Ep. 864: Is Trawling Destroying Alaska’s Fisheries?

00:00:08
Speaker 1: If this is the me Eater podcast coming at you, shirtless.

00:00:12
Speaker 2: Severely, bug bitten, and in my case, underware. Listening past, you can’t predict anything.

00:00:20
Speaker 1: Brought to you by first Light. When I’m hunting, I need gear that won’t quit. First light builds, no compromise, gear that keeps me in the field longer, no shortcuts, just gear that works. Check it out at first light dot com. That’s f I R S T L I T E dot com. All Right, everybody, we got a hot one today coming out of Alaska. Real controversial issue. It turns out we’re gonna talk about trawling. Okay, we’re gonna talk about fisheries, fisheries management, habitat issues, all leading out of a lot of conversations that people have been hearing about and having about declining king salmon numbers, declining halibit numbers. Guys that if you go up to sport fishing in Alaska, you dream of going up to fish halibit and salmon in Alaska. This is an issue you got to pay attention to. Where this conversation came out of is on the news show. We recently covered this. I don’t want to call it an emerging controversy around trawling and impacts to fisheries and bycatch and all these conversations. This is an age old This is an age old discussion. Okay, this is an age old discussion. It’s a discussion. This sort of plays along in any region where you have declining fisheries and people have to start looking at there’s like the pie right the fishery, who’s drawing from the fishery and what is leading to fishery declines. Oftentimes, in these conversations, the conversations will turn to what fisheries are having the greatest ecological impact, and those discussions take place. Okay, Tralling is an age old controversy. There’s places in Alaska where you used to be able to trall. We’re gonna talk about all these definitions that. Don’t worry. There’s places in Alaska used to be able to troll and the fisheries been shut down.

00:02:16
Speaker 2: Okay.

00:02:18
Speaker 1: On the news show, we were talking about an increased focus among fishermen on the impacts of the trawling industry in Prince William Sound or the Gulf of Alaska in general.

00:02:32
Speaker 2: Okay, the Bearing.

00:02:34
Speaker 1: Sea and whether or not this commercial fishery.

00:02:41
Speaker 2: Is linked to declines in salmon and Halibert numbers.

00:02:44
Speaker 1: And we’re just talking about this on the news show all right, talking about how it’s a heated up political issue.

00:02:50
Speaker 2: Man.

00:02:51
Speaker 1: That led to a lot of feedback, for a lot of listener feedback. We heard from a bunch of sport fishermen, charter cap captains, We heard from Halibert longliners. We heard from Sam and Purse saying ers right, talking about the damages of the trawling industry. And then we heard from a lot of people from the trawling industry talking about basically, hey, it ain’t our fault. The numbers are wrong, the numbers are misleading. This is all coming from outside interest. There’s nothing to see here, Okay. So I thought, based on the amount of conversation that our conversation generated, I wanted to dig in on this a little bit. So number one guests we’re having on right now is David Bays.

00:03:38
Speaker 2: Okay.

00:03:38
Speaker 1: David Bays is a leader of a Facebook group called stop Alaskan Trawler Bycatch. He is a former He’s a fishing guide in Alaska, used to have his own charter outfit, still in the business. He was twenty twenty four. Sam McDowell Award winner. He’s the former chair of the Alaska Charter Association and the Homer Homer Charter Association and a former member of the Homer Area, Alaska Department of Fishing Game Advisory Committee.

00:04:19
Speaker 2: All Right, welcome David.

00:04:22
Speaker 3: Yeah, I appreciate it.

00:04:23
Speaker 2: Thanks for coming on. Man.

00:04:24
Speaker 1: Yeah, So start out, start out. We’re gonna get into all these definitions. Okay, Now that was a terrible intro, but we’ll start the intro out.

00:04:35
Speaker 2: How’d you get started fishing in Alaska?

00:04:37
Speaker 4: So I was born and raised there and Homer, and I mean that was what you did as a kid in the eighties, Okay, if we had people in town or just any free weekend. We grew up next to the Anchor River. You know, it was two hundred yards away. You could walk down there. So that was that was all I wanted to do. You know, fish on trap, every second of it, and we’re in the right spot for it.

00:04:58
Speaker 2: Okay.

00:05:00
Speaker 1: So you gradually got into the charter business, targeting halibit.

00:05:04
Speaker 3: Yeah.

00:05:04
Speaker 4: So, I you know, I’m big into fishing. But when I turned sixteen, that was my first moment that I had a driver’s license and could get myself to work essentially.

00:05:13
Speaker 3: So that was the first year that.

00:05:14
Speaker 4: I started in the charters. And then while I was in college, I bought a boat, started a business, had that about twenty years and sold that recently, but I still worked for the new owners essentially, or people have the boat.

00:05:28
Speaker 2: Okay, so you’re from Homer. Next question, are you a billionaire? Not that I know, Okay, because.

00:05:36
Speaker 1: That’s important to ask because we brought up on the news show when we brought up the controversy around trawling and targeting forage fish. Okay, targeting, you know what order billions of pounds of forage fish, the related impacts of bycatch on large game fish halibit, salmon, weather, and there is a relationship between between this fishery, this industrial fishery, whether there’s a relationship between that and declining numbers of halibit, declining numbers of salmon. We were assured by many people that this is being that this narrative is being pushed by outside billionaires. Okay, So I just wanted to make sure you’re not a billionaire. But you’re from Homer.

00:06:26
Speaker 2: From Homer, Okay, and you started your Facebook page.

00:06:29
Speaker 4: Where so I didn’t actually start at Jody Mason had started it. I’m a moderator. I do most of the posts on there, but Jody Mason is another charter operator in Homer, So yeah, one of the other admins on there is the executive director of the Alaska Door Council. I do charter boats, Jody does charter boats. But it came to a head because before they set charter halibut limits, each year they take troll bycatch of halibut off the top. So when you’re talking about that pie each year gets bigger and smaller with fish population. Every fish the troll takes out of it shrinks that pie down. And so it got to where us on charter boats taking out people with roden reel fishing, they said, well, we’re going to cut you guys back by about thirty percent to protect the resource. But we take two million pounds a halibut a year spread out across all these anglers, and at that time troll was dumping you know, five six million pounds of juvenile halibate per year, so close to a million individual fish. And so then it just creates the hypocrisy of what do you mean they can waste more than we catch, you know, like this, and we’re being told that we’re cut back for conservation.

00:07:35
Speaker 1: So yeah, let’s let’s let’s back way up, because yeah, not way up?

00:07:40
Speaker 2: Are you doing great? What is a trawler? Like?

00:07:44
Speaker 1: Like, what is a trawller? What is a bottom trawler? What is a mid ocean trawler?

00:07:49
Speaker 2: Can you? Can you lay this out?

00:07:51
Speaker 3: Yeah?

00:07:52
Speaker 4: So it well to start it off, you have to think about scale boats. So when we think about fishing boats, you know, we think of a lot of people have seen like the time band on The Deadliest Catch. That’s the biggest fishing boat. They can imagine it’s huge. For most of us, it’s about one hundred and thirteen feet long. But the biggest trawler fishing in Alaska now is three hundred and seventy six feet long. So if you put that in a Super Bowl stadium, it would go from goalpost to goal post.

00:08:19
Speaker 3: And it’s about six stories high.

00:08:21
Speaker 4: So when you think of volume of fish that a boat like that catches, they catch about a half a million pounds of fish per day. They can hold about five million pounds of fish in their boat. So as we talk about trills specifically, we’re talking huge numbers, billions of pounds of catch, millions of pounds of bye catch. But the way they fish is you’ll often hear them referred to as draggers as the other.

00:08:43
Speaker 2: Yeah, that’s the name. That’s the term ‘unfamiliar with is draggers. But then it was.

00:08:50
Speaker 1: You have a little problem where you have a problem where I talked like we previewed this subject on the news show. So then I got a lot of people and I be, I need to be honest here, right. I had a lot of people explain that the way I characterize some of the questions like that I mischaracterized some issues. So I think I’ve I like, I’m familiar with people calling them draggers. But then I was introduced to the idea that that’s not that’s not the industry term.

00:09:20
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think the industry term.

00:09:22
Speaker 4: They don’t like it because it is sensed as derogatory or there’s been so many shutdowns of drag fisheries across the United States. But we actually see one good example of this. There’s an industry group in Alaska that used to be it’s like the Alaska Whitefish Draggers Association something like that, but they changed their name to something like a cooperative, you know, where they dropped the drager name essentially ten or fifteen years ago. But they didn’t change their gear. They didn’t change their boat and change their bike catch much. They just got rid of the word dragger.

00:09:53
Speaker 2: Yeah. Okay, so so get into the gear. Yeah.

00:09:56
Speaker 4: Yeah, So they pull, We’re not saying drag.

00:09:58
Speaker 3: They pull. They drag a big, a huge net.

00:10:01
Speaker 4: So the biggest ones, they say, you can fit four seven forty seven jets plus the Eiffel Tower on its side into this net. So there again, when you and I think of fishing and fishing boats and what extraction of a natural resources, this is almost incomprehensible. They’ll pull up like a quarter million pounds of fish in one sweep essentially with this net. But it has it has a chain or cable along the bottom to wait it. And on those biggest ones, that’s about a quarter mile wide. So if that’s dragging on the bottom, then you’re cutting about a quarter mile wide swath of seafloor.

00:10:37
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:10:37
Speaker 4: So they say the biggest ones will tell about six square miles of seafloor per boat per day. There’s probably forty of these factory trawlers fishing in Alaska. They have a long season so if you’d say forty boats six miles per day, fishing two hundred days per year, the number of square acres of seafloor potentially covered is just unimaginable astronomical. I think it’s forty eight thousand square miles if they could hit sixes, if you do it that way. Yeah, yeah, Because they fish twenty four hours a day, it’s this floating factory ship.

00:11:08
Speaker 1: Essentially that that makes it seem impotent.

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Speaker 4: Man, they do complain about They complain about crab pots and these regulatory meetings and say you guys anchored here, you know, or you dropped a crab pot and ignore that that they’re fishing this way. But the uh anyway, so so huge nets and they there’s kind of two divisions that they’re cut into. One is the bottom trawl that will target fish that always live on the bottom, so like flounder and soul, those are made to always be on the bottom. They kick the fish up, scare them into the net. And bottom trawl across the world has this bad name, you know, that’s what’s associated mostly with draggers. Entire nations have banned. I think Bali and Hong Kong are no bottom.

00:11:51
Speaker 3: Trail at all.

00:11:52
Speaker 4: There’s a lot of European nations are kicking it out of their marine protected areas. Bottom trail is a bad word. It always has been. There’s really not my much debate on that. People at home can google like impact bottom trawl and pick it up. You don’t have to take my word for it. There’s ten thousand results that say this is an ecological disaster.

00:12:10
Speaker 1: And that on bottom trawling just the way understanding the gear right, like like legitimate bottom trawling where you’re legitimately dragging. The argument is not only the fish, right like, not only a not only a relatively indiscriminate harvest mechanism, but also bottom damage, c floor damage. Correct, that’s the that’s like, that’s kind of what drives the argument against bottom drawing or dragging.

00:12:42
Speaker 4: Absolutely. And so we see, so I was saying, there’s two types of trawl. So we see those bottom draggers that are always hard on bottom. They’ve been banned a lot of places in the world. Alaska, in fact, has I think about sixty percent of Alaska has been closed down to bottom trawling because we acknowledge that it’s this kind of equal disaster the coral it kills the fish on the bottom all the habitat. But then there’s this other category of troll which they call midwater trawl, and so that’s primarily used for the pollock fisheries up there, which is about a three billion pound extraction per year.

00:13:17
Speaker 3: Not a lot of people know what pollock is.

00:13:18
Speaker 4: It’s essentially like the bait fish of the North Pacific, and that fishery actually began because they were targeting row, which is caviar essentially to sell to these other nations.

