In the Fishery Notices for Mondays gillnet opening this passage is described below:
The commercial gill net fleet is reminded that the success of this selective fishery is critical to their future access to Skeena sockeye.Extensions and further fishing days will be directly dependant on compliance to the above restrictions.
Now, if you take this at face value you'd be left with the impression that this is highly regulated fishery....hinging on very good behaviour from the fleet for any further access to the resource. But, when you peel away the thin veneer of actual Enforcement action...these warnings ring fairly hollow, in our opinion. Checking small numbers of gillnetters then extrapolating their behaviour to 300 boats in the fleet doesnt seem like a viable method of enforcement to us. As we've shown from Enforcement records of charges/warnings there is very little actual enforcement going on. Even with a supposed greater presence this season, it will be interesting to see just how many gillnetters are charged/warned for non-compliance with the short set/short net soak time regulation. Since 2000 there has only been 1 warning issued to our knowledge and we get our info direct from the Enforcement Branch of DFO....
So, for DFO to put such descriptions in their Fishery Notices, while in reality something altogether different really drives commercial opportunity, is really being disingenuous from our perspective. We'd love to be proven wrong and see a Fishery Notice stating: "compliance was poor to non-existant with selective gillnetting regulations so the planned opening for later this week is cancelled" We wont be holding our breath waiting for such a notice by the way....
Tuesday, August 05, 2008
Commercial openings
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2 comments:
Thank you for all of this hard work you're putting into this blog, it's great information. Please keep up the good work.
Just curious, but to date, has there been more or less commercial openings than in recent previous years? Does the apparent increase in fish result from less commercial fishing or something else entirely?
Thanks,
Mike.
Hi Mike,
Thaks for the kind words. To date, the gillnetters are just coming up on their ten year average of 12 openings. The seiners are harder to categorize as they have switched to the long, continuous ITQ openings...we'll have to compare 'boat days' stats to find out if they fished more or less than average.
The increase in sockeye/steelhead can be related to ocean conditions and where the sockeye hit landfall in southeastern Alaska. The thinking this year is they missed most of SE AK or stayed offshore...therefore not being subjected to Alaskan fishery impacts too much. It does show how much impact Alaska has when the fish do the normal thing and get hit pretty hard by their fisheries though doesnt it??
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