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Preceding pages: The salmon fishing fleet, anchored at the entrance to a small Alaskan river. Notice in the background the men in the water near the beach. The Pacific fisheries are advanced, aggressive, and profitable. Their problems are not so much in the water as in the legislatures and bureaucracies with which they must contend.
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-I-\-udyard Kipling’s Captains Courageous sailed to the Grand Banks in schooners equipped only with magnetic compasses for navigation, and fished from open dories. That type of fishing has passed into history, but Kipling’s description was so vivid and so romantic that that stereotype of "The American Fisherman” remains in the minds of many people today.
Modern West Coast fishing is a far cry from that image. Even the most critical look at it reveals that by and large it is healthy, attracting young and vigorous men, and paying a good return on investments.
In contrast to even a new fishing vessel on the East Coast, a modern West Coast fishing vessel is an efficient ocean platform. Usually she is designed to carry and manipulate a specific type of fishing gear, and, like any fishing vessel, to transport a delicate and valuable cargo. She comes equipped with an expensive, highspeed diesel main engine, possibly several diesel-electric sets which supply power to sophisticated refrigeration systems, seawater circulation systems, and electronic radio and navigation equipment which is far better than that found on a World War II vintage destroyer. The price tag for such a vessel fully equipped for fishing runs between $200 thousand and $3.5 million. The price range is not dictated by the wealth of the fisherman or by the economic health of his particular type of fishing, but by state and federal regulations and the demands of the fishery, as we shall see later.
West Coast fishing is a group of industries with nothing in common except that they take their raw material from the water and have good working relations with a bank. It is perhaps this second condition which sets the West Coast fishermen apart from their
counterparts on the East Coast of the United States who work under more primitive circumstances.
Financing is, of course, the heart of any commercial endeavor, and fishing is no exception. Until recently, however, bankers were reluctant to secure a loan with a fishing vessel. Too few of them knew anything about fishing, and too many of them had read Captains Courageous. The particular structure of Western fishing made it possible to finance boats, because the banks were willing to secure a loan with an asset ashore, such 3s a tuna or salmon cannery.
Thus, the canneries provided the financing needed for new vessels, and the fleet was able to keep up with technological developments and modernize itself with the times. The arrangement was also beneficial to the canneries because it tied the fleet to them, thus assuring raw material. There were few fishing vessel loans that were not paid off. In place of those fishermen who did default, the canneries had a ready supply of young, hungry, and eager men willing to take over the loaf with the hope of paying it off and moving on to 3 larger, more productive vessel.
It wasn’t even ten years ago that the banks beg311 to solicit fishing vessel loans. But now, there are an} number of financial organizations on the West Coa>[ that specialize in fishing vessel loans. The attraction of such loans has not been diminished by the fact that owing to inflation and the health of the fishing >n' dustries, most vessels are worth substantially motC today than they were the day they were built.
The historical parent of the western fishing industry is salmon canning, which began on the Sacrament0 River in 1864. Over the years, salmon has provide^ the financial stability on which many of the othct segments of western fishing fleets were built and carri°“ through the early exploratory and experimental ye3fS'
The Tuna Fleet ^
But now the most impressive element of the s$c'[ Coast fishing fleet is that devoted to catching the tun3 The U. S. high-seas tuna fleet is the envy of the wof^ U. S. tuna fishermen can land a ton of yellowfin °f skipjack cheaper than the fishermen of any nation ^ the world, and they can do so while earning annu}1 salaries ranging from $30,000 per year for crew me01 bers to over $150,000 a year for skippers and key men1' bers of the crew.
Yet, not too long ago, in the 1950s, the U. S. tUIlJ fleet was in trouble. Tuna imported from Japan ^ destroying the market for fish caught by the Amerio:l1’ clippers, the U. S. fleet was deteriorating because returns from fishing did not permit the building 0
new vessels, and young men could not be recruited into the fleet. It was a classic example of a dying industry.
At the time, the U. S. fleet was fishing with live bait—a hook-and-line method which required a large number of crew members and produced a low catch- per-man. It was the same method used by the Japanese, but the lower labor costs permitted the Japanese vessel owner to realize a reasonable return on his investment.
Late in the fifties, the U. S. fleet combined the durability of a nylon net and an invention of a Yugoslavian-American fisherman with the fish-finding ability of San Diego and San Pedro fishermen. What they produced was the most efficient tuna-catching machine the world knows: a U. S. tuna purse seiner.
To produce this seiner, the U. S. tuna fishermen made what can only be described as high-risk investments in gear and vessel modifications. The financing came from the canneries, but the fishermen went into debt up to their eyebrows, putting boats, homes, and any other assets they had on the line.