00:13:30
Speaker 2: So their target pollock row or herring row, pollock row.

00:13:33
Speaker 4: Oh really yeah yeah, So it’s uh, they push back hard now and say we’re feeding the world, But the origin of this fishery was for caviar essentially, and it’s still a huge driver. That’s they get about five pound five dollars per pound for the pollock row versus about ten cents per pound for pollock flesh.

00:13:50
Speaker 2: Dude, that’s okay.

00:13:53
Speaker 1: I just wanted to touch on a smith because I don’t want to forget to talk about this is when you think about fish hard listed commercial fish, or like when you think about walking in into a fish shop, I don’t care where you go buy a fish, let’s see, you’re going to I don’t know, whole foods or something and.

00:14:10
Speaker 2: You go look at fish.

00:14:13
Speaker 1: I always always look into those cases as a way of justifying my fishing because I’m like, hammit this fish. Like these fish we catch, you know, you’d be like sable fish twenty hal a bit, whatever pound, salmon, whatever pound. It makes me feel like I feel like going to my wife.

00:14:28
Speaker 2: Like watching that, dude, you should I should fish more.

00:14:32
Speaker 3: Yeah, we’re making money.

00:14:34
Speaker 1: And so you see the value of like what we think of as the fish that we serve on a plate to our family when it comes to us as a product that looks like fish, the high value of that and fishermen getting you know, fishermen getting at the dock.

00:14:47
Speaker 2: We get a custom to fishermen getting at the dock.

00:14:49
Speaker 1: Two dollars per pound, five dollars per pound, seven dollars per pound, ten dollars per pound, right.

00:14:54
Speaker 2: So like a valuable resource.

00:14:57
Speaker 1: I remember having burgers into beer with a pollock guy down in Seattle. He was based out of Seattle, and he ran one of these big pollock processor boats. Yeah, okay, he was the captain on one, and I remember sitting there and he’s talking about, we do good when the price goes up a couple pennies, and this isn’t the exact number, but I’m not far off on the number. As I’m sitting there with them ahead of him going up, he was saying like, if it like five, this isn’t far off. At five cents a pound, it’s a bummer. At eight cents a pound, it’s good. Yeah, And I remember thinking like, how could there be how could there be a fish in the ocean.

00:15:45
Speaker 2: That is so unvaluable?

00:15:47
Speaker 3: Yeah.

00:15:48
Speaker 4: Well, and so that’s what brings us to why they use trawlers in the first place and why we don’t see trawlers or draggers everywhere, is that they really shine on super low value, high volume, which coincidentally ends up being like a lot of the baitfish type species. That’s what’s super plentiful. But their case is that they could never catch enough pounds of it to make money off of it unless they were dragging it up, you know, six square miles of the seafloor per day type deal, or two hundred thousand pounds at a time. But what we’ve really found to be the scandal, if you will, in all of this is that. So we said that bottom trawl’s bad, it’s banned a lot of places. There’s really not much argument about that. Even the bottom trawlers in Alaska just kind of hunker down as this conversation happens, because the more people find out that it even exists up there, the more people want it banned. That’s just established across the world. But kind of the like I say, the sandal of it is that we’ve actually found out that the midwater nets now are on bottom twenty to one hundred percent of the time. But where that really the rubber meets the road on that is that those midwater nets are allowed to fish in these habitat areas where bottom trawl has been banned. So the fish regulators understand that these huge nets are on the bottom sometimes all the time, but they haven’t taken this next step to ban them from where bottom trawling is banned, which just this huge disconnect.

00:17:18
Speaker 1: So to help me understand the midwater thing, and I’m anything but like talk to me like I’m five years old, But I’m a five year old who looks at pollock schools on fish finders. If you’re in two hundred feet of water, and you’re looking at a pollock school.

00:17:38
Speaker 2: This is just I mean, this is like very anecdotal. Okay.

00:17:41
Speaker 1: If I’m looking at a school of pollock and two hundred feet of water, that school of pollock is stacked and maybe the bottom ten twelve feet frequently. Yeah, So but what, like, how do you define mid ocean? Does it mean like don’t touch the bottom or does it like if you’re in varying depths, Like, what is the definition of that?

00:18:00
Speaker 4: Well, so that’s where it’s This sounds unbelievable, but it’s essentially not defined. Or they call it midwater because they will sometimes lift the nets up off the bottom, so it’s not the fish. The difference between bottom trowl for target species like flounder and soul is that those fish always live in the mud, buried in the bottom, so they drop that net to the bottom one hundred percent of the time. Pollocks spend a whole bunch of their time within you know, one, two, three, four or five feet to the bottom. But they’ll also sometimes raise up and so they they have this weird deal where they say it’s not illegal to drag a midwater net on bottom. But the only reason that would be illegal or the only reason they say it was on bottom for regulatory purpose is if it pulls up twenty or more crab, it’s a weird deal in a single drag of the net. But they say if it pulled up nineteen crab that it wasn’t on the bottom. And so it’s this crazy regulatory concept that just doesn’t really hold up.

00:19:02
Speaker 1: So being on bottom or not is defined by how many crabs are you catching, because we know the crabs aren’t mid level, correct, I got.

00:19:10
Speaker 4: You, But they if you start digging into their by catch numbers. Over the last five years, this Baring Sea polling fleet had three hundred and forty five metric tons of starfish that they brought up to the deck of the boat as bycatch, and they have about forty million pounds of this flounder and sole, these fish that live hard on the bottom. And so then you start to see these conundrums. And so in about twenty twenty one there was this big crab crash. You might have seen the headlines of like ten billion crab lost in the Bearing Sea. So the same regulatory agency.

00:19:41
Speaker 2: That was related to water temperature, was it not? Maybe?

00:19:45
Speaker 4: Yeah, OK, I don’t know, Yeah, that’s the official standpoint, and there’s water numerture change. But what that triggered was this fisheries management that regulates crab in the Bearing Sea also regulates trawl, and so their crabs scientists, the crab science side of it, started to look into this and they found out that the trawlers were actually fishing in this closed to bottom trall area of the Bearing Sea, this crab nursery or crab habitat area, and that was where this document came out that well, it was the midwater troll captains themselves, the pollock captains that said, we know our nets on bottom twenty to one hundred percent of the time. You know, it said, but we can’t get in trouble for that because the regulators knew it too, Like this isn’t new news, this is just how we fish. But that has set off this chain reaction obviously of well, we have all these areas closed off of Alaska to protect habitat because we don’t want bottom trawls there, but they’re not closed to midwater trolls dragging on bottom. And so that gets super important because when we start to look at like essential fish habitat and how much of the seafloor has never been touched by a net. All these areas closed to bottom trawl, we say our pristine habitat essentially, but the reality is that the midwater nets have been hard on bottom there for a long time. And so then it just really throws off all the calculations and you get into like, well, how can this fisheries regulatory agency make this miss you know, or how can we know that they’re on bottom but not regulate it that way? And that’s where we get into revolving door and like trawlers on the regulatory agency and on and on all the way up to Washington, d C. So that’s been a huge can of worms that Alaska has been going through lately.

00:21:30
Speaker 1: Yeah, I want to talk for a minute about we talked about the equipment. Explain explain the by catch issue to me, like how much bycatch is actually there? And as we talked about this, there’s couples I’d like us to hit on in no particular order. You get it, Maybe you can tell me that we talked about some staggering amount of bycatch, but industry people pointed out to me that the bulk of it is cod. Well, the bulk of its jellyfish. They’re like, well, it’s jellyfish and cod. There’s a question about waste, and the industry is like, well, we don’t. We’re allowed, We’re permitted to retain a lot of this stuff, so we’re not actually pitching it. It’s mostly jellyfish, which are unregulated. And then at some point I want to get into the question of of well, I’m gonna say that I want to get into the question of king salmon. Okay, where they’re getting caught, where they’re coming from.

00:22:32
Speaker 2: But first explain.

00:22:37
Speaker 1: The reason I want to talk about bycatches because I want to narrow one on the fish itself. Okay, the pollock, right, because you know, and anyone who’s you know, any any kid who went through like the most basic science class science classes, fair the food chain idea, Right, you have a large praise species, large number of praise species.

00:22:58
Speaker 2: They get eaten by bigger fish.

00:22:59
Speaker 1: The bigger fish get eating by and so there’s this question of in addition to a conversation about bycatch, there should be a conversation about the stability of the food base, so forage fish, right, right, and what the impacts of removing all these forage fish might be so put that on hold while we get into to the bycatch thing. Help me understand the bycatch issue. Okay, if it’s all jellyfish, what’s the problem.

00:23:30
Speaker 4: So they say, so there’s it gets fuzzy here again, you’re not gonna like this. There’s two categories of bycatch. One is observed by catch, which is the stuff that comes up onto the boat. Somebody digs through the catch, extrapolate out the numbers and say, you guys definitely killed x amount of pounds of x amount of species.

00:23:49
Speaker 2: These observers are are federal observers.

00:23:52
Speaker 4: Correct, Yeah, they’re required by the FEDS, but they usually work through like an independent intermediary agency that staffs them like a staff group. Okay, okay, they so there’s two categories. It was the observed numbers they come up to the deck, they get counted. Those are pretty good numbers. But then there’s also the unobserved bycatch. So we talked about these nets might drag six square miles a seafloor in a day, but nobody is calculating, you know, how much stuff got knocked down or killed or dredged up bottom sediment. That doesn’t make it up on sure the boat to be quantified. Other countries have taken stabs of that. There have been some research to find out how much biomasses in one score feet of mud and the bearing sea, et cetera. But the USA in that sense just says we don’t think it exists, or they ignore it.

00:24:38
Speaker 3: Look anyway, they.

00:24:39
Speaker 2: Want to stick to what’s observed. Yeah, got it.

00:24:42
Speaker 4: But that benefits trall quite a bit to do it that way. The so the observed bycatch, they told us that over the last ten years, all troll groups in Alaska combined have one hundred and forty one million pounds of bycatch per year. So that’s about sixteen thousand pounds per hour. It’s about one milli million pounds every two and a half days. It’s three and a half billion pounds since I graduated high school in twenty twenty one. So you’re talking in massive. Tell me the annual number again, one hundred and forty one million pounds.

00:25:13
Speaker 2: Per year of of sea life.

00:25:15
Speaker 4: Yeah, correct, all species combined. Yeah, and so they so you’ll, uh, and it’s a pretty it’s an indiscriminate gear type. That’s why troll works is that it scoops up a bunch of stuff, you bring it up to the deck. Sometimes the government says you can’t keep that fish. Sometimes the fish isn’t valuable. Sometimes it’s jellyfish that doesn’t have a commercial market. But kind of like if you looked at you know, dragging a net through a wheat field or whatever. You know, there’s honey bees and stuff that you would throw out. But when you start taking huge millions of pounds of stuff out of any ecosystem, you can run into trouble. And I don’t know if jellyfish is that, but they’re there, you know, and they’ve made it a however many thousands of years there. But the really big, you know, the high related species, or the more controversial species, are what they call prohibited species catch PSC. And so those are typically either the more slow growing or commercially valuable or often the fish which are already allocated to other industries. So when we fish for halibin Alaska, if money is involved, so if you’re a longliner that catches them to sell at the store, a charter fishermen taking people out, we have these real super tight limits of you know, one point nine nine nine million pounds or whatever it is. They float up and down each year, and there’s this acknowledgement that if troll wastes them as by catch, then we can’t it’s going to affect these other industries. So they say, troll, you can’t have them at all, and there’s a conversation about, well, maybe trills should be able to sell them. But then the concern is, so last year, halibut fishermen we’re getting about eight dollars per pound at the dock for halibit, but pollock is worth about ten cents. So there’s this concern that if you allow them to catch these super valuable for fish and sell them because we got them anyways, then that you essentially indentivize that. And sure you’ll see them shifting from well we accidentally caught this, but it.

