Tag Archives: West Coast groundfish

New fishery rules could protect deep sea corals in California

The Pacific Fishery Management Council will decide Monday what happens to the underwater areas as part of an update to essential fish habitat for West Coast groundfish. “The Pacific Fishery Management Council will be making a decision on changing the areas that are opened or closed to West Coast groundfish bottom trawling,” said Kerry Griffin, a staff officer to the council, which regulates fisheries in federal waters from the Mexican border to the Canadian border, from three miles to 200 miles off shore. The proposal, scheduled for a vote Monday, >click to read<20:31

Catch Shares: West coast groundfish management is disaster, say participants

The Pacific Groundfish Quota Program Workshop Workshop brought together nearly 200 people who had been involved in creating, implementing, or making a living under the program, to look at successes and failures in the past five years. Most found the program had both, but criticism was harsh at the two-day workshop, held in Portland a few months before the Pacific Council begins the program’s first five-year review. The workshop was also known as Santa Rosa III, the third workshop of stakeholders looking at performance. The first in the series was held in Santa Rosa near the start of the IFQ program. The National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), who implemented the program in 2011, offered a scorecard of three successes and five “causes for concern” since the program began. Others were more blunt. Read the article here 13:52

Stricter West Coast fishing rules spur new technology aimed at recovering groundfish species

Sara Skamser has to do a lot less convincing these days. The owner of Newport’s Foulweather Trawl fishing net company has been a trusted business partner of West Coast trawlers for three decades, but many of them were skeptical when she began developing special nets designed to keep out unwanted species. Read the rest here 21:53

West Coast groundfish certified as sustainably harvested 14 years after economic disaster

After the United States established a 200-mile exclusive fishing zone in 1977, the groundfish fleet grew rapidly, helped by the government. Warnings from scientists that the fishery was being depleted went unheeded until 2000, when the 20-year catch average dropped from 74,000 tons to 36,000 tons and the federal government declared an economic disaster. Read more here  06:48

DeFazio-Huffman-Herrera Beutler Amendment Saves West Coast Fishermen $2.4 million – Read more here