Mother ocean is gonna need our help.

yak2you2

2012-05-06 22:24:42

~~[img="~~http://i519.photobucket.com/albums/u354/yak2you2/Tsunami%20Debris/DSCF4387.jpg" alt=""]

Debris from the Tsunami that struck japan last year. Unfortunately there is tons of this kind of stuff, and more on the way. If everybody will do their part to help clean it up, we'll continue to have a clean place to play and work.

I found a spot this spring where there was kind of an eddie in the ocean, way out away from land. It had the effect of collecting a bunch of floating junk. There was 7 or 8 floating styrofloats like this one, plastic bottles, etc. I picked up what I could hold, but my boat got small in a hurry, and I had to leave the rest. Sad.

I went to the beach a few days back with my wife and kids, and we went for a couple of mile walk. Far as you could see the tide line was covered with thousands of tiny pieces of syrofoam the size of the tip of your thumb. How do you deal with that? A hundred people with shop vacuums and rakes would have had a hard time cleaning the tiny little 2 mile stretch that we walked. What about the rest? Don't know how long it will take nature to break it down, but we are stuck with it until then I'm affraid.

~~[img="~~http://i519.photobucket.com/albums/u354/yak2you2/Tsunami%20Debris/DSCF4388.jpg" alt=""]

As fishermen, we are the first line of defense. Styrofoam, like this one are the worst of the worst. Once they make it to shore they bust up into a million tiny pieces. Worse even than an oil spill which is genrally contained at the shoreline, this stuff can be blown by the wind and scattered through forests and grasslands doing untold harm to animals, fish, and the environment in general. Please take the time to pick it up where you find it, and dispose of it properly. Thanks!

Carol W

2012-05-09 14:17:14

What is disturbing is the lack of a plan to deal with this mess coming at us, maybe we need a grant program where we pull all the left over coho trollers into the program and pay us to collect tsunami garbage, some of that stuff is a lot more valuable than a coho.

Salty

2012-05-10 02:52:21

I am thinking trollers are ideal for attaching skimming type trawls to our poles. Those of us with bow poles would get paid double of course.

lone eagle

2012-05-10 04:57:22

Do you take Yen?

Carol W

2012-05-10 15:32:59

I heard the currency for clean up was going to be palemeated chum and the kicker for the highliners would be last years Ikura.

yak2you2

2012-05-10 16:07:01

It does seem like the plan is to wait until it hits the beach, and then deal with it. Problem is, by then it will be to late. We should have a plan to use the existing fleet to round it up before it ever gets to the beach. But, funding fishermen like farmers, and cleaning up the ocean doesn't match any of the previous govt. Plans. If they fund us for a few years to clean up trash, then we'll still be around to complain about all the stupid stuff, like daming rivers, and poisoning them with agricultural run off. I'm not holding my breath for any offers our way, just have to do it on our own.

Carol W

2012-05-10 16:17:08

I agree Casey the one problem I see is that we will be filling up dumpsters at the harbor and I know if you did that in Ketchikan the harbor dept is going to charge us. Can you imagine what a seine set will look like at Granite or East Addington those boys are going to have some full nets.

yak2you2

2012-05-10 18:06:15

We got our local salmon board to start accepting collections, and hopefully get us a dumpster. At this point hauling it out and burning it is better than the alternative. There is already a pretty good sized pile in the parking lot, and growing fast. If drifts of flotsam show up like the pictures show of miles long drifts, netters could be just plain out of business. Lumber and such will tear and tangle it beyond repair. Seiners might fair a little better with the heavier web.

you would think that at some point the endangered species act would kick in. How many whales could be killed? Albatrosses? You'd think that would out weigh the desire to ignore a ready made army of helpers that they don't want in business. Instead of offering us money to learn a new trade, like they do now, they should be offering us money to help clean up the mess. I felt this way after 9/11. It doesn't take a genius to see that your not going to get to our shores on a jet very easily anymore. Sooner or later the badguys are going to figure out how to sail. So it seems like a good home guard made up of the guys who are out there the most is in order. They can spend trillions on new cutters, but it still won't be as effective as a healthy fishing fleet at keeping an eye on things. Deputize the fleet, subsidize them a little, and you have thousands of boats at your command, rather than putting them out of business.

Time to admit that the unwritten master plan of replacing the world's salmon supply with farmed fish so you can use the rivers as a cheap source of power and a gravity fed sewer, isn't going to work.

lone eagle

2012-05-10 19:49:09

Was alot of chatter about the Japanese govt. leasing an island in the Marianas to use as a tsunami garbage dump, I don't know how far that went. Source-WSJ and the Marianas Variety (newspapers)

Salty

2012-05-11 00:13:38

What a bunch of environmentalists on this web site. Lets let the market take care of it.

lone eagle

2012-05-11 15:44:25

I bought my first fishing boat with the money I made on the Exxon Valdez debacle ;Yes the oil is still there, I didn't do a good job....

yak2you2

2012-05-11 18:57:34

Lone Eagle, not all of the oil is still there. You guys picked up a lot of it. Most of what is still there, is there because of the same bureaucratic indecisiveness we are seeing now. They waited to long trying to decide what to do, while more oil leaked out every day, and spread to the beaches. Once it made it to the beaches, it was nearly impossible to clean up. and it turned into more of a cover it up program. The skimming program was effective though. With messes as massive as either, your never going to get all of the material, but something is better than nothing. It just seems obvious that fighting it at sea, gives us a lot better chance of getting more of it. To me, if they're worried about us getting fat off of it, and accomplishing very little, I'd say set a price per lb. on garbage. it would be like a bounty, to insure that they're getting what they pay for.