00:27:04
Speaker 1: Was if you just did a micro like just a micro shift, yeah, to pick off more halib it, and you had the incentive to do it, Like why not do it?

00:27:12
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean you’re talking about like maybe my mass form a close to one thousand percent more. You know, if you go from ten cents a pound to a fish that’s worth ten dollars. So anyways, these but when they they don’t want troll to catch any prohibited species at all. But fisheries regulators over time have gotten this claim from trill of will the nets are so big. We have to use big nets to make money. We just can’t help it. And so they have made these acknowledgments that, Okay, we’re going to give you a limit of how many king salmon you can catch per year or a limit of how many halibit. We don’t want you to catch them. You’re not supposed to catch them. You’re not supposed to target them, but we acknowledged that it might happen.

00:27:49
Speaker 2: So this for but you can’t have them.

00:27:53
Speaker 3: But yeah, so they.

00:27:54
Speaker 4: Say that they either can be donated or they can be discarded, but they can’t enter into commerce because they’re going to trying to prevent it from becoming this incentivized theme.

00:28:04
Speaker 1: Yeah, and a guy from the industry, from the troll industry, pointed out to me that they’re sending halibu to food banks.

00:28:12
Speaker 4: Some okay, So one of the big problems with PSC these prohibited species, king salmon and halibut get the most airtime. They’re the most controversial, essentially, but they are also caught as juveniles. A lot of this straw by catch is juvenile fish. So the average halibate as caught as bycatch a few years ago in the Bearing Sea was four point seventy five pounds, so oh, we call him ping pong paddle halibit. So the average king salmon was about five pounds, so we think.

00:28:41
Speaker 1: Of that poundages wind up being a little bit misleading.

00:28:46
Speaker 4: Yeah, but we also in strictly in terms of what goes to food banks, we think of like, wow, a food bank would love to get this one hundred pound halibut or this thirty five pound king salmon. Think how many people that would feed. But that’s not what shows up. What we see something which yields, you know, two pounds of fish and in the or fish flesh and in the case halibit, those fish are being cut down essentially just a couple of years before they would spawn the first time. And the salmon are you know, being cut down before they’ve ever spawned. And so so while the food bank conversation is valid and maybe that’s better than them being dumped over, they a couple of years ago they had this report that they donated about three hundred thousand pounds of fish in that one year versus one hundred and forty one million pounds of total by catch, so they get a tax write off for it.

00:29:35
Speaker 3: It’s a great pr blitz.

00:29:36
Speaker 4: You can open up an email to a stranger with it, or talk to somebody in DC and say, we get this by catch, but we donate a lot of you know, we donated one hundred thousand pounds, but they might have had seven million pounds of a bycatch of this halib or halibu and salmon combined, so down tends to fall apart. But they with this PSC limit, so they made this acknowledgment that, yeah, you guys have kind of in discriminate. You’re gonna have some hal but sometimes you’re gonna have some salmon. We don’t want to shut you down every time you have it. But they’re never supposed to catch it. And so it would be like if Fish and Wildlife Service said that they were going to allow duck hunters to take two bald eagles per year or something, you know, like this, Actually there was an eagle flying behind the ducks. This guy shot on accident. He’s not going to go to federal prison for the first couple, but if it gets beyond that, it’s a problem. But in no point at the end of the year, if nobody had gotten the eagle quota, would somebody go out and point blank shoot two bald eagles? You know, that’s just not the intent of this regulation. But what we’ve seen with TRALL is that they take this prohibited species catch kind of a granted. They say, we know we can catch forty five thousand king salmon this year, so we don’t care if we get up to forty four point five thousand, as long as it doesn’t shut us down. Or they say we need to use this psc to fully catch our limit type thing. But that’s just a big wander away from what it had originally been created for.

00:31:01
Speaker 1: Got it and roughly how many have you know? Another thing we got to set up is lay out where we’re talking about. So you said areas of the southeast, the practice has already been the practice has been banned in the areas of the southeast for over twenty years.

00:31:16
Speaker 2: Southeast Alaska.

00:31:17
Speaker 1: Correct, So it’s currently like areas in the golf of Alaska. And someone looks at the map, imagine like that big basin you know on the western edge. You got the illusions coming down on the eastern edge.

00:31:32
Speaker 2: You guys.

00:31:32
Speaker 3: Pro tip.

00:31:33
Speaker 2: Yeah, there you go, there’s pro tip. Hold that up. But for people listening, how you can make it. It’s not as good as how you.

00:31:40
Speaker 1: Can make a Michigan with your hand, but you can make a decent Alaska with your hand.

00:31:44
Speaker 3: So the yeah is this point towards camera.

00:31:48
Speaker 2: Fills that aiming at the camera, Yeah, it is. You’re in there.

00:31:50
Speaker 3: I was trying to pull up a real picture of Alaska to help you guys. Yeah, but it might it might take a.

00:31:54
Speaker 4: Sick worring the So this is roughly the state of Alaska. So this is southeast Alasta, comes down towards Canada and Seattle, this is the Aleutian Chain, and it sends out towards Russia. Anchorage is about right here, but most of the troll happens in the Gulf of Alaska, so a little bit south of Anchorage and Homer and then a big part of it in the Bearing Sea, which is where like the deadliest catch crabbing is. But you’re right, it was banned in southeast Alaska, which is a pretty interesting story because they historically they’d never really there hadn’t been big troll fisheries in southeast Alaska. It’s a pretty rocky bottom. They didn’t have the population to fish that they wanted, et cetera, et cetera.

00:32:33
Speaker 1: But was that what kind of keeps them onto there, just like the fjord kind of the fjord geology and hydrology of the area.

00:32:39
Speaker 4: Well, the Gulf of Alaska has it too, but really it’s the fishable populations of these like low value non like pollock and founder just weren’t there. So it h But where it came to a head is the most of these boats that fish Troll and Alaska in the summertime, we’ll do their off season down in Seattle, want Washington. And so they had this incident very particular one moment where one of these boats had left Seattle, Washington, it came up into southeast Alaska. It was legal to fish there, and I don’t know if they wanted to see what was down there, they wanted to test their net or whatever they’re fishing legally, and so they unrolled their net fishing for a day and they essentially caught the entire rockfish quota for all of this area in a single day, which means nobody else can fish for them this year. And so that, as you can imagine, put up this hell storm of conflict. And so they eventually got them banned.

00:33:36
Speaker 3: Because they obviously that was bad.

00:33:38
Speaker 4: But in that instance it was a little bit different because they didn’t really want to fish there anyways. You know, it was kind of an accident that they’d hit this limit. And so while that does set precedent that it can happen in Alaska, and like the regulatory channels are there, we’re seeing a way different thing when we start talking about this idea of it being banned or heavily restricted in these main areas.

00:34:00
Speaker 2: Okay, so so.

00:34:01
Speaker 1: Hit me with goulf of Alaska and Bearing Sea. Hit me with a little bit more on what’s getting caught on the on the halib It front.

00:34:09
Speaker 3: So the sorry you gotta keep talking your mind, Yeah, sorry, the uh we’re cool.

00:34:14
Speaker 2: On the map, people would see it.

00:34:16
Speaker 1: You’d be crazy if a dude like one, if a new prime minister, what are they got in Canada for a president prime minister If he’s like man from not On, it’s goal for Canada.

00:34:29
Speaker 3: Don’t get into it.

00:34:30
Speaker 4: The uh So, the most of the Halibit bycatch currently happens in the Bearing Sea and that comes from this.

00:34:37
Speaker 3: They call it the Amendment eighty Bottom trawl Fleet.

00:34:40
Speaker 4: It had been created uh to specifically target these bottom fish out there.

00:34:45
Speaker 3: Uh.

00:34:45
Speaker 4: And they get pretty close to four million pounds of reported by catch each year. But when they report that, that’s halibut bycatch halibut by catch mortality. So this is what you’ve gotten into in that news clip of they don’t they don’t necessarily assume that all fish caught in troll that comes up and is then released is going to die. And so they had kind of trall had co authored a study with federal regulators a few years ago that essentially it used to be assumed that every time they had a halibut come up in this net might be packed in with one hundred thousand pounds of other fish, it’s been towed for four or five hours. They used to just get dumped straight into the fishold, and they would assume that all those halibu died. But they came up with another program called the deck sword in program, where instead of dumping the net straight into the fishold, they would instead dump it out on the deck of the boat and then crew members have about half an hour to go through and throll back as many halibut as they can, and if they participate in this program, they assume only about fifty percent of the halibut die. But from a sport fishing perspective, I mean, we’ve seen that’s a real tough one. We you know, we have rivers in Alaska where if we are doing catch release fishing for a salmon and we lift it all the way out of the water to take a picture, that’s a crime. You know, that’s illegal for us because we could have killed that fish. Essentially, So when you start looking at a halibate that’s been packed in one hundred thousand pounds with this net, stepped on, sorted through for half an hour, I mean just pulling the net out of the water takes half an hour, and then you got another half an hour.

00:36:23
Speaker 2: Yeah, I don’t know it. No, But.

00:36:27
Speaker 1: Again, man, I’ve had you know, fair bit of exposure, you know, to hell. But over the years that that that’s tough for me. It is, I don’t really know. I mean that a survival rate of fifty percent seems difficult.

00:36:40
Speaker 4: It is, and so a lot of other nations don’t allow that. So a lot of them will do what they call full retention of bycatch. They say, if it came up in a trawl net, we’re assuming it’s dead. Even fins are wiggling a little bit. So you guys have to bring it all back to shore. We’re going to go through all of it in this neutral facility. So it’s not like there’s an observer out there with you know, six crew members hanging over their shoulder. They just say, if it came up in the trail on net, it’s dead.

00:37:06
Speaker 3: You guys bring it back to shorts so we can get an accurate count.

00:37:08
Speaker 4: Got it, But Alaska doesn’t do it like that, and especially on hal of it, it doesn’t do it like that.

00:37:13
Speaker 3: So what we’ve seen.

00:37:15
Speaker 4: Up there is they get about so last year, I think it was four point three million pounds of hal of it by catch mortality.

00:37:21
Speaker 3: So those are the ones they assumed dead.

00:37:23
Speaker 4: Closer to eight million pounds would have been brought up onto the deck.

00:37:27
Speaker 3: They threw them all back and they assumed about half of them.

00:37:28
Speaker 1: With Okay, so let’s let’s hoverund that number from it, and you tell me the number again, like the agreed upon number.

00:37:35
Speaker 3: Four point three million pounds.

00:37:36
Speaker 1: Okay, four point three million assumes a fifty percent survival rate kicked off the deck, thrown off the deck back into the water.

00:37:43
Speaker 4: Well, the survival rate’s already been applied to that four point three million. So those are the ones that definitely died. Another four point three million got released and were assumed to have lived or around there.

00:37:53
Speaker 1: All right, So the agreed upon dead the agreed upon dead pile?

00:37:57
Speaker 2: How big that in that region? How big?

00:38:03
Speaker 1: What is the commercial harvest on halibut of intentional halbut catch?

00:38:07
Speaker 4: So it in that region is pretty small. I don’t have that number memorized, but I do have the data on the as of twenty fifteen, average bycatch halibate they got in that region was four point seven six pounds per fish, And so that makes about eight hundred and fifty thousand fish that they assumed died last year through this bycatch. And that is more individual halibate than the entire state of Alaska all other halibut fisheries combined.

00:38:34
Speaker 2: More individual halibut.

