A Group Policing the Sea

The Alaska Department of Fish and Game was optimistic in 1988 when estimating that of all the pink salmon spawned in southeastern Alaska, 38 million would return to be harvested.

They waited and waited, but only 8 million showed up. The return was better in 1989, although four hatcheries in southeast Alaska got back only 18,087 coho salmon from 1.43 million released--only 1.26%.

Where did all the salmon go?

Salmon pirates got them, said SEACOPS and the National Marine Fisheries Service. But they had no proof until a sting operation at sea and ashore last summer apprehended several Asian fishing boats that were plundering the resource with high-seas driftnets--the notorious “curtains of death”--laid illegally across salmon and steelhead migration zones of the North Pacific Ocean by the largest fishing fleet in the world.

In a typical operation, authorities said, the salmon are collected by boats from Japan, Taiwan or South Korea, transferred to larger mother ships and then “laundered” back to the fish markets of America and Europe. For example, since 1985, France has bought an increasing amount of salmon through Singapore, which has no high-seas fishing fleet.

And since ‘85, returns to the Neet’s Bay Hatchery have dropped steadily from 11.8% to 0.5%, while legal commercial catches fell from 136 million a year to 98 million--coinciding with an increase in reported sightings of the illegal boats.

However, the return last year was up again to more than 140 million, even with the state closing down commercial fishing in Prince William Sound and near Kodiak Island because of the Exxon Valdez oil spill.

Experts said the jump in legal catches could be attributed to a 900% increase in Coast Guard surveillance, the arrests of some violators, unusually warm waters that kept the salmon farther north away from the pirates and a bountiful year that would have been even better without the pirates and the oil spill.

“It was kind of unexpected,” SEACOPS leader Mark Tennant said. “It didn’t help our case much.”

The operations start in April and extend into December. By comparison, the Exxon Valdez oil spill had little impact on salmon. Driftnets are an ongoing disaster. They have been banned in the North Atlantic since the 1970s, when boats from Denmark, West Germany and Norway, working near Greenland, devastated the Atlantic salmon population.

SEACOPS--Southeast Alaska Coalition Opposing Pirated Salmon--is a nonprofit corporation organized in 1988 to lobby for enforcement of international fishing laws, with the purpose of halting the interception of North American migrating salmon and steelhead by fleets from Asia. The National Marine Fisheries Service is an arm of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration.

The organizations have helped send salmon pirates to prison, but it’s a big ocean and enforcement is difficult.

In April, Coast Guard patrol planes spotted five vessels fishing near the Aleutian Islands, about 500 miles north of where they were supposed to be, but the planes lacked the means to do anything about it.

The Soviet Union also is concerned. According to a report in the New York Times, on May 20 the Soviets seized a fleet of “at least 10” Japanese boats fishing in the Western Pacific under the North Korean flag, apparently to circumvent fishing agreements between Japan and the Soviet Union. The incident embarrassed the Japanese government, which has no diplomatic relations with North Korea.

The Taiwanese appear to be the worst offenders, despite recent efforts by their government. Taiwan has agreed to help patrol the area this year, but one problem, according to James Tsai, president of the country’s Kaohsiung Fishermen’s Assn., is tradition.

“The Taiwanese fisherman’s idea is that this is the open sea, (and) everyone can fish here,” Tsai was quoted as saying in Alaska Fisherman’s Journal.

But international law holds that certain species of anadromous fish--those that go up rivers to spawn--belong to their countries of origin. The salmon and steelhead in question call the United States, Canada or the Soviet Union home.

Japan, Taiwan and South Korea recognized this in the Driftnet Impact Monitoring, Assessment and Control Act of 1987, which was meant to protect U.S. interests in the North Pacific. But while ostensibly fishing the region for squid, they continue to claim that their fleets are not targeting salmon or steelhead and that any taken are incidental and unintentional.

Evidence indicates otherwise--although this is largely circumstantial.

“But when you take tens of millions of cohos out of the ocean, they’ve gotta come out somewhere,” said Gary Freitag, research evaluation manager for the Southern Southeast Regional Aquaculture Assn. in Ketchikan, Alaska.

