Latest / The MeatEater Podcast / Ep. 864: Is Trawling Destroying Alaska's Fisheries?

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Ep. 864: Is Trawling Destroying Alaska's Fisheries? · The MeatEater Podcast

• 0:08
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  Speaker 1: dot com. That's f I R S T L I
• 0:38
  Speaker 1: T E dot com. All Right, everybody, we got a
• 0:44
  Speaker 1: hot one today coming out of Alaska. Real controversial issue.
• 0:46
  Speaker 1: It turns out we're gonna talk about trawling. Okay, we're
• 0:50
  Speaker 1: gonna talk about fisheries, fisheries management, habitat issues, all leading
• 0:57
  Speaker 1: out of a lot of conversations that people have been
• 0:59
  Speaker 1: hearing about and having about declining king salmon numbers, declining
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: halibit numbers. Guys that if you go up to sport
• 1:07
  Speaker 1: fishing in Alaska, you dream of going up to fish
• 1:10
  Speaker 1: halibit and salmon in Alaska. This is an issue you
• 1:13
  Speaker 1: got to pay attention to. Where this conversation came out
• 1:16
  Speaker 1: of is on the news show. We recently covered this.
• 1:21
  Speaker 1: I don't want to call it an emerging controversy around
• 1:24
  Speaker 1: trawling and impacts to fisheries and bycatch and all these conversations.
• 1:29
  Speaker 1: This is an age old This is an age old discussion. Okay,
• 1:33
  Speaker 1: this is an age old discussion. It's a discussion. This
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  Speaker 1: sort of plays along in any region where you have
• 1:41
  Speaker 1: declining fisheries and people have to start looking at there's
• 1:44
  Speaker 1: like the pie right the fishery, who's drawing from the
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  Speaker 1: fishery and what is leading to fishery declines. Oftentimes, in
• 1:53
  Speaker 1: these conversations, the conversations will turn to what fisheries are
• 1:57
  Speaker 1: having the greatest ecological impact, and those discussions take place. Okay,
• 2:04
  Speaker 1: Tralling is an age old controversy. There's places in Alaska
• 2:09
  Speaker 1: where you used to be able to trall. We're gonna
• 2:10
  Speaker 1: talk about all these definitions that. Don't worry. There's places
• 2:13
  Speaker 1: in Alaska used to be able to troll and the
• 2:15
  Speaker 1: fisheries been shut down.
• 2:16
  Speaker 2: Okay.
• 2:18
  Speaker 1: On the news show, we were talking about an increased
• 2:22
  Speaker 1: focus among fishermen on the impacts of the trawling industry
• 2:27
  Speaker 1: in Prince William Sound or the Gulf of Alaska in general.
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  Speaker 2: Okay, the Bearing.
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  Speaker 1: Sea and whether or not this commercial fishery.
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  Speaker 2: Is linked to declines in salmon and Halibert numbers.
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  Speaker 1: And we're just talking about this on the news show
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  Speaker 1: all right, talking about how it's a heated up political issue.
• 2:50
  Speaker 2: Man.
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  Speaker 1: That led to a lot of feedback, for a lot
• 2:53
  Speaker 1: of listener feedback. We heard from a bunch of sport fishermen,
• 2:59
  Speaker 1: charter cap captains, We heard from Halibert longliners. We heard
• 3:02
  Speaker 1: from Sam and Purse saying ers right, talking about the
• 3:06
  Speaker 1: damages of the trawling industry. And then we heard from
• 3:09
  Speaker 1: a lot of people from the trawling industry talking about basically, hey,
• 3:13
  Speaker 1: it ain't our fault. The numbers are wrong, the numbers
• 3:15
  Speaker 1: are misleading. This is all coming from outside interest. There's
• 3:19
  Speaker 1: nothing to see here, Okay. So I thought, based on
• 3:25
  Speaker 1: the amount of conversation that our conversation generated, I wanted
• 3:29
  Speaker 1: to dig in on this a little bit. So number
• 3:34
  Speaker 1: one guests we're having on right now is David Bays.
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  Speaker 2: Okay.
• 3:38
  Speaker 1: David Bays is a leader of a Facebook group called
• 3:44
  Speaker 1: stop Alaskan Trawler Bycatch. He is a former He's a
• 3:52
  Speaker 1: fishing guide in Alaska, used to have his own charter outfit,
• 3:56
  Speaker 1: still in the business. He was twenty twenty four. Sam
• 4:01
  Speaker 1: McDowell Award winner. He's the former chair of the Alaska
• 4:06
  Speaker 1: Charter Association and the Homer Homer Charter Association and a
• 4:11
  Speaker 1: former member of the Homer Area, Alaska Department of Fishing
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  Speaker 1: Game Advisory Committee.
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  Speaker 2: All Right, welcome David.
• 4:22
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I appreciate it.
• 4:23
  Speaker 2: Thanks for coming on. Man.