Fortunately, their skill, ingenuity, and daring paid off handsomely. Their purse seine techniques are now being copied by every tuna-fishing nation in the world, but the U. S. fleet, with its twenty-year advantage in skill, can still outfish and outproduce the competition.
A tuna seiner is a $3 million investment and a highly complex piece of machinery. If she is new she is likely to be over 200 feet long, with a crew of 16 to 20 men. Such a boat is primarily a fish-catching machine designed to carry, set, and retrieve a nylon net 600 fathoms long, 50 to 80 fathoms deep, and weighing in the neighborhood of 30 tons. The net alone is worth over $100,000.
With such a net, U. S. tuna fishermen regularly catch up to 200 tons of fish per set, and the recent record »s 350 tons. Tuna are delicate creatures, and if they die in the net, they sink, taking the net with them. Therefore, the process of getting the fish out of the net alive ls almost as difficult as catching them in the first place.
The net is manipulated with hydraulic winches, and retrieved with a group of specialized winches designed and built specifically for the tuna seiners. When the tuna have been surrounded by the net and the major portion of the net returned to the deck of the seiner, they are lifted from a pocket of webbing beside the fishing vessel. The pocket is called a bunt, and the process of removing the fish from the net to the vessel ls called brailing. A brail is a huge dip net handled from a special brailing boom that extends out over the renter of the bunt. The fish are lifted from the net and placed in a hopper aboard the vessel and distributed trough a system of flumes to the various cargo wells. Each well is refrigerated to hold the product at roughly
—10° F., and the salt brine refrigerant is often used to carry the fish in the flumes.
Most tuna have a body temperature of roughly 80° F., so the refrigeration system aboard a tuna seiner must have the capacity to remove the heat from a hot product coming aboard in large quantities. Thus, in addition to being a highly specialized fishing vessel, a seiner is also a very efficient cold storage plant.
The main source of power for a tuna seiner is a 3,000 to 4,000 horsepower diesel turning at speeds up to 900 revolutions per minute. Auxiliary power is usually made by three 300 kilowatt electric sets, with one unit serving as a standby for both electric and hydraulic power. Primary hydraulic power is supplied by either a series of electric motors or a diesel hydraulic set. Often the seine winch, the primary piece of fishing machinery, is independently driven either with a separate diesel or electrically powered hydraulic system, or by a diesel which drives the winch directly through a torque converter.
All of the tuna seiners built since 1970 or so have been equipped with bow thrusters. With the exception of two or three, tuna seiners are single screw vessels with a cruising speed ranging from 12 to 16 knots—the majority falling in the 14 to 15 knot range. All are equipped with the latest in radio and electronic gear, including Omega navigation systems and Weather Fax machines.
These vessels fish off the coast of Central America and northern South America as well as off the equatorial coast of Africa. Some boats are even considering going as far as Australia. It is conceivable that a seiner could run back and forth over the grounds constantly for 60 days during a trip, but always within a fairly limited area, say 200 miles wide and 500 miles long. The bait boats fished the same area in the Pacific, but didn’t go, as a rule, into the Atlantic, although one or two made exploratory ventures into that area, too.
Since 1965, new tuna seiners have been built at a rate of eight to 12 a year, and those yards which specialize in the big fishing vessels are turning them out at capacity rates, with 18-month backlogs.
They are owned by canneries, private individuals, groups of individuals, or by families. The only publicly held fishing-vessel-operating company in the United States, Ocean Fisheries, Inc., owns 12 tuna seiners which are managed from the firm’s offices in San Diego.
Interestingly enough, Ocean Fisheries, Inc., was put together by a group comprised primarily of owners and part owners of single vessels. They have reduced their risk by spreading their fishing vessel investment over several boats.
Although there are many independent tuna vessels,
the majority of the tuna fleet is committed in one way or another to a cannery. The major tuna canneries, Star-Kist, Van Camp, Westgate, Del Monte, Bumble Bee, and Pan Pacific Fisheries, are anxious to own part or all of the vessels in the fleets serving them to protect their source of raw material.
Recently, Zapata Corporation of Houston, Texas, purchased seven tuna seiners which it will operate under a marketing contract with Van Camp. The move is interesting because it appears to be the first time that a firm outside of the industry has made an investment in the fish-producing segment of the industry. The profit potential of a modern tuna seiner is not being overlooked by corporate investors.
The Salmon Fleet
On the surface, the salmon fishing fleets would appear to be the least efficient of all those on the West Coast, but the inefficiency, if indeed it can be called that, has been forced by federal and later by state regulations.