00:38:35
Speaker 4: Individual halibu and the halibut spawn at kind of like the males and females start at different ages, but like seven to ten pounds per fish. And so when we talked to biologists about this, they’ll say, oh, we kind of have this deal where if you you can never assume that one fish taken out of a population would have affected the total population because there’s a good chance a fish dies. Sure, I find that hard to believe. With five pound halibut. You know, when a halibut egg is laid, yeah, ninety nine percent of them die, or when a halibut’s in the larval stage, another ninety nine percent of them die or whatever. But once you get up to this five pound fish that’s about two feet long, it’s buried in the mud and it’s just almost made it to work and spawned.

00:39:17
Speaker 2: The annual survival rate is going up for sure. Yeah.

00:39:20
Speaker 4: Yeah, So so that’s a tough one to look at.

00:39:23
Speaker 3: And they’d actually, what sized again, does a halbt start to spawn like seven to ten pounds?

00:39:28
Speaker 1: Why why is there why is there so much emphasis on protecting Like like just if you I’m just talking to listeners here, if you go when you see one hundred and fifty pound halibit or someone like catches a one to fifty a one seventy one, like those are females, right, and that is a and people will talk about like there’s anglers will encourage you to cut those fish loose, even if you’re allowed to have them, because be like, those are your big spawners s. Is it just because the volume of eggs they’re putting off is so great?

00:40:05
Speaker 3: Yeah?

00:40:05
Speaker 1: Or do you think that that’s not really a good way of looking at it, that you need to save the big halbit because those females are producing the eggs.

00:40:12
Speaker 4: Well, so I look at it both ways. So this charter business i’d owned, we used to have this. I called it the Release the Beast program. If somebody would let a halibu over two hundred and fifty pounds go, I’d give them a free fishing trip the next year to encurag Really people who do this, and they say that a fish that size is laying about four million eggs per year. So yeah, they got a lot of eggs. But the reality is from a biological side, the most of the halibut cot over about twenty pounds are females, and those have.

00:40:41
Speaker 3: Over twenty yeah, yeah.

00:40:43
Speaker 4: Those have the potential to spawn, you know, maybe twenty five more times in their life. Say they’re going to live to be forty years old or whatever. It is versus the big fish. They have a lot of eggs per spawn, but maybe they’ve only got five years left to live essentially. And so the halibut biologists take, we’ve they’ve been pinned down on this because this is a big you know, social issue in Alaska.

00:41:06
Speaker 3: You guys are terrible because you killed this big fish.

00:41:09
Speaker 4: But when we ask the IPHC about it, this specific Alibert Commission, they say, we don’t think there’s any impact to actual halibut populations because they’re just not that many big fish and they’re not going to spawn them anymore times. But that also takes genetics out of it. So I I mean, and that’s why I’ve done this program of like we’ll give you a free trip, because these are the fish that have you know, beat the odds and they’ve made it and survived and.

00:41:34
Speaker 3: Anyway, So it can go both ways.

00:41:35
Speaker 1: But they like that that the fact that these fish are getting large is a demonstration of fitness viability. So allowing these big fish to be in the in the population and contributing genetics of the population, you argue, like you could be like helping perpetuate traits that lead to longevity.

00:41:58
Speaker 4: You could, I mean, yeah, it’s like the conversation of like selective deer and elk harvest type thing, selecting for genetics, but by the same token, we’ve killed a lot of them, and I leave it up to the fisherman’s choice, you know.

00:42:11
Speaker 2: But a seven pound female helbit is kicking off.

00:42:16
Speaker 4: Eggs seven years old, so that gets them up to around maybe fifteen pounds.

00:42:21
Speaker 1: Okay, yeah, okay, so she starts she can start producing eggs at about seven years of age.

00:42:26
Speaker 4: Correct, And I think it might be the males that start at age seven and the female start at age ten.

00:42:30
Speaker 3: But anyways, yeah, yeah.

00:42:32
Speaker 4: It’s pretty spawning is not relegated to giants absolutely, like a twenty.

00:42:36
Speaker 1: Pound helb, but it could be a sexually viable spawning female.

00:42:39
Speaker 3: Absolutely, Yeah, okay, understood, understood.

00:42:42
Speaker 1: Yeah, all right, now, what about so we talked about the Bearing Sea, tell me about the Gulf of Alaska.

00:42:48
Speaker 4: So the Gulf of Alaska has troll fisheries too, but they’re typically not as big, but they One of the big issues we were runn into in the off Alaska is that they the Golf of the Alaska and bar and See have different regulatory regulations, different rules to fish by, and one of the big hot button issues in the Gulf of Alaska is that there they have these dedicated bottom troll fleet. So some of the dirtiests they hard on the bottom all the time, ripping up habitat. But they only have an observer rate of about twenty to thirty percent, and so you’ll hear troll in the Bearing Sea will say we have a two hundred percent observer rate, we have one hundred percent observer rate, or this model of sustainability, but they conveniently ignore that. Right next door is this other fleet where they only send an observer along for about one out of three trips, and so there’s been this kind of widespread insinuation from former crew and current crew there that it becomes cheaper for a boat operator there to essentially throw a trip when the observers along, then a risk with the observer, then risk at the observer sees what they actually catch, and then extrap plate set out to the entire season, because if they catch, you know, two thousand king salmon and this one day when the observer’s along, then the observer says, well, the other seventy percent of the trip, you’re probably catching two thousand king salmon too.

00:44:12
Speaker 3: Which risk is shutting them down.

00:44:14
Speaker 4: So there’s this pretty wide insinuation that instead of actually going out and fishing hard or fishing for a full trip, you’d set the net out once before midnight, fish for a couple hours, you know a spot you wouldn’t normally fish, set it out again after midnight, fish for a couple hours, and then say, yeah, we had two days of observed fishing, now we have eight days without it type thing?

00:44:34
Speaker 2: Got it? How much of these fish moving? Like, what are we understanding about that?

00:44:39
Speaker 1: If you’re let’s say, I mean like kind of the hal a Bit charter mecca, right, Like if someone’s going to go up to Alaska and I and they want to be.

00:44:49
Speaker 2: Like, what’s the best Halibit area I could go to?

00:44:51
Speaker 1: I think a lot of people are gonna be like, go to the you know Homer Man, It’s like he seems like Halbert capital of the state, right, That’s what the sign says.

00:44:57
Speaker 2: So our bearings, how much of these fish moving?

00:45:01
Speaker 1: Are king salmon that are running rivers in the Gulf of Alaska Southeast Alaska? Are those kings ever winding up in the Bering Sea and vice versa? Are there hal a bit that are spawning in the Bearing Sea, that maybe we’re spending time in the Gulf of Alaska. Are these are these trading fish.

00:45:20
Speaker 4: Totally, and so they are. Halibut’s one of the easiest examples of that. So they make this assumption to halibut biologists that essentially the entire popular halibut population of Alaska and Canada move out to like three thousand feet of water to spawn in the winter, all their eggs and stuff mixed there, and then the trending currents carry them up to the Bearing Sea and that is where the larva settles. So they have these what they call designated halibut nursery zones in the Bearing Sea. And then they say as the fish get older, they have a clockwise migration, so they move south and east.

00:45:54
Speaker 1: So back up from it, they’re spawning in three thousand feet of water.

00:45:59
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, and we’ve seen them, you know, I’ve seen like ready to spawn fish in a couple hundred feet of water too, but that’s.

00:46:05
Speaker 2: These they can spawn three thousands.

00:46:07
Speaker 4: I think it’s like ducks migrating, like some of them migrate every.

00:46:10
Speaker 3: Time, and then you have local ducks, yes, got it.

00:46:12
Speaker 4: But the anyways, Yeah, So essentially the biological assumption is that the vast majority of halibut begin their life as larva settling in the Bearing Sea. Then they go clockwise, which brings them to the Gulf of Alaska, brings them to Southeast Alaska, brings them to Canada, Washington, Oregon, all the way down. And so when we talk about how there’s four million pounds of juvenile halibut being wasted a straw bycatch in the Bearing Sea each year, that means we’re hitting homer in the Gulf Alaska. Southeast Prince of Wales, Canada gets really grabby about this. Washington Oregon have like a halibut season of just a couple of days now because the population is doing so poorly. And so each year when they set these harvest limits, all these these other countries and these other areas are saying, oh my god, you gotta we can’t waste this manyhow but in the Bearing Seas.

00:47:03
Speaker 3: Here because it affects all of us.

00:47:05
Speaker 4: But we’ve seen the troll industry kind of become this powerhouse in our regulatory agencies, and they say, well, we make a lot of money from it.

00:47:12
Speaker 3: You can’t can’t shut that down.

00:47:13
Speaker 1: You know, and what about the kings salmon, for instance, are they they’re moving?

00:47:18
Speaker 4: Yeah, so you can pull up various charts where they definitely moving.

00:47:22
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:47:23
Speaker 4: So we’ll see them go from like the Gulf of Alaska into the Burying Sea and feed. You see the ones from like Oregon, Washington, and Canada will come up into the Gulf of Alaska and feed, and they all have this like four year loop. And then there’s a lot of fish from the Bearing Sea area that go and do a loop in.

00:47:40
Speaker 3: The Bearing Sea.

00:47:41
Speaker 4: But one of the things we’ve seen with king salmon coastwise or the entire you know, Oregon all the way up to Nome, is that they’re doing very poorly. And they before we started to see them crash all the way or fisheries be shut down. We’ve seen this huge shrinking size of age. So the fish of over you know, we used to see these hundred pound king salmon out of the Columbia River, one hundred pound king salmon out of Kenai River, eighty pound kings out of the Yukon River, and before they quit coming back at all, we’re seeing them get smaller, smaller, smaller, smaller. And we’ve seen the same thing with halibu. So halibut size at age, how big they are, depending on how old they are, has decreased by over half.

00:48:21
Speaker 3: Over the last thirty years.

00:48:24
Speaker 4: And so that really points people towards a food source issue. And that again is where you get into pollock, as this forge fish of the North Pacific that you know, maybe three billion pounds a year isn’t sustainable. And so then we can come into this conversation of.

00:48:39
Speaker 1: Yeah, this moves is beyond this move is beyond the bycatch chasing this food issue, right.

00:48:44
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, and also the habitat issue. So when I look at it, I see there’s three points. One is that the bycatch the raw pounds, which they can defend and say, oh it might have been jellyfish, or as a percentage, this isn’t that much of a particular river. Okay, we can give them that. But then you get into the food issue of we’re seeing fish and seabirds. They said the crabs starved to death during that warm water event. Halibut sizeded age, salmon size at age. There’s an issue with gray whales not getting enough food in the bearing seed of finish their migration to Mexico and back they’ve had big starving events with those, and then we look at how could this be, Well, we’re taking three billion pounds of bait fish out of the year or out of the water every year, and we’re also the third part of this is what the seafloor habitats, what kind of hits we’re doing there. So you’ve got the raw pounds of by catch bait fish coming off the bottom of the food chain, and then the seafloor impact of dragging say six six miles of sea floor every day.

00:49:44
Speaker 1: But you and me both know that a population can have what we call a sustainable yield, meaning you can let’s just put this in the simplest terms. Let’s say you sneak onto the local golf course and fish back, all right, and you like to make fried large mouth sandwiches. If you if you’re frying three large mouths out of this golf course pond every year, you might realize that over the years you can catch three large mouths just as quick as any other year, and that you eating those large mouth sandwiches seems to be have no impact on the population in that pond, Meaning if you didn’t catch those three large mouths, they’re probably about the same amount of large mouse in that pond.

00:50:29
Speaker 2: The pond’s going to produce blank ponds of large mouths.

00:50:32
Speaker 1: You have a sustainable yield, Okay, Like, what what evidence is there that it is having a population level impact on pollock? Like are they needing to fish longer and harder to catch the pollock? Are they needed to use to change tactics? Are they needing to move to new areas that haven’t been previously exploited, Like, is there some evidence that that they’re putting a hurt on the pollock and that it’s not sustainable yield?

