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Friday 1/9/09 Ocean conditions will be studied along with halibut stocks Thursday 1/8/09 AK salmon wholesale prices show some big gains, esp for roe
Wednesday 1/7/09 Commercial fishing outpaces sportsfishing in revenues and jobs Tuesday 1/6/09 Halibut catches decided next week; several new mgmt proposals Monday 1/5/09 Fishing gears up for 2009
NOAA. Temporary Rules for 2009 TAC in BSAI and GOA
Canada and the United States renew treaty to conserve Pacific salmon stocks and ensure long-term sustainability of Pacific salmon fishery (1/5)
Survival training for commercial fishermen offered in Kodiak (1/5)
New Economic Report Finds Commercial and Recreational Fishing Generated More Than Two Million Jobs (1/6)
President Bush's Last Act of Greenness (1/6)
Opinion. Obama's Chance For a Blue Legacy (1/6)
USCG Sector Juneau. Stability Policy for Uninspected Vessels Operating in Southeast Alaska (12/22/08)
American Fisheries Society Book. Enclosing the Fisheries: People, Places, and Power
NPFMC Items
Why storms are good news for fishermen (1/6)
Coast Guard answers vessel's distress call (1/7)
Coast Guard suspends search for overboard fisherman (1/7)
Salvage vessel arrives to grounded American Way, Coast Guard continues monitoring (1/8)
GAO. Marine Mammal Protection Criticized (1/8)
NMFS. Notice of intent to prepare either an Environmental Assessment or an Environmental Impact Statement on measures to minimize non–Chinook salmon bycatch in the Bering Sea. Comment period through March 23, 2009
AFSC Processed Report: Results of February-March 2008 Echo Integration-trawl Surveys of Walleye Pollock Conducted in the Gulf of Alaska, Cruises
STATE
Knight hired to lead gillnetters' group (1/6)
Ice hazardous even for boats in harbor (1/7)
Homer News. SeaWatch. 'Conservation corridor' proposal postponed (1/7)
Debt to the sea and the city (1/9)
MARKETING
ASMI. Alaska Seafood market Bulletin (Dec 2008)
MISC
Opinion. High time to feature Kodiak boat on popular TV series (1/7)
FEDERAL
Oscillation Rules as the Pacific Cools (12/9). PASADENA, Calif. -- The latest image of sea-surface height measurements from the U.S./French Jason-1 oceanography satellite shows the Pacific Ocean remains locked in a strong, cool phase of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, a large, long-lived pattern of climate variability in the Pacific associated with a general cooling of Pacific waters. The image also confirms that El Niño and La Niña remain absent from the tropical Pacific.
NOAA. Temporary Rules for 2009 TAC in BSAI and GOA
· 74 FR 233, January 5, 2009. Final rule to adjust the 2009 total allowable catch (TAC) amounts for the Gulf of Alaska (GOA) pollock and Pacific cod fisheries. Effective January 5, 2009, until the effective date of the final 2009 and 2010 harvest specifications for GOA groundfish. Comments must be received by January 20, 2009.
· 74 FR 38, January 2, 2009. Final rule to adjust the 2009 total allowable catch amount (TAC) for the Bering Sea pollock fishery. Effective December 29, 2008, through December 31, 2009.
Canada and the United States renew treaty to conserve Pacific salmon stocks and ensure long-term sustainability of Pacific salmon fishery (1/5). VANCOUVER, Jan. 5 /CNW/ - Canada and the United States have ratified an agreement on changes to five chapters of the Pacific Salmon Treaty (PST), which expired at the end of 2008, the Honourable Gail Shea, Minister of Fisheries and Oceans, announced today.
The renewed chapters, which took effect January 1, 2009, will help ensure the long-term sustainability of Pacific salmon stocks while supporting aneconomically viable fishing industry on both sides of the Canada-U.S. border.
"Conservation and the long-term sustainability of Pacific salmon are the key objectives being pursued through the Pacific Salmon Treaty," said Minister Shea. "This is a crucial agreement that will help people on both sides of the border benefit from sustainable fishing opportunities for years to come. The agreement will also promote increased cooperation between our countries as we manage our shared salmon stocks." More
Survival training for commercial fishermen offered in Kodiak (1/5). KODIAK, Alaska - The Coast Guard and the Alaska Marine Safety Education Association are scheduled to provide survival training to mariners Thursday and Friday at Coast Guard Base Kodiak.
