From: South Lincoln County News
BY: Terry Dillman
Marine spatial planning, the pros and cons of catch shares, and the plight of salmon fishermen were the main topics during a fishermen’s roundtable held Thursday afternoon at the Oregon Coast Aquarium.
A panel of about 25 local, state and federal fishing industry leaders gathered to discuss those and related matters with U.S. Rep. Kurt Schrader as part of the congressman’s series of public sessions in Lincoln County. Will Stelle, regional administrator for the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) Northwest Region, started things off, joining the conversation via telephone from Portland.
Stelle said most of the news “is good, but not all of it,” noting the recent spate of “heavy weather” was a culprit in making things more difficult for fishermen.
He pointed to “an incredible crab season,” good water conditions, and good projections for coho and chinook salmon. He also noted the first year of the new “catch shares” program in the groundfish fishery, where there’s “a lot of learning going on,” and “frustration for folks on the water” over certain aspects, most notably the slow influx of observer data.
Long-time fisherman Jim Seavers called the program “a work in progress” that began seven years ago with a vessel buyback “to make the fleet smaller.”
It worked, reducing the fleet from 260 to 170 vessels. It also changed the management of the fishery, he said, from six, two-month periods to one, year-long period, which “gives fishermen control over what they catch and when they catch it,” using quotas – or catch shares – under a reallocation based on the vessels’ catch histories.
“It’s complicated,” Seavers said, noting that NMFS delayed the start from Jan. 1 to Jan. 11, and fishermen have waited, either because they “stayed with crabbing longer than normal,” or are “cautiously waiting” to see how things unfold. “They have the rest of the year (to go after their quotas), and there are a lot of unknowns,” he added.