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Reduction
to halibut bycatch in the trawl and hook-and-line Pacific cod fisheries of the
Gulf of Alaska will be a hot topic at the North Pacific Fishery Management
Council meeting this week in Kodiak.
Currently,
there are approximately 5-million pounds of inadvertently-caught halibut tossed
overboard each year. The options before the council are cuts to that number of
five, 10 or 15 percent.
-- (Halibut 1 15 sec "We don't think it's quite enough ... progress in the
right direction.")
That's
Kelly Harrell, the executive director of the Alaska Marine Conservation
Council, headquartered in Anchorage. She says the bycatch is actually more than
5-million pounds.
-- (Halibut 2 11 sec "That limit is the dead halibut ... a lot of fish to be
wasting.")
Calls for
the bycatch reductions have united commercial longliners and the guided
sportfishing industry. As the halibut population in the Gulf of Alaska has
shrunk, the two user groups have competed with each other for a share of the diminishing
resource.
Tim Evers
(ee-verz, rhymes with fevers) is a retired guide out of Ninilchik.
-- (Halibut 3 30 sec "The long-liners and the charter ... a little bit of a
hit also.")
Linda
Behnken, the executive director of the Alaska Longline Fishermen's Association
in Sitka, agrees that the issue is one that bridges traditional gear-group
differences:
-- (Halibut 4 23 sec "Directed fisheries have taken ... and help rebuild
stocks.")
Behnken
says updating bycatch limits has been a long time coming, and that the ability
to avoid non-targeted fish has advanced in the last two decades.
-- (Halibut 5 23 sec "The technology available to ... even a reduced bycatch
cap.")
The North
Pacific Fishery Management Council is set to address halibut bycatch for the
first three days of its week-long meeting, which begins on Wednesday.
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