COLUMN ONE : A Catch as Catch Can Fish Plan : It’s crazy, destructive and dangerous, but fishermen pack the Gulf of Alaska like, well, sardines, for a 24-hour halibut ‘season.’ Few benefit under this odd control plan.

The blocky work boats have chugged their way up the long Pacific coastline from California, from Washington, Oregon and from all the little ports burrowed along the shoreline of Alaska. They have gathered here at the ready in the wind-tossed North Pacific--a vast armada of 4,000 vessels with names like Determined, Defiant, Steadfast and Resolution.

It is morning. The weather is merciful.

Aboard the fleet, throats are dry. Anxiety has clamped a pipe wrench down deep in the stomach. The 10,000 or so captains and crew, tough young men and tough young women, know what they are about to undertake is crazy--almost beyond the comprehension of other working Americans.

And dangerous.

And unnecessary.

And counterproductive.

You might find it the strangest way to make a buck in all the strange stories of Yankee enterprise. You might also be surprised to learn this is the brutal way in which dinner comes to your table.

At precisely high noon, the throttles are pushed open and gouts of black diesel smoke are torn away by the 25-knot breeze as the fleet steams into action.

This is the opening of America’s 1992 spring halibut season.

It lasts only one day.

The longest day in the life of a fisherman. And because of it, American consumers will eat lower quality domestic halibut for the next six months. People will be injured and risk their lives. The earnings of fishermen will be depressed.

Yes, it really is crazy.

In these 24 hours, more than half of all the halibut allotted to U.S. fishermen for the entire year is brought from the bottom of the icy, green-black sea. The fish are gaffed, heaved aboard, clubbed, partly cleaned--sometimes--and dropped into the fishing holds below. Hour by hour, nonstop, about 100,000 miles of fishing line baited with 50 million three-inch hooks will be dropped to 60 fathoms to the bottom and pulled back aboard.

This is “longline” fishing, “pulse” fishing. There is no sleep, there is no rest. Through the night, groggy, exhausted crew, on decks slickened with gurry and roiling in the open seas, wrestle to subdue fish weighing up to 300 pounds as they drum their death rattle on the wood and steel of the small boats.

At noon the next day, fishing stops. Who knows how many hundreds or thousands of miles of line are still down there on the bottom with hooked fish left to waste and die? How many undersized fish had their jaws ripped off by automatic hook removers called “crucifiers” and were thrown back overboard? How much of the perishable, tender flesh of halibut in the holds of the homeward-bound boats is bruised, torn and already beginning to sour?

We do know this: During the 24-hour 1992 halibut opener in the Gulf of Alaska this month about 27 million pounds of halibut were landed at the processing docks. That is 60% of the total catch allowed here in the richest halibut fishery in the world. Most of the rest will be caught in another 24-hour “season” in September.

These one-day halibut “openers” are conducted regardless of weather. This year, the sun shone, seas rolled along at eight feet and winds held to a mere 30 knots maximum. Just a few emergency calls were logged by the U.S. Coast Guard. Few years are so kind, as the freshly etched names on the fisherman’s memorial at the Kodiak harbor master’s office attest. Last year, in storm-torn seas, one Coast Guard officer recalled logging 13 Maydays in a single hour, many of them ignored by fellow fishermen who did not dare put a year’s wages on the line to help a stranger, never mind the honor of the sea.

From a Coast Guard H-3 patrol helicopter, the scene in the final hours of the one-day 1992 spring season is eerie: a vast sea crawling with boats so heavily packed with fish that only inches of freeboard remain above water. A squall now would drown many down there in the icy water. Lt. Clark Bashelor watches the horizon and his radar. No squalls come. The boats wallow home as if drunk with riches.

“They’re lucky,” says Bashelor.

But who knows what the next opener will bring, how many capsized boats, how many dead and injured crew, how many unanswered Maydays.

For reasons that make little sense--slavish adherence to tradition and the gold-rush dreams of too many fishermen crowded on top of too few fish--America has turned one of its finest food resources into an ugly destruction derby.

