

It’s clear that proponents of the Pebble Mine are overstating the short-term economic benefits and understating the significant environmental risks that Anglo-American PLC operating a large hard rock metal mine poses to the pristine environment of Bristol Bay.

N. Scott is a health, safety, and political advocate with a great passion for environmental conservation. He is a recent college graduate and an aspiring journalist who currently resides in the South East United States.

The new media paradigm

2011-02-11T07:12:00.000-08:00

Watching the democracy demonstrations in Cairo this morning on DemocracyNow.org got me thinking about news outlets. The demonstrators are surrounding the Egyptian state TV station now. It is being described as just the propaganda arm of the Mubarak regime. The major news organizations in the U.S. aren't that bad, but when people start calling FOX News, Faux News, then you look at the other ones with a jaundiced eye as well.

There are a lot of ticked off contributors to the Huffington Post now that Adrianna sold out to AOL for $350 million. One blog moderator gets rich and 3,500 contributors who poured out their guts in writing for her get nothing. Which begs the question, how do you ever know when your pro bono work to help society will be capitalized on by others?

I just heard the story of how Demming Coles, the spark-plug for helping the Community Development Quota groups in Alaska become rich, had to start his life over in Florida after being shuffled to the side. I know how that feels, re., the Regional Seafood Development Association movement in Alaska. Not that it helps to commiserate, but it helps to keep in mind the idea of moving ahead. And quickly.

The head of Raytheon said he goes by the 30/30 rule: do 30% more than you planned on doing, and do it 30% faster. That's probably a good idea when it comes to the media. You can't get a unvarnished truth letter in a lot of the Alaska newspapers, especially fishing related. So what is a person to do. Lots it turns out. Here's a list of wide-scope Internet based news sites, sans the Huffington Post:

Public radio and television programing is under assault by extremists in Congress now. Even though 100 million Americans partake in it and in some parts of the country it's the only news source they have. No media outlet is perfect, but I know that less isn't a better idea.

Here are Alaska and national fisheries news sites that don't give you a spin. Unfortunately, the well financed, cool and comprehensive site or two that I could list are just going to lead you astray. It's generally better to have no information than false information. And the federal and state agency sites are full of their goings-on. You might want to have a salt shaker handy when you peruse those.:

Then you have your general Alaska news web sites:

Progressive Alaska has an extensive listing of blogs about goings on in Alaska. You really have to dig to see the whole picture, as the state is so big, no one or a few web site editors or bloggers can cover the whole state. You could get another 1,700 foot earthquake induced wave and few to no reporters would go check out the damage, like the last one. Much less the news that is deliberately being hidden, like in the trawl fisheries. Or misinformation like Pebble Mine advertising on Kodiak radio, saying "We listen." Sure they listen, then they work like crazy behind the scenes promoting an environmental holocaust while working just as hard to throw fisher-folk and government officials off the scent.

Sourcing and selling fish confidentially.

2011-02-08T07:58:00.000-08:00

Reading over Robin Richardson's Global Food Collaborative web site this morning got me thinking about how she has leap-frogged ASMI's services in a key area. The Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute is a state agency with a board of directors dominated by representatives of the largest seafood processing companies. Is this a private marketing firm for the big players? That's hard to say, but consider that information the agency compiles is immediately available to the Board - the big processing company reps.

So along comes a small mom and pop processor buying fish in an region that a 'major' thinks is his bailiwick. The mom and pop calls ASMI to see if any buyers are requesting small lots of their specialty product. The information is recorded and Sunshine Chum Poppers, Inc. is now fully on the radar of the big fish houses in the area. Standard practice in the Alaska seafood industry is for the big guys to immediately engage their 'dirty tricks department' to 'handle' the competition.

No my friend, the seafood industry is not a gentleman's sport. My father was in it all his life as a major player and my mother called him a dictator, but his boss said he just didn't have the bare knuckles instincts of a street fighter that was really needed. Take for example when I was sending round P. cod to Korea. We were getting it from Sand Point, flown by the fishermen to us in Anchorage, where we would repack them and ship them to Korea. We were paying the guys around three times what Trident Seafoods was paying at their plant in Sand Point. So Trident tells the fishermen that if they want home heating oil, they better reconsider who they are selling their fish to.

Not that they needed ASMI to know what was going on, after all they've been keeping their eyes and ears open for a hundred years. The point is, a state agency is just not the place to route confidential sales information through. Market information, whether the buyer's or the seller's, is the most confidential information a company has, especially small companies who might only have a couple of contacts. And I've heard of big company reps at an airport writing down the addresses on pallets of air freight of a small competitor.

Enter Global Food Collaborative and Robin's goal of facilitating supply chain connections in the food and beverage industries in Alaska. This is what she does:

More search capability.
Enhanced new product request forms.
Easier navigation.
Higher quality information, specific to product categories.
Private/confidential collaboration between/among members.

That last one is a biggie and would make it worth it to ditch ASMI and go with Robin. Think about it. It's like getting free software that is corrupted with a virus. You'll end up with more grief than you ever imagined, if your company even survives. The failure rate among small seafood companies in Alaska is at least 85%. Risk management is what it's called.

I don't think you have to be a bare knuckle brawler like the legends of the industry. And not even the old, 'get even, not get mad.' I think when one door isn't working, look for a new door. It's just 'the fishing game' after all. Don't take it so seriously, after all most of us are not in the plutocracy, as Alan Greenspan says, and never will be. There are 'two Americas' and I hope that if the University of Alaska ever figures out how to be honest with students in any future fisheries curriculum, they will include this little fact.

Getting back to who to use to help in fish trading, are you going to use a bureaucracy mostly interested in job retention - their own? One that uses ex-military to direct it's mission to close ranks and protect it's turf? Little do the mom and pop processors know that their counterparts in ASMI pay huge amounts of money to a lobbyist to lay a mine-field of adverse regulations in Juneau to keep the fishermen and little processors down on the farm. Face it, the ASMI door is closed for innovators, and that is what is going on at the moment, by necessity. You can't competed head on with the majors in their product divisions.

Give Robin a call. I also just found a notation I'd written some time in the last year that goes, 'Identify new marketing strategies and new ways to doing small scale fisheries in general. U. Cal - Berkeley.' It's pretty clear that this is the domain of free enterprise, not bureaucracy. And it is also clear that the University of Alaska and ASMI don't have the personnel or the culture of innovation that is required to help the fisheries folk in the 'other America,' the America of 95% of us that can't afford to support candidates for political office or kick in tens of thousands of dollars each for lobbying.

Egyptians, Inuit and fish

2011-01-30T17:26:00.000-08:00

"In science you need to understand the world; in business you need others to misunderstand it." Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Today, the country of Egypt is apparently imploding due to the repressive regime they have. The police have vanished and the army is doing nothing. Where this ends is anyone's guess. Also on this morning was the Alaska Wilderness Wings reality show. The only Alaska reality show that isn't just a plain waste of time in my opinion. Maybe because I used to fly out of Petersburg with my dad when I was young, never went king crabbing, or found anything to like about Sarah Palin. And the only time I was ever fooled while making commercial vessel loans was in dealing with an ex-state trooper, so heck with that show too.

I don't want to delve into flying in the bush in Alaska today, but I appreciate Western Alaskan's dependence on all types of aircraft. The show today included a segment on the only people living inside the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Talk about remote. There also was a segment on flying in explosives for the whalers' harboons on St. Lawrence Island. It's a lonely battle for survival out there. Even in the villages on the mainland, very few have a road connection to anywhere except their own garbage dump. Not that they don't have a lot of government help. And not that some don't bemoan that fact either, given that there is a lot of time for a lot of people out there to sit around and think about how bad they have it. Same thing happens in a city.

Those folks out there are like most small owner/operators of fishing boats. There just isn't a lot of strategic thinking long term. Which many people in condos in Maui aren't good at either. But this could be a good time for Western Alaskans to do a little just for drill. The lessened amount of sea ice is allowing more sea time up there. Not a good thing for walrus. It could be good for some village folk who got the idea to go throw some commercial fishing gear in the ocean though. Not that it's culturally ingrained like in other societies, but they might want or need to get into it before long. Some are already thinking about going to sea. In places like Dutch Harbor the locals did. After they got a ten mile buffer around them to keep the trawlers out, that is.

There is a cold storage plant in Nome that will buy any amount of fish you want to bring in. Teller, too, has some thoughts of commercial fishing, as they are behind a sand spit, behind a sand spit to keep boats. It used to be the wintering spot for the Nantucket whaling fleet. They could winch their boats up on shore in lieu of a boat harbor like in the Mediterranean.

If the Bering Straits are going to be open an extra couple months a year, then you have a crack at bringing in some cod to salt down. Then you'd be looking at a small boat fueled economy like the northern part of Norway where my ancestors came from. It was working well until they industrialized the harvesting of the cod, like what happened on Eastern Canada's Grand Banks as well. And if you had a little larger vessel to fish from like my great-grandfather had, you could sail somewhere and trade them or sell them.

Where am I going with all this? Get a load of this e-mail I just received from our subject area:

"There is so much ice out there now that the idea of open water is a dangerous rumor, difficult to believe. The co-op of bottom trawlers has been meeting behind locked doors here in Nome, no reporters or public, with the regional nonprofit, Kawerak, and elders flown in and hoteled at great expense, from the Kuskokwim delta to the Artic circle.
The co-op wants to move north. And assures that there's no salmon bycatch. Neglecting to mention (king) crab, halibut etc.
NSEDC (Norton Sound Economic Development Corp.) funded the Kawerak shindig. But when people are engaged in their own holocaust it's such a monumental irony that it defies description."

Then a few days later I get this addendum. The writer was hot, despite the sun only just clearing the horizon in Point Barrow for the first time all winter.:

"The break-in and attempted theft at the hatchery here by ADF&G was 'passed' on by the DA to 'Special Prosecutions' in Anchorage. They kicked it back to the Troopers for more investigation. Basically the State in this region, in fish and game issues, is subservient to the political dictates of certain hypercorrupt tribal leadership, or quasi-tribal amalgams like NSEDC. I'd be shocked if they prosecute."
"Tyler Rhodes, a (Nome) Nugget reporter, moved to a public relations job with NSEDC a couple days ago after printing in the Nugget some slavishly flattering pieces about the CDQ group."

To tie the repression of the regime in Egypt to the life and death struggle for survival in Western Alaska; you know that any opportunity to establish a commercial fishery in Northwest Alaska will be coveted by those with the best connections to the U.S. regime. Not that the trawl companies needed to sneak around and try hoodwink the tribal leaders out of a chance for them to have community fisheries of their own, with living wages and a good multiplier effect of fishing income spent locally. Their lobbyists who control the North Pacific Fisheries Management Council repeatedly flout National Standards No. 8 (Economic development consideration). Their response to wreaking havoc on Alaska community economics is, "so sue me."

I doubt poor Egyptians thought suing President Mubarak was much of an option either. So where does that leave us? Big Japanese, Norwegian and a couple of Seattle trawl companies meeting in the frozen north of Alaska with the elders of coastal villages, without any transparency, about fishing off their shores. The elders should ask the Pribilovians how that worked out for them. Part of the justification for the massive investment in harbors in the Pribilof Islands was to develop a small boat fleet. But after the trawlers circled their islands a thousand times there wasn't much left to go out in a little boat and fish for.

The Elders need to keep in mind that lying is company policy by the trawl companies. There are no shortage of examples. And way up in the Bering Straits, like out at Adak, nobody is going to see what they are doing. And keep in mind that bottom trawling extinguishes 30% of the species complex of the bottom where a trawl has passed, per Oregon State University where the NOAA chief worked. Don't grey whales just munch on the mud and filter out all the good stuff? Would anyone want the trawlers to filter out the good stuff first. Maybe they would promise on a stack of bibles not to do that.

Bottom line: the trawl companies have been eying Northwest Alaska waters since the moratorium was put in effect there. No new research has been done. Why conduct these meetings in secret? And, there are much better fishing methods than trawling if fishing was so desired out there, ie., live capture by jig and pot. There would be any number of takers using these sustainable methods if fishing were allowed in those sub-arctic waters. It's amazing what the new fish attractants can accomplish.

Reference is made to the Tholepin blog for the true damage that bottom trawling has on crab and halibut stocks alone. http://www.tholepin.blogspot.com/
Good crab bycatch picture here: http://tholepin.blogspot.com/2010/10/enemies-of-goa-resources.html
Video of serious halibut bycatch here: http://www.tholepin.blogspot.com/2009/10/filthy-video-of-halibut-waste.html

Social Ecological Systems

2011-01-25T07:20:00.000-08:00

The following letter was written by me to some villagers I know scattered around Alaska, with supporting material on a recent Nobel Prize winner. Then I thought I'd add anecdotal information for the fun of it. Like the Easter Islander's story, which I never knew, until I saw it on the History Channel recently. And I saw plenty of parallels to what is happening on the whole space island we're on.
Many hundreds of years ago, the Easter Islanders started sculpting rocks in abstract images of men for good luck. It became a competition to see who could make the biggest one, which gave them some social advantage or other. They became possessed with sculpting these huge figures, and too, the island got hit with a mammoth storm or tsunami which left no trees standing. So they ended up eating each other.

Their solution was to have a competition once a year to climb down a thousand foot cliff by hand, swim a mile or two off-shore, and get the first bird egg of the year, swim and climb back and give it to the elders. Then the winner's family could rule Easter Island for the next twelve months. The culture stabilized after that, that is, until the British started hauling them off into slavery.

But I heard of a superior competitor in Western Alaska thinking along the same lines, although at the moment his mandate is tenuous and maybe non-existent. The comparison of the Easter Islanders to some Western Alaska villages might not be too distant in certain regards. I know one thing for sure, the big mining and oil companies aren't concerned.

Think Pebble prospect versus a good chunk of the world's salmon. The biggest gold miner in the world is interested in building a bigger port for his yacht, and those of his friends, in the Mediterranean Sea. I saw an artists drawing of a LSV mega yacht with hydroponic farms and trawl gear. What??? (The LSV means Life Support Vessel.) So does this mean the rich are going to just float off over the horizon after they have raped the land in the name of free market capitalism? Are you home Sean?

My letter and the news articles follow:

You know, I was going to write something, wasn't sure what, with the lead-in of working together. You folks in the villages have been on my mind and then I saw the attached material again. I can't imagine a large segment of society working together, for instance, all fishermen. Even if there was a pat definition of 'fisherman,' given that more of them all the time sit on shore while they rent their boat and license out. I've been writing for some time about working together, since Elinor Ostrom won a peace prize for her work on cooperative resource management.

The article below highlights the issue in regards resource management. However my thoughts have been on a community level and I wonder how much communities CAN work together to manage local resources, or do 'barn raising' projects. There are articles written about how everyone is so independent these days, the family unit is disintegrating, etc. The 'me generation' and all that. We might want to think about some very tried and true stuff to 'make it' if things keep going the way they are: peak oil, devaluation of the dollar, etc. After all, most public policy is fairly new, untested, stuff. Some is downright warped.

I started writing on low-tech fish preservation methods some years ago, and tried a low-tech processing project last winter, except with a high tech 'processor.' That processor just happened to be available, and I think it signaled to me that going low tech is safer. A blend of good, new, sustainable technology blended with good old technology. Like 'integrative medicine.' Can we look forward with courage, as communities, and decide what strategies will work if we have only ourselves to rely on? Is there any commitment for this kind of thing any more?

To develop strategies, we have to be brutally honest about what our assets are. Just about every town profile I've seen repeats the mantra of 'strong sense of community.' Even Petersburg: so why did half of the seine fleet jump ship and join the Silver Bay bandwagon in Sitka. They may maintain homes in Petersburg, and their winter moorage, but so much for the 'close knit community' business.

A new leadership paradigm could turn things around, and it must. I don't think there is a town in Alaska that isn't going down a little or a lot. The thinking is that 40 to 100 cities in the U.S. are basically bankrupt. Even whole states. And the Fed says it isn't going to bail them out with bond issues and all like they did for the banks. Remembering that the Fed was set up BY the banks.

I probably should have continued to 'fast' after 'my procedure.' You know, the kind of oscopy that nobody likes to discuss in polite company. I was starting to see pretty darn clearly. Since I had put your communities on the front burner of my mind, I did get one gem. And that is that knowledge takes a much lower position than community spirit. Although the thought included good family and interpersonal relations as well.

So after all this pondering on the fate of the coastal community, and all the key-pad racket, I conclude there is enough love in a community to 'git 'er done.' Just look at the parents with children and there's your answer right there. But we do need to stop sculpting statues.

Rewriting the “Tragedy of the Commons”

What cooperation and sharing have to do with saving the world.

by Bill McKibben

posted Jan 10, 2011

http://www.yesmagazine.org/people-power/rewriting-the-tragedy-of-the-commons?utm_source=fb&utm_medium=socmed&utm_content=McKibbenB_RewritingTragedyOfTheCommons&utm_campaign=110113_PeoplePower

: "Mexico has become a global leader in safeguarding its expansive forests. And it has done so not by fencing the forests behind "no trespassing" signs, but by giving local communities ownership rights and an opportunity to take responsibility for their stewardship."

-Luis A. Ubiñas, "At Climate Talks, An Answer Grows Outside."

It was two years before the first Earth Day in 1970 when Garrett Hardin penned the famous essay “Tragedy of the Commons,” and it fit a certain bleak and despairing mood of the time. Paul Ehrlich had just published The Population Bomb, a Malthusian account of a world overwhelmed by sheer numbers of people. Against the backdrop of that gloom, Hardin’s theory came as another dose of bad news, “proving” that we also had no hope of controlling our appetite for natural resources. Since no one owned the oceans or the atmosphere, we would inevitably fish and pollute them into oblivion. Hardin offered a few suggestions, but his title summed it up: we were witnessing a tragedy whose script could not be revised.

Oddly, a decade later his argument fit just as easily the exuberant, privatizing mood of the Reagan years. No one owns the sky or the sea? Well, then, let’s sell them! The race was on to privatize everything, from fishing rights to kids’ playgrounds, on the theory that this was the only way to manage them well. Society was the problem, the individual was the solution.

The race was on to privatize everything, from fishing rights to kids’ playgrounds, on the theory that this was the only way to manage them well.

The only thing that Hardin’s argument didn’t fit was the facts, at least not all of them. For eons communities had managed to protect all kinds of resources without private ownership. In America and in England, it’s true, a couple of centuries of enclosure and corporatization made this harder to recall. But around the world most of the pasturelands, forests and streams, had long been controlled by communities, drawing on deep traditions of custom and collective wisdom. Even in the U.S. we had classic examples—the acequia irrigation systems of New Mexico, which may be the only sustainable water systems in the American west, or the lobster fishery of Maine, protected from overfishing less by law than by long custom.

And in the years since “The Tragedy of the Commons” appeared, even a cursory glance around the landscape reveals that Hardin’s gloom has been disproven a thousand times. For example, I’m willing to bet that many of the people reading this book turned on their local public radio station this morning. Here’s how public radio works: give away your product for free with no advertising, and then twice a year wheedle people to make a donation to pay for it. Turn that in as your business plan at some bank and they’ll laugh you out the door, but public radio has been the fastest-growing sector of the broadcast industry for years. And now we have low power F.M. and community radio, not to mention the explosion of free content on the Internet.

I’ve spent most of my life as a writer—and one of the sweetest parts of that job is knowing that whatever I produce ends up in a library, an institution dedicated to the idea that we can share things easily. There are innumerable other examples—and they are the parts of our lives that we usually care most about. They don’t show up on balance sheets because they’re not producing profit—but they are producing satisfaction.

These things we share are called commons, which simply means they belong to all of us. Commons can be gifts of nature—such as fresh water, wilderness and the airwaves—or the products of social ingenuity like the Internet, parks, artistic traditions, or the public health service. But today much of our common wealth is under threat from those hungry to ruin it or take it over for selfish, private purposes.

We have to figure out how to cooperatively own and protect the single most important feature of the planet we inhabit—the thin envelope of atmosphere that makes our lives possible.

The most crucial commons, perhaps, is the one now under greatest siege, and it poses a test of whether we can pull together to solve our deepest problems or succumb to disaster. Our atmosphere has been de facto privatized for a long time now—we’ve allowed coal, oil and gas interests to own the sky, filling it with the carbon that is the inevitable byproduct of their business. For a couple of centuries this seemed mostly harmless—CO2 didn’t seem to be causing much trouble. But two decades ago we started to understand the effects of global warming, and now each month the big scientific journals bring us new proof of just how vast the damage is: the Arctic is melting, Australia is on fire, the pH of the ocean is dropping fast.

If we are to somehow ward off the coming catastrophes, we have to reclaim this atmospheric commons. We have to figure out how to cooperatively own and protect the single most important feature of the planet we inhabit—the thin envelope of atmosphere that makes our lives possible. Wrestling this key prize away from Exxon Mobil and other corporations is the great political issue of our time, and some of the solutions proposed have been ingenious—most notably the idea put forth by commons theorist Peter Barnes and others that we should own the sky jointly, and share in the profits realized by leasing its storage space to the fossil fuel industry. For that to work, of course, we would have to reduce that storage space quickly and dramatically. Barnes’ Cap-and-Dividend plan offers one way to make that economically and politically feasible.

But for this and other necessary projects to succeed, we need first to break the intellectual spell under which we live. The last few decades have been dominated by the premise that if we privatize all economic resources it will produce endless riches. Which was kind of true, except that the riches went to only a few people. And in the process they melted the Arctic, as well as dramatically increasing inequality around the world. Jay Walljasper performs the greatest of services with this book. It is—choose your metaphor—a bracing slap across the face or the kiss that breaks an enchantment. In either case, after reading it you will be much more alive to the world as it actually is, not as it exists in the sweaty dreams of ideologues and economics professors.

The commons is a crucial part of the human story that must be recovered if we are to deal with the problems now crowding in on us. This story is equal parts enlightening and encouraging, and it is entirely necessary for us to hear it.

This article is excerpted for YES! Magazine from All That We Share: A Field Guide to the Commons by Jay Walljasper and On the Commons (The New Press). Noted environmental author Bill McKibben is scholar-in-residence at Middlebury College and one of the founders of the 350 campaign to curb climate change. His most recent book is Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet.

“The Commons Offers a New Story for the Future” by Bill McKibben originally appeared in All That We Share: A Field Guide to the Commons: How to Save the Economy, the Environment, the Internet, Democracy, Our Communities, and Everything Else That Belongs to All of Us Copyright © 2010 by Jay Walljasper, published by The New Press, Inc. and reprinted here with permission.

A Nobel for Common(s) Sense
ALSO SEE BELOW: An interview with economics laureate Elinor Ostrom,

who studies the way communities self-organize to solve common problems.

Elinor Ostrom Wins Nobel for Common(s) Sense

The newest Nobel Laureate in Economics has built her career on the science of cooperation.

by Fran Korten

posted Feb 26, 2010

Elinor Ostrom was an unusual choice for the 2009 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.

For one thing, she is the first woman to receive the prize. Her Ph.D. is in political science, not economics (though she minored in economics, collaborates with many economists, and considers herself a political economist). But what makes this award particularly special is that her work is about cooperation, while standard economics focuses on competition.

Ostrom’s seminal book, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action, was published in 1990. But her research on common property goes back to the early 1960s, when she wrote her dissertation on groundwater in California. In 1973 she and her husband, Vincent Ostrom, founded the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University. In the intervening years, the Workshop has produced hundreds of studies of the conditions in which communities self-organize to solve common problems. Ostrom currently serves as professor of political science at Indiana University and senior research director of the Workshop.

Fran Korten, YES! Magazine’s publisher, spent 20 years with the Ford Foundation making grants to support community management of water and forests in Southeast Asia and the United States. She and Ostrom drew on one another’s work as this field of knowledge developed. Fran interviewed her friend and colleague Lin Ostrom shortly after Ostrom received the Nobel Prize.

Fran Korten: When you first learned that you had won the Nobel Prize in Economics, were you surprised?

Elinor Ostrom: Yes. It was quite surprising. I was both happy and relieved.

Fran: Why relieved?

Elinor: Well, relieved in that I was doing a bunch of research through the years that many people thought was very radical and people didn’t like. As a person who does interdisciplinary work, I didn’t fit anywhere. I was relieved that, after all these years of struggle, someone really thought it did add up. That’s very nice.

And it’s very nice for the team that I’ve been a part of here at the Workshop. We have had a different style of organizing. It is an interdisciplinary center—we have graduate students, visiting scholars, and faculty working together. I never would have won the Nobel but for being a part of that enterprise.

Fran: It’s interesting that your research is about people learning to cooperate. And your Workshop at the university is also organized on principles of cooperation.

Elinor: I have a new book coming out in May entitled Working Together, written with Amy Poteete and Marco Janssen. It is on collective actions in the commons. What we’re talking about is how people work together. We’ve used an immense array of different methods to look at this question—case studies, including my own dissertation and Amy’s work, modeling, experiments, large-scale statistical work. We show how people use multiple methods to work together.

Fran: Many people associate “the commons” with Garrett Hardin’s famous essay, “The Tragedy of the Commons.” He says that if, for example, you have a pasture that everyone in a village has access to, then each person will put as many cows on that land as he can to maximize his own benefit, and pretty soon the pasture will be overgrazed and become worthless. What’s the difference between your perspective and Hardin’s?

Elinor: Well, I don’t see the human as hopeless. There’s a general tendency to presume people just act for short-term profit. But anyone who knows about small-town businesses and how people in a community relate to one another realizes that many of those decisions are not just for profit and that humans do try to organize and solve problems.

If you are in a fishery or have a pasture and you know your family’s long-term benefit is that you don’t destroy it, and if you can talk with the other people who use that resource, then you may well figure out rules that fit that local setting and organize to enforce them. But if the community doesn’t have a good way of communicating with each other or the costs of self-organization are too high, then they won’t organize, and there will be failures.

Fran: So, are you saying that Hardin is sometimes right?

We have to think through how to choose a meaningful life where we’re helping one another in ways that really help the Earth.

Elinor: Yes. People say I disproved him, and I come back and say “No, that’s not right. I’ve not disproved him. I’ve shown that his assertion that common property will always be degraded is wrong.” But he was addressing a problem of considerable significance that we need to take seriously. It’s just that he went too far. He said people could never manage the commons well.

At the Workshop we’ve done experiments where we create an artificial form of common property—such as an imaginary fishery or pasture, and we bring people into a lab and have them make decisions about that property. When we don’t allow any communication among the players, then they overharvest. But when people can communicate, particularly on a face-to-face basis, and say, “Well, gee, how about if we do this? How about we do that?” Then they can come to an agreement.

