NPFMC Testimony: Loan
My name is Rick Loan, and I am currently the mate on the American No. 1, a trawl catcher processor in the Amendment 80 fleet. I have been fishing for 30 years. For all these years, we have worked continuously to reduce PSC halibut as best we can.
The Captains who I work with started their halibut avoidance experimenting with halibut grid excluders in the early 90’s. We continue to change the design to adapt to fishing conditions. We keep several different excluders on the boat at all times.
Last year we started using the Greenline excluder which is the newest form of excluder that lets out the larger halibut. In the Bering Sea, there are many small halibut which are the same size as our target flatfish. The only way we can exclude these fish is to move away from areas of high bycatch, or hot spots and warn other boats of these areas. Hopefully this year, we will have the ability to deck sort which could lower the mortality of those fish that are caught because they will not have to go into the factory to be weighed and counted.
Most of the other boats have been doing the same thing, that is, experimenting with net design, excluder designs, steaming away from productive grounds to avoid halibut or crab. This all comes at a cost – the money spent on gear design, the added fuel costs, not fishing at night, reduced target catch rates, lowered production when an excluder gets plugged with skates or a derelict crab pot, and you have to haul back early. One of the hardest parts of our job is to discard valuable fish. So the less we have to do it, the better. All Captains would agree on that.
The challenge that we have though is that the halibut swim and feed in the same place that our target fisheries do. They are part of the same habitat. In the last two years, the halibut seem to be everywhere. All of our “sweet spots”, where we were guaranteed of not finding halibut, have halibut in them. They are from 5 fathoms to 500 fathoms. There is less temperature or seasonal correlation than ever. On the grounds, we are certainly not seeing a conservation problem and we are out there 11 plus months a year. If there was a conservation problem, wouldn’t we see less fish? Instead we see more.
The guys I’ve talked to are concerned that if halibut is cut, then we can no longer harvest the same amount of fish, and this will make the halibut issue worse. More fish on the grounds is more competition for food to the halibut. We think this competition is keeping the halibut smaller. Whether it is arrowtooth in the Gulf, or flatfish in the Bering Sea, the more flats in the water, the more competition the halibut will face. Halibut PSC cuts could make it worse for the halibut in the long run.
The next best thing for this fleet is to allow us to try deck sorting to reduce mortality instead of making drastic bycatch cuts. Yesterday the freezer longliners talked about encountering halibut and halibut mortality. They catch a lot of halibut, probably as much as us. But they can do careful release, and their halibut mortality is about 10%. We are forced by regulation to keep them until they go into the factory and over the flow scale. This guarantees high mortality. We do what we can to avoid them, but when they come up we need to be able to get them back as soon as possible so we can reduce our mortality rates.
Thank you for the opportunity to testify today.