Alaskan fishing regulations forbid the use of a boat
longer than 32 feet overall to harvest the rich Bristol Bay red salmon runs, and it was not until 1951 that the federal government permitted fishermen in that large southeastern corner of the Bering Sea to operate I powered vessels. Thus, the salmon industry went into the second half of the twentieth century saddled with [ federal regulations which forced it to harvest the larges' single salmon-producing area in the world from sailboats.
Alaska’s state regulations, and prior to statehood | federal regulations, also limit the size of vessels which can be used to seine for salmon to a 58-foot length overall. This regulation was imposed to protect Alaska from competition with larger boats from out of state" notably the Washington-based salmon fleet. Of course, it also prevented Alaskan residents from building boats that were large enough to operate in the winter crab and shrimp fisheries as they developed during the pas' ten years. (The 32-foot limit applies only to gillnetters, rather than seiners. Seiners may not fish Bristol Bay)
Alaska’s salmon regulations, while extreme, are consistent with salmon regulations promulgated by Washington and Oregon. All three states are almost as concerned with assuring that as many fishermen as possible can participate in the fishery as they are with managing the fish themselves. j
Thus, the regulations are written to solve social problems rather than to create an efficient fish producing industry.
It would not be true, however, to classify the salmon j seiners and gillnetters used in Alaska, Washington, an Oregon as inefficient. They are, indeed, remarkabb suited for the type of near-shore fishing operations '° j which U. S. fishermen are restricted. Furthermore, 'bc I regulations which restrict U. S. salmon fishing to ‘n
The Present and Future of the West Coast Fishing Industries 195
shore waters are proper for good fisheries management.
Salmon from all of the river systems on the West Coast of the United States and from the Asian coast intermingle on the high seas, and it is only when the various races approach the river systems in which they spawn that they are segregated. Salmon fishing on the high seas cannot be managed because the fishing gear takes from all races indiscriminately. Fishing in inshore waters, however, can be managed and manipulated to take only from those runs which are abundant, leaving weak runs, or endangered runs to return to their spawning grounds without being molested.
Thus, the salmon regulations have created, not an inefficient salmon fleet, but one that is so specialized it is inefficient in any other fishery. A fully equipped Alaska gillnetter costs from $20,000 upward, while an equipped seiner costs over $175,000, and the vessels can be used productively for a month or two each year at most. During some years, the season can only be measured in hours. Despite these restrictions, the U. S. salmon fleet can deliver a pound of fish cheaper than any other salmon fleet in the world.
The State of Alaska, and to a lesser extent, the states °f Washington and Oregon, are now struggling with legislation and regulations which would limit entry to [he fishing industry. As in the past, however, such political activity is bogged down in social problems. While there is no question that some means of limiting entry will eventually apply to all forms of fishing in ffie Northwest, the rules will not be established without long, and undoubtedly painful, discussions between mdustry and government agencies.
The King Crab Fleet
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the Western world discovered the Alaska king crab. The discovery involved overcoming certain technological problems involved in getting the meat out of the shell during processing and marketing a new product. When the problems were solved, the demand for Alaska king crab burst °n the industry and the fleet like a bomb. At that time there was no king crab fleet. The huge "limit- seiner” fleet was composed of boats too small to survive m the North Pacific and Bering Sea during the winter fishing season, so those boats lay idle as herring seiners fit°m San Pedro, power scows, converted lightships, World War II minesweepers, and anything else seaworthy—and some not so seaworthy—were converted t0 crab vessels.
The burgeoning crab fleet prospered because it was n°t restricted by artificial limits as is the salmon fleet, though some early attempts were made to limit the
amount of gear a king crabber could fish. By 1965, new vessels were being built specifically for the king crab industry. More importantly, the new boats are making money and are being paid for in from three to five years.
A modern king crab fishing vessel costs from $400,000 to $600,000 ready to fish. These boats range in size from 85 to 110 feet, single or twin screw, with primary propulsion power consisting of a diesel engine or two delivering between 800 and 900 horsepower.
They are rugged vessels capable of surviving in the winter weather of the Bering Sea and North Pacific where crab are found. Because of their seaworthiness, they are known as "tough” vessels that provide a stable fishing platform from which the fishing gear is set and retrieved in all but the most severe weather. A crab vessel is designed to carry 50,000 to 70,000 cubic feet of sea water in tanks which hold the catch alive, and may also carry up to 100 pots, weighing 350 pounds each, on deck. Icing is always a problem, so the standing rigging is kept to a minimum by using tripod masts (which have only three legs for ice to coat instead of the seven or more stays a pole mast would have), and the house is kept low to minimize windage problems as the crabber works up to the pot buoy.