00:51:01
Speaker 4: Well, so the place. So you have to look at kind of the progression of ships over time. So you know, fifty years ago, we had low horsepower engines, They couldn’t toe as big of a net. We didn’t have near the electronics that we have now, We didn’t have starlink, we didn’t have like this real time communication between ships, and we were catching about the same amount of pollock then as we are now, but we weren’t seeing other species that depend on pollock starve to death simultaneously. But now we fast forward fifty years and we’re seeing the size and age of the pollock are quite a bit smaller, which has been a precursor to a lot of other fisheries crashes as the fish get smaller and smaller and smaller and go. We’ve seen Charlo’s complained about that. But the technology that we’re using to catch essentially the same amount of fish is through the roof. You imagine the last twenty years of where the boats have gone. And I don’t have data on how many toes they do or how many days they have to fish, but that had come up. We talked about, like that Bearing Sea crab crash. They had a tough time catching crab that year, and so they were fishing assumably new places and longer and more days. You know, so all those kind of factor in. But this year in particular, they’d done this survey of the pollock and they said in the Bearing Sea that the total pollock population had dropped by about thirty percent. But they didn’t reduce the troll harvest pollock by thirty percent. They said, you guys catch the same amount, but if that means everything else, you know, all these predator fish rely on everything that’s left. The humans didn’t lose thirty percent of the pollock all the predator fish lost thirty percent, you know that that has to come out of somewhere, and they they as soon there’s about eight billion pounds of pollock in the in the Bearing Sea each year is this population, and we’re harvesting about three billion pounds of it. So wow, it’s not like you’re leaving ninety nine percent.

00:53:02
Speaker 3: In the water.

00:53:03
Speaker 4: You know, you’re at like forty percent or so, so there’s not much room for error. And troll will make this case that you know, we talked about this three hundred and seventy five foot boat. It might cost one hundred million dollars to be built. They say, we can’t fish less because we have these huge boat payments and every day we’re tied up to the dock. It means that we’re losing money. You know. We just our businesses can’t survive on that. But that’s a pretty poor way to manage a wild resource. You know, Like imagine we said that we don’t tell guides that with big horn sheep, you know, or whatever it may be, if the sheep were having a bad year, then you guys are tied up. And we’re seeing that in Alaska that sport fishermen on the Yukon subsistence on the Yukon sport fishermen for halib it. Everybody else is getting cut back big time to protect the resource. But Troll’s been able to make this economic case of well we lose our boat, you know, where the banks would default on us or whatever it may be.

00:53:57
Speaker 2: Job loss whatever. Yeah.

00:53:58
Speaker 1: Yeah, But then but that you don’t see as much of that conversation in.

00:54:07
Speaker 2: Other commercial fisheries that are suffering as well.

00:54:09
Speaker 4: Right, Yeah, well they try, but they they don’t seem to have the sympathetic ear from.

00:54:15
Speaker 3: The fish regulators.

00:54:16
Speaker 4: Yeah, And so that brings up another interesting point with how these fisheries are managed. There’s a federal board which regulates these trawl fisheries and the majority of that is made up of people who are vested in the troll industry. So example is one of them is a vice president of a group which lobbies are as an industry rep for troll. Another one is a CFO of a group that has trok what they’re out there fishing for these pollock and those are the guys in charge of making this decision of well should we cut back the pollock catch because they just drop thirty percent yep. And they say they’re impartial, they say it wouldn’t matter. But then there’s this question of could they keep their job if they cut their employers fish harvest back by thirty percent, you know, And that doesn’t that doesn’t line up. And they’re again fishing on a wild population under the sea where we can’t see it. We’re just taking huge risks on maybe we’re right, maybe we’re wrong, but we’re just teetering on this edge of if we’re wrong one time, it could have a big ramification.

00:55:14
Speaker 2: You know, you brought up the Yukon River.

00:55:16
Speaker 1: Let me let me hit you with some feedback I got. I had made the statement on the news show. I had made a statement when I was just digging into this subject. I’ve been aware of it, but I was digging into it. I made the statement about how the draggers are killing more kings as bike This is my words, Okay, the draggers are killing more kings meaning king salmon. The draggers are killing more kings as by catch. Then make it to the upper Yukon.

00:55:47
Speaker 2: So what I was.

00:55:47
Speaker 1: Referring to is in numbers, right, there’s more king salmon getting caught as by catch. By the troll industry than the number of salmon that make it to the upper Yukon. Now, the reason the Yukon is is an important consideration here is people in the Yukon. On the Yukon River, there’s a ten thousand year old king salmon fishery there, okay. But in recent years people have been prohibited from fishing kings at all in the Yukon.

00:56:23
Speaker 2: Right, so there’s been.

00:56:25
Speaker 1: Like a closure of some subsistence practices because there aren’t enough kings to sustain the fishery. An industry person pointed out to me, He says, it’s the statement’s not accurate. Now, I want to clarify a point here, I said. I said the numbers, okay. I didn’t say that they were catching more Yukon fish than are making to the Yukon.

00:56:50
Speaker 2: But they’re catching more kings than make it to the Yukon.

00:56:53
Speaker 1: But the person pointed out, they do genetic testing on kings, Okay. He says, the Bering Sea pollock fishery had a chinook bycatch of eleven thousand, eight hundred and fifty five king salmon. They’re claiming only twenty seven of those fish came from the Yukon River, Okay, the Gulf of Alaska pollock fishery, they caught eighteen thousand, four hundred and thirty two kings. Their claim zero came out of the Yukon Okay. So this is twenty twenty three numbers, thirty thousand, two hundred and eighty seven chinook, of which twenty seven.

00:57:45
Speaker 2: Came out of the Yukon.

00:57:48
Speaker 1: And that year twenty twenty three, he’s saying that at the pilot station sonar they were counting in the Yukon fifty eight thousand, five hundred twenty nine fish. So the total Alaska pollock fishery killed and eighty seven chinooks in twenty twenty three, twenty twenty three numbers, and in that year they saw fifty eight thousand, five hundred and twenty nine fish.

00:58:17
Speaker 2: That’s the escapement. Okay, escapement not incoming? Right? What do you make of this? Oh?

00:58:26
Speaker 3: No, escapement is what returns?

00:58:28
Speaker 2: Oh? So okay?

00:58:28
Speaker 1: So okay, okay, So escapement is incoming fish? Yeah, I got it, Okay, understood therefacation.

00:58:34
Speaker 4: Never repeat this, But I think the Trawal guy’s right on this one point. So they where are those fish from?

00:58:42
Speaker 2: If they’re not out of the Yukon.

00:58:43
Speaker 4: Well, it’s a huge I mean, so if you think of Alaska, people don’t get this. But if you superimpose the state of Alaska over the lower forty eight of the US, the east side is over in like New York City, and the west side is over to California and goes from Canada to Mexico. So just the state of Alaska has more shoreline than the entire rest of the United States combined.

00:59:05
Speaker 1: I mean, Phil, can you pull up that deal where they show Alaska overlaid on the lower forty eight.

00:59:10
Speaker 2: Yeah, with the illusions and whatnot go on.

00:59:16
Speaker 4: So there’s thousands of rivers what I’m getting at, And there’s they encounter fish from other countries. Russia has fish that come in, but they An interesting part of this is that you’ll see troll kind of play with these big numbers where it suits them. But they might say that only one percent or less than one percent comes into the Yukon River, which is one out of five hundred rivers in western Alaska, all of which are essentially shut down to kingsam and fishing preemptively to save the resource. But then they’ll say that about fifty percent of the kings they catch are from western Alaska rivers. So they pull it out and say that, well, this one we didn’t get very many, but close to half of them total came out of this general area.

01:00:00
Speaker 1: Yeah, but that doesn’t I appreciate The clarification of the caers me to agree with these Yeah, I guess it brings this up.

01:00:12
Speaker 2: And this I don’t want to say that this is the crux of it, but it brings us up. You spent your.

01:00:18
Speaker 1: Life fishing, hunting, trapping. Okay, so you’re familiar, like you know that when again, to go to the pie analogy, you have any different thing. What are we’re talking about mule deer, we’re talking about king salmon, ce, cucumbers, whatever the hell anything.

01:00:41
Speaker 2: You’re going to have the.

01:00:42
Speaker 1: Pie, which is the total population that can be harvested, and then you’re going to have who’s getting their pieces of the pie. And the thing I’ve picked up in my career of paying attention to this and I’m and I participate just right along with everybody else. There’s a human tendency when the pie shrinks, there’s a human tendency to look at other people’s usage, to look at their piece and go your piece, like, your piece is too big. It could be if it’s if it’s elk. What are we gonna say, Oh, it’s the non residents, it’s the guides, it’s the whoever, right, There’s this human tendency to usually look and blame other people like no one usually goes like, Man, I’ve looked in the mirror long and hard, and I’m the reason I’m not seeing big bulls. You know you’re gonna go like, oh no, it’s Minnesotans are the reason you’re not seeing big bulls. The guides are the reason you’re not seeing big bulls. The out of state landowners are the reason you’re not seeing big bulls.

01:01:44
Speaker 2: It’s not you.

01:01:47
Speaker 1: So on this question, I think you get where, like it’s empirically true. Yeah, no serious person, Like, no serious person. This is me talking, but I’ve had a lot of conversations. No serious person is going to say that we’re not seeing a major pie shrinkage for sure.

01:02:09
Speaker 3: On King Salmon, I got a couple of things to bail you out on this.

01:02:12
Speaker 2: Well, let me finish the point. It’s it’s it’s empirically true.

01:02:18
Speaker 1: Okay, It’s like an objective reality that we are seeing a shrinking pie on hall of it. Right, no serious person is going to come and say that that king salmon numbers are better than ever in the Pacific. No serious person would say that. So if if we agree on that, like to what degree and I’m just asking you this question, I’m getting into a question to believe me, Like, to what degree is it that that? To what level of confidence? Can we look and be like, it’s like, that is the issue? Trall is the issue, and to what is it? Like is it that that it’s death of a thousand cuts?

01:03:02
Speaker 2: Right? Maybe maybe Trall is a little bit of a problem. Maybe Charter is a little bit of a problem.

01:03:09
Speaker 1: Acidification of the oceans a little bit of a problem, warming oceans, and climate change a.

01:03:15
Speaker 2: Little bit of a problem.

01:03:17
Speaker 1: We’re but we’re pointing and trying to be like, no, it’s it’s actually your fault. It’s not these other issues. It’s your fault in you alone. Right, how do you speak to that question?

01:03:27
Speaker 3: For sure?

01:03:27
Speaker 4: So that brings us back to kind of these three points with Trall. So they’ll talk about bycatch, they’ll talk about genetics in the Yukon River. But if you’re going to make an analogy about that, like big horn sheep in the Missouri Breaks. So you could say that somebody wanted to strip mine the brakes or whatever, they wanted to mow down all the sage brush out there for whatever reason to make a parking lot. They could start doing that. They stretch a chain between two bulldozers, they start to rip up the Missouri River breaks, and they might only have that bulldozer or that chain only run into two big horn sheep in a year and kill them.

01:04:04
Speaker 3: But when they.

01:04:05
Speaker 4: Destroy all the habitat and destroy all the food, then the entire population suffers. And so that’s where we keep coming back to this pollock as a bait fish, and we’re not seeing just king salmon shrink or not come back. We’re seeing it across a dozen different species marine mammals, whales, fur seals, king salmon, chum, salmon, and they. And there’s also this conversation of well, of course you guys aren’t catching many fish out of the Yukon River.

01:04:31
Speaker 3: The entire fishery crashed. I mean, yea, yeah, that’s yeah.

01:04:37
Speaker 4: I’m not I’m not turning down many blonde girls because there’s not many blond girls that want to go out me in first. But you know, like this cause and effect here, but the a good year on the Yukon River used to be like five hundred thousand fish.

01:04:49
Speaker 3: It used to be ten times bigger.