• 4:24
  Speaker 1: Yeah, So start out, start out. We're gonna get into
• 4:27
  Speaker 1: all these definitions. Okay, Now that was a terrible intro,
• 4:31
  Speaker 1: but we'll start the intro out.
• 4:35
  Speaker 2: How'd you get started fishing in Alaska?
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  Speaker 4: So I was born and raised there and Homer, and
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  Speaker 4: I mean that was what you did as a kid
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  Speaker 4: in the eighties, Okay, if we had people in town
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  Speaker 4: or just any free weekend. We grew up next to
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  Speaker 4: the Anchor River. You know, it was two hundred yards away.
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  Speaker 4: You could walk down there. So that was that was
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  Speaker 4: all I wanted to do. You know, fish on trap,
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  Speaker 4: every second of it, and we're in the right spot
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  Speaker 4: for it.
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  Speaker 2: Okay.
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  Speaker 1: So you gradually got into the charter business, targeting halibit.
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  Speaker 3: Yeah.
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  Speaker 4: So, I you know, I'm big into fishing. But when
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  Speaker 4: I turned sixteen, that was my first moment that I
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  Speaker 4: had a driver's license and could get myself to work essentially.
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  Speaker 3: So that was the first year that.
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  Speaker 4: I started in the charters. And then while I was
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  Speaker 4: in college, I bought a boat, started a business, had
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  Speaker 4: that about twenty years and sold that recently, but I
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  Speaker 4: still worked for the new owners essentially, or people have
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  Speaker 4: the boat.
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  Speaker 2: Okay, so you're from Homer. Next question, are you a billionaire?
• 5:34
  Speaker 2: Not that I know, Okay, because.
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  Speaker 1: That's important to ask because we brought up on the
• 5:39
  Speaker 1: news show when we brought up the controversy around trawling
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  Speaker 1: and targeting forage fish. Okay, targeting, you know what order
• 5:48
  Speaker 1: billions of pounds of forage fish, the related impacts of
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  Speaker 1: bycatch on large game fish halibit, salmon, weather, and there
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  Speaker 1: is a relationship between between this fishery, this industrial fishery,
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  Speaker 1: whether there's a relationship between that and declining numbers of halibit,
• 6:08
  Speaker 1: declining numbers of salmon. We were assured by many people
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  Speaker 1: that this is being that this narrative is being pushed
• 6:18
  Speaker 1: by outside billionaires. Okay, So I just wanted to make
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  Speaker 1: sure you're not a billionaire. But you're from Homer.
• 6:26
  Speaker 2: From Homer, Okay, and you started your Facebook page.
• 6:29
  Speaker 4: Where so I didn't actually start at Jody Mason had
• 6:33
  Speaker 4: started it. I'm a moderator. I do most of the posts
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  Speaker 4: on there, but Jody Mason is another charter operator in Homer,
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  Speaker 4: So yeah, one of the other admins on there is
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  Speaker 4: the executive director of the Alaska Door Council. I do
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  Speaker 4: charter boats, Jody does charter boats. But it came to
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  Speaker 4: a head because before they set charter halibut limits, each
• 6:52
  Speaker 4: year they take troll bycatch of halibut off the top.
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  Speaker 4: So when you're talking about that pie each year gets
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  Speaker 4: bigger and smaller with fish population. Every fish the troll
• 7:01
  Speaker 4: takes out of it shrinks that pie down. And so
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  Speaker 4: it got to where us on charter boats taking out
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  Speaker 4: people with roden reel fishing, they said, well, we're going
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  Speaker 4: to cut you guys back by about thirty percent to
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  Speaker 4: protect the resource. But we take two million pounds a
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  Speaker 4: halibut a year spread out across all these anglers, and
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  Speaker 4: at that time troll was dumping you know, five six
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  Speaker 4: million pounds of juvenile halibate per year, so close to
• 7:24
  Speaker 4: a million individual fish. And so then it just creates
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  Speaker 4: the hypocrisy of what do you mean they can waste
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  Speaker 4: more than we catch, you know, like this, and we're
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  Speaker 4: being told that we're cut back for conservation.
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  Speaker 1: So yeah, let's let's let's back way up, because yeah,
• 7:39
  Speaker 1: not way up?
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  Speaker 2: Are you doing great? What is a trawler? Like?
• 7:44
  Speaker 1: Like, what is a trawller? What is a bottom trawler?
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  Speaker 1: What is a mid ocean trawler?
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  Speaker 2: Can you? Can you lay this out?
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  Speaker 3: Yeah?
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  Speaker 4: So it well to start it off, you have to
• 7:55
  Speaker 4: think about scale boats. So when we think about fishing boats,
• 8:00
  Speaker 4: you know, we think of a lot of people have
• 8:01
  Speaker 4: seen like the time band on The Deadliest Catch. That's
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  Speaker 4: the biggest fishing boat. They can imagine it's huge. For
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  Speaker 4: most of us, it's about one hundred and thirteen feet long.