Winter fisheries in Alaska are some of the most dangerous in the world, where the difference between life and death can be traced back to training and preparedness. The Coast Guard and AMSEA have historically provided training to mariners each January, shortly before the start of the tanner crab season.
During the training, mariners have direct discussions with Coast Guard rescue swimmers on what to expect during a rescue. They also practice donning their survival suits in the base pool. The experience and understanding of how to don a survival suit has been shown to increase survivability of a maritime accident from minutes to hours. If a suit is in poor condition or does not fit, the AMSEA training can alert an individual to this potentially deadly problem before heading out to sea. More
New Economic Report Finds Commercial and Recreational Fishing Generated More Than Two Million Jobs (1/6). U.S. commercial and recreational fishing generated more than $185 billion in sales and supported more than two million jobs in 2006, according to a new economic report released by NOAA’s Fisheries Service.
The commercial fishing industry — harvesters, seafood processors and dealers, seafood wholesalers and seafood retailers — generated $103 billion in sales, $44 billion in income and supported 1.5 million jobs in 2006, the most recent year included in the report, Fisheries Economics of the United States 2006, which covers 1997 to 2006. Recreational fishing generated $82 billion in sales, $24 billion in income, and supported 534,000 jobs in 2006. More
President Bush's Last Act of Greenness (1/6). Over the course of his two terms in office, President George W. Bush has taken a lot of mostly justified flak from environmentalists. But there's one area where Bush can legitimately claim a deep-green legacy: the oft overlooked field of ocean conservation.
In 2006, Bush established the 140,000-sq.-mi. Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument off the northwestern coast of the Hawaiian islands — at the time, the largest marine protected area in the U.S. Tuesday afternoon, however, Bush will beat his own record, announcing the creation of three separate marine national monuments in the central Pacific Ocean that together will span some 195,000 sq. mi. Though greens were hoping for an even larger area, taken together the marine monuments will mean that President Bush — perhaps the least environmental President in U.S. history — will have protected more of the ocean than anyone else in the world. "He deserves a huge amount of credit for this," says Jay Nelson, director of the Pew Environment Group's Global Ocean Legacy Program, which has long lobbied for the protected areas. More
Opinion. Obama's Chance For a Blue Legacy (1/6). Today, President Bush will begin for the ocean what President Theodore Roosevelt did when he created the National Park System. The administration is announcing plans to create a national monument that will protect 195,000 square nautical miles of the Pacific Ocean -- bigger than the size of California and almost 50 percent larger than all U.S. national parks combined. Sweeping areas of the ocean's most pristine treasures, including spectacular corals and the deepest canyon in the world, will be protected by law and given the chance to become stronger.
Yet what is most significant about this move is the opportunity it creates for President-elect Barack Obama. More
American Fisheries Society Book. Enclosing the Fisheries: People, Places, and Power. Summary
This timely book examines effects of restricted access management in fisheries on people and their communities.
Economic logic that guides the limitation and privatization of access rights seeks to address overcapitalization and inefficiencies that result from open access fisheries. This type of fisheries management, often called rationalization, has gained international common sense appeal. Yet, the contested social impacts of restricted access, market-based resource management programs are increasingly documented in academic literature and continue to be a focus of social resistance and mobilization among those who have been displaced, or rationalized out of fishing in this process. These social impacts the outcomes of ownership consolidation, loss of jobs and income, decreased labor mobility, prohibitive entry costs, loss of fishing rights from small communities and other distributional inequities can be understood broadly as the sociocultural effects of fisheries access restrictions this volume addresses.
Drawing on rich ethnographic research in coastal communities in Alaska, British Columbia, Iceland, and New Zealand, this diverse collection of chapters demonstrates the wide reach of privatization discourses and policies and their social impacts as experienced by people and communities dependent on fishing for livelihood, sustenance, and identity. More/Order Copy
Why storms are good news for fishermen (1/6). ON THE surface of the sea conditions can be atrocious, with freezing gales and enormous swells. Slip beneath the waves and descend into the blue, however, and you enter another world, a more tranquil place where the violence of the waves above turns into an ever-gentler to-and-fro, and the temperature never falls much below freezing.