All deck equipment is hydraulic and on the newer vessels includes an articulated boom used for shifting pots on deck. The pot is lifted from the water with a specially designed "pot puller” which is a hydraulically operated sheave mounted on a davit and hung over the side of the vessel. The pot puller is used to lift the gear from the ocean bottom, which may be from 50 to 150 fathoms distant, until the bridle of the pot breaks the surface. A hook suspended from the pot boom is then inserted in the bridle, and the pot is lifted aboard with a boom-mounted hydraulic winch. The pot boom is vanged with a hydraulic ram, and the topping lift is another hydraulic winch. On deck the pot is placed in a rack while the catch is removed and the bait replenished, then the rack is lifted with one or two hydraulic rams, and the pot slides over the bulwark to be reset.
With the aid of hydraulic equipment, a deck crew of three or four men can service from 15 to 18 pots an hour, depending on the depth of the water in which the pots are set. It is tiring work, however, and most crabbers have one more man in the crew than is necessary to allow for a rotation system which permits each man to take every third or fourth month off.
Crabbers fish the continental shelf which extends from 60 miles or so in the Gulf of Alaska to over 500 miles in the Bering Sea. Crab pots are buoyed, and are usually set on loran readings so they can be easily found in a day or two. The buoys must carry
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the name and identification number of the vessel setting them. Home port for a crabber may be anywhere from Newport, Oregon, to Adak, Alaska. They work about ten months of the year, although they may spend some of that time on shrimp, or as a salmon tender. The crab areas vary throughout the year as quotas are taken from each area, and as the crab become marketable after molting.
When not working, crab vessel crews live in modern, comfortable quarters. Two-man staterooms are the rule, with some of the larger vessels having individual staterooms for each man. There is enough electric power
aboard the vessels to generate heat, and they hjvC electric galley ranges, dish washers, clothes washers ^ dryers, and, in some boats, barbecue grills.
Despite the amenities, though, and the pay—a ere*" man on a good crabber can earn $30,000 or more Pet year—crabbing is a young man’s game, and most G& vessel crewmen are in their twenties and thirties, wi^. the older skippers generally retiring to a position 0 managing owner after the boat has been paid for.
Many of the men in the crab fleet come from ^ Norwegian community, but by no means a majonO of them. Most come from fishing families, of courtc’
The Present and Future of the West Coast Fishing Industries 197
but the fleet also draws from the general labor pool available in the Northwest. Good workers are always hard to get; good workers who are willing to put up with the hardships of crabbing are harder to get. But a good fisherman can usually earn twice, at least, what he could get ashore. There are probably about 200 boats in the full-time crab fleet, with five crewmen per boat, assuming one on rotation at all times.
In the past few years, fleet operations have become popular with crab boat owners. Several owners will get together and pool their vessels with each man owning a fraction of each vessel. The risk of ownership is then spread among several vessels, and the loss of one does not put any one man out of business. Each vessel is, of course, incorporated so that liabilities against one vessel cannot be attached to the others.
Tax laws also make it attractive for fishing vessel pools, and even for individual owners, to build more vessels as the money becomes available. In this way, the fleet is continually rebuilt and enlarged.
A fringe benefit of the health of the crab business since the early 1960s has been the ready supply of big, capable fishing vessels to exploit newly discovered, or newly profitable resources. (Until then crabbers were conversions. Some conversions still working are over 60 years old.) Thus, when the shrimp resource near Kodiak became profitable to fish, many crabbers were able to move into that area of fishing with only minor modifications.
Fishing vessels in the Northwest have always been versatile, and before the Alaska limit law went into effect, a class of vessel called the "West Coast Combination Vessel” was developed and built. These 60 to 80-foot boats, unlike traditional East Coast fishing vessels, had their deck houses forward and their working spaces aft, hence, they were equally suited as seiners, longliners, trawlers, or crabbers, and many saw service in all four areas during the course of a year.
The big crabbers are following in that tradition with many operating in the shrimp fishery and serving as salmon tenders during that season, which varies from area to area and species to species. (A salmon tender is a vessel used to carry the catch from the fleet on the fishing grounds to the cannery, which may be up to a hundred miles distant.)
Until recently, the return from trawling in the North Pacific and Bearing Sea was so slight that it discouraged the entry of new boats. To be sure, there have been bottom trawlers operating from Seattle and other West Coast ports for many years, but it wasn’t until 1969 and 1970 that those vessels could sell all they could land. Generally these boats vary between 65 and 100 feet in length and have a crew of three.
Restrictions put on trawlers both by buyers (for
economic reasons) and federal and state regulations kept the fleet from growing. Some, but not all, of the government restrictions were lifted when the foreign fleets arrived off the Pacific Coast, and it became obvious that Soviet and Japanese vessels fishing alongside U. S. vessels were not hindered by U. S. laws. A hungry world, and a decrease in the bottomfish landings from the Atlantic took care of the buyers’ reluctance to take all that the trawlers could catch.