Imagine the waste and chaos if the nation frantically baked all its bread on just two days per year? What if its timber was felled in two bloody 24-hour bursts of effort? What if you had to make your living on what you could produce on June 8 and Sept. 9?

“It’s chaotic, it’s crazy, it’s blood and guts. And the real loser is the consuming public,” says Steve Hoag, assistant director of the U.S.-Canada Halibut Commission.

By raw tonnage, about 60% of America’s domestic fish comes from the waters of Alaska. By dollar value, about 50%. There are the glamorous restaurant fish like the halibut and the salmon and king crab, and there are megacatches of the more plebeian walleye pollock, sole, herring and rockfish.

Dockside value of the total catch is estimated at $1.5 billion, the marketplace value many times that. Fishing is the biggest private sector employer in Alaska and revenues are second only to oil in the state economy. In Seattle and ports to the south, the Alaska fish harvest also is a major employer. And because up to 75% of the catch is exported to Asia, the business offsets some red ink in the U.S. trade balance.

But these are days of profound change in the Alaska fishery.

The concerns of environmentalists and consumers are careening toward a collision with the time-worn traditions of fishermen; and fishermen are at war among themselves over this great, but still limited, bounty of the sea.

Back in 1976, the United States joined with other nations in extending offshore territorial claims from 3 miles to 200 miles. At the same time, Congress arranged to take fishing in these waters from the hands of foreigners and make it into a domestic industry. Fishermen know the law as the Magnuson Act, after the late U.S. Sen. Warren Magnuson of Washington state.

In the ensuing years, drawn by the hope of riches and rawboned romance, domestic fishermen gathered enough boats, crew, traps, nets, hooks, lines, sinkers and space-age electronic gizmos to strip the ice-water larder of the North Pacific of every edible fish. It would take only weeks, months at the most, if the fleet were let loose.

Today, “overcapitalized” is the term the U.S. fishing industry uses to describe its unhappy condition.

Simply, there are too many fishermen and too much gear. As a result, the length of seasons has shriveled. Annual catch quotas for the different species of offshore fish are scooped up in shorter and shorter periods each year.

The young, newly Americanized industry seemed to want it no other way.

Fishermen could not agree on alternative schemes to prevent the fleet from growing too large. Nor could they agree on quotas for each boat, which would have allowed fishermen to work at a normal pace. So it came down to all-out competition, my boat versus yours, the clock getting shorter each year in an effort to limit the catch, and never mind the consequences.

Consider just the halibut. Fishermen and government regulators agree, 100 good boats--200 at the outside--could harvest all 35 million pounds allowed this year from the Gulf of Alaska. Each boat could fish all year long and have the time to clean and ice each fish and get it to market fresh and drawing premium prices. Dangerous storms could be avoided. Consumers could count on a steady year-round supply of carefully handled fresh fish. That is how Canada manages its West Coast halibut.

But the U.S. chose to allow anybody with a boat to buy a halibut license, and the fleet has grown beyond reason. About 6,000 boats are now licensed, and 3,000 to 4,000 or more of them mass for any single 24-hour opener. With that kind of competition to get maximum fish aboard in minimum time, the carcasses are poorly handled, many are not cleaned quickly enough, and shore-side processors are overwhelmed with huge volumes all at once.

Virtually all of the domestic catch has to be frozen or it will perish. Because frozen is less prized than fresh, fishermen are paid only one-third to one-half the price the Canadians receive. This year, a price crash is predicted because demand for frozen halibut is low and some 10 million pounds of last year’s catch sit in storage freezers still. Meanwhile, Russia is opening its rich halibut fishery to U.S. boats, which will add more fish to the market.

Don McCaughran, director of the U.S.-Canada Halibut Commission, described one Alaskan halibut boat he inspected on arrival at dockside last season. Fish were heaped carelessly in the hold, sloshing in offal. The odor was strong.