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  Speaker 4: But the biggest trawler fishing in Alaska now is three
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  Speaker 4: hundred and seventy six feet long. So if you put
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  Speaker 4: that in a Super Bowl stadium, it would go from
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  Speaker 4: goalpost to goal post.
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  Speaker 3: And it's about six stories high.
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  Speaker 4: So when you think of volume of fish that a
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  Speaker 4: boat like that catches, they catch about a half a
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  Speaker 4: million pounds of fish per day. They can hold about
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  Speaker 4: five million pounds of fish in their boat. So as
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  Speaker 4: we talk about trills specifically, we're talking huge numbers, billions
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  Speaker 4: of pounds of catch, millions of pounds of bye catch.
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  Speaker 4: But the way they fish is you'll often hear them
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  Speaker 4: referred to as draggers as the other.
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  Speaker 2: Yeah, that's the name. That's the term 'unfamiliar with is draggers.
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  Speaker 2: But then it was.
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  Speaker 1: You have a little problem where you have a problem
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  Speaker 1: where I talked like we previewed this subject on the
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  Speaker 1: news show. So then I got a lot of people
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  Speaker 1: and I be, I need to be honest here, right.
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  Speaker 1: I had a lot of people explain that the way
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  Speaker 1: I characterize some of the questions like that I mischaracterized
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  Speaker 1: some issues. So I think I've I like, I'm familiar
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  Speaker 1: with people calling them draggers. But then I was introduced
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  Speaker 1: to the idea that that's not that's not the industry term.
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  Speaker 3: Yeah, I think the industry term.
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  Speaker 4: They don't like it because it is sensed as derogatory
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  Speaker 4: or there's been so many shutdowns of drag fisheries across
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  Speaker 4: the United States. But we actually see one good example
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  Speaker 4: of this. There's an industry group in Alaska that used
• 9:35
  Speaker 4: to be it's like the Alaska Whitefish Draggers Association something
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  Speaker 4: like that, but they changed their name to something like
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  Speaker 4: a cooperative, you know, where they dropped the drager name
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  Speaker 4: essentially ten or fifteen years ago. But they didn't change
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  Speaker 4: their gear. They didn't change their boat and change their
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  Speaker 4: bike catch much. They just got rid of the word dragger.
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  Speaker 2: Yeah. Okay, so so get into the gear. Yeah.
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  Speaker 4: Yeah, So they pull, We're not saying drag.
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  Speaker 3: They pull. They drag a big, a huge net.
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  Speaker 4: So the biggest ones, they say, you can fit four
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  Speaker 4: seven forty seven jets plus the Eiffel Tower on its
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  Speaker 4: side into this net. So there again, when you and
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  Speaker 4: I think of fishing and fishing boats and what extraction
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  Speaker 4: of a natural resources, this is almost incomprehensible. They'll pull
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  Speaker 4: up like a quarter million pounds of fish in one
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  Speaker 4: sweep essentially with this net. But it has it has
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  Speaker 4: a chain or cable along the bottom to wait it.
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  Speaker 4: And on those biggest ones, that's about a quarter mile wide.
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  Speaker 4: So if that's dragging on the bottom, then you're cutting
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  Speaker 4: about a quarter mile wide swath of seafloor.
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  Speaker 2: Yeah.
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  Speaker 4: So they say the biggest ones will tell about six
• 10:40
  Speaker 4: square miles of seafloor per boat per day. There's probably
• 10:45
  Speaker 4: forty of these factory trawlers fishing in Alaska. They have
• 10:48
  Speaker 4: a long season so if you'd say forty boats six
• 10:51
  Speaker 4: miles per day, fishing two hundred days per year, the
• 10:54
  Speaker 4: number of square acres of seafloor potentially covered is just
• 10:58
  Speaker 4: unimaginable astronomical. I think it's forty eight thousand square miles
• 11:02
  Speaker 4: if they could hit sixes, if you do it that way. Yeah, yeah,
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  Speaker 4: Because they fish twenty four hours a day, it's this
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  Speaker 4: floating factory ship.
• 11:08
  Speaker 1: Essentially that that makes it seem impotent.
• 11:11
  Speaker 4: Man, they do complain about They complain about crab pots
• 11:14
  Speaker 4: and these regulatory meetings and say you guys anchored here,
• 11:17
  Speaker 4: you know, or you dropped a crab pot and ignore
• 11:20
  Speaker 4: that that they're fishing this way. But the uh anyway,
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  Speaker 4: so so huge nets and they there's kind of two
• 11:28
  Speaker 4: divisions that they're cut into. One is the bottom trawl
• 11:31
  Speaker 4: that will target fish that always live on the bottom,
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  Speaker 4: so like flounder and soul, those are made to always
• 11:36
  Speaker 4: be on the bottom. They kick the fish up, scare
• 11:38
  Speaker 4: them into the net. And bottom trawl across the world
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  Speaker 4: has this bad name, you know, that's what's associated mostly
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  Speaker 4: with draggers. Entire nations have banned. I think Bali and
• 11:49
  Speaker 4: Hong Kong are no bottom.