Now, U. S. fishing companies are gearing up to place floating processing plants in the Bering Sea to exploit the rich Alaska pollock resource. Given the market for the fish and the availability of the resource, the fishermen will produce.
The Halibut Fleet
A favorite target for those who would describe the character of the U. S. fishing fleet as old and decrepit is the North Pacific halibut fleet, mainly homeported in Seattle. Most of the vessels fishing for halibut are, indeed, old timers, built in the 1920s. The majority of them are two-masted schooners, long, narrow, and deep, with auxiliary power, though the "newer” ones have more power and less sail. Many have been rebuilt and provided with more powerful engines. They vary in length between 75 and 95 feet, and their crews vary from nine to 15 men, depending on the skipper and whether he fishes 24 hours a day. The men who fish them are generally a generation older than their counterparts in the crab fleet.
The halibut fleet works, roughly, on the continental shelf from the Strait of Juan de Fuca northward to about Dutch Harbor in the Aleutian chain. In the Bering Sea, they work the flats between the Alaska Peninsula and the Pribilof Islands, and along the 100 fathom curve northward and westward to Cape Navarin in Siberia.
The vessels of the fleet are called longliners, and the fishing is done with a series of hooks, baited and set by hand, a form of fishing that hasn’t changed since 1923 when the technology of halibut longlining had reached its most sophisticated level. The reason it hasn’t changed is because the International Pacific Halibut Commission, a treaty-based organization established by the United States and Canada in that year, set fishing regulations which stand to this day, and do not permit U. S. and Canadian fishermen to change their method of fishing.
North Pacific halibut fishing regulations are based on sound biological and scientific principles, and between 1923 and 1963 they raised the annual yield from 40 million to 75 million pounds.
But, the regulations also cast the North American halibut fleets in a mold from which they could not break legally, and forced them to compete, using antiquated methods, with foreign fleets that, despite U. S. State Department assurances to the contrary, do not observe the conservation rules.
The Coast Guard is responsible for enforcing U. S. fishing regulations where they have jurisdiction. For example, they can seize a Japanese vessel fishing illegally within our 12-mile fisheries zone, or fishing illegally for salmon east of 175° W. longitude. But the Coast Guard cannot touch a Japanese vessel fishing outside of 12 miles, even though that vessel may be taking halibut illegally. The Coast Guard would have to know ahead of time that there was halibut aboard the Japanese vessel, and would have to be able to prove that that halibut was taken in the Eastern North Pacific and Bering Sea. The Coast Guard does an excellent job within its financial and material limitations. It, in fact, provides the evidence needed to apply the punitive legislation provided by the Congress, but often the executive branch of the government has not seen fit to carry the action through.
U. S. and Canadian fishermen compete on the high seas with Japanese trawl fleets which sweep the ocean floors, taking halibut of a size, and with methods, which are illegal to U. S. fishermen.
The result has been a sudden and drastic decrease in the number of halibut available to U. S. fishermen, and the conservation program of the International Pacific Halibut Commission has been set back at least 50 years.
The decline in North Pacific halibut stocks is cer-
tainly not the fault of the fishermen who must obey the laws of the United States, nor of the commission which is one of the few fisheries managment groups in the world to have rebuilt a dying resource. Neither is it the fault of the Japanese fishermen who are simply taking advantage of a situation. The decline is the result of the failure of U. S. diplomacy (whose practioners appear to view the American fisheries as expendable) when it is dealing with fisheries matters.
There are several pieces of legislation which would stop the Japanese fishing effort on halibut in the eastern North Pacific and Bering Sea. The Black Bass Act and the Fishermen’s Protective Act of 1967 are but two of the laws which can be used to force foreign fishermen to abide by U. S. and international conservation regulations, but these laws have never been applied.
The fishermen are well aware of the bankruptcy of the U. S. policy toward halibut, and this has discouraged young, aggressive men from entering that fishery- The sons of halibut fishermen go into crab, salmon, medicine, law, or the National Marine Fisheries Service, anything but the halibut industry.
The Combination Fleet
The combination salmon, albacore, Dungeness crab fleet on the Pacific coast is made up of small boats, generally under 80 feet in length, but the price tag on these vessels is not small—$200 thousand and up- These vessels are used to fish for salmon in the spring and early summer, then shift over to albacore in mid' July, August, and September, and go into Dungeness
Flood Tide, top left, is a 104-foot king crabber, about the average size of new vessels being built for that fleet. She is powered by an 850 horsepower diesel which permits her to be converted to trawling if the economics warrant it. Photo at left shows a crab pot after being lifted from the depths with its catch. A king crabber will carry up to 100 such pots on deck. The Supreme, above, is an old drum seiner, dead in the water with her net partly recovered. The salmon fishing industry is severely regulated by state and federal regulations and endangered by unregulated foreign fishing on the high seas.