We tend to assume that life in the oceans is insulated from the vagaries of the weather. But it is turning out that what goes on above the water's surface is intimately linked to the survival of the creatures below it, even far down in the depths of the ocean. ….
Take the walleye pollock in the Bering Sea off Alaska, the basis of the largest single fishery in the world. These are the unnamed white fish you get in supermarkets and fast food restaurants in the US. When Bond looked at the years in which high numbers of young pollocks survived, he found they were characterised by summer storms. …
In the Pacific too, slow ups and downs in temperature have a big impact on fish. A measure called the Pacific Decadal Oscillation index, based on sea surface temperatures, has become the most common indicator of the overall climate regime in the Pacific Ocean. When sea surface temperatures are warmer in the eastern Pacific and colder in the central Pacific, the PDO index is positive.
The PDO was mostly negative from 1950 to 1977, after which there was a strong shift to a mostly positive regime. This shift reverberated through many ocean and terrestrial ecosystems. "It's quite remarkable how significant that change was," says Beamish. "We have not seen something of that magnitude since." More
Coast Guard answers vessel's distress call (1/7). JUNEAU - The U.S. Coast Guard was looking for a crew member reported to be overboard from a crab vessel Tuesday in the Bering Sea.
Chief Petty Officer Walter Shinn said Tuesday that rescuers are searching a 28-square-mile area in water northwest of Cold Bay, or about 650 miles south of Anchorage.
Shinn said the Coast Guard had two helicopters conducting the search and a C-130 maritime patrol aircraft coordinating communications.
Shinn said the 90-foot fishing vessel Seabrooke reported a 40-year-old male getting his feet tangled in a crab pot line while going overboard.
Seas were 3- to 5-feet with water temperatures at 34 degrees and air temperature at 19 degrees. Link
Coast Guard suspends search for overboard fisherman (1/7). The U.S. Coast Guard today suspended its search for a crab fisherman who fell overboard from his vessel Tuesday about 22 miles northwest of Cold Bay. Keith Criner, 43, of Stockton, Calif., was declared lost at sea after a daylong search that covered 132 square miles, the Coast Guard said. Criner got tangled in a crab pot line and was pulled off the 98-foot fishing vessel Seabrooke at about 9:50 a.m. Tuesday.
"The aircraft conducted 11 searches encompassing 132 square miles but unfortunately did not locate the fisherman," Petty Officer 1st Class Lee Goldsmith said in a prepared statement. "Suspending a search is one of the most difficult calls that we have to make. Our sincere condolences are sent to his family and friends."
Two Coast Guard helicopters from Cold Bay and a C-130 from Kodiak got on scene by about 11 a.m. and searched 107 miles throughout the day but held off overnight. An MH-60 Jayhawk returned to the search area at 10:15 a.m. Wednesday and covered about 25 square miles of ocean before the search was called off at 11:49 a.m.
The Seabrooke was fishing for Tanner crab in the Bering Sea when the accident took place, the Coast Guard said. Link
Salvage vessel arrives to grounded American Way, Coast Guard continues monitoring (1/8). ANCHORAGE, Alaska - The Coast Guard continues monitoring the salvage operation as the salvage vessel Redeemer arrived on scene at 1 a.m. Thursday beginning a salvage assessment of the 38-foot fishing vessel American Way grounded 50 miles southeast of Chignik, Alaska.
A salvage plan will be submitted for review and approval to the Coast Guard following the completion of the assessment. The Coast Guard is working cooperatively with the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation and the Department of the Interior.
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A Coast Guard C-130 crew sighted the American Way partially submerged and leaning on its port side Wednesday. More
GAO. Marine Mammal Protection Criticized (1/8). The Bush administration has failed to provide protections required by law for 14 kinds of marine mammals potentially at risk of death or injury due to commercial fishing, Congressional investigators said. A report by the Government Accountability Office said the National Marine Fisheries Service generally lacked a “comprehensive strategy” for assessing the effectiveness of its measures to protect 30 kinds of potentially endangered animals, like whales and dolphins, that can become entangled in fishing gear or lobster traps. According to the G.A.O., officials of the fisheries service said they either had faulty data and lacked money to obtain better information, or believed factors other than commercial fishing affected the mammals. Link
NMFS. Notice of intent to prepare either an Environmental Assessment or an Environmental Impact Statement on measures to minimize non–Chinook salmon bycatch in the Bering Sea. Comment period through March 23, 2009 74 FR 798, January 8, 2009
Knight hired to lead gillnetters' group (1/6). JUNEAU - Southeast gillnetters chose fisherman-lobbyist Chris Knight as their organization's executive director last month.
