What's up with this?
afteryou
2013-02-01 01:18:32
“Did you know that your government is currently buying up BC troll licences so that you might have a few more fish to catch.....In the 1970-80's BC trollers were doing really well and built a big fleet of large efficient freezer boats that could fish independently for long periods. Then more fish were allocated to other groups and the troll fishery almost disappeared.....today no one can live from one troll licence. I have a friend with a big troller who makes a living longlining halibut and trolling tuna offshore, salmon trolling season is incidental and sometimes lasts 2 weeks.”
This is a quote from another forum out of my fast troller thread. It’s the first I’ve heard of this is it true?
Clinkerboy
2013-02-01 03:50:17
I am reluctant to comment on this but it is a sore spot with many. Under the terms of the Treaty your country put up $30 million to reduce the Troll fleet in B.C. I believe $28 million is directed at retiring licences. It has been a slow process as you are asked to offer your licence in a reverse auction type of bid. Hardball for the Widows,Orphans and dying that have to sell. Then there is the rest of us, senior citizens wondering what to do.
afteryou
2013-02-01 04:18:59
Thanks for the reply. I wish we could talk more freely among fellow fisherman regardless of which side of some line they’re on. For some reason we seem to have been pitted against each other. It is my opinion that we should have done something equally beneficial and I apologize if someone on this side of that silly line did you guys wrong. It’s not right that this has to be a sore spot. But I guess It’s like my dad always used to tell me “life ain’t fair”. It seems to be human nature to make their own half bigger.
Abundance
2013-02-01 05:11:48
That sounds hard. Like afteryou mentioned, many if not most of us on our side of the border have no idea what the treaty did. I was just a youngster at the time, but I do remember my Dad cautioning me not to mention that we were Alaskan trollers when we were walking around a Canadian harbor on a road trip to Washington. My family still talks with disgust about American/Canadian trollers making a war zone at Cape Muzon, although why there were conflicts is a bit fuzzy. I understand your reluctance to talk about this issue, but I think that we would benefit from somebody who knows the history of the treaty to fill us new guys in on the nature of the conflict. Most of the people responsible for it are gone, and we are left wondering why things are what they are. Leaving things be might be the better course, but it is obviously still being felt on your side of the border. I remember this sort of things coming up in our discussion of the differences between our fisheries. None of us wanted to bring up a sensitive subject, but many of us don't even know what is sensitive.
tketrol
2013-02-01 07:24:12
I wonder how far $30M would have gone towards enhancent. Is there any way to better assist the runs of salmon to the traditional spawning grounds above dams? Where else would $30M be better spent?
yak2you2
2013-02-01 07:28:40
It's the captains of industry like hydro-electric dams, polluk draggers, and big agriculture that kill the lion's share. To quote the U.S. govt. they simply have become, "to big to fail". This has put them above the law. Not even the endangered species act seems to be able to stop their actions.
All of us little people are left to squabble over the rapidly vanishing crumbs. I feel terrible for what has happened to the Canadian troll fleet. Terrible, mostly because it is my govt. that has allowed, even encouraged , it to happen. Not very many left making a full time living at trolling over on this side of the line either. Enhancement above the dams, trucking them below, just won't work.
tketrol
2013-02-01 07:55:46
I suppose it's also the salmon that do not survive on the way out that is equally responsible. Does buying out a few trollers for pennies (in relation to the government budget) really do much towards solving anything? Is too many fisherman the problem, or is the destruction of essential environmental conditions the problem? $30M probably does not go all that that far, but what about redirecting the 100's of millions of $'s that go to frivolous spending? I've heard that the $30M was to go towards reducing catch, and buying out the fisheran was the way they had chosen to accomplish that. Is that correct?
tketrol
2013-02-01 08:11:30
I agree Yak. Enhancement is a waste of they don't survive on the way out and are unable to grow up on the outside and return. Is targeting the ill effects of dammed rivers worthwhile at all, or should there be more effort in enhancement in non-dammed rivers?
