Troubled Waters? : Longliners Have Had No Problem Catching Fish, but They May Be Drowning in a Sea of Controversy

For Bill Craighead and Ken Trinh, the plan to set up shop on the West Coast was simple enough: They would transfer some of their fleet of commercial fishing boats from the Atlantic Ocean and fish the more productive Pacific.

And they got off to a good start, pumping money into the financially strapped and somewhat dilapidated Ventura Harbor for dock space and facility use.

At sea, the newly arrived fishermen had no trouble laying their hooks into literally tons of swordfish, tuna and dorado. The fish bring an average of $4-$6 a pound on the fresh-fish market, but Craighead has sold bluefin tuna to Japanese buyers for up to $60 a pound.

“We thought we could come out here and work and make a living,” said Craighead, 42, co-owner of Hi-Seas Fish, Inc., which has headquarters in Louisiana and Florida.

But since arriving last fall, and increasing the size of its longline fishing fleet from four boats to 14, it has been anything but smooth sailing for Hi-Seas.

The company has been hit by a tidal wave of opposition, created largely by a Southland sportfishing community fresh from a victory over the gill-netters with the passage in 1990 of Proposition 132, which banned the nets in near-shore waters beginning last Jan. 1.

The 100-foot longliners, each with 40 miles of line connected to about 800 hooks, catch not only desirable tuna, swordfish, dorado and opah, but birds, turtles, sharks, marlin and anything else attracted to the bait.

“They’ve decimated swordfish, shark and tuna on the East Coast and exactly the same thing is going to happen over here,” Bob Hetzler, chairman of the longline committee for the United Anglers of Southern California, a conservation group that represents the interests of sportfishermen, said of Craighead and Trinh.

As was the case against the gill-netters, United Anglers is pushing for legislative action to oust Hi-Seas and prohibit other longline vessels in California.

Southland anglers have not forgotten the effects Japanese longliners operating out of Mexico had on striped marlin before being expelled in 1991. In one instance, a vessel was seized and detained in Cabo San Lucas after being observed fishing within Mexico’s 50-mile sportfishing-only zone.

According to the boat’s log, there were 820 marlin aboard. Inspection of the holds, however, revealed 195 tons of fish, including more than 6,000 marlin, most of which weighed less than 66 pounds.

It is illegal for California-based boats to fish for marlin commercially, but incidental catches are unavoidable with longline gear. There is some concern about the survival rate of marlin cut loose from the longline hooks and, with no monitoring of the boats at sea, there is also concern that they are being put onto other vessels for sale on the Asian market.

Craighead steadfastly denied such claims, saying such actions wouldn’t be worth the trouble.

“The marlin are not worth a dime, even if we were fishing for them,” he said. “We wouldn’t want to waste the room and the ice on the boat on them.”

But United Anglers isn’t wavering.

“Look at past history, at Hawaii, the Gulf and East Coast,” said Bill Shedd, one of the founders of the group. “If you could go and ask anyone if fisheries would be in better shape without longliners, they would say, ‘Absolutely. This thing got away from us,’ In California, this is an accident waiting to happen.”

Longline boats were outlawed within California’s 200-mile “economic zone” in 1992 by the state Fish and Game Commission, citing concern over the possible impact on local fisheries. Longline operators such as Craighead, however, can fish beyond the 200-mile zone and are basically unregulated.

The longline fleet in the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico grew unregulated into the early 1980s. With several Caribbean countries developing longline operations, the number of vessels swelled to more than 1,000. Several species, notably tuna, shark and swordfish, went into serious decline. By 1987, it was estimated that the North Atlantic swordfish stocks were only 40% of what they had been in 1978. The average size of the swordfish dropped from 120 pounds to 60 pounds in the same period.

As the fisheries went--they are currently strictly regulated on an international level to enable them to recover--so did the U.S.-flagged longliners.

“The yellowfin (tuna) and swordfish fisheries have changed (in the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico) and many of the fishermen have told me that it’s no longer profitable for them to stay,” said Dick Stone, a Maryland-based migratory species expert for the National Marine Fisheries Service.

Many found a new and profitable base in Hawaii, fishing the Pacific for swordfish, tuna and striped marlin. The number of longline permits in Hawaii rose from 25 in 1980 to 166 in 1991.

Controversy followed the longliners, as other commercial fishermen--trollers and hand-liners, mostly--feared the longliners would impact fisheries to the point where they would no longer be able to make a living.

It didn’t help the longliners’ cause that the accidental catch of non-marketable species exceeded the catch of marketable species. According to logbook data collected in 1992, the Hawaiian fleet reported catching 95,000 sharks, but marketed only 3.6% of the catch. In the same period, the fleet caught 62,000 swordfish.

The Western Pacific Fisheries Management Council, a federal group with jurisdiction in the Western Pacific, citing more of a concern over the effects of longliners on federally protected sea turtles and monk seals, imposed an emergency rule in 1991 limiting the number of permits to 167, and under West Pac’s management plan a limited-entry fishery of no more than 167 will go into effect this year while data is gathered through observers and logbooks.

“We know now that turtles are being taken on longline hooks,” said Svein Fougner, chief of fisheries operations with the National Marine Fisheries Service-Southwest Region. “We do not have a good handle on the number or the rate of interaction. We are only now starting to place observers on 10% of all trips operating out of Hawaii.”

Swordfish are a primary target of U.S. longliners and Fougner said there is concern over the increased fishing effort, but added there is “no evidence that swordfish stocks are being adversely affected by the longline fishery or the total fishery based in Hawaii.”

But with Hawaii restricting the number of permits, there is a growing concern in the Southland that longline operators will flood into California.

The Pacific Fisheries Management Council, which has jurisdiction on much of the West Coast, has no management plan regarding ocean fisheries and would have to develop one before taking any restrictive action.

The California Department of Fish and Game could theoretically restrict the landing of longline vessels in California ports, but is reluctant to do so without any direct proof of harm to local fisheries. The DFG is currently trying to get legislation authorizing it to require the longliners to submit logbooks upon demand, “so we obtain some very specific information about where they’re fishing, when they’re fishing and what they’re taking,” said Rolf Mall, Chief of Marine Resources for the DFG.

Craighead said he is working to get observers on his boats to help gather data and determine the impact of the fishery, but added that any efforts to curtail longline fishing would do nothing more than take jobs from U.S. citizens while a huge international fleet reaps the profits of a U.S. market.

“Management needs to be in the international arena,” Craighead said. “People are worried about a dozen or two U.S. boats fishing in distant waters, when 350 Japanese boats are fishing the same waters. And if you don’t get these people on board, you can put 100% of U.S. fishermen out of business and you are not going to save one . . . fish.”

Fougner backed Craighead’s claim, saying the U.S. longline fleet deployed about 12 million hooks in 1992, “and the Japanese fleet alone probably deployed 10-12 times as many hooks.”

United Anglers said the ideal would be to have an international management plan, but added that such a cooperative effort would take years.

“Ultimately what has to happen is that there has got to be control over all those hooks in the water, not just the American hooks,” Shedd said. “But you’re not going to have an impact on the Taiwanese, the Koreans, the Japanese or whomever until you can get your own act together.”

Craighead, meanwhile, said he will keep fishing as long as he can, but he is not overly optimistic about his company’s future on the West Coast.

“With things up in the air, you can’t make investments,” he said. “We need a fish house, badly. We have a couple locations in mind, but we had to put that on the back burner. We don’t know what our longevity will be.”