Fran: But what about the “free-rider” problem—where some people abide by the rules and some people don’t? Won’t the whole thing fall apart?

Elinor: Well if the people don’t communicate and get some shared norms and rules, that’s right, you’ll have that problem. But if they get together and say, “Hey folks, this is a project that we’re all going to have to contribute to. Now, let’s figure it out,” they can make it work. For example, if it’s a community garden, they might say, “Do we agree every Saturday morning we’re all going to go down to the community garden, and we’re going to take roll and we’re going to put the roll up on a bulletin board?” A lot of communities have figured out subtle ways of making everyone contribute, because if they don’t, those people are noticeable.

Fran: So public shaming and public honoring are one key to managing the commons?

Elinor: Shaming and honoring are very important. We don’t have as much of an understanding of that. There are scholars who understand that, but that’s not been part of our accepted way of thinking about collective action.

page 2

Fran: Do you have a favorite example of where people have been able to self-organize to manage property in common?

Elinor: One that I read early on that just unglued me—because I wasn’t expecting it—was the work of Robert Netting, an anthropologist who had been studying the alpine commons for a very long time. He studied Swiss peasants and then studied in Africa too. He was quite disturbed that people were saying that Africans were primitive because they used common property so frequently and they didn’t know about the benefits of private property. The implication was we’ve got to impose private property rules on them. Netting said, “Are the Swiss peasants stupid? They use common property also.”

8 Keys to a Successful Commons
Advice on how to govern our commons by Nobel winner Elinor Ostrom.

Let’s think about this a bit. In the valleys, they use private property, while up in the alpine areas, they use common property. So the same people know about private property and common property, but they choose to use common property for the alpine areas. Why? Well, the alpine areas are what Netting calls “spotty.” The rainfall is high in one section one year, and the snow is great, and it’s rich. But the other parts of the area are dry. Now if you put fences up for private property, then Smith’s got great grass one year—he can’t even use it all—and Brown doesn’t have any. So, Netting argued, there are places where it makes sense to have an open pasture rather than a closed one. Then he gives you a very good idea of the wide diversity of the particular rules that people have used for managing that common land.

Fran: Why were Netting’s findings so surprising to you?

Elinor: I had grown up thinking that land was something that would always move to private property. I had done my dissertation on groundwater in California, so I was familiar with the management of water as a commons. But when I read Netting, I realized that when there are “spotty” land environments, it really doesn’t make sense to put up fences and have small private plots.

Fran: Lin, if you were to have a sit-down session with someone with a big influence on natural resources policy—say Robert Zoellick, head of the World Bank, or Ken Salazar, Secretary of the U.S. Department of the Interior, what would be your advice?

Elinor: No panaceas! We tend to want simple formulas. We have two main prescriptions: privatize the resource or make it state property with uniform rules. But sometimes the people who are living on the resource are in the best position to figure out how to manage it as a commons.

Fran: Is there a role for government in those situations?

Elinor: We need institutions that enable people to carry out their management roles. For example, if there’s conflict, you need an open, fair court system at a higher level than the people’s resource management unit. You also need institutions that provide accurate knowledge. The United States Geological Survey is one that I point to repeatedly. They don’t come in and try to make proposals as to what you should do. They just do a really good job of providing accurate scientific knowledge, particularly for groundwater basins such as where I did my Ph.D. research years ago. I’m not against government. I’m just against the idea that it’s got to be some bureaucracy that figures everything out for people.

Fran: How important is it that there is a match between a governing jurisdiction and the area of the resource to be managed?

Elinor: To manage common property you need to create boundaries for an area at a size similar to the problem the people are trying to cope with. But it doesn’t need to be a formal jurisdiction. Sometimes public officials don’t even know that the local people have come to some agreements. It may not be in the courts, or even written down. That is why sometimes public authorities wipe out what local people have spent years creating.

Fran: You’ve done your research on small- and medium-sized natural resource jurisdictions. How about the global commons? We have the problems of climate change and oceans that are dying. Are there lessons from your work that are relevant to these massive problems we’re now facing?

Elinor: I really despair over the oceans. There is a very interesting article in Science on the “roving bandit.” It is so tempting to go along the coast and scoop up all the fish you can and then move on. With very big boats, you can do that. I think we could move toward solving that problem, but right now there are not many instrumentalities for doing that.

Regarding global climate change, I’m more hopeful. There are local public benefits that people can receive at the same time they’re generating benefits for the global environment. Take health and transportation as an example. If more people would walk or bicycle to work and use their car only when they have to go some distance, then their health would be better, their personal pocketbooks would be better, and the atmosphere would be better. Of course, if it’s just a few people, it won’t matter, but if more and more people feel “This is the kind of life I should be living,” that can substantially help the global problem. Similarly, if we invest in re-doing the insulation of a lot of buildings, we can save money as well as help the global environment. Yes, we want some global action but boy, if we just sit around and wait for that? Come on!

Fran: Do you have a message for the general public?

Elinor: We need to get people away from the notion that you have to have a fancy car and a huge house. Some of the homes that have been built in the last 10 years just appall me. Why do humans need huge homes? I was born poor and I didn’t know you bought clothes at anything but the Goodwill until I went to college. Some of our mentality about what it means to have a good life is, I think, not going to help us in the next 50 years. We have to think through how to choose a meaningful life where we’re helping one another in ways that really help the Earth.

Fran: Let’s look ahead 20 years. What would you hope that the world will understand about managing common property systems?

Elinor: What we need is a broader sense of what we call “social ecological systems.” We need to look at the biological side and the social side with one framework rather than 30 different languages. That is big, but I now have some of my colleagues very interested. Some of them are young, and what I find encouraging is that with a bunch of us working together, I can see us moving ahead in the next 20 years or so. Twenty years from now, at 96, I probably won’t be as active.

Fran: Not as active? I wouldn’t bet on that.

Fran Korten interviewed Elinor Ostrom for America: The Remix, the Spring 2010 issue of YES! Magazine. Fran is publisher of YES! Magazine.

Community push-ups?

2011-01-10T06:19:00.000-08:00

It doesn't work too good for me to write a title first and then write a post, as Alaska has so many issues over such a vast area. It's like trying to pick what is the most important thing going on in the world at the moment. You have solidly entrenched feudalism gripping the Western Alaska villages, you have the bottom trawlers eating everyone's lunch in the Gulf of Alaska, and you have thousands of little remnant salmon runs all screaming for someone to stop killing them off entirely.

Large scale devices are in place that confounds anyone with a glimmer of hope of fixing the problems. Since most of these problems involve buckets of money applied to keep supporting politicians in place to create more trouble for the 97%, it's a cycle that isn't easily broken. It's easy to say that a serious lack of moral turpitude is the root cause, but if most people could exchange shoes with the power brokers, the results would be the same. People are worried about the future for their families and are starting to act less altruistically all the time.

You might say that the family foundations of the rich are coming through to help our toughest problems, like schools that fail the kids. It's been real cute how the schools, and I mean colleges too, have put the onus on the kids by holding a failing grade over their heads when their business model has already failed. The foundations, where all the money is, are mostly just using their hubris as another lever to crank out money for themselves. Think machine-gunning miners and Rockefeller Center.

I have three boys in three branches of the military and they use a phrase that comes to mind that starts with 'cluster.' Wow, what's it going to be like when they are in the midst of their careers, or switching careers full bore, or just living off the land, when us baby-boomers are demanding the entire GDP to take care of us in our old age. My suggestion is to treat your kids real well now, because you might well need them later. We're not so far from pioneer days when families worked as a unit out of necessity.

There is a 'Transitions' movement going on, especially in Great Britian, to redefine communities to make them work. It's said that it might be too difficult for this to take root anywhere in the U.S. because Americans don't want to give up shopping at Walmart. And Americans just aren't that good at commitment. But I wonder about areas of the U.S. that don't resemble a ghetto or a theme park. Some communities with strong traditions of community might find it more attractive than waiting for Uncle Sam, or Uncle Sean to get their act together.

One tradition I know is still alive and well is, 'A man's got to do what a man's got to do.' When the chips fall, and they are falling fast, there will be phenomenon unseen for a long time, or something new even that can't be imagined now. But the survival instinct is alive and well and that I think will be the predominant factor. Even if the Forest Service is even now hiring more 'security types' to keep people from thinking about using the forest resources more than some distant bureaucrat says they should.

This post sure didn't go as planned. I guess the economic indicators just aren't that hot these days to write idly. Even that staunch economic engine Alaska has had, the halibut fishery, is under severe strain. Is it going to go the way of the Atlantic halibut? Why does it look like it is? Why does a professional halibut biologist say the trawlers have taken and discarded 100 million lbs in five years, then retract his statement? "Oops, I didn't mean they disappeared, I just meant they vanished." If the Inspector General's Office ever got wind of this, they would do some number crunching and probably come up with a closer figure than the $10 billion lost economic benefit that I did.

But then again, they might miss the fact that the trawlers aren't just killing scores of millions of pounds of baby halibut. They are killing and wasting the adult halibut they would have become. You just don't see that kind of talk anywhere because it's so awful to contemplate. So the solution has been to hide it in the closet. Or in the middle of the room, depending on if you think in terms of monsters or elephants.

Folks have told the big seafood processors to stay out of this mud fight between fishermen in the different areas. The problem is that powerful processors with high priced lawyers love to throw their weight around, just like powerful fishermen with high priced lawyers for that matter. I thought I had a solution in the Regional Seafood Development Association concept, but that was co-opted by the anti-democratic elements too. I suspect if there was a shred of democracy in fisheries management, the abusers of the system would be taken to the nearest dock and thrown over. On the positive side, it would be easier to accomplish a movement like this in little bitty Alaska than mighty Washington D.C.

Democracy should probably start at home, and that's a tall order. My dad was so used to being in charge, from being a fish buyer before 'the war', to being a fraternity president and naval officer, to seafood plant superintendent and respected industry leader. But my mother called him a dictator, slightly tongue-in-cheek, of course. I refuse to browbeat anyone. My kids are on their way to excellence: one of them is only 21 and he has become one of the very few military guys that you have to take if you 'go outside the wire.'

People still can't comprehend how we ended up with an oligarchy in this country. They should look at how many cylinders their own family is running on. We all know the statistics there. I would suggest that if you don't see any signs of things getting better, then take some action to see that it does, because the alternative isn't looking pretty.

Down here in Oregon, we can order a variety of locally produced foods for weekly pick-up or delivery. You do this and your medical bills will start easing up. It's tough for city folk, but like San Francisco, there are farmer's markets springing up all around the city. The demand is huge and those farmers are enjoying some degree of prosperity finally. The word is, also, that the average city lot can produce over 5,000 lbs of produce a year. Maybe not in Alaska though. My grandfather planted a bushel of potatoes behind the family house in Petersburg during the Depression and only got a bushel back. It was said that he was "one of the five real captains in Petersburg," so I suppose gardening wasn't a strong suit of his.

But I see some communities in Alaska are taking a real hard look at some point down the road at the rate they are going and don't like the picture at all. And they are wondering what are the alternatives. I think it's good they are thinking outside the box on these matters finally. It's a larger scale version of my oldest son training up my grandson. He's a happy, bright, well spoken five-year-old, and can whip out fifteen push-ups at the drop of a fib. Even one-handed ones. Did the push-ups hurt him? I think not, but it was probably painful to start with.

I know I wouldn't do anything real painful for the sake of society if these politicians we have were asking, which they are too smart to try anyway. But I would if a real respected elder were. I'm reminded of the Jews who were getting along fine, until one day they decided they wanted a king, instead of an elder, to just do everything for them. We all know how that worked out for them. Not that I think that the federal or state governments will ever become more responsive to people's needs. I can only see change being possible in small communities, and if there is a rich guy in town, he's not going to give up his gravy train without a fight, so just plan for it.

There is an article in the online magazine 'the Atlantic' called 'The Rise of the New Global Elite.' How they siphon $100 million a day off Wall Street with their fancy computer trading software programs. But how the other big countries have the same thing going on, and how they all meet at conferences like the Bilderburg Group conference in this country to hob-nob. And they fly around in their private jets and live in gated communities and the 99% which is us never lays eyes on them. Will that ever change? Your guess is as good as mine. I could really get the conversation going if I said the only thing lacking now if for them to elect a leader.

Addendum added 1/11/11 from the Straylight Journal, which underscores the value of Alaska's RSDA program, which the State treats like a red-headed stepchild:

17:01/02. CO-MANAGEMENT FOUND BEST FOR FISHERIES: A study conducted by researchers at the University of Washington (UW) and published in the 5 January issue of the journal Nature found the best-managed fisheries are those that bring together local representatives and fishermen who co-determine how the resources should be managed and then enforce these decisions effectively. More than 130 fisheries in 44 countries were studied, researching how co-management practices affect fisheries around the world. The results, according to UW’s Dr. Nicolas Gutierrez, who headed the research team, showed that a co-management framework, based on shared responsibility between the government and local fishermen, is the "only realistic solution" to the problems fisheries face.

The researchers found that the traditional "top-down" approach -- trawling quotas set down and policed by central authorities -- was failing in many fisheries as rules were often poorly implemented or abused. "Many people believe that having fishermen involved in the management process is letting the fox guard the henhouse,” said co-author Dr. Ray Hilborn. “What [this research] shows is just the opposite, that the more involved the fishing industry is in management, the better the outcome.”

For more information on the study see: Leadership, social capital and incentives promote successful fisheries by Nicolás L. Gutiérrez, Ray Hilborn, Omar Defeo in the 5 January issue of Nature, at: www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature09689.html. Also see the Agence France-Presse article in the 5 January Google News at: www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5gnnAY3Y7qQs1HzJsbAx8eGIgCoag?docId=CNG.73f2f224bb3634c80ddd331e82f260e4.3f1, and the Victoria Times-Colonist report at:

www.timescolonist.com/Fisheries+urged+follow+management+method/4067835/story.html.

Rational - lies- ation

2010-11-18T09:45:00.000-08:00

The dissertation on 'rationalization,' below, is something that was missing when federal fisheries managers started calling the privatization of the king crab fishery in Alaska 'rationalization.' The logic in applying this term to disenfranchising almost one thousand two hundred fishermen under the cloud of it being the 'rational' thing to do, and then by extension, it being 'rationalization,' is just plain wrong on many levels. But 'rationalization' was used in such insidious fashion prior to this in other industries. It worked there, so why not trot it out and give it a spin in Alaska to grab the crab from the taxpayers?

Alaskans started calling it 'ratz,' in a derogatory context, often with a picture of a rat in a red circle with a red line through it. And you guessed it, the federal managers started using the term 'ratz' as a term of endearment. I say 'federal managers' to lump the U.S. agency involved and a group of lobbyists that a small group of big fish biz players(not 'industry') have forwarded. Of course, the only reason they hold sway is because everyone isle has defaulted on their obligation to keep tabs on the situation. The need is to frame it in very simple terms.

'Rationalization' wasn't a term that was going to stand on the national level. Alaskans were impotent to fight the federal government to stop privatization, no matter what they called it. But to make such a political cash cow as privatization work in the rest of the country, near ivory halls of learning, such a bastardization of classic thought would be out of the question. Hence the new term, 'catch shares.'

The temptation is to rail directly against those evil empire builders who foist such garbage thinking on us. As in the subtlety of the new term's association with fairness and helping ones neighbors in a harvesting occupation. But we need to focus on the true and the good to not lose our bearings in all the smoke and mirrors.

Some in the banking business, charged with detecting counterfeit money, would just spend hours and hours looking at the real deal. Then when a counterfeit bill appeared, they could detect the difference in an instant. We need to do the same with the buzz words that are tossed about these days to influence our thought patterns. So I'll simply submit the following definition of rationalization from an anonymous writer to hold up to an irrational federal fisheries management scheme that is ruining the industry that is the backbone of thousands of coastal communities.

"Rationalization is finding 'good reason' for things that we really know are wrong."

"When something happens that we find difficult to accept, then we will make up a logical reason why it has happened.The target of rationalization is usually something that we have done, such as being unkind to another person. It may also be used when something happens independent of us which causes us discomfort, such as when a friend is unkind to us. We rationalize to ourselves.We also find it very important to rationalize to other people, even those we do not know.

Examples...

1) A person evades paying taxes and then rationalizes it by talking about how the government wastes money (and how it is better for people to keep what they can)

2) A man buys a expensive car and then tells people his old car was very unreliable, very unsafe, etc...

3) A person fails to get good enough results to get into a chosen university and then says that he didn't want to go there anyway...

4) A parent punishes a child and says that it is for the child's 'own good'...

5) A person thinks he deserves more of the profit-sharing after each deal closed...and decides not to share it as promised..(that's so common as [I myself experienced that several times even with good "friends"] as greed makes them rationalize even more, esp. on verbal agreements)...

6) I trip and fall over in the street. I tell a passer-by that I have recently been ill.

When a person does something of which the moral super ego disapproves, then the ego seeks to defend itself by adding reasons that make the action acceptable to the super ego. Thus we are able to do something that is outside our values and get away with it without feeling too guilty.This is related to our need to explain what happens. Our need for esteem also leads us to rationalize to others. Rationalization also happens with bullies and victims. The bully rationalizes what they have done by saying that their victim 'deserved it'.

Self-Serving Bias uses rationalization when it leads to taking more credit for success than we deserve and blame others for our failures.Rationalization is one of Freud's original defense mechanisms.

We must learn to watch for our own rationalizations. Do not rationalize your life away as "rationalize = rational lies." I know it's not easy as we all do it all the time but we must at least try and learn not to do it. If you can be honest with yourself and with other people, you can gain esteem for your courage and integrity."

Anonymous

We used a five-in-one

2010-11-05T11:01:00.000-07:00

There's a multi-function scraper that remodelers and finishers use a lot and that's a 'five-in-one, herein called a scraper. And that's just because it's easier to type the latter term. Well, we wore one down to almost the nubbins scraping the insides of that old ferry, the 'Chilkat.' Boy, I'll tell you, we flew into Homer with only the tools in our bags, then had to look for a way to get over the last twenty-five miles of water. Only the lack of tools would come back to bite us later.

We should have heeded my first thought, and that was to drive up to Homer from Seattle in a big van of tools. So that hand scraper came in real handy. We did buy a needle gun for getting off the more stubborn rust and paint. We did have one heck of a compressed air system. Keep in mind how proud ferry operators are of having a real nice air horn. Keeping also in mind that the Chilkat's air horn is still there, begging to be plumbed into the system again.

Tony was the one mostly responsible for the heavy use it got. We called Tony the human tazmanian devil. He seemed to like the term. It sure fit. And not fit, like the gloves we didn't wear nearly as much as we should have. I think we all got nicked pretty good when we started using the little power grinder my son brought. Of course, I'd given him the grinder previously. We had bought an oversized grinding disk for the grinder motor. In consequence, the disk would rotate into your hand when you hit the switch. It only took nicking you once to be real careful.

This was going to be partly about a real win-win situation in the fishing business up north after a real good looking solution hit me. But now it doesn't seem to want to boil up to the surface. Just like a number of expressions I'd liked to have remembered from the movie 'Rob Roy.' But I did remember the part about "a man's honor being the best gift a man can give himself, and why wouldn't you?"

That's one solution right there. If more folks in fisheries management had a little more regard for their own selves, maybe they'd see having some honor isn't such a bad thing. And they aren't the only ones in that boat. All over the capital and in the city and bourough governments you find the same thing. It's a little depressing when you think there about four thousand of them. The only solution is to reach them one at a time. Come to consensus one cup of coffee at a time.

I've said that trying to help solve this is like running with the Olympic torch and hoping you'd get a relief carrier around the next turn. Only to find that other folk have retired to the cafe's heavenly aroma of freshly brewed coffee. No, dedicating oneself to finding solutions certainly is not the easy way through life.

It's taken all this time, from August until now, to recover from hoisting that row-boat on and off my mother's Jeep in Petersburg. I think next time I'll have a roller on the back of the luggage rack. And a few other modifications to make it work. Then I'll just have my trying to set course speed records to blame for my aches and pains. It sure is true that any effort over and above hitting the theoretical hull speed is just going to knock one's self out. I intend to put a motor of some kind in it to make long distance travel more feasible.

A friend told me that a couple had paddled and rowed from the tip of South America to Siberia. And they found that the row boat was a better way to go in the end. In my case, I've had bad back problems all my life, from packing deer out of the woods to carrying 10 X 12 creosote beams at the cannery. Even though I like to row, my back might go out, hence the motor. And I doubt it will be a gasoline motor. Too many better options now for a boat that size.

Speaking of boats, again, John Finley's 36' 'Lindy II' is for sale to someone who, in John's words, "would turn her into a yacht." And of course, this was old Harold Hansen's built-for-personal-use boat. It's a museum piece and he'd like to have it retire to more genteel climes. That's why I'm putting the for sale sign here, because the RSS feed on this goes out all over the place. I saw that when I had a hit meter on this blog. Little lights popping up all over the world. John, maybe your boat will be snapped up by a famous Nobel Prize winner to get some solitude at sea to earn another one. You put a bunch of jerry jugs of diesel and water in the hold and you can go a long ways.

The record I know of in a boat like that was over to Hawaii and back to Alaska. Harold Kalve built that boat himself, fished cod down to the Shumagins, then crossed to Hawaii. (You never did tell me what you were going to do in Hawaii, Harold.) Then he ran back to Seward, and the rest of Harold's story is history.

As far as boat building on the West Coast goes, Harold Hansen in the '30s, was at the top of the game. Everyone wanted his fishing boats. The demand for the boats coming out of his Puget Sound boat yard kept him from fulfilling his dream of retiring on a troller/longliner himself. He used all the best lumber from his yard in building the Lindy II though. John says the boat doesn't ever need caulking. It's such a sturdily built boat that it doesn't 'work.' The heavy steel shoe for ballast makes it even more stout. And John has the exact match of engine to vessel embodied in that Perkins six with a blower.

Don't they say, "Too many features to list," or something like that? I know an awful lot of people who would love to babysit that boat for a chance to take it out once in a while. Myself being one. I'd really like to go visit John and become imbued in the Finley Method of natural food consumption. He comes from Montana farm country and his mother was a nurse. She said the bear fat he brought her one time made the best pie crusts. Lest anyone think this a cool thing, John Foss told me how they handle a bear carcass in Bristol Bay. This is mostly village etiquite, but if someone has to shoot a brownie, everyone has to take part in utilizing the meat. And the result of that is having to chew brown bear jerky for a couple of hours out on the boat in between meals. That tends to put a curb in your desire to off a bear. Your friends will surely make you pay.

In like manner a lot of fish and wildlife, and other resource management for that matter, could be better handled at the local level. How does that bear management around the villages sound? Sounds fair, sustainable, justifiable (Like when a bear breaks into the school cafeteria, or someone is really in need of meat.) Somehow today it struck me again, looking at some pictures of Ben Schmidt's on Facebook of Peru, that there are teeming masses of people out there all over. We just can't afford to wipe out the fish.

There just has to be enough left for people to go get some to eat. No more extinguishing runs of salmon and stocks of herring and other things. And like the Kodiak King Crab. The list goes on and on in Alaska, and don't let anyone tell you is doesn't. And as the plunderers see their actions being illuminated more and more, they are more and more anxious to get all they can while they can. And of course, lots of the federal fisheries management guys are also industry guys. How handy is that?

Income inequality

2010-10-17T11:03:00.000-07:00

"In short, the economist’s cost-benefit approach — itself long an important arrow in the moral philosopher’s quiver — has much to say about the effects of rising inequality. We need not reach agreement on all philosophical principles of fairness to recognize that it has imposed considerable harm across the income scale without generating significant offsetting benefits."

"No one dares to argue that rising inequality is required in the name of fairness. So maybe we should just agree that it’s a bad thing — and try to do something about it."

Robert H. Frank is an economics professor at the Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University.

Although it doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that if more and more people are falling below the poverty line, and more and more $100 million dollar yachts are being built, there is something rotten in Denmark. Yes, North Pacific Fisheries Management Council, you are creating something ROTTEN. IT'S YOU WHO ARE CAUSING THE FISHING INDUSTRY IN ALASKA TO STINK. And if that puts you in a moral bind with your silent partners, then quit. What if nobody would take those crumby Council jobs? Maybe then the regions could get a handle on managing the resources in their back yards.

Here's another zinger on how the regular folk are being illegally plundered. And keep in mind Leona Helmsley's famous saying: "Laws and taxes are for the little people."

"Now, what does 'broken chain of title' mean? Simple: when a homebuyer signs a mortgage, the key document is the note. As I said before, it's the actual IOU. In order for the mortgage note to be sold or transferred to someone else (and therefore turned into a mortgage-backed security), this document has to be physically endorsed to the next person. All of these signatures on the note are called the 'chain of title.'

"You can endorse the note as many times as you please...but you have to have a clear chain of title right on the actual note: I sold the note to Moe, who sold it to Larry, who sold it to Curly, and all our notarized signatures are actually, physically, on the note, one after the other.

"If for whatever reason any of these signatures is skipped, then the chain of title is said to be broken. Therefore, legally, the mortgage note is no longer valid. That is, the person who took out the mortgage loan to pay for the house no longer owes the loan, because he no longer knows whom to pay.

"To repeat: if the chain of title of the note is broken, then the borrower no longer owes any money on the loan.
http://beforeitsnews.com/story/227/773/The_Foreclosure-gate_Doomsday_Revolution_Erupts_VIDEO.html

Where are our representatives to Congress and the state Capitals on these things? And they send out questionaires for ideas on how to fix the economy? Believe me they know enough things to fix already without launching more studies to delay and disguise. Isn't that like the little 'Texas Two-Step' from the movie 'Littlest Whorehouse in Texas?' I could make a good living betting these folk that there will be more and more studies all the time. Now that at least would do one taxpayer some good.

On the Fly in Alaska

2010-09-08T05:32:00.000-07:00

It was the third whirlwind trip to Alaska, this one lasting nine days. Late August and early September promised to be a last chance at speed-boating and berry picking, and we weren't disappointed. The red huckleberries around Petersburg were out in force. My mother makes a dynamite red huckleberry pie. You can get a pie's worth in about ten minutes with Norwegian berry picker. I made two pies myself here in the Rogue Valley yesterday from the excess production.