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  Speaker 3: Trail at all.
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  Speaker 4: There's a lot of European nations are kicking it out
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  Speaker 4: of their marine protected areas. Bottom trail is a bad word.
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  Speaker 4: It always has been. There's really not my much debate
• 12:00
  Speaker 4: on that. People at home can google like impact bottom
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  Speaker 4: trawl and pick it up. You don't have to take
• 12:05
  Speaker 4: my word for it. There's ten thousand results that say
• 12:09
  Speaker 4: this is an ecological disaster.
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  Speaker 1: And that on bottom trawling just the way understanding the
• 12:14
  Speaker 1: gear right, like like legitimate bottom trawling where you're legitimately dragging.
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  Speaker 1: The argument is not only the fish, right like, not
• 12:26
  Speaker 1: only a not only a relatively indiscriminate harvest mechanism, but
• 12:32
  Speaker 1: also bottom damage, c floor damage. Correct, that's the that's like,
• 12:37
  Speaker 1: that's kind of what drives the argument against bottom drawing
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  Speaker 1: or dragging.
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  Speaker 4: Absolutely. And so we see, so I was saying, there's
• 12:45
  Speaker 4: two types of trawl. So we see those bottom draggers
• 12:48
  Speaker 4: that are always hard on bottom. They've been banned a
• 12:51
  Speaker 4: lot of places in the world. Alaska, in fact, has
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  Speaker 4: I think about sixty percent of Alaska has been closed
• 12:56
  Speaker 4: down to bottom trawling because we acknowledge that it's this
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  Speaker 4: kind of equal disaster the coral it kills the fish
• 13:02
  Speaker 4: on the bottom all the habitat. But then there's this
• 13:06
  Speaker 4: other category of troll which they call midwater trawl, and
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  Speaker 4: so that's primarily used for the pollock fisheries up there,
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  Speaker 4: which is about a three billion pound extraction per year.
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  Speaker 3: Not a lot of people know what pollock is.
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  Speaker 4: It's essentially like the bait fish of the North Pacific,
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  Speaker 4: and that fishery actually began because they were targeting row,
• 13:26
  Speaker 4: which is caviar essentially to sell to these other nations.
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  Speaker 2: So their target pollock row or herring row, pollock row.
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  Speaker 4: Oh really yeah yeah, So it's uh, they push back
• 13:37
  Speaker 4: hard now and say we're feeding the world, But the
• 13:39
  Speaker 4: origin of this fishery was for caviar essentially, and it's
• 13:42
  Speaker 4: still a huge driver. That's they get about five pound
• 13:45
  Speaker 4: five dollars per pound for the pollock row versus about
• 13:48
  Speaker 4: ten cents per pound for pollock flesh.
• 13:50
  Speaker 2: Dude, that's okay.
• 13:53
  Speaker 1: I just wanted to touch on a smith because I
• 13:54
  Speaker 1: don't want to forget to talk about this is when
• 13:58
  Speaker 1: you think about fish hard listed commercial fish, or like
• 14:02
  Speaker 1: when you think about walking in into a fish shop,
• 14:07
  Speaker 1: I don't care where you go buy a fish, let's see,
• 14:08
  Speaker 1: you're going to I don't know, whole foods or something and.
• 14:10
  Speaker 2: You go look at fish.
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  Speaker 1: I always always look into those cases as a way
• 14:15
  Speaker 1: of justifying my fishing because I'm like, hammit this fish.
• 14:20
  Speaker 1: Like these fish we catch, you know, you'd be like
• 14:22
  Speaker 1: sable fish twenty hal a bit, whatever pound, salmon, whatever pound.
• 14:26
  Speaker 1: It makes me feel like I feel like going to
• 14:28
  Speaker 1: my wife.
• 14:28
  Speaker 2: Like watching that, dude, you should I should fish more.
• 14:32
  Speaker 3: Yeah, we're making money.
• 14:34
  Speaker 1: And so you see the value of like what we
• 14:36
  Speaker 1: think of as the fish that we serve on a
• 14:39
  Speaker 1: plate to our family when it comes to us as
• 14:41
  Speaker 1: a product that looks like fish, the high value of
• 14:43
  Speaker 1: that and fishermen getting you know, fishermen getting at the dock.
• 14:47
  Speaker 2: We get a custom to fishermen getting at the dock.
• 14:49
  Speaker 1: Two dollars per pound, five dollars per pound, seven dollars
• 14:53
  Speaker 1: per pound, ten dollars per pound, right.
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  Speaker 2: So like a valuable resource.
