OPINION: Loopholes allow some trawlers to drag bottom, harming Alaska fisheries

Most people would agree: a bottom trawler is a trawler that drags the ocean bottom.

Apparently, to those who make the rules, it’s more complicated than that.

Trawlers that drag the bottom between 40% and 100% of the time, depending on vessel type, are currently allowed to trawl in sensitive areas closed, for conservation, to both bottom trawlers and directed fishermen such as crabbers. In the process, these trawlers destroy the ocean floor, molting crab, and the slow-growing cold-water coral habitat essential for healthy ocean ecosystems, halibut populations and crab populations.

The hangup? The North Pacific Fishery Management Council, which is tasked with regulating trawlers and their impact on communities but whose voting members are mostly trawl industry representatives, does not define bottom-dragging trawlers as trawlers that drag the bottom. Instead, these particular trawlers are defined as midwater, or “pelagic” trawlers, since while their net may drag bottom, the mouth of their nets hovers above the ocean floor.

A recent study has made clear that so-called “midwater” trawlers’ football field-length nets, weighed down with thousands of pounds of target species and bycatch, drag the ocean floor up to 100% of the time, likely harming crab, halibut, coral, and many other ocean-floor species in a way that never comes up to the surface to be counted by observers as bycatch.

When this study’s findings were first brought to light more than two years ago, industry insiders acknowledged it is something they have known was happening for more than three decades.

At its meeting Oct. 3-8, the North Pacific Fishery Management Council has an opportunity to close this clear loophole.

Comments from the public were due by Sept. 27. Unfortunately, nine days prior to the comment deadline, the council, which has a long history of making it as difficult as possible for members of the public to engage productively, had not yet posted the discussion paper on pelagic trawl gear definition to which the public is meant, in part, to respond.

The council has had the opportunity to act before, in February of this year, and it failed to do so.

It’s simple: A bottom trawler is a trawler that drags the bottom. No trawler that drags the ocean floor should be allowed in areas where the ocean floor is protected and off-limits to other fishermen, including the Kuskokwim Bay Habitat Conservation Area, Northern Bering Sea Research Area, Nunivak Island, Etolin Strati, and Nunivak Island.

The only acceptable outcome here is that the Council defines “midwater” or “pelagic” trawling as trawling in which no portion of the gear touches the ocean floor.

Everything else is bottom trawling.

Alexus Kwachka was raised in Fairbanks where he held his first fishing Job on the Yukon River. He currently fishes in Bristol Bay and around Kodiak where he lives.

Jackie Arnaciar Boyer has roots in Nunivak Island and lives in Eagle River. She currently works as the Ocean Justice Program coordinator for SalmonState.

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