FV_Wild_Card
2013-02-01 10:26:23
No where in the $30mil mitigation is it specified how the money will be spent.
yak2you2
2013-02-01 16:36:26
I am no expert, but my thought on non dammed river enhancement is, if it would have worked, wouldn't mother nature already have done it? Seems like the big stem rivers that the hydro guys target are critical. What I don't understand is, why? Cheap electricity? Why does it have to be these massive concrete river killers that is the only concept considered. I say go nuclear. The power of the atom is the secret of the universe, sooner we embrace that, the better off we'll be. What's wrong with nuclear is we tend to over engineer it, and build it like a dam. No concrete is earthquake proof, period. So how do you do it? Go ask the navy. You just can't build them on land, they have to be able to move, IMHO.
Trouble is, big hydro, is a corporate engine, and they fight hard for the right to destroy rivers.
Fishermen have to take a little blame too though, sorry. We are busily making the same mistakes that has been made over and over again. All around the globe fish species have been destroyed because of it, wars have been fought because of it. Wiping out forage fish, IS THE WORST MISTAKE, you can make. They wiped out the herring in Europe, the herring, menhaden, and shad on the east coast, herring and anchovies on the westcoast. There will be some who will argue, believing that it's perfectly safe to continue to wipe out tankers full of herring. The bottom line though is,,,,there really is no free lunch. Done right, row collection fisheries can be done safely, that's it for me. I don't feel like there should be bait fisheries. I imagine it could be done safely, but why? Why not save them for all the other fish? If longliners need bait, grow them. Thats where the cards of herring we've been trolling with have been coming from for years. You see the ex-vessel price of halibut and black cod? don't tell me you can't pay a little more for your bait.
It amazes me how many trollers even support it. Some guys who support wiping out the herring here in Alaska, comment on here. " the herring spawn is knee deep in front of my house". I have no doubt that it is, are all the little bays in Alaska like that? No, there are just a few key spots that herring like to spawn, so it appears that the guys who have a house on the beach above where a 15 year old fish decides to spawn, gets to be the guy who decides whether or not it's ok to kill it? How about all the other places the herring swim around? i think some small scale, gillnet style fisheries might be alright, but herring seining seems ridiculous to me. There wasn't even a market established when they killed last year's fish for next to no money. The Board of Fisheries meeting where the dept. admitted to making mistakes in how they estimate biomass of herring. That was interesting. The dept. decided that a full third more herring would be safe to harvest under the new and improved guidelines. Usually I am a firm, fanatical supporter of the Alaska Dept. of Fish and Game., but I have to ask the question, if no one else will. Sinse we have established that it is possible for you to have errors in judgement, how do we know your not making one when you say it's ok to kill more? Doesn't it make sense to error on the side of caution, and leave some extra fish on the table? I know,,,,no one wants to hear these kinds of opinions when there staring down the barrel of the payments that come with a half million dollar herring seine permit. Thats the final reason that I feel like we shouldn't have any. Any time a permit is worth that much, it's to much. There is just to much temptation to ignore the right choices to make, in order to feed the monster.
If we screw up and mismanage our salmon stocks who suffers? Us, the guys who depend on them, thats it. But if you screw up the herring who suffers? Herring guys, halibut guys, salmon guys, crab guys, etc.
I'm sure that doesn't make me very many friends with the herring crew, but it is my opinion. Herring, or any predominant bait fish, is just to "big to fail", and to big to be owned by just a handful of folks.
tketrol
2013-02-01 17:50:15
Sounds right to me Yak. If all the favorable non-dammed rivers are already operating at full capacity as nature decides then it would be a waste and probably damaging to try to pump more fish through such a system.
SilverT
2013-02-01 20:09:57
Thanks Yak,
Someone had better fight for the bait population. When I was a kid growing up in Washington, Puget Sound suffered a huge hit. The herring population was hit hard by fishermen while local eel grass spawning beds were slowly being destroyed. For about 20 years Puget Sound was a wasteland. There were almost no resident salmon, few returning salmon and most importantly no bait. I've never heard anyone in WDFW mention destruction of the bait population as the cause, but I always believed it to be.
Lane
tketrol
2013-02-02 01:36:43
Maybe if there were more herring humpback whales would spend more time eating herring and less time feeding on salmon fry. I don't know what they have traditionally eaten by percentage, but I understand that the humpbacks do gobble up a good portion of fry. It seems like quite a threat that they eat 5000 pounds of feed in a day, and it takes a lot of little salmon fry to make up 5000 pounds. I'd like to know if this is traditional behavior or is it because it's something we have provided at hatcheries, or have the herring been depleted enough to force the whales into eating fry more often than they had in the past.
