Anchorage Daily News

Federal regulators late Saturday approved a controversial plan to settle a long-running fish feud between commercial halibut fishermen and their charter boat rivals.

Members of the North Pacific Fishery Management Council, meeting at the Sheraton hotel in downtown Anchorage, approved the plan by a vote of 10-1 after more than three days of public testimony and parliamentary wrangling.

The plan, if the U.S. Commerce Department secretary approves, will apportion the available halibut in two Alaska regions, Southcentral and Southeast, among the commercial and the charter fleets.

Commercial fishermen desperately wanted the split as a way to limit the growth of charter catches, which chew into commercial catch limits.

Charter boat captains, however, pleaded with the council not to go overboard with efforts to crimp the number of fish their clients can take home.

The lone council member voting no, Ed Dersham, said he couldn't support the plan because it "does not meet the test of fair and equitable."

Dersham has run a salmon and halibut charter boat business out of Anchor Point.

The plan his colleagues approved Saturday could lead to a lower halibut bag limit for charter boat anglers -- only one keeper per day instead of two. Such a limit would kick in during times when the halibut population is low. That's the situation now in Southeast.

A one-fish bag limit is an outcome charter captains say they and their customers can't tolerate.

When federal fishery regulators tried to enforce such a limit this summer in Southeast, where the charter catch is growing strongest and the halibut population is cycling down, some charter boat captains went to court to block the regulation.

Council member Gerry Merrigan made the winning motion Saturday. He's a commercial halibut fisherman from Petersburg.

He defended his plan as fair to both fleets, saying it "establishes a line in the sand that I think is long overdue."

Merrigan noted that commercial fishermen have strict catch limits that float up or down with halibut abundance, but the charter fleet currently faces no such restrictions.

Part of his plan would allow charter captains to lease catch rights from commercial fishermen as a way to allow charter anglers to keep more than one halibut per day.

But charter captains decry the high cost of leasing, and note that the commercial fleet historically has caught the bulk of the halibut and will continue to under the council's plan.

The council is made up of mostly government and industry representatives from Alaska, Washington and Oregon. It helps regulate fisheries off Alaska by making recommendations to the U.S. commerce secretary.

Some council decisions can take a couple of years or more for regulations to take effect.

Find Wesley Loy's commercial fishing blog online at adn.com/highliner or call 257-4590.

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