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5 Bottom Fishing: Quotas and Sustainability When Americans first began fishing in a serious way for sablefish (black cod) and pollock in Alaskan waters in the 1980s, they encountered an unusual problem. In their trawling operations, they caught so many bottom fish that they had great difficulty hauling their nets back to the surface, even with power winches. In fact, several crews found their boats “anchored” to the sea bottom by over-full, “slugged” nets. Unwilling or unable to quickly release their nets, several boats, incapable of moving, foundered in heavy seas. Most captains soon learned, however, to avoid the extensive red blotches that showed up on their electronic fathometer screens as indications of large quantities of the fish. They trawled around the edges of the concentrations and still brought up thousands of tons of fish from the sea bottom.1 The bottom-fish story in Pacific Northwest and Alaskan waters is one of increasing American efforts and capabilities, starting in the late 1970s— boosted by governmental actions—and decreasing foreign participation. The declaration of an exclusive economic zone 200 miles out to sea by the 1976 Fishery Conservation and Management Act made a tremendous difference for U.S. fishers. Five fishery experts observed in 1983 that “In the Northeast Pacific the most dramatic change has affected Groundfish resources, where all species have for the first time come under the management authority of two coastal states [the United States and Canada].”2 The tale is also one of a movement toward sustainable fishing. American bottom-fish operators responded to growing scarcity of their resource in the 1990s and early 2000s by devising quota systems similar to those in Alaska’s salmon and crab fisheries. Two salient points stand out about the development of the American bottom-fish industry: the tremendous importance of government policy in shaping the fishery and the fishery’s global scope. In this chapter, I examine Blackford_MakingSeafoodSustainable_TX.indd 122 10/25/11 8:12 AM Bottom Fishing: Quotas and Sustainability 123 first the boom-time, open-access fisheries for Pacific cod, halibut, pollock, and other bottom fish and then the achievement of sustainable fishing and its meaning for coastal residents. The very nature of fishing was altered as new laws, technologies, and economic conditions intertwined—as can be seen in the careers of Cathy McCarthy and Margaret Kohler, a mother-daughter fishing team, and Derek Lawson, who pursued halibut. I close this chapter by moving beyond bottom fish to a more general assessment of the factors involved in the attainment of sustainable fishing for salmon, crab, and bottom fish in Alaskan waters and a comparison of those successes to failures elsewhere. Early Bottom-Fish Harvesting: Halibut and Cod Commercial halibut fishing began in Alaska in 1888, when sailing ships started traveling north seasonally from Seattle and Vancouver. Just as they did in the North Atlantic, fishers worked from two-person, oared dories lowered each day from their mother ships, sail-powered schooners. Fishers in the dories dropped long, baited lines to the sea bottom and “soaked” them there for several hours to attract halibut. They pulled up the lines hand-over-hand or through hand-cranked rollers, took the fish off the hooks, and rowed or sailed back to their schooners, where they cleaned and iced the halibut before returning to port. Hours were long, and work was physically demanding. Fog and stormy weather sometimes caused dories to be separated from their schooners, with fishers lost at sea. One observer wrote, “The work was excruciatingly hard, and so dangerous in the capricious northern seas that many men and dories were lost each year.” Around the time of World War I, diesel engines replaced sails on many schooners, making it possible for the vessels to drag many long lines right over their sides. Dories were no longer needed. Dory ships gave way to diesel-powered wooden schooners typically fifty to eighty feet long. However, most schooners kept sails as a source of auxiliary power.3 Ballard, a section of Seattle, was home port for as many as 200 of the Northwest’s 300 halibut schooners in the 1920s and 1930s.4 With some modifications, schooners remained the backbone of the American and Canadian halibut fleets into the 1970s. Coastguardsman and fisher William McCloskey lovingly described them as “sturdy white-hulled vessels, their bows straight with simple grace,” and explained how halibut fishing was conducted: “In the halibut fishing process, called long lining, hooks Blackford_MakingSeafoodSustainable_TX.indd 123 10/25...

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