What amazed me this trip was the size of the salmon. I wasn't around that many, but what I saw was a real eye popper. Seeing humpies on their spawning beds with their backs that high out of water was like looking at seagulls with six foot wing spans. Something was going on in the ocean to make them that big; the cohos too. And can't forget the run of Fraser River sockeye that came in like a Bristol Bay run. Mostly I was seeing just remnants of runs in the creeks, albeit large individuals. Now if the humans would leave them alone a little while, it would probably be amazing how many salmon would show up in the creeks.

There is no problem with fish showing up to the 'ocean ranches' of course. I'm sure the thrill of the chase all over to find the best local runs is sorely missed by seiners who just show up to a hatchery to harvest the new crop waiting outside the fence like dutiful steers. Well, they aren't genetically engineered, or pumped full of chemicals. The combination could be just as lethal as oil mixed with Corexit. Nobody knows. Not that that seems to be stopping the FDA from approving GE salmon from foreign fish pens from landing in our grocery stores. And without a label saying as much.

But I digress. The solitude we often seek is still there. In one bay we entered, we were greeted by seals and spawned out pink salmon, gulls of different kinds galore, the murmerings of a flock of Canada geese, the high speed take-offs and landings of a flock of migratory ducks, and the howls of a couple of marauding wolves. That's what Alaska is all about. Not necessarily the opportunity to put a dent in all that wildlife with guns, but to know it's still there.

After renting the speed-boat for a day, we affixed my double-end fiberglass row-boat to the top of the Jeep and set out down the highway to find a place to row in freshwater solitude. Blind Slough was perfect for that, and after my sweetie exited the boat, I think I made a course record from the bridge to Crystal Creek. My back confirmed it the next day. I row facing forward a lot too, like the hand-trollers of old who stood up to row all day. From Bellingham, Washington to Southeast Alaska just for starters. Of course, some sailing and hitchiking going on as well. And, the new breed of fishermen with up to 28 foot beam seiners would certainly consider that the stone-age of fishing, even though that was only in the 1920s.

If you are only after speed, a racing shell is best. There is a formula for displacement hull speed with the length of the water-line featured prominently. But for utility and ease of rowing and handling, a peapod is hard to beat. My dream is to put a magnet motor in mine and head for Point Frederick to troll for a king salmon or two.

And speaking of that, a friend in Kake says the 'mosquito fleet' of boats is all but gone. That being the speed-boats that most families had in the village to commercially fish, and subsistence fish, for those prime kings and halibut. I guess that's a bygone era, but it was totally unnecessary in my book. Nobody was looking out for those folks. But maybe now is a good time to rethink the sustainability model of life in rural Alaska. Certainly it's not a row of 225 hp outboards on the back of a welded aluminum cruiser to pile on a 'hot bite' fifty miles away like the charter guys.

And giving a community an exclusive fishing zone around it might not be a bad idea either. I heard a good idea to level the playing field for the Petersburg processing plants and the smaller boats. And that is, to put in another enhanced fishery nearby. Turns out Petersburg can thank Gov. Murkowski for handing the cold storage principals in Sitka a million dollars in exchange for the United Fishermen of Alaska endorsement one time, which now has drawn half the seine fleet away from Petersburg. The irony is that one principal is the son of the founder of Petersburg Fisheries, Inc. Only one cannery out of three ran in Petersburg this summer.

All the processing plants play dirty though. While my wife and I had my mother to ourselves for a week or so, we got the straight scoop on a lot of things. One interesting factoid was that my father's boss at his first plant management gig told him he was too honest for the street fighting needed to run plants. But he was liked and ran that plant for almost 30 years. And I know some towns in Alaska are finding themselves on the losing end to the plants for this very reason. But mostly it's the unsustainable fishing practices of the trawlers and consolidation of the fleets. The communities never did weigh in and are still conflicted and confused.

Well, what other juicy gossip was there to be had in Petersburg? I got a chuckle out of the fish cop who fell overboard while boarding a fishing boat and sank thirty feet with his flak jacket and pistol and all. He had been a Navy Seal once, so recovered and powered his way to the surface. But the point is, why wear all the battle gear when boarding a gillnetter or troller? The M.O. is to board with several of these guys and two at the ready with automatic weapons. I guess little Tommy or a grey-haired troller's wife might just have an RPG stashed under a bunk. Same with the cadre of Forest Service hired guns. They told one friend of mine that they have to be ready in force because with this economy "people are more desperate and might try to do something in the forest they aren't supposed to." I suppose like breaking the rule against going to the bathroom behind a tree in the Tongass National Forest.

Not to mention the State Trooper in Petersburg who busted a couple of Native women who were picking up seaweed without a sport fishing license. It's good fertilizer for the garden, and I'm sure they didn't have large scale mechanized equipment to clean out the beaches. Just something they had been doing for thousands of years. Well, someone started the rumor that the Trooper had busted the Librarian for gathering seaweed, and it got all over town and next thing you know, that Trooper was history. Don't these guys have some borders to secure or something? And what about the hundreds of millions of dollars of wanton waste of fish going on every year in Alaska. I guess busting Natives for seaweed gathering for food, etc. is a lot easier. The gazillion dollar new Alaska Department of Fish and Game patrol vessel was tied to the dock in Petersburg the whole time we were in town. I suppose they were trying to nip in the bud any errant behavior by kids jigging herring without a license. The little criminals!

To be fair, the research teams on that vessel have allowed some new fisheries to open up. And they do multiple projects on a single cruise. And they can rub their bellies and pat their heads at the same time. Sorry, couldn't help it. Seriously though, if the trawl fleet starts targeting the Pacific ocean perch up in the Central Gulf, the bycatch of black cod, who also inhabit 'the edge' will be hammered. The void may draw black cod from Southeast to fill the void. S.E. quotas may drop. Not quite the same as there just being less halibut to migrate to S.E. from the Central Gulf due to trawl bycatch, but just a bad for the S.E. longliners' total allowable catch.

If that sounds ominous, believe me, Alaska has it's share of what the East Coast calls 'shadowy groups with harmless sounding names' to thank for the mess. But we've seen Law Enforcement do the right thing before, and hold out hope they will do it again.

On Ted Stevens and Information Overload

2010-08-21T11:00:00.000-07:00

"When he lost the 2008 race, he had not lost his connection to his former corporate and political colleagues or to a new generation of corporate lobbyists. Alaska had needed Ted Stevens in its first half century, but Ted Stevens, ever the Silver Surfer, had his own ideas about entitlement and Alaskan destiny. He thought he deserved to the states obsequious allegiance because he had brought home the bacon. His loving family and real friends should have set him straight- too bad they never did. Alaska and its attendant dangers had the last word. As it will for us all." By Steve Conn, former University of Alaska Professor.

I had originally posted Steve's entire article, even as parts of it worried me. I was informed by Phil Munger that at least one part was patently wrong. I admit that as a protector of things Alaskan it was easy to accept alleged affronts to Alaskan people as perpetuated by Sen. Ted Stevens. There were a lot of them. The lesson: Be careful when you think, "That's about right," when dealing with these things.

I pass on the following article by Peggy Noonan, as forwarded by a Kodiak fisherman, so we will be alert to the dangers of following the crowd; any crowd.

Information Overload Is Nothing New
From the Roman Empire to the BlackBerry jam.

It's high summer and we're all out there seeing each other. We're not
hidden away in our homes and offices as we are in winter's cold. We're
part of a crowd--on the street, in the park, on the boardwalk, on the
top deck of the ferry to Saltaire. And we can see in some new or
clearer ways how technology is changing us.

For one thing, it is changing our posture. People who used to walk
along the avenues of New York staring alertly ahead, or looking up,
now walk along with their heads down, shoulders slumped, checking
their email and text messages. They're not watching where they're
going, and frequently bump into each other. I'm told this is called a
BlackBerry jam.

A lot of people seem here but not here. They're pecking away on a
piece of plastic; they've withdrawn from the immediate reality around
them and set up temporary camp in a reality that exists in their
heads. It involves their own music, their own conversation, whether
written or oral. This contributes to the new obliviousness, to the
young woman who steps off the curb unaware the police car with blaring
siren is barreling down the street.

In the street café, as soon as they've ordered, people scroll down
for their email. Everyone who constantly checks is looking for
different things. They are looking for connection, information. They
are attempting to alleviate anxiety: "If I know what's going on I can
master it." They are making plans. But mostly, one way or another, I
think they are looking for a love pellet. I thought of you. How are
you? This will make you laugh. Don't break this chain. FYI, because
you're part of the team, the endeavor, the group, my life. Meet your
new nephew--here's the sonogram. You will like this YouTube clip. You
will like this joke. You are alive.

We are surrounded by screens. Much of their impact is benign, but not
all. This summer I turned a number of times--every time I did, a
chapter seemed to speak specifically to something on my mind--to the
calm and profound "Hamlet's BlackBerry" by William Powers. It is a
book whose subject is how to build a good life in the digital age.

Mr. Powers is not against the screens around us. We use digital
devices "to nurture relationships, to feed our emotional, social, and
spiritual hungers, to think creatively and express ourselves." At
their best they produce moments that make life worth living. "If
you've written an e-mail straight from the heart, watched a video that
you couldn't stop thinking about, or read an online essay that changed
how you think about the world, you know this is true." But he has real
reservations about what digital devices are at their worst--an
addiction to distraction, a way not of connecting but disconnecting.

In a chapter on Seneca, he finds timeless advice.

Lucius Annaeus Seneca was born at the time of Christ in Cordoba,
Spain, an outpost of the Roman Empire. His father was an official in
the Roman government, and Seneca followed his footsteps, becoming a
Roman senator and, later, advisor to Nero in the early (and more
successful) days of his reign. Seneca was a gifted manager and
bureaucrat, but he is remembered today because he was an inveterate
letter writer, and his correspondence contained thoughts, insights and
convictions that revealed him to be a serious philosopher.

Seneca thought the great job of philosophy was to offer people
practical advice on how to live more deeply and constructively. He
came of age in a time of tumult; the Rome he lived in was being
transformed by a new connectedness. An empire that stretched over
millions of square miles was being connected by new roads, a civil
service, an extensive postal system. And there was the rise of written
communication. Writing, says Mr. Powers, was a huge part of the
everyday lives of literate Romans: "Postal deliveries were important
events, as urgently monitored as e-mail is today." Seneca himself
wrote of his neighbors hurrying "from all directions" to meet the
latest mail boats from Egypt.

As written language began to drive things, Mr. Powers says, "the busy
Roman was constantly navigating crowds--not just the physical ones
that filled the streets and amphitheaters but the virtual crowd of the
larger empire and the torrents of information it produced."

Seneca, at the center of it all, struggled with the information glut,
and with something else. He became acutely conscious of "the danger of
allowing others--not just friends and colleagues but the masses--to
exert too much influence on one's thinking." The more connected a
society becomes, the greater the chance an individual can become a
creature, or even slave, of that connectedness.

"You ask me what you should consider it particularly important to
avoid," one of Seneca's letters begins. "My answer is this: a mass
crowd. It is something to which you cannot entrust yourself without
risk. . . . I never come back home with quite the same moral character
I went out with; something or other becomes unsettled where I had
achieved internal peace."

Seneca's advice: Cultivate self-sufficiency and autonomy. Trust your
own instincts and ideas. You can thrive in the crowd if you are not
dependent on it.

But this is not easy.

Everyone Seneca knew was busy and important, rushing about with what
he called "the restless energy of the hunted mind." Some traveled to
flee their worries and burdens but found, as the old joke says, "No
matter where I go, there I am." Stress is portable. Seneca: "The man
who spends his time choosing one resort after another in a hunt for
peace and quiet, will in every place he visits find something to
prevent him from relaxing."

Even in Seneca's time, Mr. Powers notes, "the busy, crowd-induced
state of mind had gone mobile." "Today we ask, 'Does this hotel have
Wi-Fi?'"

And there was the way people consumed information. The empire was
awash in texts. "Elite, literate Romans were discovering the great
paradox of information: the more of it that's available, the harder it
is to be truly knowledgeable. It was impossible to process it all in a
thoughtful way." People, Seneca observed, grazed and skimmed,
absorbing information "in the mere passing." But it is better to know
one great thinker deeply than dozens superficially.

Seneca, Mr. Powers observes, could have been writing in this century,
"when it's hard to think of anything that isn't done in 'mere
passing,' and much of life is beginning to resemble a plant that never
puts down roots."

There are two paths. One is to surrender, to allow the crowd to lead
you around by the nose and your experience to become ever more
shallow. The other is to step back and pare down. "Measure your life,"
advises Seneca, "it just does not have room for so much."

Beware, in Mr. Powers's words, "self-created bustle." Stop checking
your inbox 10 times a day, or an hour. Once will do. Concentrate on
your higher, more serious purpose, enrich your own experience. Don't
be a slave to technology.

Which is good mid-August wisdom for us all. Focus on central things,
quiet the mind, unplug a little, or a lot. And watch out for those
crowds, both the ones that cause BlackBerry jams and the ones that
unsettle, that attempt to stampede you into going along, or following.
Step back, or aside. Think what you think, not what they think.
Everyone is trying to push. Don't be pushed.

Who's on first in the Governor's race?

2010-06-05T20:12:00.000-07:00

Something's Fishy
Bill Walker | Jun 5, 2010

This weekend I had the opportunity to participate in the annual Kodiak Crab Festival, which featured a very unique gubernatorial debate last Friday. The Kodiak Debate is important because of its primary focus on Alaska's second largest employer, the seafood industry. The debate preparation alone gave me the opportunity to immerse myself in the myriad of issues impacting this heritage industry that makes vast contributions to Alaska's economy.

Once the debate got underway, the candidates addressed the challenges facing the industry, such as high energy costs and state funding for seafood marketing and other fisheries programs. Inevitably this led to the topic of oil and gas and the continued decline of oil throughput in the pipeline, now operating at two-thirds empty, which funds 90 percent of our state government. Alaska's economy is on course for a freefall if we do not get more oil in the pipeline and build a large scale gas line now.

During the question-and-answer segment of the debate in Kodiak, I had the opportunity to ask Governor Parnell specifically why he recently decided to offer the North Slope leaseholders -- BP, Conoco Phillips and Exxon -- a $20-billion incentive to take our gas, jobs and economic opportunities into Canada. It is no secret that I have been a strong critic of Governor Parnell's dogged insistence on pursuing a faltering Canadian gasline project, and this was not the first time I had taken him to task in a public setting over his willingness to put the future of his political career over Alaska's future.

Parnell danced around the question uncomfortably before finally stumbling to the conclusion that had he not made that decision, it would have amounted to a tax increase on Exxon, BP and Conoco. What? Clearly, the Governor of Alaska could not be on stage next to me making this argument. So I asked again and still the same vague, nonsensical response.

At a recent debate with Parnell at the Alaska State Chamber of Commerce, I had asked who requested this $20-billion subsidy. No one from the industry was on record asking for this concession. Did Parnell unilaterally decide to give $20 billion in incentives to try to salvage a highly anticipated failed open season in a desperate attempt to secure his election as governor? Parnell has not disclosed who asked for the $20-billion giveaway. The proposed pipeline's open season ends on July 31, yet he plans to seal the results until well past November 4th. The people of Alaska have paid for half the cost of this open season -- over $100 million -- and deserve to know what is being done with the resources that we collectively own. Something's fishy and Alaskans should be outraged.

Parnell was quick to forget this exchange, releasing a hollow, self-proclaimed statement of victory via his campaign website. Rather than take his word for it, I would encourage all interested parties to download the full debate at www.kmxt.org and decide for yourself who the victor was. You will note that when Parnell boasts of his accomplishments and priorities, he always speaks of the various social programs that he has championed. What he fails to explain is that without an economy, without oil and gas projects putting revenue into the state coffers, these programs will not have a funding source in the coming years. When the state has to slash its budget by 90 percent, there will be no way to pay for these programs, much less our schools, public safety, roads, harbors, tourism and seafood marketing and essential government services.

Parnell dodges discussion of the elephant in the room: Alaska's uncertain economic future. Instead we race head-on into a failed open season which will lead to another failed open season in another two years and on and on we go. At that point we will be paying ninety cents of every dollar Exxon and TransCanada spend while the window of our last opportunity to commercialize our gas on the world market via the All-Alaska Gasline LNG project closes.

Bill Walker is a lifelong Alaskan and Republican gubernatorial primary candidate. He served as mayor of Valdez at the age of 27 before entering the private sector as a successful business owner (construction, tourism, real estate, law). He has decades of experience in Alaska's oil and gas, tourism and local government and is a longtime advocate for the development of Alaska's natural resources.

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My Dad

2010-05-19T21:30:00.000-07:00

— Obituary —
John Enge, 95
January 28, 1915 to May 7, 2010
May 13, 2010
by Marilee Enge

John Werner Enge, a World War II veteran and fishing industry pioneer whose long life closely followed the development of his hometown of Petersburg, died May 7, 2010.

John was born to Martin and Augusta Enge on January 28, 1915, at the family home on Sing Lee Alley. His playmates were Norwegian and Tlingit Indian children and he spoke only Norwegian and Tlingit until he attended school. The wild territory of Southeast Alaska was an adventurous child’s playground and John relished exploring the surrounding waters and virgin forests with his brothers, rowing to Petersburg Creek for camping trips and fishing with his father in an open dory on the Stikine River. He liked hunting and was a good shot, but he always enjoyed being in the woods in the spring and fall, perhaps more than he did bringing home game. The 30.30 he bought for $10 off a punchboard when he was 15 served him on countless hunting trips and is still in the family.

Childhood adventures were led by packs of boys who called themselves “gangs.” John and his brothers belonged to the Point Gang, named after Ness’ Point and it included his life-long friend, Leo Ness, and brothers Arnold and Ernest. They spent days roaming the beaches and muskegs and doing battle with the Hill Gang on the Lutheran Church hill. John was an avid skier and snowy winters found him exploring the backcountry of Mitkof Island. One glorious winter day he climbed a peak above Cabin Creek and skied to the shores of Frederick Sound, leaving his wooden skis behind to walk home.

John graduated from Petersburg High School in 1933 and entered the University of Washington in the fall of 1934. He enjoyed social activities at Chi Phi fraternity, and filled his dance card at sorority functions. He studied fisheries with Dr. Lauren Donaldson at UW and completed his degree in six years, while spending half the year long-lining with his father or gillnetting with his friend Erling Strand to pay for tuition.

After college, he worked for the International Pacific Halibut Commission, spending a winter on a research schooner based in Ballard that trawled for halibut larvae in Hecate Strait. He soon returned to Petersburg where he set up shop as a fish buyer. When the news came in 1941 that the U.S. had entered World War II, John remembered he was seated on the third stool, at the counter of the Pastime Café. A member of the Naval reserves, he was soon on his way to the Sand Point air field to join the Naval Air Corps. He entered flight training, but after his brother, Arnold, was killed on a routine flight near Juneau, he requested a transfer to sea duty.

John was commissioned an ensign and given command of an LST 921, joining a convoy that crossed the Atlantic in 1944. On the eve of the Normandy invasion, carrying a secret cargo of mine-sweeping equipment, the ship was struck by a German torpedo and sank, killing 43 sailors. John stayed aboard until all of the survivors were rescued and later walked the beaches, hoping to find some sign of the lost sailors. His next assignment was in the Pacific and he spent the rest of the war dodging kamikazes. His ship performed support for the Okinawa invasion.

John returned to Petersburg in 1946 and fished with his father and brother. That fall, at a Sons of Norway Dance, he met a young school teacher named Carol Anderson, recently arrived from Iowa. They began a whirlwind courtship and soon made plans to marry, flying to Juneau on Christmas Eve for a private ceremony.

John began his long career in seafood processing buying fish in tiny Pelican, where the couple lived for four years and began raising a family. Back in Petersburg, John went to work as plant manager for Kayler-Dahl Fish Company (later owned by Whitney-Fidalgo) a processor where he spent the majority of his career. John was one of the few in the industry with an academic background in fisheries and came to be a respected for his ideas on developing new fisheries, expanding markets, and on protecting the quality of fresh seafood. He once said the advice he received from his first boss always held, “Be careful with those fish, handle them gently and keep ‘em cool.” Fishermen respected his high standards and sense of honor. He served on the Alaska King Crab Marketing Board in the boom days when Alaska was seeking new markets for the valuable product. He concluded his career at Icicle Seafoods, working for his old friend Bob Thorstenson.

John was a community volunteer who devoted time to the Petersburg School Board, a variety of groups that included the Masons, Elks, Shriners, VFW and American Legion. The Boy Scouts was a special interest and he led his sons’ scout troops and served in statewide positions. Later in life, he and Carol were active in the Petersburg Igloo of the Alaska Pioneers, and together they headed an oral history project that led to the book, “Petersburg Pioneers,” which recounts personal stories of the town’s early families. He insisted that local folks should write their history so it would not be lost. John also enjoyed working with teacher Jim Engell to bring World War II history alive for local high school students.

Above all, John loved the outdoors and loved his family. His children cherish memories of boat trips, berry picking, fishing, camping and hunting with him throughout his life. Sunny days when there was a break in work at the cannery he would ask Carol to pack a lunch and the family would jump into the little fiberglass outboard that served as transportation to outdoor adventures. There were picnic dinners up Petersburg Creek on warm evenings when the tide was high, and trips to the white sand beaches of Dry Bay on summer afternoons. He also flew a private plane and enjoyed fly fishing in remote lakes.

John was a great storyteller and raconteur and was keen and witty until the very end. He was in declining health in recent years, and suffered macular degeneration that had taken his eyesight, but he continued to recognize longtime acquaintances by their voices. He was happiest telling stories about the old days or talking fish.

He was hospitalized Tuesday, May 4, and insisted on returning to his home of 60 years as soon as he was able. He came home Friday, May 7, and died soon after, surrounded by family.

John was among the last survivors of the early generation of Norwegian immigrants who settled on Mitkof Island at the turn of the century. His grandparents, Rasmus and Anna Enge, built the first home and put down roots and the Enge family has been in Petersburg ever since.

John was preceded in death by his parents and brothers. He is survived by Carol, his wife of 63 years; sons Arnold, of Petersburg; John, of Medford, Ore.; Steve, of Port Townsend, Wash.; daughters Marilee, of Berkeley, Calif. and Elisabeth Nyssen, of Edmonds, Wash.; nieces Signe Haltiner and Bobbie Anderson; 12 grandchildren and a great-grandson.

The Floating Shipyard Revisited

2010-04-20T08:21:00.000-07:00

Or, The Cod Wars Revisited. However our time in Seldovia Bay, Alaska is labeled, I have to tell ya, Alicia, it was no picnic. It got considerably more comfortable at the end of the almost two months on anchor when hot and cold water started running through the ship's veins. And when we started using all those extra kilowatts to run electric heaters. Jesse, Troy and Jim were rock solid reliable to do the restoration that just had to get done. Making the old ferry seaworthy and comfortable for it's future endeavors.

Sorry I missed your move down to Central Point with Morgan. Funny how you can work on something for so long and then it happens when you turn your back for a minute. But it sounds like the move went well, and now it's great to see you two on a daily basis, living just down the street like you do. Hopefully the 'Chilkat' will be the same way. The interest in the ship will increase as it's true condition becomes more well known. I have close to a thousand pictures and lots of video of our time on the ship and around South Central Alaska. Gotta have a slide show soon.

The crew and I did what we set out to do, that is, get this long neglected ship ready for a new career in the North Pacific. I would have liked to have driven up to Homer with a van of supplies and tools. That didn't happen, so we had to work at a disadvantage and use skills from making do in canneries and on boats in times past. Jim brought his vast knowledge of the type of systems the boat had, from his Army specialties in diesel and gas engines. Also his theoretical and practical grasp of things electrical, going back to when he helped run a particle accelerator. The generator, the two main engines, and electrical controls all over the ship jumped to life under his ministrations.

Just to get the anchor winch working, Jim spent a week or more restoring the electrical controls and methodically restoring the winch deeper into it's housing until it submitted. I had the honor of dropping and lifting the anchor for the first time. Jim was monitoring the ships voltage, with a CB radio to his ear, while I started a haul-back. He had the novel idea of tweaking up the voltage if it was coming up slow. Jim had to put in a lot of original thought to restore the systems, as former owners and crew had jury-rigged things in the most baffling ways. Jim has earned his place along side his brother Jerry in the annals of Alaska mechanicing history. Jerry was available by phone, but I can vouch that Jim did it all. Jerry just retired from 40 years of putting in and fixing refrigeration systems in Alaska and sure liked keeping tabs on our "floating shipyard".

No, restoring a big ship on anchor in a remote Alaskan bay in the dead of winter is not ideal by a long shot. The first shore boat we got to make runs for supplies was carried away by a williwaw. Just stripped off its moorings to the 'Chilkat' in about a 85 mile per hour blow one night. We weren't worried about the ship itself, because a previous owner had purchased a battleship anchor and chain to hang onto. We knew we would never take that measure of safety with us as nothing on the ship could pull up that much weight. (Despite the story of the anchor being from a battleship, I'm sure it was from a much smaller naval vessel, judging by the chain size.)

The second skiff we bought and dug out of a snow bank, worked well. The rest of the crew had some trouble getting it started, but after I declared it a 'one crank outboard' they determined to run it equally as well. My chief disappointment up there was going out twice with the skiff clam digging and not finding a single clam for chowder. I knew that the bay had had one of the only commercial harvests of the elusive wild clam in Alaska. Turns out, there had been an extended period of sub-zero weather the year before during several very low tide cycles. Killed them all. I was told you could smell the rotting clams and kinda believed it, until I got a whiff on the wind myself. To me a natural disaster like that doesn't exactly equate to global warming.

Jesse was mostly Jim's apprentice and passed with flying colors. One day, I heard three air starts, meaning Jim had started the generator and both main engines. Jesse came running up to the top-house to get something and made the announcement of that milestone. Jesse must have been instrumental in the process, because later that day Jim was singing his praises and suggested he be the pilot of the ship. Jesse never ceased to amaze me even when he was little Connor's age. Probably why the Army sent him to support the capture of the Tyrant of Iraq.

Jesse got a lot of hard work done without breaking a sweat. He also had the best gear on board. Starting with the sleeping bag he used in the chill of winter nights in Middle Eastern deserts. I am now a disciple of UnderArmor clothing as well. He was using his powers of observation to good effect on the ship. I suppose he sharpened what powers he had in watching his back for two tours in Iraq. So, he was the one who spotted the problem with the anchor chain, (we just needed to rotate the chain with the big pry bar), and a fuel line problem that only he detected as a small hiss. So, he was always used to make the supply runs the fifty miles to Homer and back in the skiff. Still in the dead of winter. Well, I went too, except for the last trip. I knew the good stuff to get at the marine hardware store.