01:04:51
Speaker 4: So functionally, this fishery has already crashed, you know, And yeah, your bycatch of it has gone down proportionally, but it’s not necessarily because you’re fishing cleaner, not because you’re effective at avoiding them, but just because the fish aren’t there. And so what we actually saw with Trall a couple times in the last five years is all one year in the Baring Sea, I think they had eight thousand kings as bycatch. One year they had ten thousand. This is a year long, their whole thing. And so they’re telling us, God, we are good at avoiding king salmon now as everything else is crashed. But this year, in about two months, I think they’ve already got eleven thousand kings. So maybe there’s more kings around. But they’re not necessarily fishing cleaner, they’re just kind of I can’t profiting or getting fortunate off of these low returns. And if you start to look at like a thirty year history, I don’t have the number in front of me, but those bycatchy short reports statewide show about one point one million kings lost as troll bycatch, which there’s a lot of other fisheries the fish for king salmon too. But when you combine that raw bi catch plus that they’re losing their food source, plus that were towing these midwater nets on bottom and reckon the seafloor habitat, then you get kind of this perfect trifecta. And there’s definitely a conversation about ocean ascidification, other fleets, climate warming, climate change, whatever you want to call it, but they a lot of that is uncontrollable by humans, are uncontrollable in the short term. But trall could be fixed tomorrow, you know, or rained in, but not without economic pain to the people doing it. So there’s a select group that’s making a ton of money off of this, billions of dollars, and they say, well, even if we are kind of the most obvious outlier here, the most controllable variable, you can’t cut us back because we’re making a lot of.

01:06:39
Speaker 3: Money off of it.

01:06:40
Speaker 4: Yeah, And where that really connects is that, to.

01:06:44
Speaker 2: Be clear, they don’t say we’re making a lot of money off it. They say, we’re creating a.

01:06:49
Speaker 3: Lot of jobs.

01:06:50
Speaker 4: Ah, yes, they do say that they yeah, so, And where it gets really interconnects. And this is something a lot of people don’t realize is that the Fisheries Made Management Council in Alaska, which regulates trall exists under Noah Fisheries. So you hear about Noah, like save the whales, save the turtles, Noah Weather, But they don’t realize that Noah is a division of the Department of Commerce in DC. And so we think of every time that troll starts to make this economic claim and says, if we don’t catch the pollock, the Russians will, or we’re gonna this is going to create a trade deficit between the USA and other nations. You know, the US Fish and Wildlife Service or Department of Interior EPA probably wouldn’t bite on that. They’d say, we got to protect the fish first, and then how much money you guys make comes later. But when you present that to the Department of Commerce, they say, that’s a pretty good point. We’re we’re not going to make the USA lose money on this, even if Alaska only gets fractions of that money. Totally, you know, and so then you set up kind of this like Alaska versus Washington, d C. How do you want these natural resources used? It would be like, so one example is that troll claim is that it only drags about one point four percent of the entire bearing sea. They say, our impact is really small. But anybody that has fish knows that not all fishing ground is equal. There’s seamounts, there’s ledges, there’s the super productive areas.

01:08:14
Speaker 2: And so I fish less than one percent of the area.

01:08:16
Speaker 1: I fish less than one percent of the area where I fish by fish for the fish.

01:08:19
Speaker 3: Are for sure, that’s it.

01:08:21
Speaker 4: And so that would be like say that this logging or mining company came and made this claim to the Department of Commerce that hey, we want to log one point four percent of North America, Like that’s it.

01:08:32
Speaker 3: All this other forest will be here.

01:08:34
Speaker 4: Yeah, but if you look at how much forest is contained within like Washington or sorry, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, that’s about one and a half percent. So you effectively wipe out the entire Rocky Mountain elk population.

01:08:48
Speaker 3: And so that’s where these percentages becomes gated.

01:08:51
Speaker 2: I wasn’t familiar with that one.

01:08:53
Speaker 4: Yeah, anyways, so it h. Yeah, you can, you can play with percentages where it is advantageous to you. But there again, it’s this wild population that does have all these external factors on it, and we know that they’re causing problems and going to cause problems. So common sense says that we should slow down the manageable take of that, the human harvest, because we acknowledge that there’s these bumps in the roads. It’s just like if you’re driving down the highway, if you don’t slow down when it gets bumpy, you wreck your car. You know, we’re not seeing that in fisheries, management of these troll fleets. The road is doing this through everything else, all these external factors and Charles saying we’ve got to go full speed ahead will never crash. But common sense doesn’t agree with that.

01:09:34
Speaker 1: How worried are you about the How worried are you about the industry coming after you?

01:09:38
Speaker 2: Real hard? Like you personally?

01:09:41
Speaker 4: Well, yeah, that’s yeah, I H it’s definitely a concern. The UH and I so I get tangled up in We talked about there’s this stop Alaska Controller Facebook group. It’s got about fifty five thousand people in it. The state of Alaska only has seven hundred and fifty thousand people, not everybody in groups from Alaska, but it’s a huge voting block contingent. And my real drive is that I want to see these common sense rules be enforced, and then if that means it puts troll out of business, somewhere down the road, say that they right now, we talked about these halibut nurseries. Nobody can fish for halibut there because we’re going to protect the halibut on their nurseries, but trell control there so they can have bycatch of halibut because they’re not targeting them, but it’s an area shut down for everybody else. And we talked about these midwater trolls can fish in areas closed to bottom trelll because we’re trying to protect the habitat there. But they say if they got kicked out of there with their midwater nets, that they’d go out of business. And they make this argument successfully to the Department of Commerce. But no other sports matter, No other group gets to exist under these rules. So that’s what really gets me is I want to see these enforced common sense. If trell can still continue to fish under that and thrive, then that opened up a new conversation of do we want them in the state, Is this a good for society, et cetera. But if it shuts them down through enforcing common sense regulations.

01:11:05
Speaker 3: Then so be it.

01:11:06
Speaker 4: And I take a lot of heat for that because I think they know that they would effectively be shut down if those common sense REGs went into effect. But they don’t get a pass on this, not with a wild resource, you know, and not in Alaska where so many people depend on I mean fisher’s culture there essentially.

01:11:23
Speaker 1: And this fishery has been this fishery has been booted out of various places over the years.

01:11:29
Speaker 4: Yeah, so they most of the If you really go back in the history books, there’s a really neat book called an Unnatural History of the Sea, and it has a section on trawling, and it says that the first references to trolling in history were where they were banned. And so you see in like the I think it’s thirteen seventy six in Europe was the first mention of this troll net which would be drug along and indiscriminately catch everything, and it was banned then, so seven hundred years ago, close to it. Then the next instance from the fifteen hundreds, where there it had become a capital offense. So they killed two people who had added chains to the bottom of their drag nets. But as the fishing, you know, productivity of the oceans decreased, and as more money got into fisheries, that lobbying came with it, you know, and so and with that was this detachment of where fisheries regulators live a relative to where the fishing happened. So when we talk about a troll fishery, we’re talking to senators in Washington, d C. Or you know, this DC political machine that has no idea of what troll is, what Alaskan issues are. Besides that, the troll lobbyists show up in their office every day and say.

01:12:44
Speaker 2: They’ve already gotten their here.

01:12:45
Speaker 4: We’ve made a lot of billions off of this. You know, you can’t shut it down. These guys are crazy. We only caught thirty three kings out of the Yukon this year. Don’t ask us about the haliba, don’t ask us about whether or not these are a bait fish.

01:12:56
Speaker 3: And that has been effective.

01:12:58
Speaker 4: But we also see that a lot of time it comes wrapped with this campaign check of like don’t worry about it.

01:13:03
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, and then this fishery is mostly out of Seattle.

01:13:09
Speaker 4: It is, so there is about ten percent.

01:13:13
Speaker 3: So when they.

01:13:15
Speaker 4: The USA and really the world has done what they call rationalizing commercial fisheries. So it used to be that it was open entry. You if you owned a boat, you’d go pay ten dollars to register and anybody could go out and fish like crazy until the quota was got.

01:13:29
Speaker 3: Then everybody quit.

01:13:30
Speaker 4: But that created this race for fish where even if the weather was terrible, if we had two days to catch where we’d catch, we’d go and maybe somebody’d sink or die, and it flooded the canaries with fish all at once.

01:13:40
Speaker 2: It was.

01:13:42
Speaker 4: It didn’t work in that way. So they rationalized it and said, hey, if you guys have always caught a million pounds of pollock, you know, for these last five qualifying years, then we’re just going to say that for the rest of forever, we’re going to give you a million shares of pollock. And sometimes that goes up, sometimes it goes down, but you own it now, you can buy it and you can sell it, which is a crazy thing with natural I mean imagine.

01:14:01
Speaker 3: They did that with elk. But they I forgot what I was saying about.

01:14:07
Speaker 2: Well, it’s talking about where the fisheries based out of.

01:14:09
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, all right.

01:14:10
Speaker 4: So they so when they rationalize these trawl fisheries in Alaska, most of the participants at that point, like in the eighties early nineties, had been these big factory trawlers out of Seattle, Washington. But they said, we’re going to do this ten percent set aside for communities that are actually live in Alaska. They live next to this bearing sea, they’ve fished on it for thousands of years, and we don’t want them to be aced out of this resource. And so now we see some of those they’re called CDQ community Development Quota groups have about ten percent of this total fishery.

01:14:42
Speaker 2: We heard from some of these guys.

01:14:43
Speaker 4: Yeah, and some of them have gone beyond ten percent of it. So some of them leased their quote out to these big Seattle boats, but some of them have doubled down to buy their own trawlers. And as other fisheries have crashed, essentially this pollock and this trall it has become a larger and larger part of their portfolio. So now it’s like even if they’re like the residents of these communities are morally objecting to troll. They’re invested in this hundred million dollar both. They can’t just go fish for crab because crab are gone. They can’t fish for ally but salmon, those are gone. So they’re in kind of this use it or lose it scenario now, which is just a crazy concept for a rural village on the edge of the bearing seat. They kind of got drug into it in that way.

01:15:30
Speaker 2: Can I hate you with a conspiracy theory?

01:15:32
Speaker 3: Do they?

01:15:35
Speaker 1: The conspiracy theory is that this isn’t about salmon. The conspiracy theory is it’s not about fisheries. It’s like it’s somehow is using fisheries to get Alaskans worked up politically to seek broader political change, and that no one really cares.

01:15:56
Speaker 2: About these fish.

01:15:58
Speaker 1: They just want to push in a different political agenda, and this is this you’re not here about fish?

01:16:06
Speaker 4: Yeah, so that’s I mean, how right am I? Well, so you’re definitely so troll. Like we talked about from the very start bottom trawl and now these midwater trolls that it’s been found out that they’re on bottom. There’s a worldwide push to shut down bottom trawl and it’s been around for decades. You mentioned this pole that Alaska did said seventy four percent of Alaskans wanted a total ban.

01:16:29
Speaker 1: Yeah, I don’t understand that poll. And someone dismissed it saying it was a push pole. Oh, it was a manipul of the pole.

01:16:34
Speaker 2: I don’t know. I’d like to see the polling data. I have seen it.

01:16:37
Speaker 4: I got a website the uh Anyways, but I think you’ll see, like in the comment sections on your video, this not quite universal support. But if there’s two thousand comments, you’ll see twenty five from troll reps that get paid to interact and write comments, and the rest of them are you know, Alaskans and people that have dealt with troll fisheries and gotten the shorten of stick that are really v against it.

01:17:01
Speaker 1: Well that and I’m not and I’m not I’m not criticizing anyone that rode in, but the people that we rode in in defense of big troll or offense of the troll industry, and the people that rode in are in the industry. Yeah, but that might be because they’re the ones that that that they’re the ones that have an understanding of it. But I’m not hearing from I’m not hearing from anglers. I’m not hearing from rod and reel fishermen. Yeah, defending it.

