By federal order, hundreds of Alaska halibut charter businesses will be forced to close their doors Feb. 1. Most of them are small, mom-and-pop operations.
Exactly how many will fall victim to a U.S. Department of Commerce decision to impose limited entry on halibut charters, no one can say. What the consequences will be for state tourism in places dependent on small, sport-fishing businesses is not clear. Whether anglers will end up paying significantly more to go halibut fishing because of the change is unknown, although almost everyone in the charter business thinks the plan will lead to fee increases.
Officials with the National Marine Fisheries Service, the Commerce agency implementing what it calls the "Charter Halibut Limited Access Program," question the latter conclusion, but admit they can't predict what will happen.
Skippers who can establish a history in the halibut fishery dating back to 2004 get free permits from NMFS. Most of them get permits that are saleable.
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Halibut galore
Craig Medred had a lot to say about halibut this week. Check out these stories:
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Skippers who don't qualify for permits are out of business unless they buy permits from others. The going price for permits at the moment is $5,000 per angler and up. The speculation that charter rates are heading higher is tied to the sale of these permits.
Officials with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game remain largely silent about the plan. A receptionist at the agency's Homer office said she'd been told specifically not to say anything about it because it's a federal scheme. Some legislators have spoken out in protest, but they say no one is listening. Rep. Mark Neuman, a Willow Republican, said that when he pestered the Alaska Department of Fish and Game's legislative liaison about fisheries issues last session she finally told him, "My boss says I don't need to talk to you."
Efforts to get Republican Gov. Sean Parnell to pay attention to sport fishery issues didn't go much better, Neuman added. Parnell listened politely; said, "yup, yup, yup" and then did nothing. "You can't get anything out of him," Neuman said.
It is unclear, too, as to what the state might do. A 50-page outline of the NMFS program printed in the Federal Register dismisses potential state concerns as meaningless: "This rule is being implemented under the authority of the Halibut Act, not the Alaska Constitution. Legislative resolutions by the Alaska Legislature are not legally binding on this action."
Still, the NMFS regulations do appear to be the first move by the federal government to dictate how state residents can fish in state and coastal U.S. waters. In the marine waters of other states, the NMFS sets catch limits for some species but leaves it up to the states to determine how anglers gain access to fisheries -- whether by charter taxi or private boat.
State officials in recent years have aggressively attacked the expansion of federal powers on many fronts in the 49th state, but they have not complained about the federal plan for dictating how halibut sport fishing will be conducted. Neuman blames commercial fishing interests. Rep. Les Gara, D-Anchorage, a former sport fishing guide, tends to agree.
"It does not seem to me that sport halibut takes more their fair share," he said. "It seems like before (the feds) take out a sledge hammer on the charter industry, they should try a ball-peen hammer."
Neuman doesn't think the feds care what kind of hammer is used, and he's equally convinced they're not going to give their halibut plan a second thought unless the Parnell administration speaks up loudly and strongly.
Nobody really expects that to happen.
Who's watching out for sport fishing?
Nearly a year ago, charter industry lobbyist Donna Bondioli sent an e-mail to an Alaska Dispatch reporter asking for suggestions on how to make contact with Parnell.
"When Sarah (Palin) was governor," she wrote, "I spoke to Cora Crome Campbell, fisheries advisor and linked hip to hip with com-fish, at least twice a month to try to get a meeting set up but couldn't get through Cora." "Com-fish" or "comm-fish" is fishing business shorthand for the state's powerful Division of Commercial Fisheries.
Parnell last year named Cora Campbell (she has since dropped the Crome) as Commissioner of Fish and Game. A former employee of a couple of commercial fishing organizations, Campbell said she left her connections to the commercial fishing industry behind when she entered government service to work for Palin. Many in the sport fishing community remain suspicious. Commercial fishermen, they note, swing huge political clout in Alaska.
When commercial fishermen felt threatened by the possibility the federal government might allow rural subsistence fishermen to freely sell salmon under the "customary trade" provisions of the Alaska National Interest Lands Act, they convinced the late Sen. Ted Stevens to obtain a half-million-dollar grant for Fish and Game to sponsor an "educational program" on subsistence. Fish and Game, in turn, funneled the money to the United Fishermen of Alaska, the state's most influential commercial fishing group.
The man overseeing the UFA subsistence program was Dave Bedford. Cora Campbell at that time worked for him. Bedford ended his association with UFA to become deputy commissioner of Fish and Game. He is still in that position with Campbell as his new boss. All of this leaves many in the charter business skeptical that they can expect any state help in fighting back against the latest federal power grab.
