A matter of survival: Fishermen keep fighting for livelihoods as regulations tighten

By JEFF BARNARD Associated Press
The Missoulan

9/20/02

PORT ORFORD, Ore. - In the old days, when a storm would wash out the dock in this little vest-pocket harbor on the southern Oregon Coast, the fishermen would just rebuild it and keep fishing, said 70-year-old fisherman Bill Cobb.

So when the Pacific Fishery Management Council adopted tough new regulations putting most of the Continental Shelf off limits to bottom fishing, Cobb was not surprised to hear the reaction of his son, Darrell.

"Some of us are going to make it, and some of us are going to stand down," said Darrell Cobb. "I'm going to keep fishing."

Just like buffalo hunting, logging and salmon fishing before it, the seemingly limitless harvests of groundfish have hit the wall on the West Coast, said Hans Radke, a fisheries economist and chairman of the Pacific Fishery Management Council.

Radke said the fishermen who survive this crunch will be those who find new ways to catch fish species that are still plentiful, such as shrimp and black cod, without killing the four species of rockfish and five species of other groundfish that have been declared overfished.

"This is going to be a slow process," Radke said.

Though the hard times will last for many years - scientists figure it will take a century to rebuild some of the overfished rockfish species - the pain will not be as bad as some first feared, Radke said.

West Coast commercial fishing for groundfish generated $732 million in income in 2001, and recreational fishing $255 million, Radke said. An economic analysis of new regulations pegs coastwide declines in commercial fishing for 2003 at $21.2 million, or about 3 percent, and sport fishing $38.5 million, 15 percent.

Among commercial fishermen, Oregon will be hurt the worst, taking a $12 million hit. That's because the Oregon groundfish fleet is dominated by trawlers, boats that haul huge nets through the water. Trawlers come under the strictest regulations because they have a hard time controlling their bycatch, protected fish that have to be thrown overboard dead. Washington can expect losses of $5.5 million and California $3.7 million.

Pete Leipzig of the Fishermen's Marketing Association in Eureka, Calif., said trawlers are still hoping Congress will come through on a long-stalled proposal to buy out half the groundfish fleet to make the shrinking harvest easier to bear.

"We need to provide some humane approach that doesn't leave them hanging out there," he said.

On the sport fishing side, the worst decline will be in California, the primary range of bocaccio, the most overfished of the rockfish species, where regulations are tightest.

"It does put a damper on the spectrum of the fishing that we've enjoyed and the public has enjoyed for the past 30 or 40 years," said Norris Tapp, 54, a manager at Davey's Locker Sportfishing in Newport Beach, Calif. "As long as we don't have the shelf species on possession on the boat, we could fish deeper for other species like yellowtail, barracuda or tuna."