Abundance
2013-02-02 02:08:40
I think it is becuase of the hatcheries releasing vast numbers of fish in one big cloud. I think that I read that the hatcheries are going to try releasing the fry in smaller doses that are more similar to natural fry movements that are much less attractive to predators. I do thoroughly agree that forage fish have been abused, but this doesn't seem to be the cause here. My Dad grew up in Neets Bay, Ratz Harbor, Tuxekan Island, Laboucher Bay, and Kuiu Island south of Rocky Pass at various points from the Fifties through the Seventies. He said that the herring used to spawn so thick you could walk on them in all of these places when he first got there. Then the seiners came in and made a winter of it. They would fish one place until there was not one herring left, then move on to the next bay around the corner. By the time Dad left Ratz Harbor, there was not a herring left. Still isn't. It's the same with Tuxekan, and I have heard elderly Ketchikan residents say the same about their area. The first king salmon he ever sold was off the dock in Ratz Harbor in the winter during the early sixties. They were in there thick eating wintering herring. He has never caught one there since. Herring seem to making a comeback here, but I fear the rising quotas. Persoanlly, I think the sardine fishermen in California are overdoing it again too. Sorry if we are wandering away from the buyback discussion.
tketrol
2013-02-02 03:33:41
I'm not sure how common it is, but I have heard accounts if whales feeding on fry in locations other than around hatcheries. Seems like I have heard Canadians say the same about sardines and herring in Canadian waters. What I read is that humpbacks eat 4500+ pounds on the low end every day. It seems that if herring stocks are low they would have to make up for it by consuming more of some other resource.
yak2you2
2013-02-02 19:16:49
There HAS to be a better way of releasing fry so the whales can't get to them. How about pulling the pen up to, and releasing the fry into, a kelp patch where they can filter out of it? I don't know if blaming herring fishing on whale predation is fair. My guess would be it has more to do with the time of year.
lone eagle
2013-02-02 19:48:40
A problem with buybacks is that the weakhands get bought get bought out first which leaves few extra fish in the ocean. The size of the permitted fleet decreases but no real increase in income for those that remain
yak2you2
2013-02-02 20:11:48
Every permit gone, whether weak or strong is, it's one less voice to complain when they continue to convert living salmon streams into sterile hydroelectrical aquifers, which is the whole overall intention. Were being phased out, along with wild salmon.
afteryou
2013-02-02 21:35:11
khaos
2013-02-03 00:27:39
Well said, Yak. Taking millions of tons of herring out of the ocean to strip for roe or sell as bait = doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Who really knows the consequences of these fisheries? Can we really have "enough" herring? Remember the size of the coho in 2011?
Why take a chance with something like herring - everything in the ocean depends on it to some level.
yak2you2
2013-02-03 01:17:14
Exactly right khaos. Those cohos in 2011 were starved. Period. Was that related to herring fisheries? No one knows, but why risk it? Here's another thought. We all throw rocks at the draggers, because of the obvious. They are documented by observers as killing thousands of valuable fish that those of us in other fisheries depend on. King salmon, chum salmon, halibut, etc. But what if the actual polluk they're taking it's self is the problem? I once read an estimated number how big the biomass of polluk was guessed to be. I don't remember exactly, but I want to say 12 billion for some reason. What ever the number was, it was staggering, and it is often referred to as a good reason why polluk dragging is an acceptable fishery. My wonder is, since they are obviously the single largest biomass in the ocean, doesn't it stand to reason that they would ultimately also become the single largest part of most creature's diet? Now I can't see a juvenile king or coho salmon eating an adult polluk, but what about juvenile salmon eating juvenile polluk that would have been made by the adults that draggers are currently having a big impact on? Or, what if the reason your catching salmon while polluk dragging is, your in an active feeding area? So now, your cleaning out polluk from a place that salmon used to fatten up at? All of it is speculation, but my go to thought, as I specified earlier, there is no free lunch. The drag fleet takes polluk out of the gulf by the millions of metric tons, that simply has to be having an impact, besides just the obvious by-catch.