• 14:57
  Speaker 1: I remember having burgers into beer with a pollock guy
• 15:01
  Speaker 1: down in Seattle. He was based out of Seattle, and
• 15:04
  Speaker 1: he ran one of these big pollock processor boats. Yeah, okay,
• 15:07
  Speaker 1: he was the captain on one, and I remember sitting
• 15:10
  Speaker 1: there and he's talking about, we do good when the
• 15:16
  Speaker 1: price goes up a couple pennies, and this isn't the
• 15:20
  Speaker 1: exact number, but I'm not far off on the number.
• 15:23
  Speaker 1: As I'm sitting there with them ahead of him going up,
• 15:26
  Speaker 1: he was saying like, if it like five, this isn't
• 15:29
  Speaker 1: far off. At five cents a pound, it's a bummer.
• 15:33
  Speaker 1: At eight cents a pound, it's good. Yeah, And I
• 15:39
  Speaker 1: remember thinking like, how could there be how could there
• 15:41
  Speaker 1: be a fish in the ocean.
• 15:45
  Speaker 2: That is so unvaluable?
• 15:47
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 15:48
  Speaker 4: Well, and so that's what brings us to why they
• 15:50
  Speaker 4: use trawlers in the first place and why we don't
• 15:53
  Speaker 4: see trawlers or draggers everywhere, is that they really shine
• 15:57
  Speaker 4: on super low value, high volume, which coincidentally ends up
• 16:02
  Speaker 4: being like a lot of the baitfish type species. That's
• 16:05
  Speaker 4: what's super plentiful. But their case is that they could
• 16:09
  Speaker 4: never catch enough pounds of it to make money off
• 16:11
  Speaker 4: of it unless they were dragging it up, you know,
• 16:14
  Speaker 4: six square miles of the seafloor per day type deal,
• 16:17
  Speaker 4: or two hundred thousand pounds at a time. But what
• 16:21
  Speaker 4: we've really found to be the scandal, if you will,
• 16:24
  Speaker 4: in all of this is that. So we said that
• 16:26
  Speaker 4: bottom trawl's bad, it's banned a lot of places. There's
• 16:29
  Speaker 4: really not much argument about that. Even the bottom trawlers
• 16:32
  Speaker 4: in Alaska just kind of hunker down as this conversation happens,
• 16:36
  Speaker 4: because the more people find out that it even exists
• 16:39
  Speaker 4: up there, the more people want it banned. That's just
• 16:41
  Speaker 4: established across the world. But kind of the like I say,
• 16:47
  Speaker 4: the sandal of it is that we've actually found out
• 16:49
  Speaker 4: that the midwater nets now are on bottom twenty to
• 16:52
  Speaker 4: one hundred percent of the time. But where that really
• 16:55
  Speaker 4: the rubber meets the road on that is that those
• 16:57
  Speaker 4: midwater nets are allowed to fish in these habitat areas
• 17:01
  Speaker 4: where bottom trawl has been banned. So the fish regulators
• 17:06
  Speaker 4: understand that these huge nets are on the bottom sometimes
• 17:10
  Speaker 4: all the time, but they haven't taken this next step
• 17:14
  Speaker 4: to ban them from where bottom trawling is banned, which
• 17:17
  Speaker 4: just this huge disconnect.
• 17:18
  Speaker 1: So to help me understand the midwater thing, and I'm
• 17:22
  Speaker 1: anything but like talk to me like I'm five years old,
• 17:27
  Speaker 1: But I'm a five year old who looks at pollock
• 17:30
  Speaker 1: schools on fish finders. If you're in two hundred feet
• 17:35
  Speaker 1: of water, and you're looking at a pollock school.
• 17:38
  Speaker 2: This is just I mean, this is like very anecdotal. Okay.
• 17:41
  Speaker 1: If I'm looking at a school of pollock and two
• 17:43
  Speaker 1: hundred feet of water, that school of pollock is stacked
• 17:45
  Speaker 1: and maybe the bottom ten twelve feet frequently. Yeah, So
• 17:49
  Speaker 1: but what, like, how do you define mid ocean? Does
• 17:53
  Speaker 1: it mean like don't touch the bottom or does it
• 17:55
  Speaker 1: like if you're in varying depths, Like, what is the
• 17:58
  Speaker 1: definition of that?
• 18:00
  Speaker 4: Well, so that's where it's This sounds unbelievable, but it's
• 18:04
  Speaker 4: essentially not defined. Or they call it midwater because they
• 18:07
  Speaker 4: will sometimes lift the nets up off the bottom, so
• 18:09
  Speaker 4: it's not the fish. The difference between bottom trowl for
• 18:14
  Speaker 4: target species like flounder and soul is that those fish
• 18:17
  Speaker 4: always live in the mud, buried in the bottom, so
• 18:21
  Speaker 4: they drop that net to the bottom one hundred percent
• 18:23
  Speaker 4: of the time. Pollocks spend a whole bunch of their
• 18:26
  Speaker 4: time within you know, one, two, three, four or five
• 18:29
  Speaker 4: feet to the bottom. But they'll also sometimes raise up
• 18:34
  Speaker 4: and so they they have this weird deal where they
• 18:38
  Speaker 4: say it's not illegal to drag a midwater net on bottom.