01:17:40
Speaker 3: Yeah, that’s uh.

01:17:41
Speaker 4: You’ll never hear anybody that wakes up tomorrow and says, you know what, I’m in fav I think bottom trall is a good, you go friendly way of catching fish. And so what I was getting at with troll has a big problem that everybody already dislike bottom troll before they figured out it happened in Alaska. The midwater nets around the bottom, so they are kind of bottom trawl. So to me, strategically, their last possible move that they could make would be to try to make this a political issue. Alaska is this historically red state super resource extraction. People worked in oil extracting resources or they’re in fishing extracting resources, and so anytime you get into this, anytime somebody can say, well, these are the eco terrorists or these are the greenies coming in trying to control us, then they have this opportunity, and I think Troll sees that as their one last ditch move. But what they’re forgetting is that the Republican side is big into conservation. I mean, we’ve pebble mind had come through, like Trump Junior. You see these stories out of Africa where hunters had preserved the land that was this big success story, on and on, and so I fish too. There’s this extent of like we want to check the fish so that we can kill the fish, which has some irony obviously, but we want it to be sustainable, and we want our kids to kill the fish too. And what we really want is the habitat and the bait fish left intact so that that can happen indefinitely and no other fishery impacts those factors near like troll does. It’s kind of like you could, so you’re managing deer in a forest. You could hunt these white tails down until there was one buck and one dough left in this entire forest. Stop hunting, and in ten years you’d probably have a decent deer population. But if you cut down the forest and paved over it in the process, you lose those deer forever. And so that’s the concern with troll, and especially at the bottom like the seafloor impact, And that’s not tough to understand from most people.

01:19:42
Speaker 2: You know, No, it’s not man it’s not.

01:19:47
Speaker 1: So what if you had to make like let’s say, let’s say you were emperor of the world all of a sudden, it’s a good idea, Okay, your emperor of Alaska, Like, hit me with what based on your research, what you hear from people, your personal opinion, what do you feel is a what do you feel is a reasonable in your mind, a reasonable step to take, well, either to validate or invalidate the notion that is that this is partially responsible for the collapse the fisheries collapse we’re seeing around I won’t say collapse on Albert, but the degradation of the Halbert fishery, the collapse of the King Salmon fishery.

01:20:29
Speaker 2: Right, how would you find out whether that’s true?

01:20:33
Speaker 1: If you’re going to jump into management changes, what would you propose, Like, what do you think a next step would be?

01:20:39
Speaker 4: So I want to see the common sense stuff checked off first. And so this is twenty twenty six is an election for our new governor in Alaska. And that’s important to this issue because the governor of Alaska chooses a majority of the voting members on this federal and PFMC Fisheries Council that regulates troll, and what we’ve seen with the past governor is this trill vested group would donate one hundred thousand to his campaign and then he would put you know, the vice president of this corporation on this council to regulate troll. And it’s a majority goes vote system on there. So if it’s dominated by troll, it doesn’t make matter, if it makes sense, doesn’t matter if it’s ethical. If they vote in favor of it, then we’re stuck with it essentially. And so first step for me is that we need to have a governor that commits that they’re not going to put active trill reps on this regulator accounts anymore, or at least people who are are neutral. You know, I don’t want it full of a super green side. I don’t want it full of an ecological side, because I fish too, but they at least need to not be making hundreds of thousands of dollars personally for dursery. And so once you get that in there, then you can start putting forward these motions of hey, we need to if we’ve acknowledged that there’s Bearing Sea Halibut nurseries and trall is still allowed in there. It needs to be banned right there. They can still fish everywhere else, but we’re going to kick.

01:22:00
Speaker 3: Them out of there.

01:22:01
Speaker 4: There needs to be an acknowledgment that pollock or a forage fish. So forage fish get these special considerations.

01:22:07
Speaker 2: What do they regarded it as right now?

01:22:10
Speaker 4: A long story as it just target species. And there’s this weird deal in federal regulation where a fish can’t simultaneously be regulated as a forage fish and as a target species. And so Tarll successfully makes this case that you know, there’s studies out there that say eighty five percent of the forage base in the Bearing Sea is made of pollock. They say that the number two most commonly eaten thing for chinoo salmon and the Bearing Sea in twenty twenty four was pollock.

01:22:35
Speaker 3: It’s huge for halibut, huge for whales.

01:22:37
Speaker 2: Well, was the number one.

01:22:40
Speaker 3: Capelin or needlefish something like that. The uh.

01:22:44
Speaker 4: Anyways, so there’s this there’s all these documentations saying that it’s this crucial link, but they the NPFMC, essentially this troll regulated body, says it’s not going to explore that because there’s also this understanding that if they started to take that and consider and say that, well, maybe the halibut are smaller, maybe the king salmon are smaller because they don’t have enough pollock. That would create a cutback and limit for how much pollock the trollopef you can catch. So they fight that tooth and nail. But there again, it’s a super common sense thing, and if it failed, you know, after five years of study, then I get that. But it at nice at least needs to be brought to the table, So I’d kick them out of the halibut nurseries. I’d say, we’ve got to ask this question of whether pollock should be a forage fish. Another big one that we’ve run into is that a lot of the bycatch limits were set twenty years ago when the fish were a lot more abundant. So with king salmon and the Bearing Sea specifically, fifteen years ago they said that if they’re a bunch of king salmon around, you guys can catch sixty thousand of them as bycatch, or if there’s not as many king salmon around, you can catch forty five thousand as bycatch. But in the fifteen years since that they’ve crashed down to essentially nothing. You know, most people can’t fish for them in a river because that has been adjusted. But the forty five thousand, yeah, is still sitting up there and we’ve seen that with would.

01:24:06
Speaker 1: It be weird if that number want up being higher than the number of kings?

01:24:10
Speaker 4: Well, yeah, So that brings up a really big philosophical debate of if there’s only one king salmon left, who has the ethical right to catch it? Should it be the subsistence user that lives in the middle of nowhere on the Yukon River or should it be a trawler to waste it when it’s five pounds? And that’s a really easy question for people to answer, and unfortunately we’re we’re drifting off in that direction, you know. So those would be some really big ones. The other one is this issue of we at the start of this we talked about there’s two types of bycatchers. Observed by catch and there’s unobserved by catch, and we said that Charles says they only impact about one and a half percent of the Bearing Sea, But the Bearing Sea is incredibly huge. So the one point four percent of the Eastern Barren Sea is I think three hundred and ninety billion square feet And if you start to look at how much life is in a square foot of seafloor. It’s like if you’re on a trout stream and you walk lift up a river. Everything darts out of there. But you can apply different levels of what might live there. Say it’s five grams per square foot, you come up with essentially billions of pounds of unobserved bycatch. So this is the stuff kicked up by the mud drug over by the nets. But since it doesn’t make it to the deck of the boat, we just pretend it doesn’t exist. But other nations have taken that on, and we could be taking it on too if there was the will within this regulatory body to say, hey, maybe this is a problem. But there again, troll knows that it’s a real big problem if we start to quantify it or go down that rabbit hole, and so they essentially roadblock it at a DC or a regulatory level. So that’s my push is that I think there’s all these common sense concepts that just need to be explored. They we have to have a regulatory system which allows us to bring these concerns to the table and take a look at them, and right now we don’t have that.

01:26:01
Speaker 1: Last question is is there a possibility is your current governor term limited out or what’s going on?

01:26:07
Speaker 2: Yeah, so someone new is coming in?

01:26:09
Speaker 3: Correct?

01:26:10
Speaker 2: And is there a.

01:26:11
Speaker 1: Chance that that with the the is there a chance that both parties would have a candidate.

01:26:19
Speaker 3: That was committed to looking at this Absolutely?

01:26:21
Speaker 4: Yeah, so they Alaska doesn’t open primary.

01:26:25
Speaker 3: So right now we have I think nineteen people.

01:26:27
Speaker 2: That have really are you in there?

01:26:31
Speaker 4: No, thy god? No, So nineteen people have put their name in the hat, and I think we’ve heard from half of them that have taken essentially an anti troll stance.

01:26:41
Speaker 2: Or from both sides Republican and Democratic.

01:26:43
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, and independent.

01:26:46
Speaker 1: So there’s there’s a possibility that in the end, the final ballot could come out in each side of that ballot could be saying I’m committed to looking into this issue and taking some regulatory steps that’s possible.

01:26:58
Speaker 3: Correct.

01:26:59
Speaker 4: And so that is what has got troll through the roof, because those governor candidates, when they say they’re against strall, they don’t have to say that they’re going to shut it down tomorrow. All they have to do is say that they’re just not going to put trallers on this regulatory board anymore or at least not a majority of them, and just that simple threat is enough to put to have the hackles way up on Trill.

01:27:21
Speaker 2: And that’s why we’re hearing about this so much.

01:27:23
Speaker 4: Absolutely so they don’t think they can continue to win, and they don’t think they can continue to catch the volume of fish anymore if somebody besides Trallers start to regulate the fishery in a more common sense way. So, and I think there’s a good chance that that is where we’re headed, is that we’re going to have a Democrat and an independent and a Republican governor that have all said, hey, we’re gonna we’re gonna put different people on this regulatory council.

01:27:47
Speaker 3: And what shakes out shakes out.

01:27:49
Speaker 2: So let me say this man, let me I said that was my last question. Here’s my real last question.

01:27:57
Speaker 1: Let’s say trill practices were the harvest was adjusted, the Halbert Nursery was off limits, and you saw we saw a recovery of fish. Okay, so ten years down in row, twenty years down road, we see a recovery and it’s recovered to people are like, hey, we’re back in a strong position.

01:28:19
Speaker 2: Let’s revisit.

01:28:20
Speaker 1: Maybe it’s time to have the maybe it’s time to invite the troll industry back into you know, into these waters.

01:28:27
Speaker 2: What would be your attitude about that.

01:28:29
Speaker 4: Well, we’d have to. So we’ve actually seen that start to happen some. So you talked earlier about how we’ve had these big crashes in the US. So Grand Banks Cot in the mid nineties early nineties had crashed all the way. We saw West Coast ground fish early two thousands crash all the way. And so now we’re twenty five thirty five years later than that and they’re just starting to open those fisheries up again. The fish have started to come back a little bit, nothing compared to historic rates. But when we look at the regulations that they put on trawlers down there, it is insane compared to what we see in Alaska. So that’s become this frustrating disconnect for us because it’s still federal Noah Fisheries regulating all of them. But after they’ve crashed, they say, oh my god, we could never let you guys get away with that kind of bycatch, or we couldn’t send you out with an out an observer, or we’re not going to assume that half the halibut survive, you bring it all back to the dock, and we’re going to check it ourselves. That in Alaska they say, everything’s great, just keep doing what you’re doing.

01:29:29
Speaker 1: That is interesting, man, because those fisheries, I mean, those fisheries you named are places that crashed hard.

01:29:36
Speaker 4: And we actually see a fair amount of boats now fishing in Alaska with the same owners, same boats, same crew, probably not the same crew after thirty years, but same ownership structure have come from. Like there’s a fleet in Alaska that’s homeported in Rockport, Maine, and if you look at the company time one on their history, they had fished up until the early nineties and they said, well then we decided to send our fleet to a lab. But what they don’t mention is that the codfishery they were fishing on crash and they were forced to go somewhere else.

01:30:06
Speaker 3: Or lose their boats.

01:30:07
Speaker 2: It became a refugee.

