Alaskan Halibut By-Catch

searun

Well-Known Member
Here's a rather interesting article outlining the significant by-catch in the Alaskan trawl fishery which is a dirty fishery....and the awakening taking place in AK. There's more by-catch getting tossed overboard by this dirty trawl fishery than we have in TAC - the AK fixed by-catch cap is 7.73 million pounds.

Sickening waste. No wonder we are having difficulty getting juvenile halibut recruitment to improve!!

https://www.adn.com/business-econom...or-changes-to-how-managers-deal-with-bycatch/
 
That’s just the big boats in the bearing. They have no accurate account of mortalities for any of the fisheries that encounter halibut. Pcod fishery. Gulf of Alaska trawl. All a free for all.
 
I would hope Canada will be Hard on this at the IPHC meeting this year... that dirty fishery has already had more then a couple years to clean up .. :(
 
as the Alaska are pushing Canada hard the last couple years and its believed they will this year again.. perhaps its time to come out the gate swing...
 
I read the notes for the last few years it gets brought up every year but Alaska is very powerful. They point the finger back at Canada for its poor estimates of the recreational fishing sector. Even with the help from Washington and Oregon State, Alaska tends to do whatever they want.

Even If canada votes against them all that happens is everything stalls and goes to the way it was the previous year.
 
I attendant the meeting In Alaska 4 or 5 years ago.. there own ground line fleet was going after the trawl fleet. So there is a bunch of Alaskan that were getting tired of it and i'm sure still are... Not sure why anyone would allow such a dirty fishery that impacts all would be allowed to be out there.... As for the rec numbers.. I believe are numbers are still way more accurate then the Alaskan data but for the guides out there that still refuse to do log books... this is one of the reason for u to do so... just saying
 
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Some rather important differences between Canadian and Alaskan fisheries to point-out:
1/ In Canada (verses AK) - each and every commercial groundfish vessel has electronic monitoring at sea - and dockside at offload. Sporties don't - as pointed out by the Alaskans.
2/ Whatever TAC/quota is allowed and/or mismanaged in AK - the biomass estimates and the TAC generated for Canada is in a different area managed separately than the AK fishery. In other words - what they do or don't - doesn't affect us in our area as halibut don't travel like salmon - from Alaska down through our area to Oregon/Washington
iphc-regulatory-area.jpg
 
Actually halibut do migrate along the west coast, and a number of IPHC studies have been completed to determine the degree to which over-fishing in Canada for example, might impact the halibut recruitment to AK. Thus the focus on ensuring halibut are properly managed in all management areas along the pacific coast. So what AK does to contribute to discard morts does indeed impact Canada, and we should therefore be paying close attention demanding a more responsible approach. Canada's catch monitoring in all fisheries is far superior to the US counterparts in AK.

As Canada moves to electronic catch reporting for recreational (Minister signed off on it), we will ultimately have a far more robust catch reporting data base than other jurisdictions...although, accuracy of this approach is reliant upon fishers accurately recording catch. We still therefore will require fisher-independent catch monitoring such as creel, log books, and over-flight observations...IMO.

Here's a clip from the IPHC site:

"Based on 2,620 tag returns, it was suggested that as much as 2/3 of spawning stock that is resident in Canadian waters during the summer should be expected to move to Alaskan waters during the winter and be vulnerable to out-of-area interception. However, it was cautioned that the results could be subject to spatial biases in tag recovery rate and that the estimates derived from the analyses should not be considered sufficiently precise to estimate the impacts of intercepting seasonally-migratory fish."
 
I would hope Canada will be Hard on this at the IPHC meeting this year... that dirty fishery has already had more then a couple years to clean up .. :(
In my years on the Halibut Advisory Board back in the 1990's and my years as part of the IPHC meetings , AK by catch was always a huge contentious issue. It's going to take a lot more than Canada can do to stop it.
 
Thanks searun I always appreciate your factual & informative posts. I always thought the North-South migration by halibut was minor - while the East-West (deeper-shallower) seasonal migrations were the more important migratory patterns. 2/3 of resident spawning stock in Canadian waters - seems like a large number. Was that 2/3 of the stocks in Canada near the 2B/2C boundary?
 
It's pretty interesting stuff. I always thought our hali stuck around and if Canada did a good job managing we should just forget about what the AK guys were up to, but someone challenged that thinking and I started reading up more on it. Here's a link to the IPHC website, which has a lot of research info on migration. A lot of variation in patterns and distances depending on which stage the critters are in their life cycle. A great deal of migration at larval stage from the nursery grounds in AK. Juvenile recruitment is an interesting one for Canada, because as they grow in size there appears to be less migration. That relationship isn't completely solid from what I see in the research, but does suggest that if Canada manages our fishery carefully we would experience greater benefits from older age classes that tend to stick around until spawning where the larger fish migrate in winter months - often into AK waters. The bottom line for us is everyone along the coast has to work together as there is a degree of inter-connectivity even in areas and stocks that appear to not move around too much at certain periods of their life cycle. I wish we didn't have to depend so much on the AK guys to do the right thing, but it certainly appears divorce ain't an option when it comes to cross border migration etc.

Which is a long way around to saying the way AK deals with by-catch is a real **** off.

https://iphc.int/search-results?q=halibut migration
 
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