I think Jesse was the one who wanted to be there the most. He dropped out of college the minute this opportunity came up. He'd never mentioned this dream of getting back to Alaska to me prior to this. And he is more determined than ever to get back up there. Jim said, "He's the one to get this ship to wherever it needs to go." Grandpa said the same thing long ago, "He's fearless." He enjoyed it immensely when a bald eagle landed a couple feet from his head when he was painting the radar mast. And when a Steller sea eagle flew past.

The two owners were on the ship too, (although I'm a handshake owner too for writing the business plan, supplying top crew, and knowing the politics and players on the fishing grounds), but Troy was the top dynamo. I called him the human hummingbird. When he woke up in the morning he shot out of his sleeping bag like a shot out of a cannon and went the same speed all day. He had helped build a hundred houses and knew a LOT, so he carried the day in remodeling the top-house, including the crews quarters.

I did insist on using marine grade everything though. Mostly I'd start a project to demonstrate a marine compatible way to do it. Then Troy would do a good imitation of the cartoon Tasmanian devil and it would be done just like that. I brought some key tools up that I knew we would need. The power tools got a fierce workout, but the five-in-one tool got worn down to a nubbins with all the scraping off of rust and paint Troy did. When I instigated getting a air chipper, it was like the contest between John Henry and the steam hammer in the railroad legend.

What did I do up there in the frozen wilds myself? Well, I gave the project it's direction to start with. In the end it penciled out as me being the mentor. After all, Buzz saved my eighty some e-mails in a three ring binder from all winter and was calling it "The Book of John." I would say a lot of my suggestions were taken to heart. I did my share of painting, scraping, doing body and fender work, organizing, cleaning, cutting steel, climbing masts, polishing brass, tracing wires and pipes, etc. It was easy to find something to do for an old fisheries production manager and boat person like me.

And I was the official scribe for the whole endeavor. A daily journal that I would occasionally read to Lee Smith of Wasilla from my cell phone on the 'Chilkat.' The trick was to be standing in the Lounge, or outside, on the side of the ship that the cell tower was on. Otherwise too much steel gets in the way. And that's what you had to do with laptops too. In fact, Troy built a laptop desk and high stool to sit at the windows on the side that tide and wind dictated.

Tide and wind fought for control of the ship on too many occasions to count. The result would be wallowing in the trough of swells coming in from Kachemak Bay and Lower Cook Inlet. And that would double the chances of a swell. So we really got our sea legs fast. I had bought the toughest engineer boots I could find before going. The drawback was that my toes got cold. The permanent numbness in the ends of my big toes may or may not be the result of this. I was supposed to meet Morgan today to look for a primary care doctor around here. My old one is a State Senator who thinks there are only three natural medicines that work.

I think I got the ultimate compliment the other day, by way of one of the most forward thinking cafe processor/marketers around, John Foss. He said "his jaw dropped" when he read the last article on the 'Chilkat,' about a month ago. He mentioned me being a "forward thinker." Well, I've been called worse. He's special, especially, because he's been a long time reader of my blog. I'd do anything for a guy like that. Terry was the only family member, out of six families, sent care packages to us in Seldovia Bay. Like the crock pot and the bread maker.

Oh, I meant to mention that a marine insurance broker friend said this vessel design had been used in World War Two. It was designed as an intermediate range landing craft. It apparently performed so well they put big long range radars on them for picket duty around Okinawa. They were also harder to hit than a destroyer, being smaller in size. But I know one other change I'd like to see: rolling chocks. Wouldn't interfere with beaching her at all. I'm sure former owners and captains would agree, neither having the check writing ability to fund such a project. I'd do it myself, with Jesse's help, of course.

Jesse says he wants to get good at welding, so there's his chance. We were going to weld aluminum skiffs on the ship in down times. The design I had in mind had run from Florida to Portland around the Horn once. Another owner of a boat with the design could cut the chop on a windy Columbia River with both 115s at full tilt boogey. There would be no limit on how big or small you could make the design. It's not the most fuel effient, but neither is an F-15.

We really wanted to go right into salting cod from the jig boats around Kodiak. I think wherever we went the boats would welcome the chance to unload on the grounds. It's a long ways back to the city of Kodiak from most grounds for those small boats. And doing a quality pack by hand would match the Chilkat's capacity constraints. It would be a 'cafe processor.' It wouldn't be any great threat to anyone. Just cause good will wherever she goes. I may have to do it with another ship though, I don't know.

I think I get more of a charge out of seeing a whole project through, that needs doing, that nobody else is doing. And in that vein I'd revisit the 'Chilkat' project to it's completion, of putting up a salt cod pack. There was, and still is, a lot of enthusiasm for the basic business plan. I also started to describe other scenarios for putting the ship to work, like salvage work and charter work of all kinds. After all it is a premier short haul freighter. Hauling people again is actually a possibility with such an engineer as Jim.

And, of course, the ship is a landing craft that a tractor and twenty foot trailer can board with room for fifteen other cars. We didn't realize what a military design it is until we saw how honeycombed the holds are with ribs. They are knee deep and that far apart. If it ever did hit a rock, I think the rock would come out second best. I've attempted to break, cut and drill the steel in the ship all over and most often the tools came out second best. The steel was reputed to be from a canceled destroyer order at the shipyard, Martinac, of Tacoma, William Garner, lead architect. It was the first ferry made for inter-island travel in Alaska. The 'Chilkat' is dwarfed by the new ferries, it's modern, big cousins, or I should say, THEIR little orphan sister.

I was called an engineer once too when I was doing fishing gear research and development. So my eye caught the way the wiring was installed throughout the ship. And it all still works. That's because it's in rubberized tubes in stainless steel braid fastened every eight to ten inches by a 3/4 inch stainless steel strap with two stainless steel bolts. The junction boxes and light fixtures are cast aluminum with brass end plates and large navy brass fittings where the wiring runs in and out. The result is something you can do pull-ups from. I'm sure the Marines did that too on the LSI your grandpa ran during the war in the Pacific when he was Jesse's age.

The ship was a fascinating playground for almost two months. Maybe the most unpleasant part was waking up cold every morning. Then it was a mad scramble to get the wood stove going. We got one load of wood from the town drunk in Seldovia that was not seasoned at all. It was a real trick to keep that stuff going. But it was during one of the many snowstorms and everyone was running low on firewood. One local called it the "endless winter of 2010."

Speaking of locals, what a fascinating group of people live in Seldovia, starting with the town drunk who states it's hard work keeping his reputation from lagging. The center of community life is the Cafe and Bar called the 'Linnwood.' I still have a token, good for one beer there. They give them out when someone rings the bell, and you just keep it if you figure you've had enough beers already. Almost all city business is conducted there; potlucks are held there too. (The salmon chowder and cod fritters were exceptional.) We visited the library, which you would have liked, Alicia, and the City Council chambers, which had a sign saying there was a city ordinance against sniveling and carried a $50 fine for violations.

The summer is Seldovia's big time of year. It's tourist season. Lots of quirky exhibits around town, like the building with the sign announcing the Church of Cod. They believe in the barbel. In case you don't know cod anatomy, the barbel is the fleshy goatee on a cod's lower jaw. Or the king crab pot labeled, "Deadliest Catch Jail." There were lots of very ingenious and artful wooden chainsaw sculptures around town from annual competitions of years past. All in all, very quaint. A fast ferry service from Homer is starting up this spring, running several times a day from Homer.

There is a native community there and an old Russian era church, built to civilize the locals. In Seldovia, it almost seems like the pendulum has swung the other way on who is civilized. When we first got there, the harbormaster screamed at us to keep our ship away from the harbor. Before too long, as we were dropping thousands of dollars into the town's economy, we were getting rides on the harbormaster's four-wheeler. They were a little sensitive about ships needing painting tying up in the harbor. Someone left a big junker there and now the Coast Guard is the proud owner and has spent a million dollars 'watching' it. One of the big employers in town is an oil company who has two oil spill response barges anchored in the bay. Probably a bigger payroll than the cannery that used to be there.

Disappointing, too, was the lack of game around there. I suppose if you looked real close you could see some white mountain goats miles away against all the snow. But the weather there is too harsh for deer, and the mountains too steep for moose. We heard some wolves and coyotes though. Sure don't know what they find to eat. There weren't even any fish in the bay. The herring had been cleaned out by fishermen long ago. There was at least one herring, because we saw a diving duck come up with one one day. Sometimes a stock of fish gets so hammered down that it can't bounce back in numbers.

I think that's the case around there with the salmon and the herring. If someone wants to see fish in Alaska, "Go West, Young Man, Go West." Go see Bristol Bay fast, in case they put the Pebble Mine in over there. There was a winter king salmon derby out of Homer when we were there and some of the best fishing was around Seldovia. Buzz saw a jumper not far from the ship the day before the derby, and the same day he saw the diving duck with the herring. Ninety kings were entered in the derby. That's the thing about king salmon, they are thinly scattered all over the continental shelf of western North America, like sharks cruising for a meal, years before heading back to spawn. They probably caught kings at Seldovia that were from Oregon.

As you know, I can slip into a diatribe on fisheries management at the drop of a hat. I told the owners I wasn't going to do that while I was in charge of publicity for the salt cod project. Too easy for someone to get their nose out of joint and diss even good work you are doing in some other arena. Like your hair style or brand of boots. We had our hands full anyway without worrying about trawlers. Oops, I said the 'T' word again.

However there is no getting away from fisheries management if you are setting up a fish business. It's a tricky trail. For example, we figured when we got on station, we'd invite a fisheries student out on the boat and do a thesis on local stock depletion. What is worrying is that they found on the Grand Banks that a massive regional cod stock is really many, many little genetic stocks. One school of cod that spawns on one rockpile, like a small run of humpies in any little creek, will always go back to the same place, because of unique genes. When that school of cod is all caught, and they are vulnerable to that during spawning time, then no cod spawn there anymore.

Honest fishermen know this and have said it, but government research on the subject has not been forthcoming to date. Ironically, when we started talking about bringing a support ship to the cod jigging grounds off Kodiak, the trawl interests in Kodiak had someone agitate in the City Council and the North Pacific Fisheries Management Council to ban floating processors in Kodiak waters. No memtion of how far off shore, or if the many catcher/processors were included in this ban; most likely not. A fisherman stood up in the City Council and said that a support ship is exactly what they need, so they can move around and not deplete an area. If nobody fished the Grand Banks of Canada for 100 years, only half the cod would come back, since so many distinct genetic stocks have been wiped out.

Many is the time when this "just me and never thee" politicking works with the fish managers, which is why the shills even make these ridiculous requests. That's why I think the system is broken. It's been the same way since Captain Cook was "stopped by a shoale of salmon" trying to sail up the Amur River.

Arrrrrrr matey, I got sidetracked on fish politics again. Don't worry, I'll never be invited to help manage the fiah, because I think what is right is right. It's so messed up now, it's like asking Congress to vote themselves a pay reduction. Like last year when the head of the Nationa Marine Fisheries Service told the public that they could see the bottom better from the surface in 200 fathoms than someone in a bathysphere with a spotlight four feet off the bottom. Dang, that's a good camera or whatever they have. Either really spooky or really wrong. I suspect the latter.

Well, anyway, the salt cod idea is out of the closet. You don't have to have a huge amount of money to do this service for the fishermen. There's lots of room in the niche. The basic idea has never changed: bring a bigger boat than the fishing boats in with a hold full of salt, then split the cod and salt them in the hold. Then go home when the hold is full. That's how the Iberians did it since long before Columbus, off the E. coast of Canada. You don't use any more machinery than you have to. All that fancy machinery either lowers the fishermen's take, or increases what the consumer has to pay. Or puts so much pressure on the operator to do mass volumes, (and play politics), that the fish get wiped out when nobody is looking.

Hand cutting cod and putting salt on the fillets might use a little steel for a knife and maybe some for a salt scoop. Even with an 'ugly labor-saving device' like a radar, it's still what's called a 'green' operation. And the jig fishermen can certainly throw any fish back alive that they don't want to keep. Even small cod, which other gear types can't nearly match.

I've had this discussion several times recently, and with high powered folk with Phd behind their name. The question is, what is the point of deploying the most and the latest technology in the largest vessel or plant possible to prosecute a fishery. Seems to me NOAA is barking up the wrong tree by thinning out the small boat operators and supporting the very large boat lifestyle. I minored in Industrual Engineering at OSU, and it certainly teaches efficiency of methods and conservation of motion. But the discipline doesn't delve into socio-economic conundrums, like the 'right' someone has to influence government to keep the communities away from the fish so he can scoop them up uninterrupted.

I would like to see the Alaska Department of Fish and Game research small cod stock depletion factors before there are no more to study, like the Kodiak king crab.

That's why it's so important to work with head above the sand in Alaska fisheries. That is if making things better interests one, and not making them worse. And to leave a legacy in healthy fish stocks for the kids, which is what I want to do for Jesse, Daniel and Elias. All of them have, or are serving in the Armed Forces, and in no mean capacity, so why shouldn't I fight to protect their freedoms at home?

Elias was there with his new red beret when I got home from Seldovia Bay. A year of trying to wash him out of Air Force Combat Control just put him more in the spotlight. What an effort. When Jesse, Connor and I were climbing Table Rock Mt. the other day, Jesse said he'd carried men his size up that kind of stuff in Iraq, with an IV in them. Pioneering in the fisheries makes me feel like I'm helping carry that man. What more could I do?

One of these days I'll get all those pictures and footage sorted out and maybe put some on the Internet for your perusal. Lee is still thinking about writing a book on the restoration project. I'm sure it would be thicker than the 'Passport Alaska' I did that time. Some of what happened up there I'm still trying to digest. Jesse called it his third 'deployment.' Hopefully we are an example to other entrepreneurs contemplating a task everyone else says is impossible. Our mission was accomplished, and we wish the owners of the 'Chilkat' well.

To be continued.....

Continued....

The M?V Chilkat becomes the F/V Chilkat

2010-04-14T08:42:00.000-07:00

Restoration Continues on M/V Chilkat

Making Progress Towards New Life Salting Cod in Old Traditional Way
_________________________________________________________

These days, the old M/V Chilkat is both a home and a business to the six crew members who have come together to combine their individual skills, knowledge, and experience to restore the ship and implement their plan of helping cod fishermen keep their way of life.

If such a thing as destiny can guide our lives to help accomplish things that are just meant to be, then the dream these six men have will become a reality. This crew works together like a well oiled machine.

Already having lived two lives, the Chilkat is making a transformation into a third. This small ship goes back to World War II, where it was originally built as a landing craft for the military to off load on the island of Iwo Jima. Made under war time conditions, no expense or quality of materials was spared in her construction. These landing craft were built for an expected one time use only, but the Chilkat's small size enabled her to escape being hit by enemy fire, and she was taken back to the Martinac Ship Yards of Tacoma, Washington to be refitted for service as an Alaskan ferry.

For many years the M/V Chilkat served patrons of the Alaska Marine Highway. After being sold to at least two buyers who didn't quite know what to do with the ship, the Chilkat sat empty in Seldovia Harbor for four years, patiently waiting for her new crew, who is now working diligently to restore her utility. John Enge, Buzz Richards, Jesse Enge, Steve Dawson, Jim Hansen, and Troy Bert call the Chilkat their home and business rolled into one.

"We are on a crusade to prove that fishing can be done sustainably, with proper support services in a sustainable fashion," said John Enge, the scribe and ship's log keeper for the crew. "Most of that reads hard work and low tech," he added. He calls it a "working museum."

John went on to say, "We found the ship to be in much better working condition than we'd thought." Their objective is to restore the Chilkat for salting fish in the old traditional manner. John's family history lends credence to their business plan, as his ancestors were two of the first residents of Petersburg, Alaska in the mid 1800's and were dory fishermen in the old tradition. "Now it will come full circle," John continued, "as the Chilkat serves the cod jigging fishermen off Kodiak this spring and summer. "Hook and line cod jigging by dory as done off the Grand Banks for hundreds of years will sustain the Chilkat for as long as it's an open entry fishery."

The Chilkat will be capable of serving many other support functions, such as for research, sport, commercial diving, salvage, and cargo transport. It has a main boom for lifting skiffs, an unloading and side loading hoist, and a bow door designed to drive in with a semi and trailer. It also has five water tight holds for additional storage. Being used for a boat welding and fabrication shop in the winter is also being considered.

For the time being, work is the order of the day, from paint scraping and new paint to overhauling the many different systems the Chilkat needs to have in good working shape. The crew has been surprised at the amount of metal found, not only brass was used throughout, but silver was used in the electrical connections. Also surprising is how the Chilkat has become part of the eco system in Seldovia Bay, with various wildlife around it. Birds have made it a stopover, ducks have used its deck for takeoff, otters have rested on a small lip above the water line. Even whales have been close by.

When she's ready leave, the huge anchor that now holds the Chilkat will be tied off to a buoy, charted, and left for other boats to use. A new maiden voyage, even just a short run to Seldovia when the ice flows out of the harbor, will be something to celebrate for the little ship with at least three lives.

Iditarod facts

2010-03-09T20:01:00.000-08:00

There's a thread going on that turned into a dialogue about the Iditarod Race, mostly against it, on a new fb friend's page. I'd like to share my comment that I added:

Hi- I'm getting in here late. Nan, you and I just became fb friends last night. Laura suggested it to me, and had nothing but good things to say about you. You invited me to this discussion this morning and I have found my way here.

So many things we all agree on. I live in Alaska and much of my background has had to do with sled dogs. I've never raced the Iditarod, but have worked for people who did, and still have many friends who have or do. I have raced in some sprint races, but mostly we had sled dogs for the pure pleasure of enjoying their company in the winter for outdoor "recreational" mushing, as it is called.

I can tell you, and it doesn't matter to me whether you believe me or not, that when a dog dies on the Iditarod Trail, the grief is heartwrenching. Mushers have spent years training their dogs and have developed a bond with their dogs like no other.

Dog care and health are the most important thing in these peoples' lives. It is such a way of life that it can be said that it IS their life. Any other things that come up in their life are just minor in comparison. When I first came to Alaska as a single woman in 1988, I first worked for a husky kennel with 110 dogs. I became acquainted with Joe Reddington, called "the Father of the Iditarod" for starting the race. He had mushed dogs for so many years, his knowledge of them was incomparable. He lived and breathed dogs, and I learned a lot from him. (just a note here, if I get cut off, I'll just go to the next "comment" to continue.)

When I was working at that kennel (not Joe's) the dogs were more important than people. I found that out when I was taking a big, rambunctious dog from a top tier of a two tier dog box on the truck. This big white dog came shooting out of that box like a rocket. I was always told to never let go of the dog, so I kept ahold of him and we both hit the ground and rolled part way down a hill together. The owners raced over to where we were and asked if the dog was alright. This always stuck with me, see, because they didn't ask if I was alright, they asked if the dog was alright.

I cooked the dogs' food, and believe me, they eat better than most people. It often made me hungry smelling their food cooking. I've taken dogs from their dog houses, or I should say their area around thier dog houses, to be harnessed up at the sled. Some of those bigger dogs were so excited at the thought of getting to run with the sled, it was almost impossible to handle them. But I was always told not to discipline them because it might curb their enthusiasm.

My main job was shoveling their poo and keeping their areas clean. I often thought of myself as being a servant to "man's servant" in that respect, and it was very humbling. Their houses are kept off the ground, so as not to conduct the cold of the ground, and kept filled with straw for insulation. Sled dogs are perfectly suited to their Alaskan environment, and have a heavy undercoat and many more hairs per square inch than other breeds of dogs. They enjoy the cold! They can stand much more cold than heat. They get up to 10,000 calories of high quality food a day when they're racing.

Yes, they are on chains in their "area," but the chains are on swivels and allow the dogs a circle with a radius of at least 10 feet. I've seen ordinary owners chain their lone dogs up for their whole life, and that is what breaks my heart. Not the sled dogs who lead an active life with much attention, affection, and social contact with their nearby team mates.

Like Laura, I won't argue anybody's misconceptions about the Iditarod because I don't have to. I already know the truth. So thank you for reading this far. Remember, we're on the same side when it comes to animal welfare.

Lee Smith

Ghost Ship of Seldovia Bay comes to life.

2010-03-06T12:12:00.000-08:00

For four years the old Alaska ferry Chilkat has sat in Seldovia Bay, unattended, a mystery. But these days she sports strings of lights against the night sky, signaling to people in Seldovia that she is gradually coming back to life, a very new life. As John Enge, one of those aboard the Chilkat now relates, an idea was born to take the tired ship into a new future as a cod fish processor.

A plan was formed among the group to establish a "mother ship" for the cod jigging fishermen who work out of Kodiak. Enge tells how a lot of fishing jobs were lost in Alaska when IFQs, or Individual Fishing Quotas, were instituted, and how Alaska has only one remaining fishery left that isn't privatized. That is the cod jigging fishery for Pacific, or true, cod as it's also known. The group working on the Chilkat wants to see the cod jigging fishermen get a decent price for their fish, so a plan has developed to do everything possible to make that a reality.

But they also want the fishery to be a sustainable one, unlike the injuries done by giant trawlers, which in areas of the east coast of Canada and America have already depleted the resource.

Enge has a good handle on the history of fishing before trawlers, and how for hundreds of years fishermen did it the old way and the cod were always there. He believes there is still time to turn it around for at least a segment of Alaska, the cod jiggers who go out in small boats and fish with line in contrast to the trawlers who drag miles of nets and waste tons of bycatch fish.

Saving lost time

Here we have a viable plan for the small fisherman to make a go of a family enterprise. Currently the cod jiggers lose a lot of valuable time taking their catch back into Kodiak to be processed, and getting back out to the fishing grounds. With the Chilkat taking on its new roll, they can upload their fish to it and also come aboard for a short rest and relaxation, with a shower and a good meal and be back out fishing right away.

The "processing" of the fish that takes place on the Chilkat will be the salting method, so no costly energy will be used for refrigeration. To get the cod aboard, a block and tackle system run by hand will be employed. Both of these methods will ensure more dollars to the fishermen. The Chilkat will run the salted cod to Kodiak for shipping to points around the globe.

According to Enge, North America is almost the only place in the world where there is no market for salted cod. He told of the Atlantic coast of Europe and Africa that import salted cod and provide a good market, along with some Asian countries. Salted means no refrigeration is needed from the processor to the customer, thus ensuring a good product. The group plans to market their cod as "Reel Cod," as in caught with reel and also being the true cod, not imposters.

Right now, though, the work is on the ship, where the crew of six is living somewhat more comfortably this week.

What intrigued me, though, was the logistics of the project. I had many questions. For instance, how do they get their supplies onboard, as the ship is anchored out in the bay? I was told that a former owner put a large door in the side that is about six feet above the water, and local Seldovia people have been providing a taxi service.

I then asked about the water situation and found out that for the time being, they are bringing in cases of bottled water until the huge tanks for water storage can be cleaned and come online. They have a desalinator for sea water on order. The cooking aboard is what Enge calls "field cooking," done by his son Jesse. They just progressed from cooking on the wood stove to using an oil stove. As Enge spoke to me by phone, his son was trying out a new bread recipe he's found online.

What about fuel?

What about fuel for the big generator, I wondered? Enge told me that there is a double tank aboard that has several hundreds of gallons of fuel in it yet, and that is being filtered into usable quantities to provide for heat and cooking. The ship's lounge has been turned into a comfortable living area.

Last week the area experienced an intensive storm with wind of hurricane force, but the Chilkat's giant anchor held her steady. The skiff was blown away but later found and recovered before it could be blown further out to sea and lost. Enge just called with the latest news: The ship's flag had been raised. It was raised it in honor of the three veterans aboard, and to show the world this is an American ship.

Lee Anne Smith lives between Wasilla and Big Lake and recently signed on as publicist for the crew work down on the Chilkat. "I may be paid in all the fish I can eat, but I believe in this project," she said.

Kodiak letter sung to the tune of 'OUR TOWN'

2010-02-15T15:57:00.000-08:00

This letter was C.C.'d to me by the author, addressed to the politicians representing the Kodiak area: Rep. Alan Austerman, Sen. Gary Stevens, Gov. Sean Parnel's office, U.S. Sen. Begich's office and U.S. Sen. Murkowski's office. It describes the drying up of the once thriving fishing community. The reason? Jane Lubchenko and NOAA's famous 'catch shares' system I suspect. But listen to the author, she lives there.

Hello Ladies and Gentlemen, 2-14-10
Alan , you asked me during the LIO call in, to make sure I tell the country that Joe Childers
dosn't represent all Alaskans. How about you guys do that, too? It would mean alot! It's exactly what I've been asking. When you just stand by and let this happen, don't raise your voices to anyone in gov't, or anywhere else that I can tell, aside from the HR21, that got stuck in your office Gary, it's condoning the plan.

There was an opportunity to take a stand, and honestly, Gary, I think you could have tried harder. It's not over yet, and a lot is happening. We need you. This town is becoming a ghost town. Island TV just closed. That means that we have 3 vacant spaces right here on the mall. Norman's is open 3 days week and Ardingers only on Saturday. The building where I used to be for 8 years, next to AC, has a minimum of 3 spaces for rent. The corner of Center and Mission, where I was for about 1 year, was available all summer and fall. I finally got relieved of the whole rent, but am still responsible for a goodly sum. After we couldn't rent it for what I was paying, Mel kind of bought my lease.

Now the USCG is expanding into that space, but that's a shame because it used to be prime retail space. Royal T's used to be there and moved in next door to The China House, is only open on the weekend, after taking another job.

My business is down between 60 and 70%, from last year, and I have the best possible spot in town, next to Henry's. One reason I felt comfortable making a life here, investing my life in this town, is because the fishing industry insulated our economy, to a large extent. That is no longer the case. So many jobs have left town and the boats that fish here are usually from somewhere else, and they bring their crews with them.

Come on. God darn it! Please. Alaska needs to take a stand. The North Pacific Council is gearing up to give away the Gulf of Alaska groundfish. Doesn't that bother you!? Do you think it's right to let this travesty go on right in front of your eyes, and do nothing about it? You seem to hide behind the fact that it's "the Council", a group of self serving interests, who are out to take our resources, and my livelihood, and are above reproach.