Salty, I'm not much as far as being an enviromentalist goes. If I had my way we'd be drilling in ANWAR, and mining and logging would be ok too. Here's the kicker with me though, if you get drunk and run your oil tanker up on the reef, or we catch you leeching anything, or falling anything to close to our salmon streams from mining or logging operations, you should go to prison for it. Industry doesn't have to be a bad thing, there is just a right way, and there is a wrong way. Media and public opinion shouldn't have anything to do with it. If your into eating whale meat, or wearing baby seal skins, and as long the stocks are there to sustain harvest levels, I'm ok with that too. I think everybody should be able to shoot sea otters, even though they're cute. So yeah, enviromentalist in it's classic form, doesn't really fit me.

What we have with this Tsunami debris though, is different. This is a natural disaster, not anybody's fault, but no less dire. Rather than trying to figure out who should pay to clean it up, everybody just needs to jump on it, before it's to late. We can all wait around and try to figure out who's going to pay us, or we can just go pick it up before it wrecks our beaches and fisheries.

Salty

2012-05-11 20:57:48

Just so any readers of this blog understand, I am a long time known SE environmentalist. 20 years on the board of directors of the Sitka Conservation Society. A term on the old Alaska Conservation Society Board, at the founding meeting of SEACC, the first paid member of the Alaska Marine Conservation Society, etc. I just donated $500.00 today to Save Our Wild Salmon.

So, from having long experience with environmentalists, particularly the one in the mirror, I know that every one of them is unique. I also know that a hell of a lot of fishermen don't understand that the environmental label fits on most of them and most of their businesses, particularly salmon trollers, benefits from past work of environmentalists from Green Peace to the Sierra Club.

It always humors me to hear fellow fishermen bad mouthing the hand that feeds them.

Salty

2012-05-12 00:30:51

Here is some information on what is being requested. Kudo's to the Alaska Democrats and Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski.

As the 2012 summer fishing season approaches and fishermen prepare to once again to practice their trade netting salmon from Alaska's seas, Democrats from Alaska's House of Representatives and Alaska's senior Senator Lisa Murkowski reach out to the federal government to create an aggressive plan to protect Alaska's coastline from the threat posed by debris from last year's tsunami in Japan.

In response to hearing the concerns of the tsunami debris rising among Alaska's fishermen, Sen. Lisa Murkowski reached out to NOAA administrator Jane Lubchenco, asking her for information regarding the status of ongoing prevention and monitoring efforts.

Yesterday, Sen. Murkowski wrote a letter to Dr. Lubchenco, pointing out that already Alaska is experiencing much higher than typical levels of debris throughout the Prince William Sound area. Stating that commercial salmon fishing season opens in mid-May in Prince William sound, she requested that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration began coodination with other federal agencies, the state of Alaska, local governments, and local industry to begin tracking debris that could possibly encroach on historical fishing grounds.

Meanwhile, yesterday, eight members of the Alaska House Democratic Caucus also called on the federal government to come up with an aggressive plan to deal with the debris problem from Japan. They stated in a letter that, “This debris could cause serious ecological, health and safety concerns for our coastal communities, not to mention significant economic impacts that could ripple throughout the state.” said House Democratic Leader Beth Kerttula of Juneau. “We know it’s coming—the first of it is already here. We need federal resources to get an idea of what we’re up against so we can develop the best way to deal with these waves of debris that could keep coming for months or more.”

in the letter addressed to Dr. Lubchenco, they requested "that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration make the necessary resources available to assess the potential magnitude of what could be a prolonged torrent of debris littering Alaska's coastline."

Already the forefront of the debris has reached Alaska shores. The lighter wind-driven debris such as Styrofoam, large, light containers, furniture, ships and buoys have already made it across the Pacific. Heavier objects, sitting lower in the water, are moving slower in the currents but will inevitably make landfall all along the Pacific coast of the United States including Alaska. it is unknown at this time what levels of toxicity this debris contains. This is one of the concerns that Alaskans have as the summer progresses and individuals come into increasing contact with it.

The Japanese government estimates that approximately 4.8 million tons of debris, including factory buildings, houses cars and trees were swept into the ocean after the March 2011 disaster. Of that total it is estimated that at least 1.5 million tons of debris, including ships, lumber, and other lighter items remained afloat to be swept off in the currents. They believe that the remaining portion sank to the seafloor close to Japan's shores.

Previous projections estimated that the debris would not make landfall on the North American continent until between March of 2013 and March of 2014, but recent observations have shown that the debris is moving across the ocean at a much faster rate.

The House Democrat's letter can be read here.

Senator Murkowski's Letter to Dr Lubchenco can be read here.

yak2you2

2012-05-12 15:02:24

Here's another perspective.

http://www.thearcticsounder.com/article/1219officials_dropped_the_debris_ball

The bottom line is, they've got the talkin' part done, lets see some action. Trouble is, it's going to cost a lot of money, and being an election year, and a struggling economy, nobody wants to go out on the limb. Makes me miss Uncle Ted all the more, he'd have gotten something done.

yak2you2

2012-05-12 18:32:13

~~[img="~~http://i519.photobucket.com/albums/u354/yak2you2/truth/72962_3902191595135_1289550382_3711906_1649196349_n.jpg" alt=""]

A picture is worth a thousand words.

Jackson Combs

2012-06-07 06:45:22

http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/story/2012-06-06/oregon-coastal-debris-japan/55431448/1

"A nearly 70-foot-long dock that floated ashore on an Oregon beach was torn loose from a fishing port in northern Japan by last year's tsunami and drifted across thousands of miles of Pacific Ocean, a Japanese Consulate official said Wednesday."