• 18:41
  Speaker 4: But the only reason that would be illegal or the
• 18:43
  Speaker 4: only reason they say it was on bottom for regulatory
• 18:46
  Speaker 4: purpose is if it pulls up twenty or more crab,
• 18:49
  Speaker 4: it's a weird deal in a single drag of the net.
• 18:53
  Speaker 4: But they say if it pulled up nineteen crab that
• 18:55
  Speaker 4: it wasn't on the bottom. And so it's this crazy
• 18:59
  Speaker 4: regulatory concept that just doesn't really hold up.
• 19:02
  Speaker 1: So being on bottom or not is defined by how
• 19:05
  Speaker 1: many crabs are you catching, because we know the crabs
• 19:08
  Speaker 1: aren't mid level, correct, I got.
• 19:10
  Speaker 4: You, But they if you start digging into their by
• 19:13
  Speaker 4: catch numbers. Over the last five years, this Baring Sea
• 19:16
  Speaker 4: polling fleet had three hundred and forty five metric tons
• 19:18
  Speaker 4: of starfish that they brought up to the deck of
• 19:20
  Speaker 4: the boat as bycatch, and they have about forty million
• 19:24
  Speaker 4: pounds of this flounder and sole, these fish that live
• 19:27
  Speaker 4: hard on the bottom. And so then you start to
• 19:29
  Speaker 4: see these conundrums. And so in about twenty twenty one
• 19:33
  Speaker 4: there was this big crab crash. You might have seen
• 19:35
  Speaker 4: the headlines of like ten billion crab lost in the
• 19:37
  Speaker 4: Bearing Sea. So the same regulatory agency.
• 19:41
  Speaker 2: That was related to water temperature, was it not? Maybe?
• 19:45
  Speaker 4: Yeah, OK, I don't know, Yeah, that's the official standpoint,
• 19:49
  Speaker 4: and there's water numerture change. But what that triggered was
• 19:53
  Speaker 4: this fisheries management that regulates crab in the Bearing Sea
• 19:56
  Speaker 4: also regulates trawl, and so their crabs scientists, the crab
• 20:00
  Speaker 4: science side of it, started to look into this and
• 20:03
  Speaker 4: they found out that the trawlers were actually fishing in
• 20:06
  Speaker 4: this closed to bottom trall area of the Bearing Sea,
• 20:10
  Speaker 4: this crab nursery or crab habitat area, and that was
• 20:15
  Speaker 4: where this document came out that well, it was the
• 20:17
  Speaker 4: midwater troll captains themselves, the pollock captains that said, we
• 20:22
  Speaker 4: know our nets on bottom twenty to one hundred percent
• 20:24
  Speaker 4: of the time. You know, it said, but we can't
• 20:27
  Speaker 4: get in trouble for that because the regulators knew it too,
• 20:29
  Speaker 4: Like this isn't new news, this is just how we fish.
• 20:33
  Speaker 4: But that has set off this chain reaction obviously of well,
• 20:37
  Speaker 4: we have all these areas closed off of Alaska to
• 20:40
  Speaker 4: protect habitat because we don't want bottom trawls there, but
• 20:42
  Speaker 4: they're not closed to midwater trolls dragging on bottom. And
• 20:47
  Speaker 4: so that gets super important because when we start to
• 20:50
  Speaker 4: look at like essential fish habitat and how much of
• 20:52
  Speaker 4: the seafloor has never been touched by a net. All
• 20:55
  Speaker 4: these areas closed to bottom trawl, we say our pristine
• 20:58
  Speaker 4: habitat essentially, but the reality is that the midwater nets
• 21:02
  Speaker 4: have been hard on bottom there for a long time.
• 21:06
  Speaker 4: And so then it just really throws off all the
• 21:08
  Speaker 4: calculations and you get into like, well, how can this
• 21:11
  Speaker 4: fisheries regulatory agency make this miss you know, or how
• 21:15
  Speaker 4: can we know that they're on bottom but not regulate
• 21:17
  Speaker 4: it that way? And that's where we get into revolving
• 21:20
  Speaker 4: door and like trawlers on the regulatory agency and on
• 21:24
  Speaker 4: and on all the way up to Washington, d C.
• 21:26
  Speaker 4: So that's been a huge can of worms that Alaska
• 21:29
  Speaker 4: has been going through lately.