No! I believe it is your responsibility to tell the truth. So many livelihoods, all around the country, are at stake, (www.unitedwefish.com), and we know, you know, what the outcome will be, without a doubt, and you do not raise your voices? I have to take high blood pressure medication because of the stress of it on me; both from the fact that I have no money, and I am watching this scenario unfold and our state govt is doing NOTHING about it!

Ladies and Gentlemen, it's time! How about it?! I'm sick of hearing 'it's not my call!' No one is paying me for the hrs. I spend trying to fight this. You are being paid, and I want my monies worth, please!
I will be looking forward to hearing about your progress. Of course, if there is anything I can help you with, please let me know. I'm here for you! Thank you, Rhonda Maker
907 481 3100

And here's another one from the East Coast, which is why a national rally is being held on the steps of the Capitol in D.C. on Feb. 24. It's a national issue of preserving our marine food supply for the local economies.

Hello Everyone,
>
>
> Thank you Rhonda, for this heartfelt letter. I stand behind you.
> My own family has lost our fishing livelihood to this scam
> called Catch Shares.
>
> ITQ's (Individual Transferable Quota)
> is an economic tool, not a conservation one. The scallop
> fishery that I've been part of the last 20 years is not over fished now or
> recently. Some closed area scallops are dying of old age.
>
> My state of Massachusetts, has made a powerful
> political statement by electing Scott Brown to replace Senator
> Ted Kennedy's place.
>
> Our country is a mess right now.
> Main Street, America is suffering from unemployment. Jobs are our number
> one concern and we are losing them needlessly.
>
> We need political leaders who walk the walk, not just talk the talk. If
> you are not willing to act for the people, we will find someone who will.
>
> Thank you,
>
> Mary Beth de Poutiloff
> family fisherwoman

A response to the NPFMC whitewash

2010-02-14T14:41:00.000-08:00

Hi, Duncan,

As always, thank you for a quick response. I never claimed that Bruce Leaman, IPHC Director, ever said what Steve Hare, his employee, did to PAG at the IPHC annual meeting we both attended. Bruce Leaman is a gentleman, a scholar and a diplomat, everything my mother and grandmother wanted me to grow up to be, but didn't. Remember Bruce is accountable to Hillary and her counterpart in Ottawa. Bruce CANNOT say what his chief scientist, Steve Hare, admitted in public two weeks ago to PAG. Bruce has to take the national interest of Canada and USA under consideration EVERY time he opens his mouth. Enough said? Within 5-years (way too late) Bruce will say in public what Steve Hare already has. That's his job description and I need to respect it, which I do.

Duncan, as a voting member on the NPFMC, which was conceived, sold-door-to-door in the U.S. Senate and won against heavy odds by the Old Man, Don and a bunch of Kodiak waterfront rats, you MUST follow the best scientific information available EVERY time you make a status of stocks (OY, ABC, TAC) decision. If you don't, the SOC can remove you at his pleasure. As an attorney, you don't need a peg-legged "sea lawyer" like me to remind you of that. You are your Father's son and he remains one of the wisest men I ever met in my life AND he always made time for me and other young guys around Kodiak in the 1970's, without exception in my memory.

Can you and Sam wait another 5-years for Bruce to get permission from Canada and Hillary to admit the "best scientific information available," which Steve Hare struggles with every day? You know as I do that the Observers Union has twice told Bill Karp tht there's been organized halibut bycatch hanky-panky going on aboard Kodiak trawlers for over 3-years. Bob Alverson's cell # is (206)972-9616. Call him at your convenience. You know, as well, the downward track that the halibut TAC is on now. You heard, like I did, Steve Hare throw cold water all over the "coming rebound in halibut recruits to the commercial fishery starting in 2011. The man almost apologized ahead of time for the possible recruitment failure. Talk about lowering expectations while painting a rosier picture. That got to me, Duncan. Can Alaska coastal communities afford to go on this way? Can those halibut families bet on the come that Steve Hare's just another Chicken Little, that Denby, as Chairman of the Council's Observer Committee, can make a dime's worth of difference before 2013 at the earliest, that Jim Balsiger will evoke his emergency power to increase observer coverage on Kodiak trawlers in 2010? I don't believe they can. I know Bill Alwert can't and doesn't want to.

But, I'll tell you what. let's just continue to take the easy way out and BLAME THE GODDAMN LONGLINERS for the disappearance of over 100-million pounds of halibut bycatch these past 4-years according to Steve Hare, not Bruce Leaman...yet.

Duncan, your Father was a born 'n' bred soil conservationist. For hours, he indoctrinated me that any nation's (never mind region's or state's) strength and durability are only as sound as its soil. I say this to you without reservation but also with personal admiration for you: Your Father would raise holy, God-awful Hell if he'd been voting in your seat this week in Portland. He'd have thanked Bruce Leaman for his sincere testimony and then demanded that Steve Hare come forward next and describe the best scientific information available about this horrible mostly-unobserved GOA halibut bycatch and "deficit" and their impact on so many Alaska families.

Duncan, I'll come to Anchorage at any Council meeting you choose, kneel and kiss your ass in front of everyone, if Governor Sean, representing every single Alaskan alive today, sides with Bruce Leaman, who was born a better man than I'll ever become, instead of Steve Hare. By the way, please remind me who's successfully bull-shitted Governor Sean lately. I read ADN regularly and haven't seen that list in there yet. Quite the opposite.

Otherwise, you kiss mine at the same venue. Deal? In fact, I'll give you three for one: I'll kiss Julie's and Al's, as well, if I lose.

With respect and personal admiration for you and your Father, a genuine Pioneer of Alaska,
TC

P.S. I read and re-read your wife's Halibut poem frequently. I gets to me every time and I'm still envious that she got that gift and I didn't.

On Feb 13, 2010, at 6:17 PM, Duncan Fields wrote:

> Hi Tom,
>
> I appreciate your concern on this issue. You may have been listening to the Council on line but I specifically questioned Bruce on this issue and he indicated that "bycatch" was one of many variables that could account for the "lost" halibut etc. I know there is more to it than that, but with Bruce's responses to my questions, I wasn't able to get a "hook" to proceed on that agenda item. Stay tuned, Sam and I are working through the Council process to have a complete discussion of halibut bycatch allocations.
>
> Not what you want but the best I can do.... at this point.
>
> Duncan
>
And a minor letter from yours truly to help a reporter get some facts in the matter

I'm racking my brain to help solve this. One thing that strikes me is there is a blog with video footage of halibut sinking white side up in a long column and still a big pile of halibut on deck getting tossed over. The blog is the Tholepin blog authored by someone in Kodiak. Tom might know what was entered in the record of the Council meetings and the IPHC meetings. But the Council most often, and I think this case might be the same, decides to call the evidence 'hearsay' so it doesn't have to be entered in the record. I'm sure the NPFMC isn't the only Council that does this, although the NPFMC is particularly adept at covering huge mistakes and thefts.

My time is limited as I'm now in Homer working to get an old state ferry polished up to service the cod jig fleet, the only fishery that isn't privatized. To demonstrate a successful marriage of sustainable fishing and sustainable processing without privatization. But the Council only gave the jiggers one percent of the TAC, so they aren't too concerned. But I have to fight the trawlers efforts to stop us from providing this assist to these sustainable fishermen. They have asked the NPFMC and the Kodiak City Council to ban floaters from Kodiak waters. Maybe the only place in the world such a thing would be even discussed. But a jig fisherman testified that such a floating service vessel is sorely needed to just keep the jig boats from depleting individual spawning cod stocks.

The fishery managers on the Grand Banks have found that these many small spawning stocks are genetically distinct, like salmon runs. Once one small spawning stock is wiped out, it never returns. And Duncan Fields is dedicated, by his own admission, to engaging in this practice with the gear than is so effective at it: trawls. We want to have a researcher on board to do DNA studies. The State and Federal govt won't do studies that jeopardize these trawlers it seems. Heck, the NPFMC won't even do the economic impact analysis on the halibut IFQs they were supposed to do twelve years or so ago.

If Tom or I wrote a whole book on the subject, under the current Council System it would be just labeled 'hearsay.' Even if we had five thousand fishermen sign the book. A longline crewman who fished under Arne Fuglvog can describe in detail, and has for Law Enforcement, the collusion that exists.

Wouldn't it be novel if the more sustainable fishing methods were given priority access to the fish resources? It wasn't the king crabbers who knocked down the stocks in the Bering Sea, it was the trawlers bringing up 'red bags' for a couple of years after the NPFMC opened the 'crab sanctuary' to bottom trawling. Their trawls were solidly packed with red king crab that they had to throw over dead. Like the real numbers of king salmon bycatch, it's all been covered up for years. It would take a lot of Freedom of Information Act invocations and a lot of money to tell the real story. I'm sure nobody was talking as the buffalo were being extinguished either.

I could get the evidence, but I couldn't say how here. And it would cost more than you or I make together. Emails aren't safe. The floater ban attempt came a week after I starting sending emails on our project. Pretty coincidental.

John

NMFS decides 100 M lbs isn't worth worrying about

2010-02-13T11:09:00.000-08:00

IPHC's Steve Hare strikes out in 3-straight pitches at NPFMC meting in Portland
...
Sat, February 13, 2010 7:41:27 AM
From:
Tom Casey
...
Add to Contacts
To: swa@ak.net
Cc: Gary Painter
Billy,

IPHC's chief scientist, Steve Hare, who told the halibut processors at January's IPHC annual meeting in Seattle that over 100-million pounds of "un-accounted-for-GOA trawl halibut bycatch" is missing from the IPHC's halibut abundance estimates these past 4-years, STRUCK OUT in three straight pitches at this week's NPFMC meeting.

STRIKE 1: The Council's industry Advisory Panel (AP) voted 11-7 NOT to investigate Steve's conviction. "Case Closed!" as far as they're concerned.

STRIKE 2: The Council's Scientific and Statistical Committee (SSC) never even took up Hare's concern, even though IPHC has a permanent voting-member on the SSC. What up (as they say in the 'hood) on that? IPHC Executive Director Bruce Leaman is as vigilant as they come. How'd that one get by him and his man on the SSC?

STRIKE 3: Even after public testimony (Finally, thank God!), the NPFMC, itself, decided (as of Friday close of business) to IGNORE Steve Hare's conviction and DISMISS it as mere hearsay, NOT credible enough to cause any serious, scientific review at this time. So the ADFG Commissioner (Denby) , the NMFS Alaska Regional Director (Doug), all 3-Washington State voting members (Bill, Dave and John), representing the dominant sector of the Pacific halibut fleet, and even the voting-members from Homer (Sam) and Kodiak (Duncan), the two largest halibut ports on Planet Earth, simply blew-off Steve Hare's best attempt to explain the 100-million pound halibut "deficit" as a routine math error, I suppose. I mean, we all make them, right? What's the Big Deal anyway? Maybe Steve just misplaced a decimal point or 2 or 3. Things like that happen. You know?

Anyway, here's where the rubber meets the road, though. Alaska Governor Sean, who, recent polls show, is very likely to be re-elected (based on his current, over 2-1 voter approval ratings) in November, has chosen to run in Alaska's coastal communities on a "Maximize bycatch reduction in 2010" platform this year. Will Governor Sean take Steve Hare seriously or kick him to the curb as the NPFMC did this week in Portland? As I told you in January, I don't believe Governor Sean is that easy to bullshit or lead down a primrose path. I'll give you 2:1.

But, we must be harshly realistic. The GOA trawlers (Julie and Al) won HANDS-DOWN this week and halibut long-liners and sports fishermen lost their asses. Don't shoot the messenger, namely me, please. Maybe Arnie Fugulvog will get Lisa to intervene some how. He's never shown any fondness for a swift kick in the chops before (him and his Dad being halibut long-liners, themselves) and Lisa's way up there now in the U.S. Senate's Republican hierarchy, appearing on CNN, MSNBC and FOX almost every day now.

So, don't scuttle the ship yet. Maybe it's a twilight double-header we're playing here and we'll take the nightcap under the lights. Who knows? Just don't bet the farm on it yet. I wouldn't.

P.S. Forgive my vanity, please, but has it occurred to you that Lisa hasn't aged a single, goddamn day since her election to the Senate, while my hair keeps falling out like those curly, pink, polyethylene fibers on a cheap, Value Village bathroom rug? What up on that one, too? That girl's a genuine "Babe," with deference and respect for her intellect, judgement and her professional office. She knocks me on my ass. Seriously. Always has. Anyway. Whatever. You catch any kings off Chiniak lately or are you stuck on the beach cause Captain Courageous, Gunnar, is still chasing senioritas down in Argentina? Get a freakin' life, Wilhelm. This is pathetic. I remember when you used to be cutting-edge. Hell, I remember when I used to be cutting-edge. Nevermind. Call me when you lose your grip on the Crown bottle and give Huckins a generous ration of shit for me, as well. He deserves it! Call Denby, too. I'm sure he'll welcome your "input." He got hitched in December, you know. Laurie's got his ears pinned-back already, as far as I can tell. Ain't that just peachy? Anyway, adios.

Regards,
TC

P.S. What'd the Modoc say? Did he come up to Newport or did you go down there? We still have to exorcise him this year. Yes?

On another note, the intrepid Alaska Governor, Sean Parnell, decided that the crewmen aren't worth worrying about either. One commentator said that the official state statistics have that there are only three, (yes 3) crewmen in the anchor Gulf of Alaska community of Kodiak. Not a good way to get support for the many hundreds of crewmen there who got left out when 'catch shares' were passed out. Just officially pretend they don't exist, then their rights and role in Alaska society can be trivialized for the benefit of a few who will yield campaign contributions. Thanks for nothing, Sean.

This commentator intends to bring up the issue at about election time this fall. Right at the last week before the election when things stick in voters' minds. And I reckon I'll bring up the issue of the 'Alaska contingent' on the North Pacific Fishery Management Council not demanding an official investigation of the missing 100 million lbs of halibut. You gotta realize that this has been going on a lot longer than just the last four years too. And that it isn't just halibut, but tanner crab, king salmon, chum salmon, herring, squid, and unknown number of lesser species. A price tag on the lost economic value of this by-catch to the North Pacific economy? In the billions of dollars. This is not chump change. Stop protecting the villains, Sean. Unless you want to be labeled one yourself.

Letters on the missing 100 million lbs of halibut that were 'found.'

2010-02-06T21:17:00.000-08:00

Last night at the IPHC party at the Edgewater Hotel, we were told by a halibut processor who attended Steve Hare's presentation to PAG that Steve admitted to them that the 100-million pounds of missing halibut that the IPHC cannot account for these past 4-years was caused by "un-reported GOA trawl bycatch." Steve NEVER told that to us fishermen on the Conference Board, which really stinks. I request 2-minutes tomorrow morning to put this on the record at our Observer Committee meeting at AFSC. Denby, this is grotesque and it suggests that the IPHC process, itself, is warped towards favoritism, which we have NEVER believed before, NOT ONCE. We trust Bruce and Greg. But Steve makes us wonder now. Plus, why wouldn't Jim and Ralphie come clean with us yesterday? Don't they think we can handle it?

Can you please call Steve on the carpet tomorrow and make him explain why he failed to fully-inform us fishermen and the Observer Committee of what he knew about the true status of our halibut stocks. Based just on what the Canadians told us yesterday, they'll insist on being compensated for this and we long-liners don't have the deep pockets to pay them off. I'll bet you they start ogling the trawlers ITQs or that $34-billion in the Alaska Permanent Fund (to get the Council's attention) just to bring this issue to a boil when they address the NPFMC in Portland next month. Trust me, they are really pissed off now and it seems unlikely they'll take it anymore(Remember Peter Finch's 1976 performance in "Network"? Double it!)

Don't mean to ruin your day,
TC

Billy,

I am the grandson of Luigi Lepore, who grew up in the 1890's commercial fishing in the Bay of Naples. Before he turned 25, he immigrated to America and worked on the railroads of the Northern tier. By the time he turned 30, he'd married an Irish immigrant woman and settled down along the West shore of Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island to raise his 2-boys and 4-girls fishing scup, tautog, shrimp, blue fish, hard shell (quohaugs) and soft shell (butter) clams and oysters to support them.

Italian tradition dictates (as does the Yupik's) that the first grandson "belongs" to the grandparents as a form of Social Security (ask the elders in Togiak). This was ordained by God the Father in Luigi's mind, even though his daughter, my mother, never bought into it. Regardless, since I was his "property", he decided that early-morning fishing and preparing the catch for delivery to his customers took precedent over my grammar schooling. Since my mother taught in the same school system that I was frequently truant from, there was often Hell and professional embarrassment to pay. But in the East Coast Italian culture of the 1950's and early 1960's, daughters did not raise their voices to their Fathers in front of anyone else, ever.

But after years of my mother's frustration over Luigi continuously delivering me to grammar school by Noon, instead of 9 AM, Father and daughter went out to the chicken coop behind his green and white garage one Sunday afternoon following lunch and screamed at each other for 10 minutes or so, after which my indentured servitude ended and my daily education began in earnest the next morning.

Here's what I remember most vividly from those early years: "Fish always rots from the head!" As soon as possible, Luigi would cut the head off whatever fish we caught that morning, just like clockwork. We even pulled the heads off the bay shrimp shortly after beach seining them, which was a royal pain in my frozen fingers, since I got stuck with the job normally.

So who cares?

If the "Fish still rots from the head," Steve Hare, or someone else, has to be promoted or fired tomorrow morning if the IPHC and NPFMC and NOAA Fisheries in DC are to sustain ANY fisheries management credibility. Know what I mean? Who's been in charge of reducing bycatch (a strict mandate of MSA 2006) since Steve Hare realized that there's been an extra 100-million pounds of GOA halibut mortality destroyed these pasty four years? Anyone? Or nobody?

More precisely,

1. What did IPHC Commissioner and NOAA Fisheries Director Jim Balsiger know about Steve Hare's revelation and when did he know it?

2. What did IPHC Executive Director Bruce Leaman know about his own employee's revelation and when did he know it? Here's what he wrote to me last month.

3. What did Denby, our Observer Committee Chairman and ADFG Commissioner, know about Steve Hare's revelation and when did he know it?

4. What did Eric, our NPFMC Chairman, know about Steve Hare's revelation and when did he know it? Before the Council re-set the 2,000 mt GOA trawl halibut bycatch cap for 2010 at their December Council meeting?

5. What did Doug MeCum, our NOAA Fisheries Alaska Regional Director, know about Steve Hare's revelation and when did he know it? If never, shouldn't Jane (who's been an Oregonian longer than you have, Billy), our NOAA Director in DC, appoint Sue Salveson to replace Doug immediately? Isn't that only fair given that Steve Hare claims that over 100-million pounds of halibut have been destroyed by Julie's and Al's Kodiak trawlers these past 4-years without a single ticket or $20-fine being written and levied by NOAA Fisheries enforcement agents? Sound as fishy to you as it does to me?

6. What did Chris, our NPFMC Council Executive Director, know about Steve Hare's revelation and when did he know it? No one I've met has been able to bullshit Chris since he took the job. Not me, not no one. Was he blind-sided like the rest of us?

Here's the good news, though. Governor Sean is running for re-election in Alaska's coastal communities this year on a "Minimize Bycatch Now" platform. My guess is that if Kodiak's City Mayor and Borough Mayor and Kodiak fishermen, themselves, ask Governor Sean to convene a special investigation during the campaign to iget to the bottom of Halibut-Trawl-Bycatch-Gate by call Steve Hare to testify under oath as his star witness, we might actually put and end to this federally-sanctioned insanity long before 2013, as the NPFMC and NOAA Fisheries now plan, at the earliest!

My money's on Jane (currently on leave from Oregon State University), though. Once she picks up on Steve Hare's revelation, the you-know-what will hit the you-know-what-else. Wait and see. I'm just glad I'm not the one who'll have to tell her to her face. My guess is that she'll be "disappointed" to say the least, meaning severely pissed-off and mad as Hell at whoever compromised her leadership credibility.

Bob Alverson tells me that Jane doesn't suffer fools and their transparent excuses very well. Good for her! Kodiak trawlers flushing $400-million of un-accounted for GOA halibut bycatch down the drain these past 4-years ain't chump change.

We ought to build a tall, bronze statue of Jeff Passer (NMFS enforcement agent) on the grounds of the IPHC at UW and in front of Fishermen's Hall in Kodiak. Jeff has been completely vindicated by Steve Hare after many years of bureaucratic intimidation and suppression at NPFMC meetings.

Who knows? Maybe, with any luck, the Kodiak trawlers will get a first hand chance to explain themselves to Jane, personally, with Steve Hare and Governor Sean standing right beside her. Think we could sell that show out in the Sullivan Arena in Anchorage or in the Kodiak High School auditorium or in the UW Fisheries School auditorium in Seattle? Bet we could!

Regards,
TC

Hi Tom
Noooo…we haven’t put any number on what we think the true bycatch might be. Yes we believe it is higher than the cap but I don’t think anyone could say, with any greater credibility than anyone else, that is x million pounds. In the absence of data, no one has a lock on truth. It’s not just the zero observer coverage on <60 footers, it’s the requirement for only 30% coverage (and the games involved with that) on the 60-125 ft boats.

…and I don’t venture to speak for Dr. Jim.. J

Bruce,

The hottest rumor in Ballard this week is that you and our IPHC staff now suspect that there's a very high probability that closer to 8-million pounds of halibut bycatch is actually being killed in the GOA trawl fishery than to the official 4.4-million pound annual cap set by the NPFMC because of the total absence of observer coverage on the under-sixty-foot trawlers.

Do you think that our lead IPHC Commissioner and friend, Jim Balsiger, will put his foot down now before our annual longline TAC shrinks another 10%-20%? None of us in Kodiak, Seattle or Newport believe that Barack, Michelle, Jane, Margaret or Monica would tolerate for a New York minute this type of reckless over-fishing on their watch, especially because thousands of Northwest and Alaska families depend on the GOA longline halibut fishery to pay their monthly bills and send their kids to school. Think we're wrong?

Regards,
TC

The Death of Science?

2009-12-14T14:11:00.000-08:00

To my East coast friends,

"The scientists were so convinced by their own science and so driven by a cause "that unless you're with them, you're against them," said Mark Frankel, director of scientific freedom, responsibility and law at the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He also reviewed the communications."

This quote has to do with the swiping of over 1,000 e-mails from scientists at the University of East Anglia. It sounds like the 'science' we see in the North Pacific, and the quiescence of organizations like the University of Alaska and the state Administration. And of course what drives the scientists in Alaska are the big trawl companies and their hired guns in the NPFMC and in their trade associations.

I remember when I was a development specialist in fisheries in state government, my boss said that the lobbyist for the shore plants had come through and threatened the job of anyone getting in their way. True story. And by the way, I like the guy who said, "I don't need science, I've seen it for myself." That's what Greenpeace was talking about too when they video taped and physically observed all the bottom trawl destruction in the Pribilof Canyon that wasn't supposed to be there, and then NMFS just blew them off so they wouldn't have to put it in the record.

Remember when my Blog was 'hacked' and Blogspot took it down? A webmaster told me that it could have been done by posting vulgarity in my comments section. That was one day after I had a discussion with Mark Vinsel, the Executive Director of United Fishermen of Alaska. UFA later bragged about their prowess in Internet subterfuge in an Anchorage Daily News blog. That is, before the Highliner blog was discontinued. (One UFA functionary was maybe talking too much for the larger cartel to tolerate? The guy got replaced as President of UFA by Joe Childers.)

The point of all this is that my e-mail account is not secure, and a patent attorney told me once not to send anything by e-mail. So when we started e-mailing about sending a floating buying station to Kodiak, immediately a measure iwas brought to the Kodiak City Council to ban 'floaters' from Kodiak waters. That would be unconstitutional under two constitutions, and the gall of these people isn't the point either. The point is that they don't see any common ground with regular people. And in taking this step, they have suddenly revealed a lot about themselves. ('They' is represented in large measure in Kodiak by Julie Bonney, dba Groundfish Data Bank.) Julie Bonney has also asked the NPFMC to consider banning 'floaters' from the Gulf of Alaska.

These requests would be laughable and never be considered worthy of putting on paper by the most callous 'privatizer' if it weren't for the zealousness of large numbers of people in this sector of natural resource extraction. It is a small group in the overall scheme of things, and their goal is to maximize their share of the taking of the marine resources and/or being a quisling to it all. (I just read that there was a Nazi collaborator in Norway named Quisling.) It is the usual function of a democratic government to protect the 99% of us who actually own the resource, but in this case the government is complicit in the theft. Does Jane Lubchenko have a personality disorder or something? Anybody know?

The trawlers in the Gulf of Alaska and the processing companies there have put the fear in not only government functionaries, but a whole swath of society. In 2009, the local newspaper, the Kodiak Daily Mirror, stopped writing about the subject of 'privatization' of the marine resources. I'm sure a lot of people have thought of me, "That's all well and good to stand on principle, but you if you want to get a job in the industry you just can't speak up." And I have been told that to my face, but have never entertained the thought of compromising my principles.

Where is this going? The Bering Sea has been lost. The Gulf of Alaska is being lost. Don't let the same thing happen to the Gulf of Maine and other swaths of Atlantic fishing grounds. The federal fisheries management council system is not bottom-up management. You are bottom-up management. And this winter is the last chance to exercise your constitutional right to help manage common resources properly. It won't be 'common' after this. I gave four years of my life to shed light on all this. Please consider taking part in these new initiatives to alter our fisheries management paradigm, constructively and tirelessly. Vaya con Dios.

P.S., Consider how much easier it is to go to Council meetings on the East coast compared to the North Pacific where they conduct meetings far removed from the fishermen. I don't know how far it is from Portland, OR to Dutch Harbor, AK, but that's the range of meeting places. That alone partly explains why Alaska's fisheries were 'lost.' It's like being invaded and all your crops being confiscated, like when one million Ukranians starved to death when the Communists took their crops under the guise of socialism. Here they call it 'rationalization,' but it's still just stealing.

Transparency is Fish Management King

2009-08-23T07:33:00.000-07:00

This is what I was talking about on Facebook: "RFA(Recreational Fishing Alliance) is recommending that the US Department of Commerce and individual governors in each of the coastal state coordinate a more transparent appointment process in the future,(to the federal Fishery Management Councils) thereby allowing potential candidates to be fully vetted within the fishing community as required under federal law.

This reaction was prompted by the appointment of PEW connected folk to the Mid Atlantic FMC. This right there is why our fisheries are in such bad shape. Maybe these prople are God's gift to fisheries management, but I doubt it. Not only was the appointment process not transparent, (no opportunity for public vetting) but the PEW and NOAA agenda is not transparent. They can't and don't seem willing to justify their 'catch share' agenda.