McCaughran continues: “He brought in 70,000 pounds. Of that, 15,000 had gone bad and had to be thrown away. The rest was downgraded in value because of its quality. However, that fish was then cleaned off, frozen and when it’s sold to consumers, it’s not labeled as reduced-value fish.”

Little wonder that halibut is one of the few domestic foods that has declined in quality over the years.

The governor of Alaska, Walter J. Hickel, operates one of the state’s major hotels, the Captain Cook in Anchorage. The management of the halibut fishery infuriates him on the most practical of levels. “I can’t get fresh Alaskan halibut for my restaurants. I have to buy from Canada--imagine that.”

And the 24-hour halibut openers are not the most absurd result of the freakish competition among U.S. fishermen in the North Pacific.

There are so many herring boats that the “season” in some places lasts 20 minutes. These fishermen use nets. They hire airplanes to help them find the schools of spawning herring and then get to drop the net into the water only once. This will determine whether they will be rich or poor for the season.

The black cod season used to run 200 days. Now it is down to 15 to 18 days. In 1990, there was a year-round season for pollock, the largest single harvest from this region of the ocean. Now it is down to 5 1/2 months. Yellowfin sole was a year-round fishery. Now it lasts 2 1/2 to 4 months.

“Fishing has been a way of life. Today it’s comparable to agriculture in the 1850s: There’s the family farm, but no marketing, no realization of one’s place in the world’s food supply,” says William Aron, director of the federal government’s Alaska Fisheries Science Center in Seattle.

“Only now is the industry recognizing that it is a food source more than a way of life. Today there is a transition gradually under way, but it is still a fragmented industry without a game plan . . . and this is going to cause a lot of pain, personal pain.”

Will it be the fish and the interests of consumers that will suffer in this transition to the 21st Century? Or will it be the fishermen who try to hold on to their old-fashioned ways?

The question is white-hot these days.

And the answers are unsettling.

For, in this industry, to a degree unheard of in allocation of other public resources, the regulation of United States fisheries is left to fishermen themselves.

“We haven’t had a real problem yet because we’ve had plenty of fish in the North Pacific,” says Robert D. Alverson, manager of the Fishing Vessel Owners’ Assn., a Seattle-based group of long-liners.

But the vast increase in the number of fishermen, their pell-mell accumulation of gear and financial debt foreshadow a day when there simply will not be enough fish to keep everyone prosperous and afloat, no matter how absurdly short the seasons.

And what then?

Alverson fears for the long-term health of the fish and the fishing industry. “I’m beginning to sense the pressure building. Right now, we’re allowing no margin of error in our fisheries. . . . I’m a strong believer in history. And the history in places like New England is that every time caps on the catch or quotas or restrictions get in the way of the fishermen, they are repealed or lifted or ignored.”

In New England, and to some extent off the mid-Atlantic Coast and the Gulf of Mexico, the industry’s regulatory control of the fishery and its determination to meet short-term economic demands have led to overfishing and steep declines of up to 80% in valuable fish stocks. And still the fishing continues there as fishermen try to scrape out a living.

In a 1991 report for the independent Center for Marine Conservation in Washington, D.C., fisheries biologist John P. Wise said these areas were suffering a “near-disastrous situation of overfishing.” He found hundreds of species that were on the decline because of fishing pressure and mismanagement.

A 1991 report by the government’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration declared that overfishing in the Lower 48 states means “the nation is wasting large economic benefits and many recreational opportunities.”

For many years after the foreign fishing fleets were driven away, the North Pacific avoided the downward economic and environmental spiral that widespread overfishing creates. If one species went into decline, there always was something else to target. But recently, with the mushrooming of the domestic fleet, pressure has built on this self-regulating industry to harvest ever more and more.

In Alaska, the fishing industry holds seven seats on the 11-member North Pacific Fishery Management Council. Under the Magnuson Act, this council has the dominant role in the regulation of offshore fisheries--all the waters from the boundary of state control three miles off the coast to the 200-mile limit. The other four members of the council are from government. There are no seats for consumers or conservationists.

This council is similar to the seven other councils that regulate regional offshore fisheries, both commercial and sport, off the coasts of the Lower 48 states.