• 21:30
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I want to talk for a minute about we
• 21:35
  Speaker 1: talked about the equipment. Explain explain the by catch issue
• 21:40
  Speaker 1: to me, like how much bycatch is actually there? And
• 21:45
  Speaker 1: as we talked about this, there's couples I'd like us
• 21:47
  Speaker 1: to hit on in no particular order. You get it,
• 21:51
  Speaker 1: Maybe you can tell me that we talked about some
• 21:53
  Speaker 1: staggering amount of bycatch, but industry people pointed out to
• 21:57
  Speaker 1: me that the bulk of it is cod. Well, the
• 22:01
  Speaker 1: bulk of its jellyfish. They're like, well, it's jellyfish and cod.
• 22:05
  Speaker 1: There's a question about waste, and the industry is like, well,
• 22:12
  Speaker 1: we don't. We're allowed, We're permitted to retain a lot
• 22:15
  Speaker 1: of this stuff, so we're not actually pitching it. It's
• 22:18
  Speaker 1: mostly jellyfish, which are unregulated. And then at some point
• 22:24
  Speaker 1: I want to get into the question of of well,
• 22:27
  Speaker 1: I'm gonna say that I want to get into the
• 22:29
  Speaker 1: question of king salmon. Okay, where they're getting caught, where
• 22:31
  Speaker 1: they're coming from.
• 22:32
  Speaker 2: But first explain.
• 22:37
  Speaker 1: The reason I want to talk about bycatches because I
• 22:38
  Speaker 1: want to narrow one on the fish itself. Okay, the pollock, right,
• 22:43
  Speaker 1: because you know, and anyone who's you know, any any
• 22:48
  Speaker 1: kid who went through like the most basic science class
• 22:50
  Speaker 1: science classes, fair the food chain idea, Right, you have
• 22:54
  Speaker 1: a large praise species, large number of praise species.
• 22:58
  Speaker 2: They get eaten by bigger fish.
• 22:59
  Speaker 1: The bigger fish get eating by and so there's this
• 23:01
  Speaker 1: question of in addition to a conversation about bycatch, there
• 23:06
  Speaker 1: should be a conversation about the stability of the food base,
• 23:10
  Speaker 1: so forage fish, right, right, and what the impacts of
• 23:13
  Speaker 1: removing all these forage fish might be so put that
• 23:16
  Speaker 1: on hold while we get into to the bycatch thing.
• 23:20
  Speaker 1: Help me understand the bycatch issue. Okay, if it's all jellyfish,
• 23:29
  Speaker 1: what's the problem.
• 23:30
  Speaker 4: So they say, so there's it gets fuzzy here again,
• 23:34
  Speaker 4: you're not gonna like this. There's two categories of bycatch.
• 23:38
  Speaker 4: One is observed by catch, which is the stuff that
• 23:41
  Speaker 4: comes up onto the boat. Somebody digs through the catch,
• 23:43
  Speaker 4: extrapolate out the numbers and say, you guys definitely killed
• 23:47
  Speaker 4: x amount of pounds of x amount of species.
• 23:49
  Speaker 2: These observers are are federal observers.
• 23:52
  Speaker 4: Correct, Yeah, they're required by the FEDS, but they usually
• 23:56
  Speaker 4: work through like an independent intermediary agency that staffs them
• 23:59
  Speaker 4: like a staff group. Okay, okay, they so there's two categories.
• 24:04
  Speaker 4: It was the observed numbers they come up to the deck,
• 24:06
  Speaker 4: they get counted. Those are pretty good numbers. But then
• 24:08
  Speaker 4: there's also the unobserved bycatch. So we talked about these
• 24:11
  Speaker 4: nets might drag six square miles a seafloor in a day,
• 24:15
  Speaker 4: but nobody is calculating, you know, how much stuff got
• 24:18
  Speaker 4: knocked down or killed or dredged up bottom sediment. That
• 24:21
  Speaker 4: doesn't make it up on sure the boat to be quantified.
• 24:25
  Speaker 4: Other countries have taken stabs of that. There have been
• 24:28
  Speaker 4: some research to find out how much biomasses in one
• 24:30
  Speaker 4: score feet of mud and the bearing sea, et cetera.
• 24:33
  Speaker 4: But the USA in that sense just says we don't
• 24:36
  Speaker 4: think it exists, or they ignore it.
• 24:38
  Speaker 3: Look anyway, they.
• 24:39
  Speaker 2: Want to stick to what's observed. Yeah, got it.
• 24:42
  Speaker 4: But that benefits trall quite a bit to do it
• 24:44
  Speaker 4: that way. The so the observed bycatch, they told us
• 24:49
  Speaker 4: that over the last ten years, all troll groups in
• 24:52
  Speaker 4: Alaska combined have one hundred and forty one million pounds
• 24:54
  Speaker 4: of bycatch per year. So that's about sixteen thousand pounds
• 24:58
  Speaker 4: per hour. It's about one milli million pounds every two
• 25:01
  Speaker 4: and a half days. It's three and a half billion
• 25:03
  Speaker 4: pounds since I graduated high school in twenty twenty one.