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crab, local shrimp, bottomfish, or any of several minor fisheries during the winter.
Although during the course of the year the boat may range from southeastern Alaska to Baja, California, she is never far from a buying station. Nor does she have to be. The fishing grounds are on the continental shelf adjacent to Washington, Oregon, California, and Alaska, sometimes practically on the beach, never more than 150 miles off shore, and the processors and buyers have arranged their plants so that few are more than 20 hours from the grounds, even for an eight-knot boat.
Many of these vessels are "mom and pop” operations with a husband and wife sharing the responsibilities equally. Quite a number of the fishermen in this class are reformed or retired land workers from all levels of the shoreside economy, and the coastal albacore, crab, and salmon fishery provides not only a chance to work on the ocean but also a good income.
One would think, of course, that such artisanal fishing efforts would foster inefficiency and high prices, but for many years the price of albacore caught by U. S. fishermen has been at least $200 a ton less than that caught by Japanese fishermen, and the Japanese are now buying salmon in large quantities from U. S. fishermen.
Making and Breaking the Rules
U. S. fishermen are more than able to compete with foreign fishermen when they are not handicapped by U. S. regulations. It is significant, perhaps, that the two healthiest segments of the western industry, crab and tuna, are also the least regulated.
There are no perfect fisheries regulations. No one realizes this better than those responsible for establishing and enforcing them.
Regulations are imposed to protect stocks of fish from over exploitation and, thus, ultimate extinction. They take two forms: those that restrict the amounts of fish that can be taken, and those that restrict the types of gear that can be used.
Of the two, catch restrictions are preferable because they allow the fisherman to improve his methods and maximize the efficiency of his operation. Catch restrictions can almost always be justified on biological grounds.
Gear restrictions force all fishermen to operate at an established level of efficiency; generally that level is low. Gear restrictions are difficult to justify from a biological standpoint, and are almost always applied for political reasons.
There are exceptions. The North Pacific halibut fishery is working under gear restrictions that force the
use of individually baited hooks and lines. Trawling for halibut is much more efficient, but trawling is als° non-selective because it takes, and usually kills, all sizes of halibut from sub-legal to mature. Longlining f°r halibut is extremely selective; the baited hooks take predominantly large, mature, and legal fish. By restrict' ing the gear to longlines, the International Pacific Halibut Commission rebuilt a dying resource.
Now, the resource is again dying because Japanese fishermen are not obliged to observe the regulations which apply only to U. S. and Canadian fishermen.
The most efficient way to catch a salmon is with a trap placed in a strategic spot along the salmon’s path Yet, salmon traps are illegal because a few trap owners can dominate the fishery and exclude all others. Interestingly, traps were probably used by Indians to take salmon long before white men appeared on the Pacific Coast.
The efficiency of the U. S. and Canadian salmon gillnet and seine fleets is awesome. It is probable that the combined salmon fleets could take every fish of every run between Nome and San Francisco if the}' fished without restrictions. It is for this reason that the U. S. salmon fleet may be the most restricted fishing fleet in the world. Regulations dictate the size of the vessel, the length and construction of the gear, the size of the mesh in the nets, and the times and places where fishing is permitted. Sometimes the salmon "season lasts less than 24 hours. Still, with all of these restrictions, the U. S. salmon fisherman can sell his fish f°r less than his Japanese counterpart fishing without gear or vessel restrictions on the high seas.
Under the International North Pacific Fisheries Treaty, signed by Japan, Canada, and the United States
in 1954, the Japanese agreed not to fish for salmon west of 175° W. longitude. When the treaty was signed, it was thought that the abstention line at 175° W. would protect all U. S. salmon runs, but it was later discovered that Bristol Bay red salmon crossed the line during their ocean migration.
Japanese fishing fleets operating just west of the abstention line regularly take an average of 20 per cent of the Bristol Bay salmon catch, and in some years take almost half the catch. According to U. S. scientists who have studied the problem, approximately 40 per cent of all the salmon caught in high seas gillnets drop out of the net dead before they can be landed on the deck of the fishing vessel.
U. S. tuna fishermen working in the eastern tropical Pacific are bound by regulations established by the Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission. The IATTC sots quotas for their regulatory area which extends roughly from San Francisco to the Chilean-Peruvian border and seaward 1,000 miles. The quota in 1973 was 160,000 tons, and that year the U. S. fleet was allowed to fish without restrictions only for the first three months.
