By Paul Rogers and Julia Scott
Mercurynews.com

Bay Area News Group

Posted: 08/04/2009 06:31:47 PM PDT
Updated: 08/05/2009 04:15:13 AM PDT

Click photo to enlarge
(Click to enlarge)«1»Three years after they banned or strictly limited fishing in 18 percent of California’s ocean waters from Santa Barbara to Half Moon Bay, state regulators are poised to extend similar restrictions today all the way to Mendocino, cementing California’s place as the national leader using marine reserves to restore fish and wildlife.

The proposal to be considered by the state Fish and Game Commission would establish 22 new marine protected areas limiting or banning fishing in 20 percent of state waters from Half Moon Bay to Point Arena.

The goal: to help boost beleaguered populations of everything from rockfish to Dungeness crab to abalone by essentially leaving their habitat alone.

Rather than traditional

(Click to enlarge)rules that set fishing rules for individual species, like salmon, the idea is to set aside important areas such as kelp forests and underwater rock formations where all species can rebound and grow larger, away from nets, traps and hooks.

“This is like the establishment of national parks in the water,” said Meg Caldwell, director of the environmental law program at Stanford University.

“We are not just managing fish. We are trying to protect ecosystems that we know will respond when we take away fishing pressure.”

California has jurisdiction in the ocean out to three miles off shore.

Within that area, the proposal would ban fishing in 11 places, including: off Montara on the San Mateo Coast; in state waters around

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much of the Farallon Islands; near Point Reyes National Seashore; off parts of Sonoma County, including Bodega Head and much of the northern Sonoma coast; and off Point Arena in Mendocino County.

Fishing restrictions

Fishing also would be limited in 11 other areas, including near Fitzgerald Marine Reserve in San Mateo County, small parts of the Farallon Islands, waters further off shore from Point Reyes National Seashore, Bodega Bay and areas north of Gualala.

The rules would affect commercial and recreational fishing.

Roughly 800 commercial fishermen work the area between Half Moon Bay and Mendocino, down from 2,200 in 1992. Faced with a 1999 law that required the state to establish some marine reserves, many of them say they will advocate for a less-restrictive option that would set aside 18 percent of state waters in the area.

San Francisco fisherman Larry Collins organized a large group of fishermen to go to today’s meeting to push for that option, but he admitted he’d prefer to see no closures at all.

“There are a lot of things you could do that would be a lot better for the ocean than this program,” said Collins.

Coming on the heels of two years of outright bans on Chinook salmon fishing and disappointing Dungeness crab returns, any fishing closures are a slap in the face, said Tom Mattusch, captain of the Huli Cat, a Half Moon Bay sport vessel.

“We don’t need permanent closures to fix this,” he said. “Every year we’re losing ground we can fish on. Every year we get pushed into smaller and smaller boxes.”

Mattusch was part of 45-member advisory panel of fishermen, government regulators and environmentalists that drew up four options for the marine reserve system. Fishermen preferred a more limited option, while environmentalists wanted more expansive rules. In April, a five-member Blue Ribbon Task Force selected a compromise that combined elements of both, which is what the commission will consider today.

Though Mattusch signed a letter with several other fishermen and environmentalists endorsing that compromise, he said existing federal and state regulations already impose annual catch quotas and close a substantial part of Northern California coastal waters to fishing each year, and appear to be working.

County support

Environmentalists, however, noted that the compromise measure is backed by the Alameda, Marin, San Mateo and Sonoma county boards of supervisors, the California Academy of Sciences and the Marine Mammal Center.

They point to a study commissioned by the Department of Fish and Game, that found the new reserves would cost commercial fishermen only about $500,000 a year since they could still fish on the edge of the reserves and in other areas.

“Marine reserves are really a scientifically proven tool,” said Kaitilin Gaffney, director of the Ocean Conservancy’s Pacific ecosystem protection program.

“They provide refuge for juvenile fish to grow up. They allow female fish to get bigger, and the bigger and older they get the more eggs they produce,” she said.

It is too early to know how the marine reserves established in 2006 have worked, scientists say.

But underwater surveys last year in the Channel Islands, where similar reserves were put in place in 2003, found 50 percent more rockfish, sheephead, lingcod, spiny lobster and other species in the off-limits areas five years later.

“For several species, particularly those that had been commercially fished, there were greater numbers and larger fish in the reserves than outside,” said Mark Carr, a marine biologist at the University of California-Santa Cruz who helped write the study. “Initially, at least, the reserves appear to be working.”

Marine Reserve proposal