And SEACOPS attorney Michael Holman said: “We see millions of metric tons (of salmon) being offered (for sale) by countries that don’t produce salmon.”

To avoid seeming hysterical, the accusers have tempered their views.

Earl Krygier, extended jurisdiction coordinator for the state of Alaska, said: “A combination of oceanographic factors can affect returns. High-seas pirates have been taking significant numbers of fish, but whether they’re fully responsible is a different story.”

There was a similar crisis in Alaska’s Bristol Bay until fishing boundaries were moved westward in 1978 to chase out Japanese driftnetters. The U.S. harvest of western Alaska salmon then increased from an annual average of 33 million to 136 million in 1984-86, when the Asian boats started moving into the squid zone.

The ’87 law specifies boundaries between the squid fishing area and the much more profitable salmon fishery farther north.

SEACOPS said that from April to December, fleets from Japan, Taiwan and South Korea total 800 to 1,000 boats, which on any given day deploy about 25,000 miles of net--enough to circle the globe--as they ply the width of the Pacific from Japan to North America.

Wayne Lewis, special agent in charge of enforcement for the fisheries service’s Pacific Area office in Seattle, said that through September of last season, planes and boats patroling the salmon area saw 75 boats driftnet fishing as far as 500 miles north of the line. Thirty-seven were Taiwanese, 26 Japanese and 12 South Korean.

Driftnets are the high-seas version of the controversial gill nets used by inshore commercial fishermen. Like giant volleyball nets, they hang as deep as 40 feet and can stretch up to 40 miles, collecting not only salmon, but dolphins, whales, seabirds, seals--and perhaps even squid.

Worse, SEACOPS estimated that 600 miles of driftnet is lost every year to become what it calls a “floating cemetery” of sea life, of no good to anyone.

All of that, SEACOPS said, is where the salmon are going, and part of the proof may be in the albacore.

Last year, Gary T. Sakagawa of the fisheries service’s Southwest Fisheries Center in La Jolla released a report that apparently demonstrated how driftnets were having an impact on the albacore population in the North Pacific. The reported harvest dramatically declined from a peak of 123,330 metric tons--about 100 million fish--in 1976, when driftnets came into significant use, to a record low of about 28,000 metric tons in 1988.

Albacore, which do not seek out rivers to spawn, are not subject to regulation, so the catch is reported--unlike salmon poaching, which can only be estimated. But Sakagawa’s figures paralleled those of the Southern Southeast Regional Aquaculture Assn., which had fewer than 15,000 of an expected 236,000 coho salmon return to its Neet’s Bay hatchery in 1988.

Normally, an acceptable return would be 7.7% to 13.2%. The ’88 figure was about 0.5%, and ’89 showed an increase to 1.26%.

“Obviously, driftnets have an effect,” Sakagawa said. “Whether they’re the sole effect isn’t clear.”

Steelhead, the seagoing trout that number about one to every 50 salmon, are similarly hit. SEACOPS estimated that half of the annual run of 1.57 million are being lost to driftnets.

And, SEACOPS said, sales records indicate that as many as 114 of the Taiwanese boats have never sold any squid.

“Being able to prove it’s the fault of the driftnets is next to impossible,” conceded Bill Koran of Long Beach, president of the SEACOPS Southern California chapter.

But they can try. Last year, the fisheries service staged “Operation Sure” to nab violators red-handed. A 200-foot refrigerated transport vessel, the Redfin, was leased from a Seattle shipping company to pose as a high-seas bootlegger.

At the same time, Lewis dispatched an agent into Seattle with $1.5 million in cash to negotiate with Patrick Lee, a Taiwanese national who has been called “the salmon smuggling king.”

They agreed on a price of $1.3 million, and the Redfin rendezvoused with a Taiwanese fishing boat in the mid-Pacific.

“But the deal we had made for the salmon was that it was to be 50% sockeye salmon,” Lewis said. “When our agent boarded the boat, all he could find was chum salmon and steelhead. So, the Taiwanese fish broker was here in Seattle dealing with my other undercover agent. We told him the price was for the (preferred) red salmon--the sockeye--and if he couldn’t do better than that, the whole deal was off.