Foreign tuna fleets, by virtue of special allotments or because they choose to ignore the IATTC regulations, or are not obligated to do so, fish without restriction 12 months of the year. Nowadays there are many such fleets, belonging to Japan, South Korea, Canada, Mex-
Kathleen, left, from Tacoma, Washington, is a steel albacore and salmon troller completed in 1973. She is operated by a husband and wife team, and roams from Alaska to Baja California. Mar-Gun, above, from Seattle, is a trawler delivered in 1970. When built she was 86 feet long but later was lengthened to 110 feet, which gives her a cargo capacity of 175 tons. She can store two complete trawls on her reels, aft. All her fishing machinery is hydraulically powered.
ico, Costa Rica, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Panama, Cuba, and even Spain.
Two new U. S.-owned tuna seiners delivered in 1973 were registered in foreign countries where they will not be bound by IATTC regulations. Foreign vessel owners are wooing U. S. tuna skippers and engineers by pointing out that if the Americans operate foreign vessels they will be able to fish in the eastern tropical Pacific year round without restrictions.
Fishing regulations are necessary if we are to use the wealth of the seas wisely. But restrictions and regulations must apply to fleets of all nations equally.
The hungry nations of South America do not appreciate the value of conservation regulations, but perhaps the recent collapse of the anchovy resource in Peru will
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U. S. Naval Institute Proceedings, Naval Review 1974
awaken them to the value of fisheries management.
Japan’s aggressive high seas fishing fleets have never been impressed with the value of fisheries management either and practice what is called "pulse fishing.” Pulse fishing is practiced by most high seas fishing nations— Japan, Russia, Spain, East Germany, Poland, and Great Britain. It can be justified by the scientists of those nations who point out that it is reasonable for a high seas fleet which demands tremendous production levels to fish intensively in an area until the returns reach a point which do not justify further fishing. The fleet then withdraws for one year, two years, or ten years, depending on how long it takes the stocks to recover from the fishing pressure. Theoretically, the stocks of fish replenish themselves when relieved of heavy fishing pressure. Perhaps the rationale for pulse fishing is valid, but the technique places a tremendous hardship on coastal states which depend on continuing resources for their livelihood.
U. S. fishermen on the West Coast are not being outfished by foreign competition, they are simply operating under a different set of rules, rules which are eminently valid in most cases, but which put them at a disadvantage when competing with foreign fleets. Despite this disadvantage, however, the U. S. fishermen are holding their own on the grounds and in the market place.
Most West Coast fishermen do not favor the 200-mile limit that finds favor in New England. Rather, they support the three-species approach as set forth by the U. S. negotiating team at the spring, 1973, preparatory meeting for the Law of the Sea Convention. The three-species approach would establish separate management procedures for pelagic fish which swim freely throughout the oceans, continental shelf fish which remain within fairly fixed limits on the continental shelf and slope, and anadromous fish which roam the ocean but return to a fresh water stream to spawn.
The three-species approach offers the opportunity to manage the resources using sound biological principles, whereas the 200-mile limit is simply a geographical description which may or may not be usable to manage a fishery resource. For example, the 200-mile limit off the west coast of South America is useless as a tool for managing the yellowfin resource since the fish are within those limits for only a portion of the year.
Generally, Western fishermen are aware of the value of fisheries management programs. They have grown up with such programs, and have lived with them through the experimental stages when fishery scientists were struggling to gain the knowledge and skills necessary to manage a fishery resource. The fishermen have profited from the successes of the programs, and have shown remarkable restraint when faced with failures.
They are understandably frustrated, therefore, when they see foreign crab, tuna, and salmon fishermen fishing in areas, at times, and with gear, that are illegal for U. S. fishermen, and their feelings are further aroused because they realize the foreign efforts are often emasculating U. S. management efforts, and the U. S. fleet will be asked to sacrifice their catch to assure the survival of the resource.
Disaster Bureaucratic Style
The National Marine Fisheries Service attempted to the late 1960s to prove that factory trawlers, such a* those operated by other fishing nations, would make U. S. fishermen "more competitive.” But the solution to the Western fishermen’s problems with foreign fleets lies, not through bigger fishing vessels, but through diplomacy.
In any event, the government’s interest resulted in two subsidized 296-foot stern trawlers, the Seafireez1 Pacific and Seafireeze Atlantic. The vessels were built a( a cost of more than $10 million, half of which v*5 provided by the U. S. government, they were built ovef the protests of the U. S. industry which realized the futility of the project, and they were managed by 3 firm which knew nothing of the fishing industry and though it is axiomatic in the fishing industry that ne"' vessels are built for particular skippers, whether the skipper owns all or only a portion of the vessel, hat* not even selected captains for the vessels when the) were built.