Still, some halibut charter operators are trying to raise funds to independently sue the government to block the imposition of limited entry in the sport fishing business in Alaska. Kent Haina of Charter Operators of Alaska said his organization is close to having the money to at least launch a challenge to the NMFS plan in court.
Meanwhile, other halibut charter skippers are bailing out of the fishery -- or thinking seriously about it. "I'm looking at some welding work in North Dakota," said skipper Hill Norvell from Seward.
Jim Lavrakas, who runs a small boat out of Homer, said he tried to stay in business by making a $30,000 offer to buy a sport-fishing permit good for charters of up to four anglers at a time. The offer was turned down, and Lavrakas, who had a career as a photographer for the Anchorage Daily News before abandoning the struggling newspaper business for the struggling tourism business, said he is moving on.
He has a plan for a "fish and dining" excursion -- The Kachemak Bay Feast from the Sea -- that will pick tourists up in Homer, take them on a sightseeing tour of Kachemak Bay, let them catch some rockfish and cod, and then deliver them to a dining room in Seldovia where a chef will fix their catch for dinner while Lavrakas entertains them before delivering them back to the dock. As a photographer, Lavrakas was most admired for his ability to talk people into letting him take pictures of almost anything. He believes his ability as a pitchman for Alaska gives his new business a good chance of success.
He has recently learned, however, that he faces a new problem. If he licenses his boat as a charter craft, as he required to do under state law to take anyone fishing for anything, the federal government says it will be illegal for him to use the boat to take his wife, kids, visiting friends or grandma Sally fishing for halibut.
Lavrakas said he is not all that upset about being pushed out of the halibut business. It had become stressful, he said, trying to produce the "big fish" anglers have increasingly demanded as halibut charter fees have gone up. But he is outraged that federal officials want to dictate what he can do on his own boat with friends and family when he is not chartering.
He is not alone. Fish and Game halibut biologist Scott Meyer in Homer said the state is also upset with Commerce's interpretation of the new sport halibut fishing regulation. The federal agency has gone so far as to say that it could cite recreational anglers for illegally fishing if they get too much "compensation" from the friends they take fishing. Friends, according to a NOAA enforcement agent, can now only contribute a "fair share" to the cost of the fishing trip, whatever a fair share might be.
The former "Fishing Dude" videographer for the Daily News and a long-time observer of Alaska fisheries, Lavrakas predicts there could be a little chaos in Cook Inlet this summer.
The chaos might actually be a good thing for some charter skippers, although not necessarily so for anglers. "I've already raised my prices for this year because of the permits," said Hill, who plans to at least get through one more season before moving on. Hill's problem is that he has a 40-foot boat and lodge in Seward and needs to run a 12-angler operation to make a profit. But because left the halibut fishery to reenlist in the military during the Iraq War, Hill only qualifies for a permit good for six anglers, according to NMFS.
"It's almost like not getting one," he said, "but they don't care."
NMFS did tell Hill that if he'd been recalled for duty, he would have qualified for a military exception under the rules. But because he volunteered he was out of luck. He'd like to buy additional permits to haul more anglers, but prices are too high despite a surplus permits. Hill knows operators of "six-pack boats" who got permits good for up to 20 anglers, but appear willing to just sit on them if they can't make $6,000 or more per angler on a sale.
Nobody knows how many slots for anglers will end up in that sort of limbo this summer. Also unknown is how many now-defunct charter businesses that operated during "qualifying years" now long past will suddenly find themselves the owners of permits already worth thousands per angler.
Not-so-free market dynamics
The website Alaskabroker.com, which has trafficked in the sale of permits to catch halibut commercially, has already started dealing in "sport halibut charter permits." As of Jan. 17 it was offering three permits for sale for prices ranging from a low of $40,000 for six anglers to a high of $86,000 for five anglers. The site also claimed a pending sale of six seats for $48,000.
NMFS expects this year to issue 766 transferable charter permits and 354 non-transferable charter permits, said management specialist Rachel Baker in Juneau, who argues enough will get into the hands of businesses planning to fish to keep charter prices steady. Some in the business, noting the financial incentive for non-fishing businesses to hang onto permits, question that.
The basic law of supply and demand is in play. The fewer charters available to anglers the more likely the price of charters goes up. As the prices for charters go up, the permits become increasingly valuable. Baker said she couldn't comment on such speculation.
"We don't even have good data on what people charge for halibut charters," she said. Lacking such information, Baker added, it is impossible for NMFS to make any predictions about the economic consequences of the charter plan.
"It's difficult to assess," she said. "We do not have that ability. We have no data."