01:30:09
Speaker 4: Yeah, And that’s been another big deal with this This concept of a factory trawler is it’s essentially a floating, pretty self sufficient city. And so even now the factory trawlers fishing in Alaska, most of the crew isn’t from there. I think ninety seven percent of the crew is non Alaskan. So they fly to this boat, they live on it for two weeks, they work, they fish, they come home, and they don’t really care where that boat is. That boat could be in Nicaraguar, it could be in the Arctic or the Antarctic or wherever. It’s not like you and I go out and fish in this pond in our backyard. They’re flying to the boat, they work, and it’s this mobile city that moves around. So because of that, Trall has never had to have this local investment. You know, if you and I lose our fish in the backyard, or we lose the elk in Montana, you know, that might be the end of our fishing or hunting. But when you’re from this like factory platform, you just move to another continent or you move to another area and you keep doing what you’re doing. It doesn’t impact you in the same way. And you’re not worried about what your kids are going to do because your kids could buy somewhere else too.

01:31:12
Speaker 2: So yeah, you know, it’s not a death sentence to wipe an area out.

01:31:16
Speaker 3: For sure, not in the same way.

01:31:17
Speaker 4: And there again, that’s crazy that you know, we have a wild resource that we regulate in this way and take this bigger risks with because we see all the protections, you know, sage grouse or bighorn sheep or whatever it may be. We’re counting a single species and those we can go out with the helicopter and look at. But what happens in the ocean is a whole new.

01:31:37
Speaker 2: Ball game, you know.

01:31:38
Speaker 1: One of the craziest things. Just the final thought that I was reading about this morning.

01:31:45
Speaker 2: So these fish that.

01:31:50
Speaker 1: The troll fish they’re catching, they were x they’re moving them from the West coast over to.

01:31:56
Speaker 2: New Brunswick, so they’re moving them over to Cannon.

01:31:59
Speaker 1: They’re going through them on these fish are going through the process fisher going through the Panama Canal. But there was some like some regulatory advantage to using Canadian rail.

01:32:10
Speaker 3: Yeah, the Canadian railroad scam.

01:32:12
Speaker 1: Okay, there’s some regulatory advantage to using Canadian rail Okay. So these dudes they got in trouble for this. These dudes hit on this scheme where they they load these fish up. I think it was it Pollock. I think it was Pollic or Harry, can’t remember. They load these fish up and take them by ship through the Panama Canal up but when they get up there, when they get to the Canada, they’d put them on a train that would go one hundred feet back and forth, and then they would take them off the train.

01:32:49
Speaker 2: It went nowhere.

01:32:50
Speaker 1: They loaded them and unloaded them in the same spot, and the train traveled one hundred feet and they’d offload them in order to be able to be that there was a Canadian rail proud.

01:33:00
Speaker 2: Yeah, they got busted.

01:33:04
Speaker 1: It was funny reading about it is like, it seems like such a weird little scheme, but it was. I was reading about there’s like this year’s long investigation. It’s like how much you need to investigate that?

01:33:13
Speaker 3: Well, they so that’s that’s the most.

01:33:16
Speaker 2: It’s like the most cynical things. So funny, dude.

01:33:20
Speaker 1: Can imagine like working there and being like, oh, no, no, what now I’m supposed to put these fish on this train and move them a hundred feet back and take them back off again.

01:33:27
Speaker 2: Well.

01:33:27
Speaker 4: I think that was actually part of the breaking story was there was this videotape of this worker like laughing at it’s not even a train. You drive the entire semi on this rollie card and it goes there, and it goes back and then the semi drives off. But they so that was American seafoods was at the center of that.

01:33:43
Speaker 2: That was the funniest story, man.

01:33:45
Speaker 4: But they there’s this Jones Act regulation that says if you’re shipping from the USA one port in the USA to another port in the USA, you’re required to use American ships with American crew. But that is it’s more expensive to ship American maide or American in that way. So they dodged that by they’d use this. But there’s an exception of that that says if the fish lands in another country and it is transported somewhere on a rail, then it can come back into the USA and it never had to travel on this American ship. Oh so they found this big savings of They’d send this foreign ship around to Canada right north, you know, forty miles the US border, drive the truck on the roly cart, roll it back and forth on a train track, and then drive it back into the USA and dodge all this all taxes.

01:34:37
Speaker 1: I had laughed this morning, drinking my coffee on the couch, and I was reading about that scheme.

01:34:42
Speaker 2: Do that is just just it’s just you gotta laugh, man.

01:34:45
Speaker 4: But there’s more of that story. So this American Seafoods, Uh, there’s this regulation that foreign interest can’t own these shares of an American fishery. But American Seafoods was started by this guy and Norway. It has a Norwegian CEO and the majority owner in it right now is a private equity company out of New York City that has its parent company is over in Switzerland. So then you start to look at this essentially foreign country that scamming the US out of using US workers. They had a bunch of EPA fines, et cetera, et cetera. So there again, when we think of guys that go fishing, or when we hear from the troll obviously say we’re just common fishermen too. You know, sorry about I’m not well spoken. I’m just this little, low key fisherman. The biggest pollock holder in the Bearing Sea is American Seafoods. That’s half on by private equity, you know, with backing in another nation.

01:35:41
Speaker 1: So I’ll be curious, man, I’ll be curious, as someone like after hearing your conversation, right, I’ll be curious who reaches out that wants to explain. Yeah, that wants to explain, like if they if they want to explain the other side of this, or if it’s just too that, if they find that it’s better not to talk about it.

01:36:06
Speaker 2: I’ll be curious see what happens.

01:36:08
Speaker 4: Yeah, it’s been really fascinating for me to watch this reaction in Alaska because, like we say, nobody wakes up tomorrow and decide suddenly that they just love trawling. If you make money from it, or your parent company makes money from it, or a family member does, then you’ll see people that’ll defend it and say, well it’s an economic engine. Maybe this isn’t right, but nobody just converts.

01:36:29
Speaker 2: So would you ever do a debate?

01:36:31
Speaker 3: I don’t know.

01:36:32
Speaker 4: The interesting thing to me is that I don’t really see it as a debatable issue. You know, there’s this ethical component of this that’s pretty hard to get around. So you know, we could say you’re going to debate whether hunting is ethical or not, and I know what your stance is going to be. And sure, if there’s somebody from PETO, we know what their stance is going to be. And you guys could debate and they throw out a thousand facts, and you throw out a thousand facts, understand, and the people listening wouldn’t get anything out of it.

01:37:03
Speaker 1: Yeah, So that they would talk about if I was debating some of Pete, they would talk about a set of concerns that that I’m not concerns about.

01:37:13
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, yeah, and so. And it’s also that you know, I do this. It’s not fun anymore, but it was an important issue to me to take on personally, and so I do it on my own time, on my own dollar.

01:37:29
Speaker 2: You know.

01:37:30
Speaker 4: But if you get up against like these multi billion dollar corporations, they have been tired teams of lawyer, They hire a lot of the fisheries regulatory people, they hire a lot of the lasket Department of Fishing. Game gets hired into their essentially lobbying wing. So if you go and talk to somebody about it, it’s not like you and I talking about something we don’t know. Once I’s got essentially a team of lawyers and all this data set on the back, and it’s me saying, but it’s still not ethical, you know, it’s still not ethical. So it’s interesting in that way, and I think we’re going to see it come up in like these Alaska governor debates. I think there’s a couple candidates there out of this nineteen that have started to do like some kind of pro troll commercials. So I think we’re going to see it come up in like these political debates there.

01:38:13
Speaker 2: Why wouldn’t that be interesting?

01:38:15
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, I will be.

01:38:17
Speaker 4: There was one Dave Bronson’s one of the guys running for governor up there, and he said he was digging around this. It’s NBFMC, this Federal Fisheries Council that regulates it, and one of the guys there told him anonymously that he said, if they ever tried to regulate pollock as a forage fisher, if somebody from that regulatory agency brought that up, that they would lose their job or essentially be eliminated from that process because that’s such a threat for them to have to consider that. Hey, there’s other stuff that he’s pollock too, So there’s a lot going on in the background.

01:38:47
Speaker 2: Well, I’ll be watching, man, I’d be curious.

01:38:49
Speaker 1: Yeah, it’s been it’s a it’s an interesting debate, and I think that, like I’m interested in it’s a fishery that I’m exposed to it’s a fishery that I love. A lot of people that I’m very close to are involved, and you know, built their lives around those fish, So I care about that. I’m also interested in it from when I made that point about when it comes to wildlife resources and we have shrinking pie or in some cases expanding pies, and what those wedges look like, and who gets those wedges, and that understanding how those that plays out, whether it’s you know, understanding how that plays out, whether it’s like Bobcats in Nevada, you know, Sam Bardier off an Island in Florida, fish up in Alaska, whatever, like, that question will always be relevant. And I think that, you know, I would like listeners to just pay attention to how it goes, how it goes in other places, what the debates look like, because eventually this kind of conversation is gonna this is this kind of conversation is coming to you something you know, and.

01:40:01
Speaker 4: I think that’s so that’s been a big, like near and dear issue to me, is that now there’s this accusation that this is like a big green movement in Alaska or people from the outside want to come and force their conservation a reels onto us, and I’ve so we’ve had that Facebook group about six years. I’m the main person that posts on there, and I’ve had probably hundreds of messages or seen comments of people that say, hey, we have to get going to make more enemies. We have to get green Peace in here, we have to get Peta in here, Sea Shepherd or whatever it may be. And I say, oh my god, no, like, we don’t. That’s not how we want conservation to go. We’re fishermen ourselves. We run this big risk of if this becomes too much of a headline issue and troll feeds off of this as it messages Alaskans, they run this fear factor deal of hey, we’re going to get these guys in here that think fishing is unethical completely and they’re going to shut it all down for you guys. But that is really not the vibe. You know, Mike, to be glad.

01:40:59
Speaker 1: I’m glad that you’re in instinct because a lot of people will be like a lot of people will take whatever kind of partner they can find in something, and and and it can it’ll come around and bite. And you ask, like we’ve been covering this situation on Catalina Island with them wanting to eradicated on Catalina Island, and you see like like, uh, you know, maybe some hunter group being like, hey, we’re kind of on the same opinion with Humane Society about this.

01:41:23
Speaker 2: You know, that’s partner up.

01:41:25
Speaker 1: I’m like, dude, those guys will cut your throw first chance they get. Man, for sure, watch out for those hosers. All right, Well, man, I appreciate you coming on the show and talking about it. I’m sure we’ll talk about it more. I’m not gonna invite you down to do a debate because I think you’re probably right. It probably won’t be too productive, but we’ll see.

01:41:42
Speaker 3: Man Like if oh, you’ll get some letters, well no, and.

01:41:45
Speaker 2: I might talk to somebody about it. Would have to depend. I’d have to kind of see what they had at stake, you know.

01:41:51
Speaker 1: I’m a little bit want to know, like what what what what they felt was threatened, how personal it was, you know.

01:41:59
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean so, I think the question to ask the other side is like, you know, with the midwater nets on bottom, they say, hey, if we’re not allowed to fish for pollock on the bottom with these midwater nets, we’ll go out of business. But does that really make sense to somebody to say that, you know? Or they say, hey, if these pollock were regulated as a bait fish because everything eats them, then that could put us out of business. And I think they need to be pushed on that of is that because you’re getting paid, you know, millions of billions dollars.

01:42:29
Speaker 3: To catch these fish?

01:42:30
Speaker 4: Or is that because that’s common sense and good conservation? And for me, it’s when they exclude that to even say that, hey, we’re going to get fired from this fisheries regulation process if we even bring up the idea that pollock should be regulated as a forage fish is essentially corruption, you know, or it’s not. It doesn’t follow the intent of good governance that we all depend on and we live by, you know, so understood as that starts to fall apart, it has ramifications for wildlife everywhere.

01:43:00
Speaker 1: All right, man, David Bays he uh can be frequently found at the Stop Alaskan Trawler by Catch Facebook group.

01:43:13
Speaker 2: You can frequently be found fish in Halibitt, out of home or Alaska.

01:43:16
Speaker 1: You should come up there then we fish south there, I should though, That’s what the big one.

01:43:22
Speaker 2: All right, Thanks for coming on many thanks Lon,