Daily Archives: April 3, 2022
Into the ice: A crab boat’s quest for snow crab in a Bering Sea upended by climate change
Aboard the F/V Pinnacle in the Bering Sea. Through the wheelhouse window, Capt. Mark Casto spotted a white line on the horizon. The edge of an ice floe was illuminated by bow lights piercing the morning darkness of the Bering Sea. He throttled back the engines. Soon, the Seattle-based crab boat began to nose through closely packed pancake-like pieces and bigger craggy chunks, some the size of boulders, which bobbed about in the currents and clanged against the hull. Casto grabbed a microphone to relay a change in plans to the deck crew. Pull the pots up and stack them aboard. They would search for crab somewhere else. “Where the hell did that ice floe come from? … We’re retreating. It’s a hard word to say,” Casto declared. photos, video, charts and grafs, >click to read< 17:50
Dismal B.C. herring season sparks renewed calls for moratorium
Three days after setting his nets out in the Strait of Georgia between B.C.’s mainland and Vancouver Island, Josh Young headed back home to Pender Harbour. The herring he was expecting to catch were nowhere to be found. “I will be honest… the stocks I saw this year weren’t the healthiest year I’ve ever seen,” Young said. “We didn’t catch our entire quota.” Young wasn’t alone. When the season opened March 3 for boats equipped with seine nets, they scooped up their fill of the silver foot-long fish in 48 hours. By the time Young and hundreds of others using gillnets arrived on March 5, the fish seemed to have disappeared. “It was a different year,” Young said stoically. >click to read< 16:31
Big Brother is watching you. “we want to know who you are, where you are & what you have caught”
While we all appreciate the need to have accurate data there are ways in which the objective can be achieved without creating a world akin to the dystopian future foretold in the novel, 1984. When you hear the terms “Big Brother”, Room 101 or “Thought Police” did you know that both phrases come directly from George Orwell’s classic novel 1984? Orwell’s dark cautionary tale published in 1949 about the dangers of totalitarianism, government surveillance, and censorship left a profound mark on the English language, as Orwell introduced readers to new words and phrases to help him describe the anti-utopia of Oceania where the story is centred. Some may be moved indeed to describe the recent introduction of I-VMS, the intimate monitoring of the very smallest fishing vessels in the UK fleet, as ‘Orwellian’. >click to read<13:28
‘Deadliest Catch,’ a reality show with drama – and room for make-believe
This year, nine Bering Sea crab boats will appear on the Discovery Channel show’s 18th season, premiering April 19. That represents nearly a quarter of the 39 vessels registered as of March 21 to catch snow crab in the 2022 harvest, which has been greatly reduced due to conservation concerns. Some are smaller boats that may have a more difficult time operating in the cold, rough water of the northern Bering Sea, where surveys indicate most of the crab were to be found this year. But with the money paid by Discovery, their captains had plenty of added incentive to keep crabbing, and keep their crews employed, in 2022 rather than transferring small catch quotas to larger boats. Just how much “Deadliest Catch” pumps into the crab fleet is largely kept confidential. >click to read< 11:32
Reallocation: Fed changes to BC crab fishery could bankrupt some commercial fishermen
Commercial crab fishermen in British Columbia fear that changes to the way they can fish for Dungeness crab off the west coast of Vancouver Island could push some small, family operations out of business. This year however, crab fishermen like Jason Voong, 33, may not be able to harvest enough crabs to stay in business following changes announced by the federal government in December to reallocate half of the licenses available in the area to local First Nations. “I fully support, and the fishers support reconciliation, it’s just a process that’s wrong right now the way DFO has treated the commercial fleet and the five nations.” >click to read< 09:41
The Galician fisherman who accidentally became a spy in the Falklands War
Four decades after the war that hurts Argentines the most, Fernando Otero, a 68-year-old Galician sailor who never lived more than ten blocks from the sea, remembers his days aboard the Usurbil, the fishing vessel that in 1982 searched for hake by the Argentine Sea when he was militarized and forced to do intelligence work while pretending to fish. “I was there when the military arrived and the ship was militarized,” says Otero, a senior naval mechanic who was in charge of maintaining the Usurbil’s machines. When he arrived in Argentina to board the Usurbil, the steel-hulled freezer trawler that had been launched in 1968 in Vigo and later sold to the company Pesquera del Atlántico SA, Otero had ten years of experience and had already sailed the Atlantic, the Pacific, the Indian. >click to read< 08:46