“So he started making phone calls to Taiwan, talking to vessel owners. Vessel number one then said, ‘We made a mistake. We’ll take you to some more vessels.’ ”

The Redfin followed the Taiwanese boat that night and the next day and met two other typically shabby rustbuckets, which threw some samples of salmon over to the Redfin. In addition, Lewis said, “We were able to see down in the holds that they were full of salmon.”

The captains were invited over on the pretext of discussing how to transfer the fish at sea.

“The real problem is that we don’t have any jurisdiction over anybody but U.S. citizens out there,” Lewis said. “But when they stepped on board that United States flag vessel, they entered the United States of America, so we were able to take them into custody.”

That’s when Lewis was supposed to cue the Coast Guard cutter Morgenthau, lurking over the horizon, to come in. But one captain had just gotten into his skiff to come to the Redfin when the Morgenthau came into view. The Redfin captain swung his ship around to block the view, and the Taiwanese captain never suspected that anything was wrong.

Once the trap was sprung, the two Taiwanese vessels started to flee the scene, with the American vessels in pursuit. One, the Ta Fang No. 11, tried to foul the Redfin’s screws with a driftnet and later rammed it, causing some damage to the paint.

The Redfin soon abandoned the chase to transport its prisoners to port, while the Morgenthau trailed the other boat, the Sung Ching No. 1, for 2,700 miles, within 40 miles of Taiwan, where Coast Guard personnel were finally given permission to board--and found 100 metric tons of immature salmon in the holds.

Lee, arrested with two associates, pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 70 months in federal prison and ordered to pay $66,000 in restitution. The captains, Meng Hsu and Chan Lin, pleaded guilty and face up to five years in prison and fines of $250,000 each.

A month earlier, the Coast Guard intercepted the Taiwanese boat, Ta Chieh No. 3. A helicopter videotaped the crew pitching crates of fish and individual 10-pound salmon overboard before the captain permitted the Coast Guard to board, but some of the evidence was collected by U.S. sailors in an inflatable dinghy.

The Coast Guard said the captain offered them gold, money and sex to forget the whole thing. He was charged with bribery but convicted of forgery in a Taiwanese court and his license was suspended for 12 months.

Under another agreement reached late last summer, Taiwanese boats will be required to carry transponders, which would indicate their locations to a base receiver. But authorities have little hope many will comply.

Japan also has been a problem, long before last month’s embarrassing deception uncovered by the Soviet Union. In January 1989, undercover National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries Special Agents arrested Michel May, president of AMPCA Seafoods of Seattle, and Yasushi Igari, president of a Japanese company, after they negotiated a deal to sell 24 million pounds of Taiwanese-caught salmon to the agents.

May pleaded guilty and received a six-month prison sentence, but Igari jumped $150,000 bail and fled to Japan, which has refused to extradite him.

Japan also has refused to give the U.S. Coast Guard the right to board its fishing boats for inspection without the consent of the Japanese government.

The 1987 law allows for only nine American and Canadian observers.

“So one boat will stay legal (with an observer) and another nine will catch salmon,” SEACOPS’ Koran said.

However, the Magnuson Fishery Conservation and Management Act, currently in Congress, contains strong language that would curtail the high-seas deployment of driftnets, although it stops short of banning them.

SEACOPS is pressing for enforcement of the Pelly Amendment to the act that provides for economic sanctions against unsound fishing practices. That was used to get the European driftnetters out of the North Atlantic.

Also, a United Nations resolution would bring an end to high-seas driftnets worldwide by June 30, 1992, for those nations that choose to observe UN resolutions. Taiwan doesn’t belong to the UN.

SEACOPS’ financial resources are limited, and the Coast Guard can’t cover the entire ocean. According to Outside magazine, the Sea Shepherd Society, which has taken on whalers with its concrete-bowed “eco-warship,” will patrol the North Pacific this summer, looking for Asian driftnetters.

But even the arrests aren’t expected to discourage the perpetrators much. The Japanese, in particular, have been fishing the Pacific for centuries and aren’t likely to stop what they do so well.