A new method for counting fish by the International Pacific Halibut Commission has set off another round of debate among Alaska's charter and commercial fleets and could have far-reaching effects for both industries.
The new method, called a coast-wide assessment, looks at the entire fish stock as a whole, and then divvies up the allocation per area from there. The old method counts fish in each specific area to come up with a harvestable limit essentially treating fish from different areas as separate stocks.
The thinking behind the coast-wide assessment comes from new science that is pointing to halibut migration patterns across fishing areas. For example, a fish caught out of Homer (Area 3A) in the summer may have spent the winter south of Kodiak (Area 3B) or vice versa. And halibut tagged for sportfishing derbies in Southcentral Alaska reportedly have been caught as far away as off the Washington coast.
All this movement by the fish has led the IPHC to adopt this new method to come up with its annual recommendations, said IPHC executive director Bruce Leaman.
"We had to come up with a method that didn't assume that the fish weren't moving," he said.
The difference in the methods has led to increases in some areas, but a reduction in Southeast Alaska already a hotbed of conflict between charter and commercial fishermen has rekindled the fire.
The overall fishery catch limit has been reduced from 65.17 million pounds in 2007 to a recommended 59.24 million pounds for 2008.
The Southeast Alaska region, Area 2C, has been reduced from 8.5 million to 6.2 million pounds.
Under the rules of the Guideline Harvest Limit, or GHL, the charter share of the Area 2C catch would be reduced to just 930,000 pounds, roughly 600,000 pounds less than the amount caught by the charter fleet there in 2006, according to the National Marine Fisheries Service.
That reduction, and the likely over-the-GHL harvest, could trigger a host of measures by NMFS from annual limits to a one-fish-per-customer limit aimed at reducing the charter catch to a number closer to the GHL in 2C.
If customers can only catch one fish per day in Southeast Alaska, but two in other parts of the state, they will likely alter travel plans accordingly, said Rex Murphy, spokesman for the Alaska Charter Association.
And while that may be good in the short term for business in areas like Homer and Kodiak, it would eventually lead those areas to exceed their own GHLs, he said.
"It would be a bad thing," Murphy said.
The problem in Area 2C would leak over to other areas, he said, and it wouldn't even exist in the first place if the IPHC continued using the old model, which would allow a charter catch of 1.432 million pounds in 2C.
The IPHC recommendations will be presented at the group's annual meeting in Portland, Ore., Jan. 14-18.
Murphy said several representatives of the charter industry are traveling to the meeting to offer alternatives to the IPHC.
Some of these alternatives include asking the IPHC to stay with the old method or asking them for a larger harvest in Area 2C. But the charter group's preferred alternative is the establishment of a combined catch limit for the entire charter and commercial sector that will be passed on to the North Pacific Fishery Management Council to decide how to allocate it, Murphy said.
Ben Stuart can be reached at ben.stuart@homernews.com.
