Scary fishing story

This whole series of articles is very scary! It may be too late for us predators bring back the Atlantic cod.
The Alaskan cod have been over fished for way to long and may be headed the same direction.
Three years ago I took my son to Sitka for a college graduation present.
The charter company has a policy that if you release a halibut over 100 lbs you get a free day of fishing! My son and I both received one extra day and it was well worth releasing those monsters.
We also had to release several over sized ling cod. These are also all females and the future of the stock.
 
Dan-

Wow! What a story of exploitation, devastation, ignorance, and lack of restraint!

And the future doesn't look good at all, the damage being seemingly irrepairable.

It always makes me think twice when I see even the sport fisherman take all they can get legally and go out again ASAP to get their share of the bounty, and then complain about the closures and limits.

I've seen a big reduction in some of the fish stocks here in California in my lifetime, and hope the same fate is not just ahead for our neighbors in the PNW.

Joe.
 
that is a sad pair of articles.

a conservation related thought-
what's the difference between a turn of the century picture of some folks with a big pile of salmon and recent pictures of folks with a big piles of tuna? those old timers where trying to scratch out a subsistence in a tough era and conservation was unheard of.
 
Dan,

I always wanted to have a left handed halibut derby. Since about 1 in 35,000 halibut is going the other way, it would make a nice statewide contest where size isn't the criteria.
 
Tom-

Is a left handed halibut...er...one who's reversed right to left with the eyes turned to the other side of the topside and the fins as well making it a right to left mirror flop over of a "right handed" one?

Joe.
 
Hopefully we collectively have learned something from the past. Ecosystems are a bit more complicated than we once thought. I release any halibut over 75, not so much for conservation but because they are such a pain to handle on a small boat. I had a friend out once on his first halibut trip and he got one that I guessed was 150-180. He was insistant that we keep it so I sat down and told him that if he could get it into the boat I'd let him use my knife to fillet it. He decided that some pictures would do just fine!
 
fish farming !!! the one i read the ratio is 20 lbs. wild fish to one pound farmed fish on the table .. the pellets fed to farmed fish consists of wild fish, that is bottom fish etc that is not profitable or popular on the North American table .. theirs a American lady that has spent years studying the effect of fish farming up Port Hard way and the sea lice are killing the wild stock "fingerlings" ... she has found the area around the fish farms are polluted with these lice and the wild stock are being wiped out the fisherys and polititians are still studying her report llike they don't care .. they introduced east coast salmon because they fatten up quicker they have escaped and are now in our waters ... i think the short term benefits, what ever they are will catch up the native fish will suffer in the end ... wc
 
It might not be just the overfishing. I was talking with some bird biologists last week in Shoup Bay (near Valdez, Alaska) last week. They've been banding and measuring baby kittiwakes (look like gulls, squawk like gulls but somehow aren't gulls) for a few years there. The size and vitality of the chicks has been on a steady decline for a couple of years there. They think it is something missing in the food chain. Since they eat bait fish, it could be that the fish are not picking up the nutrients they need, either.
The warmer spawning waters on the Kenai Peninsula seem to have hurt the red salmon run there, too.

Of course the research is being threatened with shutdown by the fed. "Lack of funding."
Pat
 
Another type of fish farming is the "enhanced" salmon runs. F&G estimates that in 2004 812 million salmon were released into PWS. These fish are eating food. Something else used to eat that food, even if that food died of old age, sank to the bottom and fed shrimp and crab. What critters out there are going hungry because of what the salmon eat? I've never seen this addressed.
 
dogon dory":1szbq44j said:
I'm through taking. It's time to give some back.
Click to expand...
Someone has to be a taker to keep this earth in balance. If every body gives and no-one takes, the earth becomes unbalanced, so I will do my part to keep it in balance.

Dan - you can give me your part.
 
I with David on this one - there is room for all of god's creatures (right next to the veggies on my plate). However, I must admit that I am re-thinking my own fishing habits a bit. In the Puget sound there is a slot limit on ling cod. When the season's open (which is very short) you can only keep lings that are larger than 26" and less than 40". In area 4 (near Neah Bay) you can keep any ling larger than 24". Anyone who thinks that sport fishing doesn't impact the stocks hasn't fished for bottom fish in area 4. 9 of 10 lings with in 10 miles of Neah Bay are less than 24" in size and many are 24" +/- 2".

I do OK financially and don't need to keep my limits every time I catch them. This takes a bit of re-thinking on my part, but I am releasing more fish now than I used to before.
 
Joe,

A left handed halibut has the eyes migrating to the other side and results in the fish if placed with the gills down the fish is swimming to the left. As far as gaffing is concerned, it is whatever side is down.
 
wc
I saw that show you are talking about. It turned out if the fish farms did their harvest just before the fingerlings spawned then there were no sea lice. This happened once, the next time the fish farms were right back at it. They ignored the fingerlings, and the sea lice were back. She actually figured out a solution to the problem, proved it worked, and then was ignored after that first time. When dinning or buying fish, we will only take wild.
Also did you notice what kind of boat she was driving? A nice 22' Cdory.
Jimbo
 
Just something to add.

Our beloved Congress has a lot to do with the over fishing aspect of the story. Back in the seventies, we had a Congressman named Studds, not a very nice guy, who along with a Senator from, I believe, the State of Washington, decided to get the government involved in the fishing industry.

Fishing up to that time, was a family affair. If your father was a fishermen, you were one. Most of the boats were wooden and old, but the families made a living.

Studds decided that there should be more newer boats, so the government got into the business of financing new boats. To the people of New Bedford, this looked good. Congressman Studds was bringing home the Bacon. The only problem was now every Lawyer in New Bedford got into the fishing industry, because the government would help them to buy the boats. Now everybody got into the fishing industry. Hence, over fishing.

During the eighties, the government decided that we had to many fishing boats, so the government bought back the boats at a profit for the lawyers. The only problem, it was to late.

End of story.

Fred
 
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