Tag Archives: North Pacific Fisheries Council
Gulf of Alaska trawl pollock vessels to be included in electronic monitoring program
According to the 2023 annual report from the North Pacific Observer Program, the vast majority of groundfish harvest in Alaska is observed with full coverage, meaning 100% of all trips are monitored by either onboard observers or electronic monitoring. After years of testing the program, electronic monitoring will soon be expanded to include pelagic trawl pollock catcher vessels and tenders delivering to shoreside processors or stationary floating processors, across the Bering Sea and Aleutian Islands, and the Gulf of Alaska. That includes vessels that already have an observer on board. more, >>CLICK TO READ<< 07:55
Craig Medred: Fish fight end?
The North Pacific Fisheries Council has taken an unprecedented step to try to increase the value of halibut to the Alaska economy by allowing a yet-to-be-created, charter-boat fishing entity to buy fish from willing commercial fishing interests in order to boost sport harvests. Efforts to shift some of the halibut harvest back toward tourism businesses comes in the wake of a study indicating that “individual fishery quotas” created for the commercial halibut fishery in the early 1990s have not worked out quite as planned. A well-intentioned idea, IFQs (Eye-F-Cues) as everyone in the fishing industry calls them, were intended to shift halibut harvests away from big-boat operations toward individual fishermen working as owner-operators of fishing businesses hopefully based in Alaska. But that isn’t exactly how things turned out. Read the rest of the story here 10:58
Bering Sea fishery management needs to change for halibut users across Alaska
This year the Magnuson Stevens Act will be reauthorized by Congress. The MSA is the law by which the National Marine Fisheries Service and the North Pacific Fisheries Council manage the federal fisheries off of Alaska. In public hearings, the message that “all is well in Alaska waters” and “no major changes to the law are needed” has been echoed by many groundfish industry lobbyists. Although no one will dispute that the Bering Sea groundfish industry is a behemoth, its financial success is coming at the expense of other users. Halibut fishermen in all areas of the Bering Sea have a catch limit of 3.2 million pounds this year. The estimated bycatch cap in the Bering Sea is almost 8 million pounds. Read more here 10:58