The Seafireeze Pacific and the Seafireeze Atlantic failures from the day they were delivered. In the case of the Seafireeze Pacific, the only one of the pair to enter the Pacific, the costs of operating a combined floating processing and fishing operation were simply too gre3C Skilled fishermen would not work for the salarteS offered because they could make more working °n smaller, more efficient two, three, and four-man boats
On a West Coast fishing boat, everyone is a fishet' man, including cook, captain, and engineer. Evcry°nC works when there is work to do, and everyone svofk5 on a share basis. On the Seafireeze vessels, there ^ three crews, one to operate the ship, one to fish, 311 one to process. The total ran to about 60 men, all or‘ salaries.
The size of a net towed by a trawler does not incrc3>c proportionately with the size or horsepower of ^ vessel. Thus, the 65-foot Georgene, fishing in compe!1 tion with the 296-foot Seafireeze Pacific, was towing^ net with a 90-foot groundline, while the Seafireeze to^'e a net with a 120-foot groundline. To be sure, opening of the net is a square factor, and the size 0
The Present and Future of the West Coast Fishing Industries 203
the net is a cubic factor, so the Seafreeze's net was substantially larger than that of the Georgene. But the Georgene was operating with a total crew of three and delivering her catch to a plant no more than 20 hours from the fishing grounds. The Georgene regularly delivers over two million pounds of fish per year. To compete on a catch-per-man basis, Seafreeze Pacific would have had to land approximately 40 million pounds of marketable fish per year. She didn’t and, perhaps, never could.
Foreign nations are forced to put factory ships on the grounds because they are fishing 3,000 miles from port off the coast of the United States. Foreign wages are lower, and foreign manning requirements are less than those in the United States, but even so, U. S. trawl fishermen working out of West Coast ports land more fish per man than their foreign competition.
Plants ashore are substantially cheaper to operate than floating plants, and competition from such processors who need not either feed or house their employees, nor maintain a huge piece of floating machinery, made the processing aspects of the Seafreeze Pacific as uneconomical as the fishing operation.
Recently the Seafreeze Pacific was sold to Pan Alaska Fisheries, Inc., for $800,000, less than 20 per cent of her cost only five years ago. After extensive modification, because Pan Alaska felt she was not adequate even when new, she will be placed in a harbor on the Bering Sea and serve as a processing plant only.
Pan Alaska, of course, has the skill and management ability to operate a fish processing plant, something neither the NMFS nor the original owners of the Seafreeze had. Even with these abilities, the operation will be a gamble, but it will be an $800,000 gamble, not a $5.6 million gamble.
In summary, the Western fishermen do not want or need technological help. Their current methods of fishing and handling fish are as efficient as is possible within the framework of the regulations they must follow. Their high level of efficiency is the result of industry-developed practices and innovations. Government aid at the federal and state level has been primarily concerned with fisheries management, and the agencies concerned have contributed greatly to the industry through these programs.
The U. S. Coast Guard does a remarkable job of patrolling the West Coast in the areas where foreign fleets operate. Those areas stretch from San Francisco to Kodiak, and on to Adak and include all of the eastern Bering Sea. It is a huge expanse of ocean, most of the year the weather is miserable, and the Coast Guard’s surveillance ships and airplanes are spread very, very thinly.
Still, they do seize vessels for fishing illegally, but the token fine imposed upon the guilty foreign vessel and captain is not enough to discourage a continuation of illegal fishing. Because of treaty arrangements, Japanese vessels violating salmon regulations established by the International North Pacific Fisheries Treaty are tried in Japan. The most recent fine imposed on a Japanese vessel caught fishing salmon illegally in the Gulf of Alaska was a license suspension of three months and $190. In contrast, a Seattle-based salmon fisherman caught in a similar violation in Alaskan waters would probably have his Alaska commercial license revoked and never again could he fish salmon in Alaskan waters.
Federal legislation exists which would solve many of the Western fisherman’s political problems, but because of other diplomatic considerations, laws such as the Black Bass Act and the Fishermen’s Protective Act are not applied.
Until fishermen have some assurance that legislation passed in their behalf will be used, they will continue to have little confidence in the candor of the political and bureaucratic leadership.
The West Coast resources are still relatively healthy when compared with the disaster in the Atlantic, but eventually continued uncontrolled fishing by foreign fleets will deplete the Pacific as it depleted the Atlantic.
We cannot hope that the Law of the Sea Conference will settle the problem, because the decisions made at that conference cannot possibly be applied in time.
The West Coast fishermen need only courageous political leaders who will apply existing laws to protect one of our most valuable renewable resources.
An Absence of Candor and Confidence
The weakness of the Western fisheries, and of national fishing in general, lies at the political level. Not many people and not much money are engaged, and the political clout they wield is proportional to their
size.