Fishermen’s News Online – Page 49

NPFMC Urges Pollock Industry to Reduce Bycatch, Declines to Impose Restrictions

22Jun

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NPFMC Urges Pollock Industry to Reduce Bycatch, Declines to Impose Restrictions

Federal fisheries managers have acknowledged the ongoing crisis in Alaska salmon stocks, and have opted to respond with additional research and a request to the Pollock industry to institute immediate measures to reduce chum bycatch during the summer fishery. At its June meeting in Sitka, Alaska, the North Pacific Fishery Management Council requested a discussion paper on chum salmon bycatch building on the previous analysis, which was performed in 2012. But for now, the council has opted not to impose new restrictions that would impact the Pollock trawl vessels whose bycatch of chum salmon in 2021 reached 546,043 fish. Additionally, the Pollock industry was asked to report back at the end of the B season on how bycatch reduction efforts worked. During the meeting, the council...

Recycling Company Braces for Influx of Nets from Bristol Bay

22Jun

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Recycling Company Braces for Influx of Nets from Bristol Bay

Net Your Problem, a Seattle-based company led by research scientist Nicole Baker, is forecasting an onslaught of commercial fishing nets for recycling at the end of the Bristol Bay salmon fishery in July, to ultimately be made into new plastic products. Baker said in a dispatch from Bristol Bay on the eve of that fishery that Net Your Problem had launched a new collection site across from a city dock in Naknek, Alaska, and was spreading the word to fishermen and fishing industry related entities to drop off worn out fishing nets at season’s end. Baker, a former North Pacific groundfish fisheries observer, now works at the University of Washington in Seattle as a research scientist, but said she is working on expanding her footprint to other fishing ports to make this a full-time ...

22Jun

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Desautel Named GAPP Board Chair

Bob Desautel, co-founder, president and chief executive officer of Global Seas and Nina Fisheries, has been selected to serve as chairman of the board for the Association of Genuine Alaska Pollock Producers (GAPP), replacing outgoing chair Mikel Durham of American Seafoods. GAPP CEO Craig Morris said Desautel has plans to redouble previous efforts to increase industry investment in the nonprofit focused on promoting wild Alaska Pollock in major whitefish markets worldwide. Desautel was an active harvester in the North Pacific from 1978 to 2000. In 1994, he co-founded Nina Fisheries, which expanded globally to Chile and Argentina four years later. In 2001, Desautel co-founded Global Seas, a subsidiary of Nina Fisheries, which became one of the West Coast’s premier vessel managemen...

North Pacific Research Board Looks to Fill Seats on Science Panel

22Jun

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North Pacific Research Board Looks to Fill Seats on Science Panel

The North Pacific Research Board, created by Congress in 1997 to recommend marine research activities to the U.S. Secretary of Commerce, is accepting applications through Aug. 22 to fill four seats on its science panel. Desired qualifications include expertise in one or more of the seven categories, which include: marine fish and/or marine invertebrate ecology; stock assessment and fisheries management; salmon life history and ecology; quantitative ecology; climate and earth systems models; genetics; and physiology. Candidates, according to the Research Board, should demonstrate active engagement in science and research applied expertise, knowledge of pressing fisheries management issues, research needs, and priorities of state and/or federal managers. They should also be comf...

Melting Glaciers Likely to Boost Healthy Salmon Spawning Habitat: Study

15Jun

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Melting Glaciers Likely to Boost Healthy Salmon Spawning Habitat: Study

Dramatic increases in the melting of Alaska’s massive glaciers in the midst of global warming reflect a silver lining for wild salmon, but once the melting has concluded, such benefits will likely not be realized, according to Peter Westley, a fisheries researcher at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Westley highlighted recent work led by colleagues at Simon Fraser University that quantified the rich bounty of salmon habitat currently hidden, but soon to be revealed, by rapidly melting glaciers. The current rate of melting glaciers in Alaska is much higher than salmon have experienced in a long, long time, said Westley of UAF’s Salmonid Evolutionary Ecology & Conservation (SEEC) Lab. Currently, glaciers are helping cool the waters and create new habitat for wild salmon, ...

