Halibut anglers who hire charters in Alaska appear destined to take another hit as the federally run North Pacific Fishery Management Council continues efforts to roll back the sport catch of the popular flatfish.
An advisory committee to the council on Monday recommended that halibut charters be banned on Thursdays this summer and that charter anglers be restricted to an annual limit of five fish. Previously, anglers could fish any day and there was no seasonal cap.
The rules would not apply to anglers who have their own boats or who rent boats.
An organization dominated by commercial fishermen and bureaucrats who work closely with commercial fishermen, the council has steadily been driving a wedge between charter operations and private anglers.
Commercial fishermen get 82 percent
Last year, the council reduced the quota for sport halibut harvests and then restricted charter operations in Southcentral Alaska to what operators called a "one and a half fish" limit. Charter anglers could keep one halibut of any size, but the second fish had to be less than 29 inches – about a 10-pound flatfish.
Private anglers were left with a limit of two fish of any size.
All of this follows the council's decision to mandate that about 3,000 commercial fishermen who hold halibut "shares'' get 82.5 percent of the halibut catch.
The remaining 17.5 percent of the catch is to be split between charter operators, mainly small mom-and-pop tourist businesses, and private anglers. Historically, the charters were responsible for most of that catch, given that a lot of anglers booked charters.
And they continue to dominate the sport fishery even as charter prices climb, largely a result of higher fuel prices. Catch restrictions ordered by the council and the shrinking size of flatfish now found in the North Pacific have also pushed anglers out of the halibut fishery or toward boat rentals, purchase of their own boats, or even fishing from kayaks, something once thought foolhardy in the sometimes turbulent waters of Cook Inlet south of Anchorage.
The result has been downsizing in the charter industry. The problem of the moment is that the industry is not downsizing fast enough, according to Alaska Department of Fish and Game biologist Scott Meyer. He estimates the number of charter halibut caught in Area 3A, which includes the ports of Homer, Seward, Kodiak, Valdez, dropped 16 percent this year from a 2013 catch of 217,000 halibut to 182,000.
That was only 2 percent higher than forecast, he concluded in a 36-page report to the council committee working on setting charter limits. But the council doesn't care about how many fish are caught -- though that is the way most Alaska fisheries are managed.
State-federal conflict
Federal officials, however, use a different system: poundage. It is how they measure catches in the Pacific, where commercial operators harvest millions of pounds of fish.
On the poundage scale, Meyer reported, area 3A charters caught 413,000 pounds, or about 23 percent more than allowed by their newly reduced quota. How to get that catch down to within the quota poundage was tossed to the council's Charter Management Implementation Committee, which met in Anchorage on Monday.
The council process isn't set up well to manage sport fisheries, which deal in the number of fish caught and not the poundage, Meyer said. And, he added, it lacks the flexibility of the state system.
Small increases and decreases in sport harvests over short periods of time are hard to predict, he said, and the tools for limiting harvests are few, especially when the feds oppose some of those tools.
Seasonal bag limits have long been a fixture of state management, but Kevin Heck, law enforcement supervisor for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Alaska, told the committee on Monday that his agency continues to oppose such limits.
The state might think they work, he said, but "that's an area on which we have a difference of opinion on. We think there are lots of ways people can cheat.''
The state view is that most people generally try to comply with laws. The federal view seems to be that anglers view laws as challenges to be overcome. Heck detailed how anglers could get around the annual limit, and how hard it would be for federal officials to prosecute cheaters.
'Very discouraging'
At the end of the day, however, the committee ignored him and voted to suggest annual limits plus a one-day-per-week closure for the North Gulf Coast. Meyer estimates such a closure will cut the annual harvest by a few percent and the annual limit by a few more, though he admits it's hard to predict.
The regulation could force frugal anglers away from areas that typically produce small halibut toward areas known for bigger halibut, he said. It's not unreasonable, he said, to fear that more restrictions could actually increase the poundage of fish caught even as the number of fish caught declines.
None of it was what halibut charter operators wanted to hear.
"It is very discouraging,'' Andy Mezirow, a member of the committee and a Seward-based charter skipper, said in an email after the meeting. "I have invested my family's life savings in the fishing industry.''
Contact Craig Medred at craig(at)alaskadispatch.com