An experimental project undertaken by the International Pacific Halibut Commission to assess the viability of catching halibut with pots and reducing the bycatch of fragile rockfish species with the same gear type resulted in disappointment.
IPHC researcher Steve Kaimmer spent several days on a Canadian fishing vessel in June to conduct the pilot program, and said he ran into an unexpected problem: “Couldn’t catch any fish.”
Kaimmer worked hard preparing for the project. “I spent months getting all the gear together, worrying about whether the gear is going to work, how am I going to do this, what are the modifications going to be, yada yada yada,” he said.
It’s not that the fish weren’t there, or the gear was faulty. “We went out on the charter, and the gear all worked marvelously,” Kaimmer said. “I think in 36 gear deployments, I saw half a dozen halibut that behaved what I think of as appropriately: They came up-current and nosed into the trap where they would be following the scent, but they wouldn’t go around, and when the trap was turned the right way, they wouldn’t go in.”
The rockfish that were the reason for the experiment also were abundant. “I saw hundreds and hundreds of rockfish; sometimes I’d have the trap down for an hour, and there’d be plenty of rockfish around, and I only saw two of them go into the trap. The whole experiment was predicated upon catching halibut and rockfish, and then trying to change the trap to catch fewer rockfish and more halibut. We tried quite a few things, a few different baits, changed the shape of the tunnel a little bit to try to catch more, but I never thought I’d have trouble catching either. The gear all worked well, and we learned a few things, but for the most part it was a pretty big disappointment.”
Kaimmer said that the target area was proven halibut grounds.
“We had a Canadian halibut fishermen along,” he said. “They have lots of contacts, it’s a pretty close-knit community up there, and by the second day we were calling everybody they knew to get ideas, plus we had some locations from our survey that had been very good. We went there, didn’t see much.”
One variable that might have made a difference was the time of year. “We might have been a little early in the year, we were there right around June 1, but that still doesn’t address why we weren’t catching the rockfish. If I did it over again, I’d probably do it in late July or early August, but I didn’t really think that was going to be a problem,” he said.
Although they were set up to use some different styles of tunnels once they began catching fish, they never got a chance to vary from the sock tunnel on the original pots.
“I had two different styles of triggers,” Kaimmer noted. “I had a kit to make up rigid tunnel heads and what-not, but initially we were using a sock tunnel. After a few days we tied the top of that sock tunnel open to make it perhaps more encouraging to go in. But all the modifications that were in my head were to reduce the rockfish catch, I hadn’t really considered that I would have difficulty catching the halibut.”
Something was learned about rockfish/pot interaction.
“I caught a couple of rockfish in the observed pot,” Kaimmer said, “and a couple actually got back out. We put very large escape rings in the traps. We were trying not to catch rockfish, and so with the very large escape rings we thought at least some of them would get out, and those actually did work well. Probably about half of the rockfish that went in the traps went out the large escape rings, but that was still a very small number.”
Although Kaimmer has not given up on the idea, the future is uncertain. “It was a very expensive trip from our standpoint,” he said. “Many of our trips are able to catch and sell fish to reduce our overall cost, and although it all gets put in the same bunch, this one didn’t get to sell any fish. It wasn’t even designed to sell any fish; we were going to release anything we did catch. It was a large piece of money. I would hope that I would be able to go again, but it’s going to take probably a bit more requests from the outside to say ‘jeez, we think this will work if we do this,’ or ‘look what I’ve done with traps, why don’t we go out and do this.’ It probably won’t go if it’s just coming from me.”
It was not a total wash, though. “It’s always fun to put a camera on the seafloor,” he said.
Steve Kaimmer can be reached at stevek@iphc.washington.edu, or at (206) 634-1838, ext. 210.
Cristy Fry has commercial fished in Homer since 1978. She also designs and builds gear for the industry. She currently longlines for halibut and gillnets salmon in upper Cook Inlet aboard the F/V Realist. She can be reached at cristy-fry@excite.com.
