Anchorage Daily News

A federal judge today blocked a new fishing rule cutting the number of halibut that Southeast Alaska charter boat anglers can catch each day from two to one.

U.S. District Judge Rosemary Collyer in Washington, D.C., issued a temporary restraining order today in the case brought by Southeast charter boat captains, who complained that the new rule was driving away customers for this summer.

A hearing on whether to extend the order as a preliminary injunction has been scheduled before the court for June 20.

The one-fish rule was imposed this season in the tourist-oriented Southeast fishery as an effort to curb the catch by the charter fleet, which has been exceeding a harvest limit set by the federal North Pacific Fishery Management Council. Commercial fishermen, who buy and sell quota shares for the bulk of the halibut catch, complain that the unlimited growth of the charter industry has been eating into the value of their shares.

The North Pacific council plans to resume work on a long-range plan for allocating halibut between the charter and commercial fishing industries in October. The effort has been under way for 15 years.

Today's ruling was based on a procedural issue regarding the steps necessary before imposing such a limit on charter boats, said Earl Comstock, a lawyer representing the Charter Halibut Task Force, the group that brought the lawsuit.

The one-fish rule had been imposed only in Southeast Alaska, where a decline in halibut has meant a 43 percent cut in the commercial harvest over the past two years.

But the rule had raised concerns in Southcentral Alaska, where charter boats worried they might face a similar restriction someday.

Federal lawyers argued in court that they had followed a long public process and met all the legal requirements to set the one-fish rule.

Commercial longline fishermen contend the charter fleet should share in the conservation cutbacks required by federal fishery managers. They note that 81 percent of the quota shares in Southeast are owned by Alaska residents, and they point to studies showing that 97 percent of the charter customers in the region were from out of state.

Charter skippers argue that the federal council's effort to hold them to a small share of the statewide total catch is unfair. Today's ruling focused on narrower procedural issues, however, rather than the fundamental allocation question.

The court ruling means that in Southeast, charter clients go back to the previous rule, which allows two fish per day as long as the second halibut is less than 32 inches in length.

Find Tom Kizzia online at adn.com/contact/tkizzia or call him in Homer at 1-907-235-4244.

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