Marine Economy Pours Billions Into America’s GDP, Reports Show

15Jun

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Marine Economy Pours Billions Into America’s GDP, Reports Show

Economic reports compiled by two Commerce Department agencies confirm that America’s marine economy continues to pour billions of dollars into the nation’s gross domestic product, albeit tempered by a general economic decline during the first year of the global coronavirus pandemic. Results of the annual Marine Economy Satellite Account released in June by NOAA and the Bureau of Economic Analysis show that amounted to some $361 billion in 2020, the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. That total represents a 5.8% or $23 billion reduction in real terms, adjusted for inflation, from 2019, outpacing the general economic decline of 3.4%. The data, report and other materials are available at https://coast.noaa.gov/digitalcoast/data/marine-economy.html and on the BEA Marine Economy web...

GAPP to Announce Funding Awards for Product Proposals by Mid-September

15Jun

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GAPP to Announce Funding Awards for Product Proposals by Mid-September

A major promoter of wild Alaska Pollock plans to announce by mid-September matching grants for its latest round of partnership funding in a competition to expand markets for wild Alaska Pollock products worldwide. All proposals are due to Genuine Alaska Pollock Producers (GAPP) by Aug. 12. “The global food sector is now, perhaps more than ever, ripe for disruptive innovation and break-through promotions,” GAPP Chief Executive Officer Craig Morris said. GAPP’s research has identified key growth areas for wild Alaska Pollock that are of particular interest in this round of funding. Specifically, the organizations has said that it will give particular emphasis to programs that take place in “favorable” or “very favorable,” as identified by Wild Alaska Pollock 2040 research. GA...

Silver Bay Seafoods Fined for Water Quality Violations

15Jun

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Silver Bay Seafoods Fined for Water Quality Violations

Silver Bay Seafoods LLC of Sitka, Alaska, has been fined $467,469 by the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation for violations of their Alaska Pollutant Discharge Elimination System permit at the processor’s Naknek River facility in Bristol Bay. DEC officials, which announced the fine on June 7, said that in addition to numerous violations identified at the Bristol Bay processing plant during a scheduled inspection in 2021, the company repeatedly discharged significantly more fish waste into the Naknek River than permitted, despite a DEC decision to deny Silver Bay Seafoods’ request to exceed discharge limits. “Not only did Silver Bay Seafoods' knowing and recalcitrant disregard for permit terms put the local environment at risk, but it also gave them a material competi...

Life-Sized Fishermen’s Memorial Planned for Unalaska

15Jun

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Life-Sized Fishermen’s Memorial Planned for Unalaska

An accomplished artist from the Czech Republic who has spent years in the maritime industry plans to erect a life-sized fishermen’s memorial at the Carl Moses Boat Harbor in Unalaska in 2023, honoring lives lost in pursuit of the Bering Sea’s bounty. The memorial would include life sized statues of long-line, crab and cod harvesters, on an octagon shaped, five-foot high base constructed of a stainless steel frame, adorned with stainless steel sea life figures. The names of vessels and lives lost are planned to be displayed on the memorial on plaques and in other creative ways, according to the artist, Karel Machalek. Machalek was born and raised in the former Czechoslovakia, which is now the Czech Republic. There he learned to weld and worked as a tradesman. The city of Unalas...

NOAA Report Shows Huge PSC of Chum Salmon By Pollock Fleet

8Jun

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NOAA Report Shows Huge PSC of Chum Salmon By Pollock Fleet

New federal and state reports show that while salmon runs in Alaska have in some cases reached a crisis point, that trawlers are catching and discarding more Chinook and chum salmon from the Yukon and Kuskokwim river systems than subsistence and direct fishers are allowed to harvest. The issue of declining salmon stocks remains a complex, multi-faceted one, involving much discussion on topics ranging from trawl bycatch to climate change to the impact of juvenile hatchery fish produced in Alaska, Washington state, Japan, Russia and South Korea. NOAA Fisheries’ genetic studies of trawl salmon bycatch in 2020 and 2021 released at the end of May determined that 52% of the Chinook bycatch from the Bering Sea and Aleutian Islands Pollock trawl fishery in 2020 included an estimated 16,7...