Alaska pollock trawlers are feeling pressure over salmon bycatch, so this reporter went to see for himself

October 20, 2023 North Pacific

Bering Sea factory trawlers scoop up tens of thousands of pollock at a time, and pressure is intensifying to avoid catching salmon as populations of chum and chinook have plummeted in recent years, causing closures for subsistence harvesting. The trawlers are not entirely to blame, warming oceans due to human-caused climate change are almost certainly a factor, but they have drawn the ire of salmon advocates from Western Alaska to Washington D.C. This is a 341-foot vessel that I went out on, the Northern Hawk, with a crew of 129 people. And most of them work below the deck in a fish factory that, basically when the fishing is reasonable, operates 24 hours a day. Then there are these incredible fillet machines that will fillet 180 fish a minute, and the job of the human is basically to just feed the machine 24 hours a day. And it’s kind of mind-numbing work. Your hands move constantly to make sure the fish are positioned correctly. >>click to read<< 07:40

400 miles northwest of Dutch Harbor, Alaska pollock trawlers, Bering Sea, Captain Jim Egaas, Casey Grove, F/V Northern Hawk, factory freezer trawler, in pursuit of pollock bounty, in the Bering Sea, North Pacific fishing industry, reporter Hal Bernton, salmon bycatch, struggle to dodge salmon

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The New England groundfish debacle (Part III): who or what is at fault? Nils E. Stolpe/FishNet

It took me a while to decide how to most accurately describe the situation that has been visited upon the New England fishing communities that are and since colonial times have been dependent on the groundfish fisheries.

NILS STOLPE: The New England groundfish debacle (Part IV): Is cutting back harvest really the answer?

While it’s a fact that’s hardly ever acknowledged, the assumption in fisheries management is that if the population of a stock of fish isn’t at some arbitrary level, it’s because of too much fishing. Hence the term “overfished.” Hence the mandated knee jerk reaction of the fisheries managers to not enough fish; cut back on fishing. What of other factors? They don’t count. It’s all about fishing, because fishing is all that the managers can control; it’s their Maslow’s Hammer. When it comes to the oceans it seems as if it’s about all that the industry connected mega-foundations that support the anti-fishing ENGOs with hundreds of millions of dollars a year in “donations” are interested in controlling. Read the article here

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