I've observed the process very closely since joining the Alaska Commercial Fishing and Agriculture Bank in Alaska in 1984. Not a slam-bam-thank-you-mamme study. Nor has my analysis been 'purchased,' just ask my kids who can't get a red cent out of me. There is no transparency in the federal fishery management council system. East Coast reformers may be surprised to know that their nice neat 'best managed fishery in the world' Bering Sea is managed thusly thanks to a timely $200,000 plus grant to the university that the famous 'two-pie theorist' worked for.

Decisions are made behind closed doors, public comment is ignored, so folks don't bother showing up for the most part. (The North Pacific Fisheries Management Council will hold meetings out in left field, like Portland, Oregon, or Dutch Harbor, Alaska. Have you ever inquired how much it costs to fly to Dutch and back. It's like going on safari to Africa. If you have to ask the price, you can't afford it. Not much public inclusion there.

What nails down this connection between secrecy and poor fish stocks is a study done by researchers at Dahlouise University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. They looked at a ton of factors present in fisheries management regimes around the world and found that the one that stood head and shoulders above the rest when the fish have been wiped out is a LACK OF TRANSPARENCY in decision making.

This is how you get a lot of experts saying that the fish are headed for trouble. Then they can change their minds and say the fish could survive. It's because we CAN change the way we do business on the ocean. It's up to us. The way NOAA is going at the moment does not represent change, so we're still on course to get what's behind Door No. One.

I'm not saying that 'catch shares' don't have some role to play in some fisheries, but not as a panacea for all fisheries, and not at the exclusion of other well founded strategies that support the economic well-being of fishing families and communities. You ignore those two and your management tools are like tying fire-brands to the tails of foxes and turning them loose in the wheat fields.

Some people might wonder who all these folk are up in Halifax who come up with these studies. I haven't been to Dahlouise U, but I flew over to Halifax from Anchorage, Alaska to visit Technical University of Nova Scotia (TUNS) and I can vouch that the folks I saw have their stuff together. I thought that using a couple of 280 foot clam catcher/processors was a bit much for the clam resource, but that TUNS was the best fisheries product lab I'd ever seen. (Those clam boats are a private investment matter, but the dollars involved do intimidate fisheries managers.)

And, I don't know exactly how to put this, but like in the U.S., if I had been single I could have made huge strides professionally that trip. That kind of thing is an example of what I'm talking about on transparency. Maybe we should call the PEW Group, or the Environmental Defense Fund, NOAA's 'midnight mistress.' Or is it the other way around? In these affairs, one never knows, does one?

People are people all over, looking for ways to benefit themselves, so if you don't have transparency, you are going to have food fights for sure. Same as the Native Americans had around here in Oregon over the Camas fields. Herring food fights have been going on for a long time in the North Sea. And transparency won't come either when local newspapers like the Anchorage Daily News and the Kodiak Daily Mirror won't discuss anything of substance, or print letters from advocates for the fish and for the public. A lot of folks might be surprised to learn too, that political correctness is just a new term for deviousness and is a recent phenomenon.

Now, there are some cases where closed door decision making works, and maybe we need more the sort. I refer to the the panel of ex-judges who arbitrated in the case of Pacific Gas and Electric vs the People of Hinkley, California. The ground water under Hinkley was green and full of hexavalent chlorine, but the government had no threshold levels of green drinking water to say PG&E was in violation. So as people were dying right and left around the toxic dump site, PG&E denied responsibility, and might have gotten away with it had it not been for some objective men working alone. But these men's records of decision making were transparent, as former public officials.

If NOAA is so concerned about social well-being, they should create protections to enhance transparency. We would like to see NOAA make good on their own planning and strategy documents which states clearly that they are collaborative and transparent. We would like to see in their own words how privatization works to benefit society and the fish stocks. They need to make the argument themselves. They need to walk the talk they have put in print. Here are some things from their Next Generation Strategic Plan (NGSP:

Stakeholder engagement
"Details societal benefits and how NOAA will achieve them."
"Generates agreement on challenges and opportunities."

NOAA hasn't detailed the societal benefits of 'catch shares,' nor attained any level of agreement on the use of this management tool with the public at large, or if it even is a legitimate one. If they call 'willingness' by only the potential recipients of instant wealth to accept it, 'agreement,' we have a big problem. Under the 'no-transparency' model of fisheries management, we'd better start learning to grow community gardens on the fish docks.

Freedom to choose share-cropping the ocean

2009-08-01T10:00:00.000-07:00

The Tyee, an online magazine from British Columbia, has an article on privatizing the rivers in B.C. Sound crazy? Think privatizing all the ocean's fish like NOAA wants to do. British Columbia started this fish privatization business, and countries we sometimes compare them with, like New Zealand, were right there with them. Turns out, someone has been pushing these ideas in the think tank, the Fraser Institute, and now the Campbell government is fully on-board.

'The Family' at 'C' Street in Washington has also been preaching 'privatization' to the Washington elite for decades: their 'trickle down fundamentalism' would have the rich have it all and then bestow blessings on the rest of us as good Keepers of the Faith, and as their mood swings on any one day. Part of this mentality is that these rich and powerful folk can do no wrong, as they have a 'mandate' to govern, and be Keepers of the Wealth as well.

This is how really wrong these folks are. People have tremendous freedom in our countries, right? Then in the Fraser Institute's mind, we have the freedom to sell ourselves into slavery as well! Isn't all that convenient thinking for big fish companies who want to own the fish. Big political contributors/investors don't want to actually be on a boat, but if they had a way to get the fish and get someone else to harvest their fish, they could be generous in return, wink, wink.

Ecotrust Canada came out with an socio-economic analysis of the Individual Transferable Quota system, or catch shares, that Canada implemented and it isn't pretty. It's called 'A Cautionary Tale About ITQ Fisheries.' They call the new breed of landlord who has managed to buy all the shares and get people to go to sea for them - 'sealords.' And as you can imagine, sealords wouldn't pay much for the harvesting subcontracting service.

Tradition doesn't have a leg to stand on anymore, thanks to various cultural revolutions. So do we just get over the fact that fishermen are going to be just equipment operators for the owners, at whatever pay is the whim of the day, and if they don't like it, the owners will just hire lower paid help? Hence, freedom to enslave oneself.

You've heard me and others use the term 'sharecropping' fishermen before. These are people who used to be able to just go joust with the elements and seize hold of ocean resources out of the common fisheries and claim them as their own. Long tradition there - yielding the culture and nomenclature of 'fishermen.' So now that people are starting to just plough the ocean floor for all the Michael Milk'ems, what do we call them and their task-masters?

Using fishing techniques that literally plough the ocean floor is a real yardarm knot in itself. That right there proves the fallacy that the new owners of the fish will respect the ecology of the oceans. Jane Lubchenko of NOAA knows this and so do real lifestyle fishermen. She was around Oregon when OSU researchers concluded that bottom trawling extinguishes 30% of the species complex on the bottom: target fish, bait fish, invertebrates, vertical structures like coral and sea whips that the immature fish need for protection, etc.

Lots of places on the continental shelf have been so smoothed over by trawls, they might as well keep trawling now. Sea whips and coral are old as redwood trees, so they wouldn't grow back to provide habitat any time soon anyway. I'm amazed that any fish at all can live in these areas. It points to the resiliency of the marine ecosystems, especially if there is scientific fisheries management and not management by fisheries lobbyist, as currently practiced in the U.S.

Ending trawling is going to be like ending racism. You're not going to stop it, but you can at least stop lynching fish stocks. But don't hold your breath with this NOAA administrator. They figure now the reason all the sea mammal life in the Bering Sea is disappearing is 'chemicals.' Ignore the fact there is a giant fleet of factory trawlers out there that makes the 'Deadliest Catch' boats look like kayaks.

'The Privatizers' have reason to believe they can get away with this theft of the commons, because there is plenty of precedent and they have figured out how to get armed force to administer it. They want us to believe their engineered theories and have us just accept that Michael Milk'em will be a wonderful protector of the seas.

Going back to privatization of the rivers too, we are getting a taste of it in this country as well. A village in Alaska on the Yukon River got a lesson in River Privatization 101. Most of this has to do with the 'rights' of a corporation to put electric power turbines right in a fast moving spot in a river. With the exorbitant cost of fuel to make electricity in Alaskan villages, Fort Yukon, Rep. Don Young's home-town, got the notion to get a permit for a good spot nearby. When they checked, they found that it had already been taken by a company from the Midwest, as had all the other good spots on the horizon. We all might be surprised what all has been sold off around us that we thought was free.

One last point, one that I make all the time. Remember how if you can tell a lie long enough and loud enough......? Then remember how often you have heard the expression, "the North Pacific has the best fisheries management in the world." Let me give you some facts.

1. The federal Fisheries Management Council up there opened the king crab sanctuary to bottom trawling and wiped out the king crab. Only a remnant remain.
2. Pot fishing for black cod was outlawed, so now half the black cod is stripped off fishermen's lines by sperm whales. (Think "Don't feed the bears." Not to mention possible over-harvesting due to non-reporting of losses.)
3. The king salmon are disappearing coincidentally with the huge by-catches of same by pollock trawlers. Ya think?
4. The number of herring gillnet permits in Western Alaska has dropped from 252 to 51, coincidentally with by-catches of up to 100 tons a tow by trawlers in the Bering Sea. There is still no sanction on this practice.
5. In one recent year, 17 million pounds of squid were accidentally destroyed, food for lots of sea creatures at their different life stages, as herring are.
6. Northern fur seal, sea lion, and sea bird populations are steadily diving coincidental with the growing effectiveness of trawl fishing technology and sifting more water for the pollock needed to keep the floating factories running.
7. Millions and millions of pounds of halibut are destroyed as by-catch every year, to the point where they cut public catch down. You didn't think the North Pacific Fisheries Management Council (lobbyists for the big fish companies) would cut their own production down?
8. The North Pacific started with lots of fish and crab; the foreign fleets didn't make a dent up to 1976 when they were pushed beyond 200 miles. They did wipe out Pacific ocean perch as the preferred species, but they've come back in spades, and there is a huge food fight to 'own' them. The vastness of the fisheries resources has helped hold up total tonnage, as has technology advances in the face of declining stocks. (Remember 'canyon buster' bottom trawls, and mega-trawls that a flock of Boeing 747s could fly into at once?
8. Fisheries reporting by NOAA Fisheries Service has covered up these inconvenient facts. Alaska hasn't changed appreciably since Territorial days when Washington ran the place on behalf of large campaign contributing canning companies. The only change is that now trawl companies are king, and people like Ted Stevens gave them a leg up financially which is going to be hard to reverse.

Solutions?
1. Don't give away things that aren't yours to give away, especially without the owner's(the public's) knowledge. Dr. Lubchenko is no King George.
2. You'll never have real fisheries management if the federal fisheries management councils are manned by representatives of moneyed interests, or are not required to recuse themselves when there is a conflict of interest. That system needs overhauling first of all.
3. My pet concern: stop commercial fishing close in to towns so Noah Finclip can row out and and catch food for his hungry family.
4. How do you stop all the 'spin' from all sides? Do like on the Columbia River - have a Judge decide. They have a record run of sockeye this year. Or require a peer-reviewed study to back up claims, like who is inherently more committed to ecosystem health. Jane Lubchenko says commercial fishermen are the most altruistic, millions of other folks say they are slash and burn types.
5. I'm no more impressed with a guy snagging king salmon out of a Rogue River holding pool than a trawler 'dumping' a deck load of salmon.(Oops) So, engage other fishermen to enforce the rules and make it pay for them. Pay them for their observations of all sorts. They are on the grounds a lot more than bureaucrats.

More about this later

Oh Brother, Where Art Thou Quota Shares?

2009-06-29T10:23:00.000-07:00

Sometimes a real fired up piece shows up on the Internet, such as this from Montauk, that deserves to be framed. I will add one thing; one of the two skippers who went to D.C. to testify long ago against the crew, declared his sincere regret for that testimony as he lay dying.

"When the Individual Fishermen's Quota system was being debated in Alaska there was a massive effort to placate crew, and some concerned skippers, that crew would be taken care of. There was no provision anywhere in the statutes to recognize thousands of career fishermen's rights to future participation, because they weren't an all-seeing, all-powerful boat OWNER.

The National Marine Fisheries Service traveled around Alaska assuring everyone that the crews would be the beneficiaries of a tens of millions of dollars "Displaced Fishermen's Fund." If there was such a pot of money to get those NMFS guys so fired up it sure disappeared fast. If you Google search that fund now it directs you to the state labor department. And everyone knows, except for maybe the folk who pulled this bait and switch, that fishermen are 'independent contractors' in the eyes of the IRS and not eligible for state assistance.

It was told by one fisherman in Kodiak who was keeping track, that 80% of the 'jobs at sea' went away when catch shares/IFQs came to town. I remember the days just prior to this, in the ports in Alaska, when the bars would be hopping and the economic multiplier effect was more like a mosquito hatch on the tundra in June. Was overcapitalization occurring in the harvesting sector? Maybe, but nobody was going bust except the usual ones who shouldn't have been out there in the first place. In Alaska, however, just the talk of more privatization in the post salmon-limited-entry period, got the gold fever going real good and all kinds of odd folk got boats. All this robustness came to a screeching halt when halibut and black cod IFQs came in.

The majority of IFQ owners soon were out-of-state residents. The more agressive boat owners bought up small blocks of IFQs wherever they could get them. They figured they would rise in value like gold in wartime, and they did. Newer entrants had a harder time still getting into the fisheries. As human nature is, the boat owners found a new way to grow their business besides that.

They then started requiring potential crew to go out and buy IFQs to bring on board to even get a job. And of course all crew percentages started to take a dive as skippers' loan payments for IFQs rose. At maturity, the IFQ/catch share system, allows the owner of the 'shares' to lease out his shares to someone who will share-crop them.

Basically, the wealth is being siphoned out of the fishing regions and fleeing to nice places to live all over the world. This is especially true in the trawl sector, especially the owners of multiple vessels. Who sometimes own shore processing plants.

Then you get one who buys a $50 million business jet and flies politicians all over the place, especially to good fishing lodges. At this point you have huge cash flow and can get your people in as Congressional aides. Who in turn write white papers (or just put new names on others' papers) and walk them over to any agency in D.C.

As that all transpires, these 'fishermen' cum processors, put plans in motion to gain private rights to the fish for their plants as well as their boats. If you doubt this can happen look at the effect of lobbying on healthcare, banking, or credit reporting agencies. If these processors, can start to control whole fleets through fear of blackballing, they have no fear of competing lobbyists.

Now, you might say that scientific management of the fisheries will shore up the whole coastal economy, because the law requires it. That fishermen will take a vested personal interest in maintaining healthy fish stocks. Not!!! Anyone who doesn't think fisheries management runs on raw political bargaining is smoking crack.

It's the rare reporter who writes on this subject for the major media (this here is strictly commentary). It's complicated first of all, and you don't want to be on the outs with these big players if you draw a salary. Organizations and agencies don't stick their neck out, especially to protect anyone. (Maybe with NOAA calling for a national review of NMFS enforcement lapses, honesty, truth and justice will reign finally. Good luck on that.) And some fishing magazine editors have received their reward and gone to work for the big processor (in the office tower, not the sky).

To this day, folks who band together under the processor banner, look for plants to buy for their 'production history.' Or they advance the fiction that they are boxing and marketing their catch to 'grandfather' into this when processor quotas happen. Did we hear that a big West Coast processor bought a plant on the East Coast now? It's significant who that processor is. Their banker would be well aware of these plans, as a free chunk of the commons would vastly increase the value of the company. You could expect the banking lobby in D.C. to get behind this as well.

So, 'catch shares' has a history of morphing into processor shares and share-cropping fishermen, unemployed hordes of crew and skippers, empty boat harbors and a flight of small shore-side businesses, and in Alaska's case anyway, plundered and wantonly wasted stocks of fish. This is fact, not theories like that 'vested interest' malarkey from people who have never been around the ports.

The next time you hear Jane Lubchenco say we need 'catch shares' to save the fish, simply ask her what makes her think that. There is nothing new under the sun in fisheries, just a willful ignorance of the facts makes some things look new and appealing. And for Heaven's sake, don't listen to Alaska Rep. Don Young. The current system he supports has 'fired' the majority of Alaska fishermen, given over half the processing/marketing opportunity of Bering Sea stocks to Japanese companies, and wiped out the king crab and king salmon for the most part.

Those stocks were especially vulnerable to the "Rise of the (Fish Factory) Machines" that Don oversaw. If the reader has any interest in the future, don't take Don's advice. He has his anchor out in the the past with a good ten to one scope on it. The only thing I can say about Don winning his last election is that Alaska voters are maybe like Alaska bachelor men, the odds are good, but the goods are odd. When I lived in Alaska I voted for Don once or twice, but I no longer eat the milk of simplicity, but the meat of the truth.

Remember, the big money is in marketing. The big players love privatization as it helps them abuse price transferring. This siphons the wealth out of the U.S. in a BIG way, like IFQs do on a regional basis. The good fish products we produce goes overseas for value adding and product laundering. We import 80% of our fish now, and lots of it is suspect farmed fish. Wouldn't it be nice if our kids could jump in a economical boat and go out and catch something to support their families. The fish and the coastal economies don't need more of the same, sold as something new.

A whole new look at how we do oceans is in order. Just peruse NoTrawlZone.Blogspot.com for a wee bit, a blog from someone on the front lines. He still leans forward when he walks, hence proving the old saying that if it ever stopped blowing in Western Alaskan everyone would fall down."

Oceans Week, or Exxon Week

2009-06-12T09:59:00.000-07:00

Some very strange things going on in Washington. Oceans Week is sponsored by Exxon and friends. The events are staged by them and moderated by them under the guise of a do-gooder foundation. Some enviros have been sucked in, but the respected ones haven't. Here's what Food and Water Watch had to say about the whole happy mess.

“Yesterday, one of the panels for Capitol Hill Oceans Week, Feeding a Nation: The Role of Fishing and Aquaculture in Today’s Economy, touted parceling out our oceans to a few big businesses as the best way to feed U.S. consumers and alleviate pressure on over-stressed wild fish. These ideas at the most basic level are ocean privatization – giving over what should be a public resource, our oceans, to private entities to use for their own economic gains with no benefit to the general public. Sadly, these ideas seemingly are also openly backed and supported by U.S. government agencies charged with conservation and management of natural ocean resources, as they participated in the program.

“The panel was designed to convince members of Congress and others that catch shares of fish, known in policy circles as individual fishing quotas (IFQs), and ocean fish farming benefit the economy and the environment. While major issues like job loss and pollution were admitted as potential issues with these programs, they were immediately dismissed as unimportant.

“Fortunately, no one bought the obvious attempt at a sales pitch. In reality, most IFQ programs force many historic smaller-scale fishermen to stop fishing, or pay exorbitant prices to buy or lease fish quota to continue fishing. Often it is large-scale fishing operations that are rewarded with the most shares of the quota. The problem is, many of those businesses got big by fishing hard with gears that are associated with negative ecological impact – like too much fish being caught and habitat damage.

“Ocean fish farming, the mass production of fish in large floating pens or cages in the open sea, is also at the forefront of debates over equitable use of public resources and was overwhelmingly backed by panelists. They presented the tired and unsupported mantra that a U.S. ocean fish farming industry would benefit the public by providing new jobs, reducing pressure on depleted wild fish populations and lessening U.S. dependence on imported seafood products that are often unsafe for consumers. However, most people now know that ocean fish farming programs often primarily benefit the corporate owners of the facilities rather than consumers. The United States exports more than 70 percent of the seafood produced here. We our seafood to countries willing to pay higher prices for fish produced in accord with U.S. health, safety, and environmental standards. Likely, this will not change dramatically with the coming of ocean fish farms. The industry is intended for profit—therefore fish will probably be sent elsewhere for bigger dollar returns—likely leaving the United States with just the negative environmental and economic consequences.

“As for jobs, the salmon farming industry in Scotland, Norway, and British Columbia dramatically expanded production in those regions, but because of more mechanization, added no new jobs or even decreased employment. Worse than not creating new jobs, is the potential for offshore fish farming to reduce existing jobs. For example, when farming of salmon became popular, from 1992 to 2001, the value of the wild Alaskan salmon catch plunged from $600 million to a bit more than $200 million, a drop of more than 60 percent. As the market was flooded with farmed product and prices crashed, many fishermen were forced out of business. Although prices of Alaskan salmon have since recovered, thanks to intense marketing efforts, many fishermen were permanently displaced. These effects trickle down. As the number of fishermen dwindles, support businesses, like marine supply stores and dock facilities, will also suffer, risking more job loss and hurting the economies of coastal communities during a national economic downturn.

“Capitol Hill Oceans Week should not be used as a forum to promote potentially ecologically destructive and economically devastating programs for our oceans. Rather, this week should be an opportunity to discuss ideas for more innovative management and technologies, and to explore more sustainable options to meet our domestic seafood needs.”

Privatization only helps the banks

2009-05-22T10:58:00.000-07:00

Lets talk about NMFS chief Jim Balsinger's wish to expand the Individual Fishermen Quota system.
Over the years there have been numerous fishing industry stooges who have pushed privatizing of the fishery resources. And it wasn't too difficult; fishermen who were the larger players saw they could "own" a piece of the fish stocks forever, or until they wanted to sell them for inflated prices. A real neat deal for them. Not a neat deal for smaller boats, new fishermen, the U.S. taxpayer, and communities. And now not a neat deal for many of the 'winners' as well.

These privatization shills, by and large, are now sitting pretty with continued consulting fees from the big operators they helped in gaining ownership of swimming fish. The injustice of this was noted way back in America's formative years by an early day Supreme Court decision. Seems a guy had been chasing a fox all over on his horse, but when it ran through the village, a guy popped it with his squirrel gun off his front porch and claimed ownership. Ownership came to mean, in the fisheries, 'pulled onboard.'

The wealthier guys kept at the politicians until in recent decades they attained ownership of the foxes in their dens and moving around anywhere. And now they have hirelings running after them for low wages. Now if a fox is eating your chickens, just fuggetabatit. You'll be thrown in jail for shooting it. And I'll stop here before I slide into how the tanneries cut themselves in on the 'ownership on the hoof' scam. Take a look at these missives from a Kodiak 'fish hireling' on the evolution of IFQs there at ground zero of fish privatization in America.

"Friday there was an ad in the KDM for some Kodiak home area Halibut IFQ's, a breathtaking $5 under the price of the last few years(now $23 asking price for one pound of IFQ). It's the first price fall in a steadily rising price since passage of the law 15 (?) years ago. (I talked again to that guy with the 12,000 lbs for sale. I was the only call on that ad he told me. So we can assume that the real market price is $8 to 10 under last year's $28. Anybody that has bought in the last few years owes more than their shares are worth, and the lender owns their home and boat. But they still have to straggle out and get their fish.)

The drop is one small part of the larger scenario. From the start, IFQ's were a board trading game. You can get State loans easy by pledging your house and boat, so everyone ended up by leveraging themselves to the max. And all the predictions were right about the effect of IFQ's on the fish price, they do raise the price to the fisherman, lockstep with the rising value of the Q shares. Last fall the Halibut price went way over $4, it's $2.80 now.

This would be no problem in a free fishery which regularly weathers price drops. But it's going to sink and ruin just about all the dreams of avarice of a large share of those few who remained after the law put 80% of Halibut fishermen out of business within a year of passage.

My family(that I catch their quota for) has $240k worth of Q's, or had,,,It's $184k now and falling and it's not going to pop right back. I called the guy with the Q's. Sure enough, the poor sod had a big payment due. He said his phone wasn't ringing off the hook(to sell out).

And the good part(that's a joke) hasn't even started yet. The POP(Pacific ocean perch) quotas will double and double and double. My best estimate, after sucking up every single thing I could about POP for more than a decade, is that the stock has at least a sustained yield of 100 thousand metric tons annually; it's 10k mt now. For every added pound of POP there will be added the by-catch of the Black cod and Halibut that we thought we owned with our Q's.

For me it means at least twice as much time on the water this year to make ends meet. Which is great cuz we fished very few days last year for a lavish payout, and it's a blessed relief to get out of town.

Hmmm, this sounds like a letter to the editor. I think I forgot who I was writing to once I got wound up. But isn't it bizarre? We all think Q's have changed the fishery and that's that, but we ain't seen nut'n yet."

The fisherman spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly to the media, was afraid for his life, was just giving a sketch before full details are revealed, cited office policy and was afraid he might get his bouys cut off. Heck, he'd be shunned by the Untied Fishermen of Alaska, the Pacific Seafood Processors Association and NMFS worse than a car salesman at an Amish picnic.

With that exhausting formality out of the way, here's the precedent, or lack of it, used by other commercial fishermen to justify their 'rights' to public resources:
"The U.S. is a steward of all natural resources---sunfish, ducks deer and stripped bass---all of them. THE CONCEPT THAT A PRIVATE COMMERCIAL ENTERPRISE IS NECESSARY TO PROVIDE THE PUBLIC WITH THE ENJOYMENT OF THESE RESOURCES BY SELLING THEM TO CONSUMERS SO THEY CAN EAT THEM WAS REJECTED BY THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT AND STATE WILDLIFE MANAGERS BEFORE 1900. THERE IS NO BASIS IN ANY FEDERAL COMMON LAW, ANY WILDLIFE LAW OR THE CONSTITUTION FOR SUCH A PROPOSITION"

Now I'm really confused. Why is Jim Balsiger promoting IFQs if it's such a lousy deal for America? Maybe he will be retiring to that big office building in Seattle that houses all the other bought and paid for editors and fishery managers. Nevertheless, this is not NMFS policy, Obama's policy or any other public policy, to give common property resources to a few derivatives dealers.

And I'm not just saying that because my forefathers pioneered in fisheries and never handed down private rights to the commons, they never would have thought to demand any. And in the case of a goodly number of ocean fishes, the stocks are going down, down: so much for it being a better fisheries management system as well. Don't look to an IFQ system to slow down the annual 'dumping of two billion lbs of 'the wrong kind' of fish. IFQs don't do that.

The NMFS should be protecting the food chain first, on behalf of the American people, then let a commercial harvest occur in a way that is sustainable. Trawling, whether on the bottom, or midwater, is not sustainable. Where in the world has it ever been sustainable? There may be a way to trawl sustainably, but it hasn't been used yet, and there is no political will to make it happen widely if there was.

