Gill Net Fishermen Seek Reprieve From Ban : Environment: The law approved three years ago takes effect today, putting some out of work. A group is seeking the injunction until a lawsuit is heard in April.

Andy Rasmussen will be out of work starting today.

He has not quit his job, nor has he been fired. Rasmussen, a gill net fisherman, lost his job by public vote.

In 1990, 55% of Californians voted to ban gill net fishing in a three-mile zone along the California coast. The law goes into effect today.

A coalition of environmentalists and sportfishermen backed the proposition because they said gill nets, which are anchored to the ocean floor and stretched like volleyball nets to trap fish, pose a threat to many marine mammals.

Although Rasmussen and about 50 other fishermen who set their nets between Oxnard and Santa Barbara have had three years to prepare for their last catch, most cannot fathom what they will do when their fishery is closed.

“I have no idea what’s next,” Rasmussen said. “About 80% of my income is destroyed. My business is pretty much gone. I’ll probably be in an unemployment line on the first of the year.”

The gill-netters are staking their hopes on a lawsuit that challenges the proposition on constitutional grounds. A San Diego Superior Court judge is expected to rule Thursday on the gill-netters’ request for an injunction that could let them continue fishing, at least until the lawsuit is heard in April.

But if the judge rules against them they will be devastated, the gill-netters say.

The problem for the gill-netters is that they cannot make an easy transition to another method of fishing, said Tony West, president of the California Gillnetters Assn.

Many, such as Hank Hubble, one of about a dozen gill-netters based in Ventura Harbor, built their boats specifically for gill-netting.

“I put $60,000 into that boat, and this would basically make it useless,” Hubble said. “I couldn’t use it, and no one would want to buy it. It would be a total loss.”

Although gill-netting will be permitted outside the three-mile limit, most of the boats are too small to safely operate that far from shore during harsh weather.

Gill-netters will find it difficult to switch to another type of gear because the state has imposed limits on the number of fishermen who can enter other fisheries, West said.

“I’ll tell you what these guys are going to do next year,” West said. “They’re going to go broke.”

Sponsors of the proposition argued during the 1990 campaign that benefits of the ban far outweighed the harm that would come to the state’s gill net fishermen. The proposition’s author, Assemblywoman Doris Allen (R-Cypress), said during the campaign that gill nets were the equivalent of strip-mining the sea or clear-cutting the ocean.

Gill nets, she said “are referred to as ‘walls of death’ because they entangle and painfully kill thousands of mammals such as whales, dolphins, sea otters and sea lions. More than 100 species of sea life are affected.”

To help the fishermen recover from the loss of their industry, Allen created a fund that is to pay gill-netters to switch to less destructive gear.

To date, only eight of the 136 fishermen who applied for compensation have collected money from the fund, and the gill-netters argue that many who deserve money will never receive it. That, West said, is because the proposition was worded so that compensation for gill-netters would be based on the average annual income they earned from 1983 through 1987.

“The problem is that there are a number of the fishermen who didn’t work all five of those years,” West said. “Nobody is going to come out of this with what they are supposed to be getting. . . . If they started fishing in 1988, they don’t get a dime.”

Tom Barnes, the Department of Fish and Game officer responsible for doling out compensation, said he has had no choice in how the money was rationed.

“We’re going by the letter of the law,” Barnes said.

Even those who have received money through the fund, which was established by adding a $3.15 stamp required on sportfishing licenses, say the amounts have been inadequate.

The average amount given out has been $18,000, Barnes said.

Although the earnings of the fishermen vary greatly, West said, the average yearly income for a gill-netter is $80,000 to $100,000.

The reason compensation is so low, West said, is that Fish and Game is only compensating fishermen for fish that they can prove were caught in the three-mile coastal zone.

Hubble said the fishermen are just one link in a chain of people who will be hurt by the loss of business.

The gill-netters, who fish mainly for halibut, angel shark and other bottom fish, sell primarily to local markets.

Supporters of the proposition argued at the time that the loss of the gill-netters’ catch was not substantial--they said it made up less than 2% of the fish sold in California.

But each catch, Hubble said, goes through a seafood distributor and several truckers and markets before it lands on someone’s dinner table.

“There are probably 10 different people who handle my fish once it leaves my boat,” Hubble said. “All of them are going to be hurt by this.”

Meanwhile, consumers will be buying the same types of fish from different sources, said Steve Rebuck, vice president of the American Seafood Harvesters Assn.

“People are just going to have to pay more to get the same fish from other countries,” Rebuck said. “It really doesn’t make much sense.”