The United Southeast Alaska Gillnetters' Association represents all 475 Southeast drift gillnet permits. Its board of directors unanimously decided on Knight.
Knight fishes for salmon, halibut and crab in the summer and early fall, and has drift-gillnetted since 1990. Most recently he has been a consultant and lobbyist, and he worked for the Legislature for 13 sessions.
Knight said his primary focus will be to create a better membership base and communicate better to permit holders. He'd also like to find common ground among commercial fishermen, instead of battling over allocation, he said.
Knight said he was particularly concerned about the potential for harm to fish habitat from poor oversight and planning of new development projects.
Ice hazardous even for boats in harbor (1/7). Cold winter conditions leave moored boats in Kodiak’s harbors in dangerous conditions to sink even when they’re not out at sea, Harbormaster Marty Owen said.
The leaky culprit? Frozen pipes and through-hull fittings can leak or potentially burst – a danger that can happen to any size vessel.
“A one-inch hole at the bottom of a boat will sink it real quick, particularly if no one is watching it,” Owen said.
Owen and Coast Guard officials suggest boat owners constantly check on their boats. The harbor’s staff also monitors the docks three times a day. More
Homer News. SeaWatch. 'Conservation corridor' proposal postponed (1/7). The Board of Fisheries has backed down from its earlier decision to hear a controversial Cook Inlet proposal outside of the usual cycle of Cook Inlet-based meetings, in order to give the public more time to weigh in.
The board originally had agreed at an October work session to hear proposal 379, which addresses changes to the Upper Cook Inlet Management Plan, at the March meeting, which takes place in Anchorage and deals mostly with shellfish issues. It will now be heard during the regular Cook Inlet meeting cycle, which takes place in February of 2011. The proposal would modify the Upper Cook Inlet plan to close specific areas to drift gillnets regardless of run strength, in order to aid escapement in the Susitna drainage. The board contends that the proposal brings the management plan in line with its intent at the last round of Upper Cook Inlet meetings in February of 2008.
Critics said pushing it through out of cycle was a back-door way to accomplish something that has been a pet project for board member Howard Delo, which is to establish a "conservation corridor" up the middle of Cook Inlet. More
Debt to the sea and the city (1/9). The organization that built the Alaska Commercial Fishermen's Memorial on the waterfront downtown needs help paying down its debt to the city - so it's turning to the city.
The memorial was paid for in part with a $94,000 no-interest loan from the Juneau Assembly in 1996. Fees for having names added to the memorial are used to cover engraving, maintenance and to pay down the debt, though the community of families that have lost fishermen has been virtually exhausted since the memorial was built, board Vice President Bob Millard said.
Fewer and fewer requests have been coming in, prompting the memorial board to ask the Juneau Assembly to forgive a big chunk of its debt. According to a September e-mail from board President Bruce Weyhrauch to city officials, the board had $53,000 in its account and an outstanding debt of about $81,000 with the city. Weyhrauch and his board proposed paying down $43,000 of the debt, reserving $10,000 for future expenses and having the city forgive the remaining balance. More
Opinion. High time to feature Kodiak boat on popular TV series (1/7). In response to “‘Deadliest Catch’ sets sail from Kodiak” (Daily Mirror, Jan. 2, 2008):
My name is Marlene Lambert. I live in Milton, Ind., in the Lower 48. I read the Kodiak Daily Mirror every day. My son, Joe Spink, lived and worked in Kodiak. He was the deck boss on the F/V Jenoah out of Kodiak. He went overboard and was lost at sea on Sept. 21, 2004. I came to Kodiak in November of 2004 for the court hearing to declare him dead. I fell in love with Kodiak and the people there. I have never gone to any other place to visit and been made to feel so much at home. More