Everyone wants to participate in divying up particular fish schools, but when each share is a percent of not much, then it's the fault of the 'regulations.' Everyone needs to get on a little hill and take a look around at the forest health a minute instead of focusing on one tree or two.

"I want it all, I want it now."

2009-04-07T08:42:00.000-07:00

This title is from a new TV series on the Tudor family of Great Britain. It pretty much was the Tudor motto through the centuries until they got so big that "the sun doesn't set on the British empire." Shift to the North Pacific fisheries. A convenient little mechanism was put in place by empire builders there called 'rationalization,' or privatization, or LAPPs, or quota shares. The name shifts depending on what makes it go down easier in the local arena.

As the big fish swallow the little fish(companies), they can legally stay big without threat of competition, or rebellion, and even have their own Court and science folk. The Tudors wished they had it so good.

Now jump to the present fact of trawlers catching those iconic king salmon by the tens of thousands and throwing them over dead. That is literally a lot of peoples' lunches, and high quality ones at that. When king salmon are around they bring a LOT of LOCAL economic activity. In testimony in Oregon's fish fights, the owner of a large chain of sporting goods stores said a king is worth about $500.

Not surprisingly the trawlers are now pointing to how many people around the world they feed with the virtually worthless whitefish they are allowed to keep and sell. Personally I prefer a bottle of water over a greasy breaded pollock sandwich where health matters are concerned. Notice they said "around the globe." Of course, Americans don't eat pollock eggs, nor that much fish paste either. And you can bet it's being sold to a foreign subsidiary at cost to dodge U.S. taxes. I'll bet if you really scratched your head you'd find the whole thing doesn't benefit the U.S. that much.

Here's an e-mail I got on the recent North Pacific Fisheries Management Council hearings: "From what I heard, McCable showed with a per diem Exodus of Coastal Villagers, schooled in talking points, perhaps supplied with testimony. Must have cost Coastal a quarter million to put on a farce for "American" seafoods."

"But there was some social networking by the good guys and girls that will help later. Like Obama says a movement fizzles out without an organization to perpetuate it. Need to be as tactical as the very well rehearsed opposition."

"It's ironic we can't save them from themselves."

Another comment, reported in the Anchorage Daily News; this from the Washington D.C. elite: "In a tense exchange just before the vote, Nicole Ricci, a foreign affairs officer for the State Department, told the council that the new cap wouldn't do enough to meet a treaty agreement between the U.S. and Canada to ensure strong salmon stocks in the Yukon River.

"I don't understand how you can call this a reduction," she said, noting the upper limit of the cap is higher than the average bycatch over the past decade.

"This has been one of the most disappointing things that I have sat through.""

The upshot is that the 'Council' voted to keep wantonly wasting 60,000 plus king salmon every year; in the face of Alaskan food shortages in the area because of failed king runs, and a broken Treaty with Canada, broken provisions of the Alaska Native Interest Claims Act (an Act of Congress), and the Alaska delegates and the Administration probably violating the Alaska State Constitution.

How is wiping out a vital food supply taking care of the Alaska public? Well, the good Governor said the Western Alaskans should move away and get a real job. I sure hope cooler heads in Washington D.C. prevail on this one. The Tudors of the North Pacific may have won a round, but it's not over until the fat lady sings. No pun intended to the President, or the head of Commerce I should say. That should be fun to watch, because he was the Governor of the state where these big trawl companies are headquartered. Does he want to ever go home again?

There were comments made at the Council meetings recorded on this blog, http://anonymousbloggers.wordpress.com/2009/04/05/npfmc-salmon-by-catch-meeting/ that some of the king salmon are from the endangered runs in British Columbia, Washington, Oregon and California. I know some don't believe that, and I think research has been squelched on that issue. And I read where the 'upper six figure' CDQ managers threatened their own share-holders with pulling salmon restoration funds if they testified against king salmon trawl by-catch. Of course these Community Development Quota groups that get 10% of the harvest of the Bering Sea don't give much back to the villages, or there wouldn't be hunger and cold out there, of couuurrrse.

And I'll say it again, when you speak up about this stuff you get called every name in the book. And not the 'Good Book' either. And that's the kid glove treatment; this is not a fight for the timid.

At the NPFMC meetings we've all just witnessed executive privilege run amok, and how renewable resources become unrenewable. This is what happened to the buffalo. It's happening again right before our eyes. And it's not only king salmon stocks that are being knocked flat, but it's herring, squid and halibut too. These trawlers were given the go-ahead to catch the pollock because it was a resource being 'wasted.' And in 1981, the Council voted to open to trawling the king crab sanctuary the Japanese fleet had set up to protect spawning female crab. Big 'red bags' of crab were the result and the crab stock collapsed the next year.

This is where the Nobles have a chance to stand up to the Tudors on the Plains of Runnymeade. But I see the Northern Tudors point, the Nobles let the Wall Street Tudors have hundreds of billions of dollars with no strings attached, so nobody is going to make us sign no steenk'n Magna Carta on fish. Coincidentally there is a bill in Congress aiming to legalize any amount of king salmon catch: "...and 44 national, regional and state conservation groups today pressed congressional leaders to oppose "The Flexibility in Rebuilding American Fisheries Act of 2009," saying the legislation would allow overexploitation of vulnerable fish populations."

But I'm encouraged to see citizen lobbyists stepping up to the plate, http://notrawlzone.blogspot.com/, that are voices for the peasants; the ones that were told to 'eat cake.' That was a French Queen who said "Let them eat cake," when told of her subjects hunger, but the same difference as the Tudors. The point is, we don't NEED kings to admire and to say they have our best interests at heart, we have Oprah.

Waging Peace for the Salmon

2009-03-08T17:39:00.000-07:00

For Community Based Fisheries Management to work, fishermen of different gear groups need to meet face to face. That brings up a vision of Japanese and Seattle trawl company owners meeting with Eskimo salmon gillnetters to work out getting some of the Yukon kings through the trawl fishery alive. And you never used to see http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=top-10-myths-about-sustainability, 'sustainable fisheries,' that viral marketing shtick, on North Pacific Council/National Marine Fisheries Service and Coast Guard reports. Even in reports of vessels stopped for lifejacket violations. Like they are trying to convince us the fish are invisible and just swim through nets. Remember what Hitler said about saying something loud enough and long enough?

The king salmon and the chum salmon (some say the pollock as well) that are being brought up in pollock trawls in the Bering Sea in vast numbers are on the brink of collapse, like the Atlantic cod before them. 2009 is tracking previous high salmon by-catch it looks like, and slowing down the by-catch is mostly voluntary. Would those big factory trawlers slow down if they haven't broken even? The history of extinction of species is being made as we speak. Exact numbers of king and chum salmon, herring, squid and halibut are irrelevant; the commercial fisheries for these have plummeted since the start of large scale domestic trawling in the Bering Sea . Goliath is just eating everyone's lunch.

Of course the justification is to keep the pollock train moving. Much of the pollock dollars come from selling their eggs from spawning season fishing to the high-end market in Japan . The pollock itself is ninety-something percent water and virtually useless as food for humans in my opinion. Notwithstanding the current practice of selling scrawny bits of them covered with lots of greasy breading to kids at McDonalds. Let the buyer beware.

Other funny, or not so funny dynamics are at play. At a sportsman's show here in the Rogue Valley of Oregon last weekend I kept hearing that foreign fleets are wiping out our fish offshore. Where did that come from? They have been gone since 1976. Except the media hasn't done a good job of explaining that it is American flagged vessels who are overfishing the runs, because it begs the questions of Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How.

In this fish company lobbyist game of Spy versus Spy, they even have Oregon legislators talking 'foreign fishing.’ The little black spies really got 'em barking up the wrong tree. And Alaska legislators can't even utter the word 'by-catch.' And don't think the Universities are any better. One Alaska Professor recently was de-funded for speaking out for fish conservation, upon request by the U.S. Department of Commerce. It's sure not coastal communities' commerce they are looking out for.

Isn't this the era of 'green jobs' and ecosystem management? Obama beware! Remember that old video game, "Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego," Now the coastal communities and all of us who eat fish should play a game of "Where in the World are the State Legislators."

And I've heard a flurry of complaints about a big news-service in Alaska removing blog submissions because they make some of the perpetrators of by-catch uncomfortable. The main point is like the legal beagle of the biggest trawl company said, "Help us behave ourselves."

The Bureau of Indian Affairs is helping Western Alaska Villagers with checks for maybe $500 apiece this winter. That's like giving each one of them a fish, after all, one carefully marketed large Chinook from the Copper River sold for $1,000. Thanks alot. To the federal government's credit they tried before to give them a fishing pole instead of a fish, it's just that the pole broke. And it wasn’t their entire fault it broke. But the fishing hole is being fished out anyway. Where did ALL the pollock in the Donut Hole go? Where did that huge school of pollock in Shelikof Straits go? Why do trawlers have to sift so much more water in the Bering Sea now to get enough salable fish to buy gas?

Lots of experienced people saw it coming. My father saw it coming in the 70's when he set up one of the first white-fish plants in Alaska in Petersburg . I don't know the whole history of why no trawling is allowed in S.E. Alaska to this day, but they had knocked the pollock stocks flat and ended up trawling flounder in little bays full of Dungeness crab. Bottom trawling in state waters all through Alaska was prohibited about the same time as well.

Remember, those mid-water trawl nets are like pulling a football field sized sieve through the water sideways. There are 12 factory trawlers and fifty odd smaller trawlers. And why don't they take some net makers suggestion to heart and slow down so the kings have some chance of escape? And why don't they say who it is that is responsible for all the by-catch, when they testify at Council meetings? Like kids in the school yard fight, they all stand in a circle with the teacher in the middle and point a finger to the one to the right.

Articles like this are supposed to end with a call to action to address the, "How can I help, nobody is ever going to listen to me." To maybe take a cue from the fighter plane Aces of the Tuskagee Airmen, the Western Alaska gillnetters could convoy to Anchorage to read their testimony into the Federal record at the next NPFMC meeting. Since a paralyzed fisheries management system hasn't listened to the cries of "stop the bycatch" before, maybe it's time to bring out the "Double V" slogan again. For peace to rein in the land, I think you have to "wage peace" on an individual basis. It's what makes us men. I urge you to read the story of David and Goliath again. And my message to the purveyors of the politically correct 'sustainable fisheries' mantra, it makes you look foolish, especially in a branch of Homeland Security. Tens of thousands of residents of Western Alaska might consider Homeland Security, who protects the trawlers, a real oxymoron.

Science vs Barons of the Fish Business

2009-01-28T17:40:00.000-08:00

"The days of Washington dragging its heels are over. My administration will not deny facts; we will be guided by them." President Barak Obama. At this point, we need a refresher for the thousands of new appointees in the Obama administration who may not have been following the demise of the ocean resources.

The 'Lindy II' is a model of efficiency and selective fishing methods. (Photo by John Finley of Kodiak, owner.)

Maybe they noticed there are very few fishing boats down in the harbor anymore, and maybe they associate it with global warming or the foreign fleets, or just a general disinterest in bouncing around the ocean anymore. So let's have a little refresher course.

President Obama's statement would seem to indicate the tide will turn on those few fish companies who are trying, and currently succeeding, in eliminating the independent fisher/businessman. Sure, these companies use fishermen too, if you can call sharecroppers fishermen; the skippers and crew who are sworn to silence about their activities on the fishing grounds for the chance to supply the company store. Just try interview a trawl crew in the whiting fishery off Neah Bay, Washington, or a pollock skipper, mate, or deck crewman in the Bering Sea, much less get a ride-along.

This is what a Federal Judge recently had to say: "Harrington also served notice that an era of "window dressing" respect for the legitimate concerns of the governed fishing industries and their states would no longer be tolerated." Judge Harrington was referring to the National Marine Fisheries Service and their 'Councils' and their disregard for science and common sense.

It is apparent that the two trawl fisheries mentioned above are not conducive to family fishermen, subsistence and sport users, the many other species of fish in the ocean, or the coastal communities. The problem is that these giant factory trawlers, and many independent trawlers fishing for shore plants with 'legal rights to process a certain % of the total catch,' don't mind snuffing out all other species of sea life. The big fishery in the Bering Sea is the pollock fishery, prosecuted by mid-water trawlers. That would seem to be a safe way to fish. Just scoop up the schools of pollock, leaving plenty behind for replenishment of the stocks. (Except that half the pollock fishery is right before propogation and the pollock never get to sow the seeds of the next generation.)

The first mates on these 'death star' ships are scanning the ocean with electronic equipment, a process they liken to submarine hunting. It's fun. And it's been profitable for the 'designated owners' of the pollock (and the crab). Many times, the electronics are indicating the wrong kind of fish; fish that they are not permitted by law to keep. So down goes the nets and up comes millions of pounds of squid, king salmon, chum salmon, halibut, herring and anything else that lives in proximity to the pollock. It's not like they all live in separate apartments. You clean out one apartment and you get a mixed bag of occupants. Remember, the trawl nets are like pulling a football field-sized sieve sideways through the water, with everything in that amount of space for miles squeezed into a 'sock' on the end of the net. (I won't even go into bottom trawling where Oregon State University researchers found that it extinguishes 30% of the species complex where they have been.)

There has been discussions by the Western Alaska Natives on the blogs of the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner and the Anchorage Daily News on this subject. The problem is that they live on the salmon that have to swim past all these trawl nets, and not very successfully as it turns out. For their food supply, they don't need a small fraction of the dead salmon that gets thrown over the side of the trawlers. (And this is a problem the whiting fishery has off the coast of Oregon and Washington too. The lack of water in CA, and Dick Cheney and Pacific Power doing in the Klamath R. king salmon, isn't the only reason the West Coast troll fishery had to close. Again, it was the small guys who had to bite the bullet.)

It hasn't been 'politically correct' to point out these truths. You will notice the fisheries managers on the Yukon River won't criticize their peers managing the Bering Sea fisheries. Same as down here in Oregon. The Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife won't criticize the Pacific Fisheries Management Council for intercepting their king salmon. (Did I hear the ODFW Commissioner had a barbecue for these Council folk?) The family fishermen have to stop fishing AGAIN to accomodate the big fish barons, in this case the owner of Pacific Seafoods.

And why would that owner testify on a little issue like non-selective fishing practices in the main channel of the Columbia River? There are hardly any fish caught commercially in-river anymore: it's a glorified sport fishery for a few. But it's supported by the big fish baron as a matter of principle. He is majorly involved in midwater and bottom trawling on the West Coast and doesn't want anyone to get a toehold in the by-catch/nonselective fishing issue.

This same virulence is manifesting itself in Alaska in the form of the owner of Trident Seafoods, who said he will shut down his plants if he doesn't get the Pacific ocean perch. (Politicians don't realize that if he gets those fish he will use the biggest trawler possible and none of the benefit will touch Alaska. As opposed to a large fleet of community based boats targeting the POP selectively, and leaving the ecosystem intact as well.) I've butted heads with this company and came out on the losing end. We were flying Pacific cod to Korea and Trident told the fishermen to stop supplying us or they could kiss home heating fuel good-by. That was in January. Does anybody still believe the big fish buyers/processors/marketers support the idea of 'community?'

The NMFS has allowed these overlords to regulate themselves, using lobbyists to man the Management Councils, in much the same way the financial sector was allowed to police themselves. In case anyone needs to be told in the most basic terms, there is a reason much of coastal America is without fish. It doesn't just happen and it started way before global warming. There was no global warming when Hume built a cannery at the mouth of the Rogue River in Oregon, intercepted the runs for canning purposes, started a newspaper to justify all of it, got himself elected to the Oregon Legislature to fight for his sole right to the fish, and even sent men to the spawning grounds upriver to get the spawners for their eggs. Sound familiar?

Maybe the heart of the issue is the political correctness that we are now saddled with that keeps the status quo rolling right over the disadvantaged. Has anyone ever looked into the melding of Marxism and Freudism at the Frankfurt Institute for Marxism for the explanation to why we just can't seem to stop all this foolishness? The boots on deck people are the last ones we should point a finger at in this, for the most part. They are paid peanuts for their fish, blackballed, regulated and threatened out, and could care less about political correctness. Remember when Khrushchev said that he didn't need to get into a war with us, that we would bury ourselves?

I would admonish that we really take President Obama's words as a license to demand that our public servants, the politicians and agency staff, do what Obama is calling for them to do. After all, they are working for us, not the other way around. I would say, speak up now if you value liberty. And given that the dry belt is moving northward, what if all the food and money is going away fast? (After I wrote this I saw in the Medford Mail Tribune that California is in a multi-decade record drought.)

Last year a friend said the Alaska Permanent Fund was at risk of evaporating and he was heckled for it. Guess what it's value is now compared to the start of 2008? And how can you wait for your stocks to appreciate when those companies are going out of business? Turns out much of business wasn't our friend. (Notice the banking lobbying effort to stop mortage refinances in court. Your friendly banker is knifing you in the back. One Congresswoman said Congress has been owned by the financial industry for too long.) There are tons of dots to connect. You'll see many businessmen cut and run, but some, like the fish barons, are digging in their heels with the view to carve an empire out of the chaos.

Ok, that's ten minutes worth, but I'll include a dedication of this article to a family member who turns 94 today. He managed one of the first two bottomfish operations in Alaska and always pointed to the risk of overharvest with non-selective fishing gear. He captained large Naval vessels in two oceans during WWII, pioneered in many areas of Alaska fishing, processing and marketing and has lived in Alaska all his life. If you know the fish business in Alaska you know who I'm talking about.

Action Plan for Alaska Fisheries

2009-01-10T14:48:00.000-08:00

If you insert the Alaska comparable into this Action Plan, you have a pretty good blueprint for halting the demise of the Alaska fishing industry. There is no evidence that this industry isn't going the way of the other basic industries in this country, like the auto industry, or the steel industry, or fishing in California, Oregon and Washington. Commercial fishermen are like United Autoworkers Union members. It has been a good gig, but things changed. Business as usual is not sustainable or competitive. Either one is a killer for them and the communities they live in, and is darned dangerous for the country as a whole.

With three Alaska born sons in three branches of the military now, I'm more sensitive to living a patriotic life here at home. I also think that this last Presidential election demonstrates the country's skepticism that $50 million 'fish boss' jets and demanding 'ownership' of ocean resources is synonymous with patriotism. Are the 'ownership rights' to fish in Alaska, especially by Japanese companies, being wielded in a patriotic manner? Is what is being demanded, and promised, is change. Change to what? Look at this blueprint and see if you can improve on it, with the country in mind, not individual pocketbooks.

The conversation needs to be dominated by more of the former and less of the latter. We hear alot about global warming and coral reef extinction, and fish stocks around the world collapsing. We tend to lose focus on our problems at home of spawning stream and river degradation and destruction of the ocean bottom with trawls, for example. I lived in Israel for a short time and I guarantee that the Israelis do things right, because their survival is at stake. Well, ours is at stake now.

We can't automatically talk about economic recovery; we dropped to our knees for a reason. There won't be an economic recovery if we keep making SUVs with big V-8s and keep snuffing the life out of our streams and the bottom of our oceans. Otherwise the lessened amount of money we can generate will continue to flee overseas in a greater percentage all the time, making it harder to recover still. The following article was published anonymously in Ahab's Journal, as the author was "speaking on condition of anonymity because she wasn't authorized to talk to the media."

AN ACTION PLAN FOR NORTH CAROLINA’S COMMERCIAL FISHING FUTURE

President-elect Barack Obama, Governor-elect Beverly Perdue, the United States Congress, and the North Carolina General Assembly have an unique opportunity to assist the commercial fishing communities that harvest carefully managed, sustainable marine resources, provide wholesome, healthy food to U.S. consumers, and lend support to local, state, and national economies.

At a time when food prices are high, when public concern over food safety is rising, and when jobs are disappearing, the United States Congress and the North Carolina General Assembly can adopt forward-looking policies that support thriving, socially-just, and environmentally-sound commercial fishing communities at relatively little cost.

With a straightforward shift in policy, the future of the small, independent family-owned and family-operated commercial fishing businesses that have been the hallmark of the North Carolina fishery can be secured.

A bold vision of economic, social, and environmental sustainability for traditional coastal communities will strengthen the vital connection between harvesters, consumers, and healthy oceans and coastal waters, as opposed to fostering an anonymous food production system with little accountability.

On the federal level, a shift in policy can be accomplished through amendments to the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act, the framework for management of United States fisheries in federal waters.

*Amend the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act to allow flexibility in rebuilding American fisheries.

Magnuson currently requires federal fishery management councils to rebuild fish stocks to healthy, sustainable levels in the shortest time possible, not exceeding 10 years in most cases.

This rigid rebuilding schedule doesn’t allow councils to minimize the adverse socioeconomic impacts of harvest regulations on fishing communities, even though the councils are directed to minimize adverse impacts under national standard eight in Magnuson.

Adding just a few years to the recovery deadline can often mean the difference between the survival and the collapse of commercial fishing infrastructure, such as docks, processing plants, and fish houses.

Congressman Walter B. Jones introduced the Flexibility in Rebuilding American Fisheries Act (HR 4087) in 2007, and Congressman Frank Pallone (NJ) introduced a nearly identical bill (HR 5425) in 2008. Both bills attracted bipartisan support, and Congressman Pallone is expected to introduce a similar bill in the 111^th Congress.

*Amend the Magnuson-Stevens Conservation and Management Act to strengthen measures to prevent the adverse socioeconomic consequences of Limited Access Privilege Programs on small harvesters and on fishing communities.

Under Limited Access Privilege Programs, sometimes called Individual Fishing Quotas or Rationalization Plans, the total harvest quota for a fish species is divided into quota shares that are allocated by the government to individual fishermen or corporations based on a history of past landings in specific years – those with higher past landings of a species are allocated more shares, while some fishermen will not qualify for shares.

After the initial allocation, the shares can be sold, bought, or leased. The idea is that the market then resolves the issue of who gets to fish.

Huge social justice issues surround the use of these systems. In the initial allocation of quota shares, the federal government grants an asset to a relatively small group of fishermen who then essentially “own” or control future participation in the fishery.

While fishermen who are lucky enough to qualify for large initial harvest shares gain new wealth under Limited Access Privilege Programs, other fishermen face additional hardship, i.e. the expense of buying or leasing shares if they want to continue in or enter into the fishery.

Researchers in Alaska have found that rationalization programs carry harsh consequences for smaller, remote fishing villages, where the generational aspect of commercial fishing is broken as shares are sold to individuals or companies outside of the villages.

A Government Accountability Office study of Individual Fishing Quotas found that the easiest way to protect the economic viability of fishing communities is to “allow fishing communities to hold harvesting quota and decide how this quota is to be used.”

Magnuson authorizes federal fisheries managers to assign quota shares to fishing communities and to regional fishery associations, but the eight federal fisheries councils have not proposed alternatives to Individual Fishing Quotas that undermine fisheries for scores of coastal communities.

*Amend the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act to require referendums in which fishermen in the regions managed by the South Atlantic Fishery Management Council and by the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council must approve a Limited Access Privilege Program, as currently required for fisheries managed by the New England and the Gulf of Mexico Fishery Management Councils.

*Amend the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act to include a minimum standard for “best available scientific information.”

National standard two in Magnuson states that conservation and management measures shall be based upon the best scientific information available. In other words, biological and socioeconomic data can be sketchy or not representative of all gear types or regions, but if that is all that is available, it qualifies for use in federal fishery management plans.

*Amend the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act to establish a grant program or low-interest loan program to protect and enhance waterfront access for commercial fishermen.

As coastal populations have increased, less waterfront land has been available for commercial fishing docks, boat slips, and fish houses. Senator Susan Collins (Maine) introduced the Working Waterfront Preservation Act in 2007, and a similar bill was introduced in the U.S. House last year.

In addition to amending Magnuson, the U.S. Congress can take other steps to secure the future of small, independent family-owned and family-operated commercial fishing businesses in North Carolina and other coastal states.

*Pass the Trade Reform, Accountability, Development, and Employment Act.

North Carolina commercial fishermen have not benefited from free trade agreements and the growth of the global seafood market. Low-cost competition from seafood imports from Asia and Latin America countries with little or no environmental, food safety, and worker-safety oversight has resulted in stagnant or even plunging ex-vessel prices paid to domestic commercial harvesters.

As U.S. shrimp imports grew from 264,207 metric tons in 1996 to 556,936 tons in 2007, prices paid to North Carolina shrimpers dropped from $2.54 to $1.88 per pound.

More than 84 percent of the seafood consumed in the U.S. in 2007 was imported.

The Trade Reform, Accountability, Development, and Employment Act (TRADE) lays out a process for the review and renegotiation of existing trade agreements and the reform of the negotiating process and policies. The bill (S 3083, HR 6180) was introduced in June 2008, and drew more than 80 cosponsors, including Congressmen Walter B. Jones and Heath Shuler of North Carolina.

*Oppose offshore aquaculture legislation that does not protect the environment, human health, and coastal economies.

At the request of the Bush administration, several versions of the National Offshore Aquaculture Act have been introduced in Congress. The current administration has promoted offshore aquaculture as the remedy for the nation’s $8 billion seafood trade deficit, despite the absence of information on the economic feasibility of offshore operations and despite environmental, food safety, and local economic concerns.

*Secure federal Saltonstall-Kennedy funds to strengthen the North Carolina commercial fishing industry.

These funds come from duties imposed on seafood imported into the U.S. Funds could be used for marketing, developing value-added seafood products, protecting and enhancing waterfront access points for commercial fishermen, and other projects.

*Secure federal funds from the Market Access Program operated by the U.S. Department of Agriculture Foreign Agriculture Service to support the overseas marketing of North Carolina seafood.

*Federal permitting or leasing for activities in offshore waters must be consistent with state coastal policy.

In addition to offshore fish farming, projects like wind farms, wave and tidal energy operations, and oil and gas drilling, and conservative efforts like marine sanctuaries, marine protected areas, or “no-fishing zones”, are likely to be proposed for federal waters off the coast of North Carolina. A strong state coastal policy could protect the state’s commercial fishermen.

*North Carolina commercial fishermen must be recognized as important stakeholders in the development of ocean management policy in North Carolina.

As activities in coastal waters increase, the odds are great that North Carolina commercial fishermen could see important, traditional fishing grounds in state waters placed off-limits.

*Receipts from the sale of North Carolina standard commercial fishing licenses and retired standard commercial fishing licenses should be deposited in special, dedicated trust funds to fund research, education, marketing, waterfront access and other projects that benefit commercial fishermen.