You can pick up any magazine, and read all kind of expert theories. Ocean acidification, global warming, etc. My personal guess though, is it's just the same old mistake we've always made. It's the domino affect. Take out the primary forage fish, and everything above them goes with it. All species are cyclical. But what are the odds that halibut, king salmon, cohos, all predatory fish, would experience a crash at the same time? It's a food problem in my opinion, I'm convinced of it. So if I'm right, how would over fishing herring in S.E. affect the king salmon in the Yukon? I don't know the travels of herring, but I doubt it's related. The only thing that all species have in common is their travels to the gulf and the "dough nut hole" in the Bering Sea. Where they eat the only thing there is a rapidly shrinking supply of. Polluk. Once again though, enter the corporate lawyers and hush money.
Abundance
2013-02-03 01:46:04
I know that I have often caught salmon with pollock in them, particularly down deep in wintertime. Sometimes it is hard to tell the little pollock apart from saffron cod, but not the medium sized ones. I was actually wondering with my brother earlier today about what fish are out in the mid gulf that the salmon grow up on. I know that when the salmon arrived here in 2011, there was plenty of feed around near shore. They must have gone hungry out in the mysterious ocean, and who knows what is out there. I do know that pollock eat a lot of juvenile salmon, but that doesn't appear to be a major ocean problem that I have heard about yet. Did you hear about the soft fleshed halibut in Cook Inlet? They attributed that to poor nutrition. something very complicated seems to be going on, and I really don;t think that any one thing can be pointed to as the problem. i like seeing the theories though. I am getting a lot of learning out of these conversations.
lone eagle
2013-02-03 02:23:48
And there's no management plan for whales.....they keep growing and growing. We can't even manage cormorants ; how about switching out the chum hatcheries for herring?
khaos
2013-02-03 02:38:05
Many (and sometimes most) of the larger coho we catch have pollock in their gullets, even though we are fishing in huge herring patches. There is a very clear lure preference in these places, and your best pollock imitation hoochie is usually the best lure in the water. I imagine pollock are attracted to bait balls just like salmon, probably hovering underneath in scattered bands - and very easy for salmon to catch.
I haven't seen a shortage of pollock around here, but that doesn't mean their abundance is not a factor where the salmon are growing up.
Maybe the taking of billions of pollocks plays a role, maybe it doesn't, but it's worth speculation. I've heard a lot of good ideas and possibilities, but nobody really knows for sure what is happening. My guess is that all these ideas play a part, and the tricky part is figuring it out and doing something about it - without blaming the wrong people, creating fish wars and ruining folks livelihoods.
What if the pollock harvest is what is causing the slower growth of halibut? Average size for kings seems a lot smaller than I remember 15 years ago, even 10 years ago.
I for sure don't have a definitive answer, but it's good to be talking about this. The ocean is still a mystery, and I doubt we will ever figure it all out.
Coho stomachs were often empty in 2011, even with plenty of bait around. It was almost as if they had given up on eating, or didn't have the energy to catch anything that wasn't towing in a straight line... And when I did find them, they weren't around the bait.
yak2you2
2013-02-03 03:03:43
I wouldn't have much of a problem at all with polluk fishing if it was "folks" who were doing it. But the 350 ft. factory ships owned by corps. like McDonalds, and Tyson chicken. I can't get behind that. When does it end? How about a mile wide net behind an aircraft carrier? I don't like to sound like one of those conspiracy guys at all, but everything thats bad, always flows to big industry.
khaos
2013-02-03 03:21:13
I'm with you on this Yak. Let them hook and line pollock all they want, but get rid of the ocean sweepers. Make pollock worth something more than a nickel a fish, if that's what they really want. You are right - taking billions of ANYTHING is usually going to have an effect.
I doubt that will ever happen though. There is a lot more money lobbied for pollock, than there is for salmon trollers!
yak2you2
2013-02-03 04:53:51
Giant pot fishery, thats how I wish they fished. Then they could release the by-catch. Yes the of McMystery fish would go up, how is that bad? They make the same money with half the impact on the resource.
I've thought about this a lot. Were going about it all wrong in how we try to fix it. Trying to get the govt. To fix it is, and has been a colossal waste of time. We need to sell it to corprate execs. That are doing it. They are greedy, but theyre not stupid. If we can show them that pots, and increasing their price will cut their use of resource in half, while maintaining the same price, and as a kicker they would actually be the green stewards they are already claiming to be.
Whole key would be getting them to believe that all of the currently crashing stocks are the canary in the mine shaft warning that a crash of their stocks next is imminent. They have a lot more at stake to lose than we do. They've already consumed the rest of the planet's free stuff, there is no where left to move on to.