Haina said it is the lack of data -- and the entry of NMFS into the business of regulating transportation -- among other things, that bothers his organization. Some question the legal authority of NMFS to regulate watercraft. Charter boats don't catch fish like commercial boats. In fact, state law bars charters boat skippers and their crew from fishing at all. All they can legally do is haul people to the fishing in much the way taxis haul people to the shopping.
"We're a taxi service," Norvell said. "That's all we are."
Baker concedes the agency is wading into the business of transportation regulation in the 50-page defense of the NMFS regulations, recently published in the Federal Register. But, she argues, this has no real affect on consumers. No one needs to go out on a charter boat, she writes: "The commercial fishery provides access to halibut to those who prefer to purchase it in grocery stores or restaurants ... (and) non-guided recreational fishing also is a source of public access to the halibut resource," she wrote.
Much of the non-guided fishing takes place on sometimes dangerous waters. Charles Swanton, director of the state's Division of Sport Fisheries, swallowed hard and would not answer when asked who would take responsibility if people died because increasing charter costs pushed anglers to invest in their own rickety watercraft in order to go fishing. The amoeboid nature of sport fisheries in the 49th state is something well known in the sport fish division. If fishing effort in one area is restricted -- which is what the NMFS regulations are intended to do -- it invariably pops out in some new area.
Baker argued federal officials shouldn't be held responsible for trying to judge this sort of fall out because of limited entry. NMFS, she said, had to act to keep sport-fishing businesses from expanding because they threatened to cut into the commercial catch of halibut.
"It is intended to stop the growth," she said, and there is no doubt sport catches grew, at least in the past. Sport fisheries for halibut in Southeast Alaska and Cook Inlet were tiny prior to the 1970s. They then increased from a catch of about 10,000 fish in 1975 to 580,000 by 2007, according to data from the Alaska Department of Fish and Game.
Commercial fishermen, who believe they own the halibut fishery, grew more outraged each year the catch went up. They began calling for limits on sport fishery growth in the 1990s, and on Dec. 9, 2005, the North Pacific Management Council -- a commercial-fisheries-dominated entity that recommends to Commerce how Alaska marine fisheries should be managed -- put charter operators on notice that a limited-entry plan could be coming someday.
And then everything began to change. The U.S. economy weakened in 2007 and then went flat. Charter businesses struggled to stay afloat. The sport halibut catch fell significantly. The Southcentral harvest -- primarily focused around the communities of Homer, Seward and Kodiak -- dropped 24 percent between 2007 and 2009. The sport catch there in what is called Area 3A is now about 4.7 million pounds, about 60 percent of it caught by charter fishermen. The commercial catch in the same area is about 22 million pounds. In the Gulf of Alaska west of Kodiak and the Bering Sea, there is almost no sport catch, and a commercial catch of about 18 million pounds, according to the International Pacific Halibut Commission, which sets acceptable catch limits for the U.S. and Canada.
Economic studies of sport fishing done for the state of Alaska in the past hint that the 12 percent of the halibut catch taken by anglers in labor-intensive sport fisheries in Cook Inlet and Resurrection Bay, west of Anchorage, could be worth as much or more to the Alaska economy than the 88 percent of halibut taken by commercial fishermen in highly efficient commercial fisheries. But nobody knows for sure. There was no economic analysis done on the costs and benefits of Commerce's plan to try lock the sport and commercial fisheries in place at 2005 levels.
Asked why no one sought to determine what might be in the economic best interests of Alaska as a whole before setting regulations for halibut charters, Baker said that "would be unfeasible with our current resources." Asked if anyone had ever suggested the resources be found to do an economic analysis, she said, she didn't know. Asked to find out, she said, "I may not be able to do that. I have other things to do this afternoon."
Asked this and similar questions, Swanton said the issue is so complicated he'd prefer to have all questions submitted via e-mail. He was sent a list of nine questions. A week later came this response: "The breadth of the questions you have posed are taking some time to address, we plan on having a response back to you by early next week."
Apparently the questions had not been asked within Fish and Game previously. But then, as some charter boat skippers and Alaska legislators observed, why would they be asked? Limited entry in the halibut charter fishery can't help but protect the business of commercial fishing interests in Alaska, Neuman said, and commercial fishing interests are in control.
"You can't even get a friggin' resolution (opposing this) through the Legislature," he said. And if one could, it wouldn't matter, because as Baker pointed out in the lengthy Federal Register defense of the NMFS regulations, the federal government doesn't think it needs to listen to the state anyway.
Contact Craig Medred at craig(at)alaskadispatch.com