6/3/03

Recreational fishermen around Northern California were saddened to learn that Captain Jim Casey, who operated the charter boat Patty-C out of Noyo Harbor for many years, passed away on May 20th. He was a real gent.

I had spoken to him at length only a few weeks ago down at the Rumblefish dock, where he used to help out. When I mentioned CENCAL, a coalition of diving clubs, he mentioned that he had been a member back in the early 50s, in the days before neoprene, and when divers often braved the chilly Northern Californian ocean in little more than bathing suits.
Jim Casey pioneered light tackle rockfishing here on the north coast, and made these killer diamond-shaped jigs that were very effective on ling cod. Soft-spoken and seen-everything, Jim was a treasure who will be sorely missed in the harbor.
Despite the flat-calm seas this Memorial Day weekend, and hundreds of private boats scouring the region for salmon, it was reported to have been a very slow bite. Sunday, only two fish had been counted by the fish count lady at the public ramp at Noyo.

You may have read about that news report concerning a "90% decline in large offshore fish populations" - if you didn't hear about it, you must be living under a rock. The first thing to realize about this study, which was first announced in Nature magazine, is that when you hear a single story, with a single message, broadcast internationally in print, radio, and TV, there's a well-oiled publicity machine behind it working overtime to spin the story in a certain direction - in this case, to promote the implementation of large no-fishing zones in coastal waters.

I was able to locate the original study, by Ransom A Myers & Boris Worm, in the May edition of Nature. They analyzed data from the Japanese pelagic longline fleet going back to the 50s. It's appalling data indeed. Pelagic predators in the open ocean, species like bluefin tuna, swordfish, and marlin, have been reduced to 10% of their unfished levels by seafood gourmets. "Industrialized fisheries typically reduced community biomass by 80% in 15 years of exploitation." "Pelagic longlines are the most widespread fishing gear, and the Japanese fleet the most widespread longline operation, covering all oceans except the circumpolar seas." (It's therefore not surprising that a US submarine, surfacing in the middle of the Pacific, hit a Japanese longliner in the middle of nowhere.) Myers & Worm commented on the way this fishery acts as a very efficient data collection system, not to mention fish collection system. "Longlines, which resemble long, baited transects, catch a wide range of species in a consistent way over vast spatial scales." Translation: Japanese longlines catch nearly everything, all the time, everywhere. What they don't catch is swept up along the bottom by trawlers. It's truly mind-boggling, the geographic spread of the longline fleet's activity, which is shown in global maps in the Myers & Worm paper.

The key word here is "industrialized" fishing. It's not the commercial salmon day boats, nor the weekend warrior sportfisherman, who has wreaked this environmental havoc. One of the major points of the study is that removing so many top predators from the ecosystem has unknown effects on entire pelagic communities.

Marine Reserves may be an answer, but the trend is for the no-fishing zones to be placed in coastal zones, where the impact is greatest on the public access to public trust resources. Closing areas in California state waters, or even within the 200-mile Exclusive Economic Zone managed by sovereign nations, will have zero impact on offshore longlining.
To sum up: sushi-buying is politically incorrect and money is no object to the enviro foundations when cranking up their publicity machine for marine reserves, and the reach of their bullhorn is global. Coastal zone marine reserves will not address problems with offshore species and longlining.
Bruce Jacoby, of the Boston Globe, wrote an op-ed piece a few weeks back, titled, "Is Catch and Release Fishing Inhumane?" It was a typical bash on sportfishing. I tend to agree that C&R fishing is weird, and even cruel, but I am biased because I fish for food and fun with friends. Yet fishes do not have the brain pan, nor the neurological receptors, to experience what humans call "pain." (The anthropomorphism within the envirowhacko community is a whole 'nother subject I could rant about for hours.)

A better question for Jacoby would have been: "Are Seafood Buyers Inhumane?" What about the Japanese buying marlin - MARLIN! - for catfood? Pacific "red snapper" - a marketing term for the entire complex of deep-water sebastes rockfish - sells cheap in any supermarket here in the US, even as the data shows that the populations cannot sustain industrial exploitation from bottom-dragging trawls. Our fisheries are managed in-house by commercial interests through regional councils. The fox is in charge of the hen coop.