These funds could be set up in a manner similar to the trusts created for coastal recreational fishing license receipts.

*Establish a continuing North Carolina grant program or low-interest loan program to protect and enhance waterfront access for commercial fishermen.

As coastal populations have increased, less waterfront land has been available for commercial fishing docks, boat slips, and fish houses. One-third of the fish houses in North Carolina closed in the years from 2000 through 2006. In many instances, those closures left commercial fishermen with no boat slips and no unloading docks. The Waterfront Access and Marine Industry Fund created in 2007 will assist commercial fishermen in several communities, but many coastal towns and counties still lack public docks.

*Create regional seafood development associations in North Carolina to increase the economic value of North Carolina seafood.

North Carolina seafood must become a strong brand name, recognized on state, national, and international levels, if the state is to accrue the highest possible economic, environmental, cultural, and consumer benefits from its marine resources.

Regional seafood development associations were authorized by the Alaska legislature in 2004. That legislation could be a template for similar legislation in North Carolina.

In Alaska, these non-profit associations are created only with the approval of licensed fishermen in a region, are managed by licensed fishermen, and are funded by an assessment on harvests as well as by state and federal grants.

Development associations would help increase the demand for and the value of North Carolina seafood by developing promotional activities, developing more value-added products, developing more seafood processing facilities, developing and protecting commercial off-loading facilities and other infrastructure, improving harvest quality, developing innovative direct marketing systems, and other projects.

*Enforce truth in labeling laws on restaurant menus or require country-of-origin labeling for seafood products sold in restaurants to protect seafood consumers.

Who has the trump card in fisheries policy?

2008-04-18T12:22:00.000-07:00

There's a saying that "if the footmen weary you, what are you going to do when the horsemen come"? If you're a fisherman, the horsemen are here already. The ecology may be the National Marine Fisheries Service's responsibility, but from these examples, you might find them packed in with the other horsemen.

We wonder if the "media" is such a 'shallow Hal' as to agree with the NMFS that electronic observation of bottom trawled areas trumps the visual means of using diving spheres like last summer in the Bering Sea. You just never read about NMFS hyjinks specifically and separately from their 'Councils'.

"Judge Oliver Wanger of the U.S. District Court in Fresno sided with a coalition of environmental groups, commercial fishermen and Indian tribes, which contended the department's plan left too little water for the chinook salmon run. Wanger remanded the NMFS opinion, questioning the logic of its conclusion -- that killing half the salmon population wouldn't hurt the species."

That's the logic that has killed off hundreds of other salmon runs. When the first half is gone, someone else decides that killing half the remainder won't hurt, and so on. The stakeholders aren't taking it seriously and the media hasn't made the connection between the New Bedford Petition and this latest Judicial rebuke of the NMFS.

NOAA has hired a global warming coordinator, but it is seen as too little, too late. And the guy surely won't change the culture of the whole of NOAA Fisheries. Only Congress can do that, and that is what the Petition is all about. One incensed fisher-wife went out and quickly got 300 signatures for the Petition. I know a whole bunch of Alaskans that are fix'n to make that an exercise in futility by keeping their heads down.

The subject of Congressional oversight keeps coming up. Another article from the East Coast said this. “The Massachusetts groundfishing fleet, and the communities that depend on the fleet for their economic vitality, have suffered unduly from federal fishing restrictions that have also failed to achieve the goal of reviving fish stocks. ...... the federal regulatory system needs to be fixed for the long term. ”

Do you agree with the National Marine Fisheries Service on Puget Sound king salmon protections? "Essentially, the Fisheries Service argues that allowing too many fish to return would be a waste, because the current habitat is so degraded that it can't support more spawning fish." You can just imagine them saying that too when the Pebble Mine in Bristol Bay wipes out a salmon run or two, or three.

Or get this Administration rejection of getting serious about overfishing and global warming effects on the fishing industry and coastal communities. "Democrats, led by panel Chairwoman Madeleine Bordallo (D-Guam), said the legislation is needed to address overfishing, climate change, pollution and other threats to ocean health and the nation’s marine economy."

Or do you believe the new Acting Director of the National Marine Fisheries Service, Jim Balsiger, when he says that surveying the bottom of the Bering Sea for damage by trawling is best done from the surface? This was in response to citizens who privately financed looking at the bottom with video equipment and eyeballs. Would he be trying to hide his poor job of protecting the ecosystem? Under his watch, so few king salmon escaped the trawlers to go up the Yukon River that the Canadian Native fishers didn't get any at all last year.

I maintain that a fifth grader could see that politics motivates the NMFS more than science does. The debates in Kodiak between the contenders for the lone Congressional seat from Alaska decidedly leaned toward local prosperity as opposed to Seattle and Japanese prosperity. The lone apologist for the raping of the North Pacific in that debate was current Congressman Don Young. Did anyone mean to give the fisheries 'trump card' in Alaska to a couple of politicians who are under federal investigation for corruption? And why should the public have to petition Congress to save it's food supply and jobs anyway?

The disgusting part of the pillage is that Alaska's congressional delegation is trying to hang onto their jobs at the cost of many thousands of jobs for Alaskans, and hide the fact with pork. And none of the state agencies want to piss off the pope, Ted Stevens that is. So the public is unaware that billions are lost from the Alaska economy through abusive transfer pricing, lack of new product development and value adding in-state, flight of resource ownership out of state, trading free market capitalism for oligarchies, and using untold millions of dollars of taxpayer money to pay fishermen to give up so the remaining few can survive the low prices paid for the fish and crab.

Here's one concrete thing a reader can do; send a comment to NMFS telling them to stop the bottom trawlers in the Bering Sea from destroying the bottom any more than they already have. Written comments, identified by 0648-AW06, must be received by 21 April 2008 and may be sent via the Federal eRulemaking Portal website at www.regulations.gov.

The capstone for many or our frustrations, and many economic graves, was NMFS hiring a wheat-belt economist to bring to Alaska his bought and paid for 'two-pie system' of sharing the crab. Here's the story on why these kind of economic theories are dead wrong and how you end up with thousands of unemployed fishermen and lower prices at the stroke of a pen, even with the fish stocks the same.

"But as this discussion will demonstrate, there is a large problem here that should be cause for great concern: Neoclassical economic theory is predicated on unscientific assumptions that massively frustrate or effectively undermine efforts to implement scientifically viable economic policies and solutions." When you have a theory that says there is no limit on natural resources, or environmental vulnerability, it's easy to just say, "lets divvy up two pies instead of one." Something's bound to give. On this one I think I'm as smart as a fifth grader.

Is Corporate Responsibility in Fisheries a Oxymoron?

2008-03-03T14:46:00.000-08:00

What's wrong with this statement? "Most recently, Kodiak trawlers tested the waters for a co-op in the rockfish fishery. The slower pace extended the fishery from three weeks to seven months, keeping more seafood workers on the job longer. By fishing cooperatively, the trawlers cut halibut bycatch rates by more than 70 percent."

Could this little former coho stream in Sunset Bay, Oregon possibly, finally, get help from a newly created "Threatened" status in the area? Why there won't be any king fishing on the West Coast this year off OR and CA is only a mystery to newly minted reporters. Hint, all the little run failures add up.

The only thing that might be right about this statement is that Kodiak trawlers initiated "something," albeit, not where the public saw it happen to THEIR fish. (Notice I didn't say, "where the public COULD see," because someone like the FBI might have found out.) I'll also give them that it did stretch out the season, in large part because the processors were busy with salmon.

Basically, a few trawlers agreed to be locked into selling to certain buyers, for whatever was offered for the fish, just for the opportunity to finagle salable rights to the resource later. It is not a co-operative, because it is not a system to compete in a free market by vertically integrating their harvesting businesses. Co-ops, or associations, or combines, or whatever you want to call them, are to bypass other businesses that are unfairly taking advantage of their position in the supply chain. This does not describe the Rockfish Pilot Program whatsoever.

Helping fishermen band together for survival purposes in Regional Seafood Development Associations was what the Legislature wisely saw as a necessary assist in working cooperatively. The Legislature defined what a co-op is with that Bill. But the trawlers in Kodiak went straight to Sen. Ted Stevens to subvert this movement and mint a counterfeit. Thanks for working contrary to the will of Alaskans AGAIN, Ted. And where were you Don?

Look at what some in Britain think about trawling the life out of things.("Trawling and scallop dredging are to be banned in Fal Bay and the Helford River in Cornwall after conservationists successfully threatened to take the Government to the European Court for failure to protect marine wildlife.") They must have taken to heart the Oregon finding that when you have that kind of trawling, you literally extinguish 30% of the species complex.

And then the feds say not to look at the bottom with your eyes because looking from the surface with electronics is the 'preferred way.'(Jim Balsiger, Acting Director of NMFS) Yeah, the preferred way to hide the truth of the destruction of the marine ecosystem.

Getting back to the Rockfish Pilot Program of the North Pacific Fisheries Management Council being called a co-op. I think it is wholesale irresponsibility of folks to repeat stuff like this for public consumption. One good thing about repeating this drivel is it will keep the power lunches coming. I won't even mention the fallacy of creating more jobs and cutting halibut by-catch. Just ask Global Seafoods of Kodiak.

Since I keep seeing this fiction in the mainstream Alaska media, I have to assume it's a PR campaign. And of course it is, since it is only a 'pilot program' that the newly created closed class of businesses wish to perpetuate and no official endorsement of it's efficacy has been made.

This article was supposed to be about corporate social responsibility. They say that at the heart of every issue is a heart issue. Not that anyone's heart is about to change very soon. It is a consideration, though, when you think about spending time and money barking up this tree or that. But keeping in mind that a corporation doesn't have a heart, there is definitely no percentage in trying to change THAT.

The validity of the arguments of politicians(federal fish managers are in this category), corporations, and us plain folk, can be weighed in the statement, "— there are elements of reverence, care and respect, even anticipation, that are essential..." The article this statement came from is a must-read for folk in the seafood business. Not so much for our approach to the culinary side, but now more than ever, to the respect-for-the-environment and community side. Everyone has some environmentalist in them, just like everyone has a little vigilante in them.

From New Bedford to Kodiak, fishermen are starting to take a wholistic approach to their businesses, especially when some folks show no reverence, care and respect for them and their crops. Or where their crops live, as well as where they and their families live.

Fishing for Answers

2008-02-25T08:13:00.000-08:00

A University of British Columbia Professor won a $150,000 three-year fellowship to document financial factors contributing to unsustainable commercial fishing around the world.

Each dam on the Rogue River is estimated to cost 20% of the run in lost fingerlings. If this derelict was taken out, research indicates a potential, potential increase of 60,000 king salmon for an economic impact of $12,000,000 a year.

"With the award, Sumaila will create databases that detail the cost and ecological impact of commercial fishing that will form the basis for models to document the massive fiscal and environmental waste being caused by poor management of global ocean resources."

This kind of research goes in one ear of the North Pacific Fisheries Management Council and right out the other. Take the dumping overboard of 140,000 plus(reported) king salmon in the Bering Sea alone. Untold numbers of chum salmon and also Gulf of Alaska king salmon not-withstanding. I'm sure the Canadians on the Yukon would throttle a Bering Sea trawler if he could get his hands on one after not getting any kings last year. And after thousands of years of getting all they wanted. Looks to me like the trawl fisheries from Neah Bay, WA to Bristol Bay, AK are purloining the brood stock of king salmon. Or is it global warming, or maybe UFOs. You can't be sure, so no sense getting excited.

Is what we have going on here is the War of the Worlds of Fish Users; the couple of corporate behemoths that are tightening their grip on total control of the fisheries, and advocates that have little or no economic stake. Assisting the consolidation are a few Congressmen and the apathy of fishermen and the public. This blurb from the East might give some impetus to stopping wasteful fishing practices. (I'm not talking about sustainable commercial trolling at all here.)

"Decades ago, one argument that ended commercial Atlantic-salmon fishing in some Canadian provinces involved an economic angle. In one province, for every $1 a commercially caught Atlantic salmon generated into the economy, sports fishing for this lordly species produced $19. It was a no-brainer to eliminate commercial fishing. As with Atlantics, sports fishing for stripers provides more revenues per fish than does commercial fishing." Hence, Pres. Bush's decree this winter.

Here's another blurb from California: "The long-term goals include involving fishermen in fisheries research and management, ensuring the sustainability of lobster populations, and maintaining working harbors. In addition, CALobster , is building an education program to train graduate students in community-based fisheries management. The community includes fishermen, scientists, managers, environmental groups, and general public."

Now that sounds like a plan. Especially the part about involving the public. After all, they need this clean, nutritious source of protein and not the translucent, maybe even glows in the dark, stagnant-pond-raised shrimp they are trying to feed us now. China is getting more of our clean, wild seafood and we, their toxic farm raised stuff, all in the name of tax avoidance by the marketers/processors.

Speaking of the public, here's an article that is one view of the public's feelings about the fishery resources. The overall vast majority of people in this country really think fish is smelly and and don't have any clue about populations of fish species. Not that a load of advertising can't change that, but at the moment fish managers and corporate interests are taking advantage of the apathy. In this "fishing game" will the real fish manager please stand up?

Down in this Southern Oregon part of the world, the local fish creek, a main tributary of the Rogue River, is siphoned off to water vast pastures just for horses. How you gonna fight that when there is a life-sized plastic horse on the top of a main-street store, and the hardware store sells cowboy gear and silver belt buckles. It could be a great king salmon spawning stream. In the fall I always report seeing king salmon ramming their heads into the Irrigation District dam, then they pull it for the winter.

Why am I the one to report this when there are over 100,000 people in the area? Ask yourself again, does the family fisherman stand a snow-ball's chances without some help?

Homework assignments: Check out the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act. And why did John McCain not vote on the 17 environmental bills in Congress in 2007, or the one to revoke the tax credits to oil companies? That one didn't pass by one vote. Why too, did Dr. Balsinger, the new golden boy of the National Marine Fisheries Service, write that surface sensing of sea-floor habitat trumps actual video footage of the sea-floor? You can stop wringing hands over declining fish stocks and start looking at some necks to wring. Just kidding of course, go back to hand wringing.

Planned Obsolescense for Fishermen?

2008-01-29T16:39:00.000-08:00

It's been a wonderment to me why so many fish stocks keep going downhill in this country. Even salmon, as much as that is refuted by the marketers who want the premium 'sustainable' label.

We should have started flying these P. cod to London instead of Korea. They are as good as gold over there now.

It's easy to see though, if you are unbiased, and are student enough. A big problem with fish management, at least in Alaska where I hail from, is that the citizen councils are all of one stripe or another. These fishermen and company representatives fight like mad for the biggest share of the pie out in the industry, then continue the fight in the council chambers. And when they do agree they'll go so far as to invent a 'two-pie system' just for themselves.

The only stocks in Alaska I know of that aren't going down all the time, or are already fished out, are arrowtooth flounder, which is inedible after you bring it to shore, and dogfish shark, which is a protected specie. Which now may be resulting in an ecosystem way out of whack. So what's the use trying to train our youth to enter this industry. What are they going to inherit?

Fish and Game has often used lack of funds as an excuse for not doing a better job or opening new fisheries. Sometimes State appointments to these fisheries management councils vote contrary to the wishes of the Governor who appointed them. Now the Feds are using the same 'lack of funds' excuse to disallow a little decentralization of authority.

Let's not let pesky fishermen try to get up on their high-horse; get organized, take some control back locally. After all there are national policy imperitives, like continuing to rebuild the Japanese economy.

I don't know what's wrong with the notion that our industries should at least be 51% U.S. owned. And that goes for the fish swimming in the sea too. How many other scenarios will be played out like the Chase Bank deal, where they were bought into by a Malaysian bank to the tune of $12 billion, after Chase lost $18 billion.

To keep this from becoming another 40 fathom letter, here's some comments from the leader of a Port of New Bedford Business Alliance program to help fishermen nationally get up on their feet. Boats are flocking to New Bedford, MA as it is one of the few full service ports left on the East Coast. And Gene, I did see the petition mentioned in National Fisherman magazine.

"Hello John,

Thanks for the update. I agree with you that the feds foster a disorganized commercial fishing industry. Just last week, they shot down the prospect for organized fishing sectors in New England (seventeen were proposed under Magnuson reauthorization) because the feds said they did not have the manpower to accommodate them in the near term. They know the fishermen essentially won't have time to financially survive the delay. Congress can pass all kinds of legislation, but as always, the devil is in the details of implementation. In this case, it seems simply to be planned obsolescence through attrition. The average age of fishing vessels captains here has risen to fifty-five.

The local newspaper in Gloucester, MA did a negative piece on the petition as Gloucester seems to have become very tied to NMFS, where the regional office is coincidentally in Gloucester. When you and Susan wrote your pieces promoting the petition, no other papers picked it up. The Gloucester article, in contrast, appeared in over fifty papers worldwide, which shows the specific power of the strict conservationists and they know it too. So do the feds. They have a lock on communications, and besides, the fishermen are not only too tired to counter, but too afraid - a sad sight indeed and support in the form of money and manpower is in short supply.

What's necessary, at least to my mind as you know, is to rally around the petition, which is slowly being reformatted for distribution on paper - the net surprisingly has proven not nearly enough. The petition needs champions.

All the best, Gene"

Mid-December Fisheries Memo

2007-12-13T09:40:00.000-08:00

News of the New Bedford Petition has been appearing in a number of news outlets.

Island Free Press
Commercial Fishing News
National Fisherman
Kodiak Daily Mirror

Port Alexander, Alaska. Notice the haze from the surf out at Cape Ommaney, the bottom tip of Baranof Island. The sport fishing here is a closely guarded secret. Oops.

Maybe the thousands of fishermen on the East coast and growing numbers on the Pacific coast, that have signed the petition, in hard copy and on-line, have struck a nerve. The Director of the National Marine Fisheries Service, Bill Hogarth just quit. U.S. fishermen are proposing to take NMFS to Congress, unlike the Canadian halibut fishermen who are taking their Dept. of Fisheries and Oceans to a court of law.

"John, Am anxious to see if King runs rebound, Chigniks' run was acceptable but not great. Many places had none at all. Seems obvious that the harder they fish for less pollack the more kings they will intercept." I hear this a lot these days. People worrying that as the trawlers scratch harder for pollock, they are filtering much more of the ocean and hence catching more and more king and chum salmon and squid. These species all live together, and that seems something that the National Marine Fisheries Service tends to ignore; catching the whole food chain in one sweep and keeping just some of it. My take is that the U.S. public doesn't care anymore if the trawl sector and the government wrings it's hands and keeps saying, "We just can't seem to stop."

I also think waterfront businesses, in addition to fishermen, are going to weigh in on the shenanigans this time. And if CNN coming to Alaska to report on the corruption is any indication, the local papers will come out of hiding too.

Heck, the whole makeup of what fish are down there has changed due to global warming. And certain fishermen are still allowed to destroy the bottom habitat, making it impossible to rebuild the stocks of many species as required by the Magnuson-Stevens Act. Ignoring these elephants in the room is what is griping everyone. But as fishermen gain their voice through this petition, there is some real odd rustling in the bushes.

It boils down to dirty fishermen and dirty fisheries managers versus the clean fishermen and clean fisheries managers/scientists. And it's going to take Congress to sort it out, and if they won't the courts will have to, because time is running out on the fish stocks, ask any fleet of boats chronically tied up to the dock.

On all fisheries management plans, the NMFS should be required, like publicly held companies do in a prospectus, to state, "Consequently, actual results may vary materially from those described in (our) Forward-looking statements." In both cases "forward looking statements" simply mean jerking your chain.

By-catch reduced to 50 lbs per boat per day
"The by-catch allowance for commercial vessels harvesting summer flounder in the waters of the Atlantic Ocean and Maryland's coastal bays and landing those flounder in Maryland is reduced to 50 pounds per vessel per day." No wonder the fish companies that make up the North Pacific Council don't want observers on trawlers in the Gulf of Alaska. There is only 13% observer coverage. These trawlers have taken up to 64,000 lbs of salmon by-catch per boat, and destroyed them, in a day.

The by-catch of halibut is even worse, if anyone cares. Both coasts' observer programs are similar. When observers are on board, the skippers make "observer tows," that is, they fish in low by-catch areas. Then at night, or without observers, fish in the high by-catch areas and nobody knows what they catch. Maybe the integrity of our food supply warrants Homeland Security types, instead of interns, as observers. Jim Huckabee was talking about enough food just today in Iowa.

Reduce Fish Catch Now For Bigger Net Profits Later
A new and compelling argument for reducing fish harvests - the profit motive - could persuade world fishers to endure the short-term pain of lower catches for the long-term gain of higher returns for their labor, according to authors of a ground-breaking study on fisheries over-exploitation. I hyper-linked an article earlier that said that maximum sustained yield was too much to take from anadromous fish populations, because not enough biological material was left for the ecosystem's needs to support the runs. A vicious cycle of decline that has characterized U.S. fisheries.

The Letter Department:

"Maybe wearing fishermen down until they're too tired to mobilize was part of government's plan all along. The bureaucracies have been very skilled at snaring fishermen in complex discussions leading to decisions on very specific management actions that are largely not comprehensible to the general public and that leave most fishermen unable to think outside of that box. The Stratton Report issued way back in 1969 identified practioners more interested in a way of life than in economic efficiency as a roadblock in government's vision for fisheries. If managers recognize withdrawals on the wealth of communities at all, it's only to say those withdrawals are a necessary consequence of resource conservation.

Susan"

(That letter echos all who say that when the Bush Administration talks lower costs to the consumer, you need to read that "lost jobs." It cost the Alaska king crab industry 1500 jobs. Nobody in Alaska with their head in clear air views the feds "economic efficiency" as anything more than a resource grab by big multi-national corporations and big boat/fleet operators.)

"FYI - in just the past twenty-four hours, from Alaska there were about ten signers of the petition online - nice going John. Oddly, however, and within the same timeframe, most press articles on the petition have been suddenly subverted, ergo much harder to find unless very explicit words are typed into search engines. It would take knowledge and a concerted effort, but the net can be compromised that way, and the suddenness indicates that it very well may have been intentional. If so, it tells me that the petition is that strong, cannot be countered, hence only technically blocked. Welcome to the new age."

December Fisheries Memo

2007-11-30T16:42:00.000-08:00

Aquaculture strategizing by European Union
They feel that they hatch the technology and other countries benefit from it mostly. (They forget that it was Dr. Donaldson of the University of Washington who jump-started salmonid farming to begin with back in the 1960's.)

This plant in Petersburg, AK(center) was my "base of operations" from 1966 through 1978. It was also where I hung up a lot of my game, repaired my skiffs, and learned to fish for "dollies" and hunt crows.

DNA "Fin-printing" project for salmon launched
This project could show what commercial salmon fishermen or Indians are getting short-changed by the trawlers salmon by-catch.
The result (of Federal fisheries management) is "the piracy of the 21st century. Grab what you can and take off." Remember, Federal Fishery Management Council members can just ignore the scientists and vote depending on which side of the bed they woke up on. Other wild cards: they use non-fishermen to find and count fish, (the Dept. of Agriculture doesn't use fishermen to count trees.) they don't take into account that fish migrate, and they don't take into account long cycle water temperature changes.

The New Bedford Business Alliance announces a call to the industry to have Congress hold hearings on the National Marine Fisheries Service.
(This site contains an on-line petition as of Dec. 1)
A petition had been gaining serious traction Back East, then the head of NMFS resigned. Rats jumping off the ship? Just think how much bigger the longline, gillnet and troll fleets in the Pacific would be if trawl by-catch were eliminated and the estimated 6,000,000 pounds of king salmon and the extra 100,000,000 pounds of halibut showed up at the docks every year.

These are the numbers that Sen. Ted Stevens and his symbiotic NMFS have been holding back from the City Managers and Mayors in Alaska. And in the face of pollock and Pacific cod stocks declining in Alaska, this may be a lot of communities' and fishermen's last chance to call for transparency, and SANITY. Maybe the root problem is that NMFS burns up their budget on mundane and arcane details and doesn't have the funds (or will) to tackle the big problems.

If the "owners of government" want to speak up in a petition, it's going to be hard for Congress to tell them to get lost like Sen. Ted Stevens does when the average fishing delegation flys back to D.C. to see him.

Industry Market Research Report (Australia) is what we need for Congress to understand the fishing business. And make them read it, not like Hillary does.
I don't think Alaska's ports really bought into the "God bless us and nobody else" platform of "rationalization." Government leaders just got hoodwinked into it by some folks pretending to represent the industry. We now know that it shrinks the industry and causes divisions in the communities. As an example, some fishermen leaders in Alaska are promoting a smaller salmon seine fleet because they only get 35 cents a pound for chum salmon there, then sneak off and seine for them in Puget Sound, WA for 85 cents a pound with no explanation!
Here's a telling letter on how special interests and your average fish manager gangs up on the boat harbor. (Government folks buy into "privatization" of the fish because it simply makes their jobs easier.)

"Good morning John,

I agree that Brother Grimm was an odd choice. (A consultant from Colorado, that was brought(bought) to speak on limited access privileges.) That presentation was arranged by Environmental Defense - they are big LAPP proponents - you might want to check out their website.

I think you're right about the environmental gains not holding water. A friend who has a brother in Florida on the Gulf of Mexico told me because her brother didn't qualify for a red snapper share, he now has to throw overboard the snapper he catches while fishing for grouper. Our fisheries here are mostly multi-species too, so the same thing is likely to happen here.

During the presentation by Brother Grimm, (a fisherman) said, "My family owns 10 boats and I don't agree with LAPPs." A survey by our state fisheries agency found no difference between support of LAPPs between "big fishermen" and "little fishermen" - that was interesting to me.

I've wondered about Environmental Defense applauding the safety benefits too. For one thing, our fish are migratory so fishermen have to fish when the fish are here. For another, even without processor quotas, some fisheries run on volume and the fish houses call the shots as far as wanting fish or not. And, as you mentioned, prices are better at different times. (Referring to being forced to fish in stormy weather.)

One state employee whispered to me while the presentation was going on, "The problem is that NC (North Carolina) commercial fisheries have never been about economic efficiency but have always been about community wealth." This weekend provided an example of what we stand to lose here - at 3 am Saturday a fisherman called 911 and ended up in the hospital with serious heart problems. By 7 am this morning all the fishermen on the island committed to giving him 2 percent of their pay until he gets back on his feet.

As always, your insight is greatly appreciated,

Susan"