Actually, regulation is a two-step process. The councils deliberate and make determinations on how much fish should be taken, how, when and by whom. Their findings go as recommendations to the U.S. secretary of commerce, who then typically signs them into regulation.

Because the council is technically an advisory group, it is not subject to the same conflict-of-interest codes or traditions as other regulatory bodies. In fact, fishermen are not expected to shrink from voting on matters that affect their pocketbook. They are expected to do so, even to the point of changing their votes if their economic interests change.

“I’m afraid that council members cannot help but view their actions in terms of how does this affect my boat. Or my group. People just don’t tolerate these sorts of conflicts of interest in any other government agency,” says Lee Alverson, who helped write the Magnuson Act and is a retired acting director of the National Marine Fisheries Service.

Along with others, he is now concerned about whether the council can withstand the pressure of its own immediate financial self-interest and protect the Alaska fisheries over the long run.

“I think so. But I wouldn’t guarantee it,” he says.

Penny Pagels, Northwest fisheries campaigner for Greenpeace and an adviser to the council, is more pessimistic. “We see that short-term economic gains supersede long-term environmental concerns every time. Economic concerns are all that are ever raised. Every decision is reduced to dollars.”

The sweet, white-meated halibut illustrates the agony of trying to regulate the fishing industry from within.

Annual limits on the catch are established by a separate Halibut Commission. This organization was created by treaty between the U.S. and Canada in 1923 after halibut were profoundly overfished at the turn of the century. The commission sets annual limits on how many fish can be taken but does not regulate who can fish. That is left to the governments of the two countries. In the United States, this falls to the industry-dominated North Pacific Fishery Management Council and the secretary of commerce.

Because there are so many boats in the U.S.-controlled waters, the only way the catch limit can be enforced, officials say, is by guessing how many fish will be caught in a given number of hours and adjusting the length of the season accordingly. For more than half of the halibut openers of recent years, however, the regulators have guessed wrong. So the limit has been exceeded--several times by more than 200%.

This spring, the council took a painful step into the future. It voted, 7 to 4, to recommend restricting forevermore who can get into the North Pacific halibut and black cod fisheries.

Fishermen who have been in the business for at least three years would be given a share, or quota, of the overall catch in future seasons, depending on how much they caught in the past.

It might be called the last homesteading of the West.

Just like the old homesteading acts employed during the western expansion of the nation, the resource is to be deeded free of charge to those settlers with the longest and strongest claims.

In this case, individual quotas initially would stabilize the size of the fleet at 4,000 to 5,000 boats. Each boat could catch its quota any time it liked between March and November.

If everything went smoothly, the earliest the quota system would take effect is 1994.

In the years after that, it is believed that quota holders would begin buying and selling their shares. Eventually, economics supposedly would push the fleet to reduce its excess fishing capacity one way or another. Either the halibut fishery would consolidate in just a few hundred large boats, or maybe larger numbers of smaller craft will prove more competitive over time.

But many Alaskans, including the state’s powerful congressional delegation, have bitterly fought the individual fishing quotas.

Local schoolteachers complain they will be denied a chance to join the free-for-all fleet of 6,000 and try to catch a few halibut to supplement the family income. Processors fear they will have to hire a year-round labor force, not just the seasonal operation they have now, or watch the halibut and cod go to Seattle for processing. Fishermen who once specialized in some other catch object to a system that would exclude them from trying for halibut once or twice a year. And so on.

All of these opponents are expected to carry their case to Washington, where Commerce Secretary Barbara Hackman Franklin will make the final judgment later this summer.

These opponents are encouraged by the memory that 10 years ago a Republican Administration had an opportunity to bring the fleet under tighter rein. But the Administration said no.

At the time, aides to President Ronald Reagan said such regulations ran counter to the free market: “As an Administration, we’re just opposed to limiting fishing to only those who have formerly fished. . . . We are concerned that it would interfere with basic economic liberties.”

Times researcher Doug Conner in Seattle assisted with this story.