• 25:07
  Speaker 4: So you're talking in massive. Tell me the annual number again,
• 25:11
  Speaker 4: one hundred and forty one million pounds.
• 25:13
  Speaker 2: Per year of of sea life.
• 25:15
  Speaker 4: Yeah, correct, all species combined. Yeah, and so they so you'll, uh,
• 25:21
  Speaker 4: and it's a pretty it's an indiscriminate gear type. That's
• 25:23
  Speaker 4: why troll works is that it scoops up a bunch
• 25:26
  Speaker 4: of stuff, you bring it up to the deck. Sometimes
• 25:28
  Speaker 4: the government says you can't keep that fish. Sometimes the
• 25:31
  Speaker 4: fish isn't valuable. Sometimes it's jellyfish that doesn't have a
• 25:33
  Speaker 4: commercial market. But kind of like if you looked at
• 25:38
  Speaker 4: you know, dragging a net through a wheat field or whatever.
• 25:41
  Speaker 4: You know, there's honey bees and stuff that you would
• 25:43
  Speaker 4: throw out. But when you start taking huge millions of
• 25:45
  Speaker 4: pounds of stuff out of any ecosystem, you can run
• 25:49
  Speaker 4: into trouble. And I don't know if jellyfish is that,
• 25:51
  Speaker 4: but they're there, you know, and they've made it a
• 25:54
  Speaker 4: however many thousands of years there. But the really big,
• 25:59
  Speaker 4: you know, the high related species, or the more controversial species,
• 26:02
  Speaker 4: are what they call prohibited species catch PSC. And so
• 26:06
  Speaker 4: those are typically either the more slow growing or commercially
• 26:11
  Speaker 4: valuable or often the fish which are already allocated to
• 26:14
  Speaker 4: other industries. So when we fish for halibin Alaska, if
• 26:18
  Speaker 4: money is involved, so if you're a longliner that catches
• 26:21
  Speaker 4: them to sell at the store, a charter fishermen taking
• 26:24
  Speaker 4: people out, we have these real super tight limits of
• 26:27
  Speaker 4: you know, one point nine nine nine million pounds or
• 26:29
  Speaker 4: whatever it is. They float up and down each year,
• 26:32
  Speaker 4: and there's this acknowledgement that if troll wastes them as
• 26:34
  Speaker 4: by catch, then we can't it's going to affect these
• 26:36
  Speaker 4: other industries. So they say, troll, you can't have them
• 26:38
  Speaker 4: at all, and there's a conversation about, well, maybe trills
• 26:42
  Speaker 4: should be able to sell them. But then the concern is,
• 26:44
  Speaker 4: so last year, halibut fishermen we're getting about eight dollars
• 26:47
  Speaker 4: per pound at the dock for halibit, but pollock is
• 26:50
  Speaker 4: worth about ten cents. So there's this concern that if
• 26:52
  Speaker 4: you allow them to catch these super valuable for fish
• 26:56
  Speaker 4: and sell them because we got them anyways, then that
• 26:59
  Speaker 4: you essentially indentivize that. And sure you'll see them shifting
• 27:02
  Speaker 4: from well we accidentally caught this, but it.
• 27:04
  Speaker 1: Was if you just did a micro like just a
• 27:06
  Speaker 1: micro shift, yeah, to pick off more halib it, and
• 27:10
  Speaker 1: you had the incentive to do it, Like why not
• 27:12
  Speaker 1: do it?
• 27:12
  Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean you're talking about like maybe my mass
• 27:14
  Speaker 4: form a close to one thousand percent more. You know,
• 27:16
  Speaker 4: if you go from ten cents a pound to a
• 27:18
  Speaker 4: fish that's worth ten dollars. So anyways, these but when
• 27:23
  Speaker 4: they they don't want troll to catch any prohibited species
• 27:27
  Speaker 4: at all. But fisheries regulators over time have gotten this
• 27:30
  Speaker 4: claim from trill of will the nets are so big.
• 27:32
  Speaker 4: We have to use big nets to make money. We
• 27:35
  Speaker 4: just can't help it. And so they have made these
• 27:37
  Speaker 4: acknowledgments that, Okay, we're going to give you a limit
• 27:40
  Speaker 4: of how many king salmon you can catch per year
• 27:41
  Speaker 4: or a limit of how many halibit. We don't want
• 27:44
  Speaker 4: you to catch them. You're not supposed to catch them.
• 27:45
  Speaker 4: You're not supposed to target them, but we acknowledged that
• 27:48
  Speaker 4: it might happen.
• 27:49
  Speaker 2: So this for but you can't have them.
• 27:53
  Speaker 3: But yeah, so they.
• 27:54
  Speaker 4: Say that they either can be donated or they can
• 27:56
  Speaker 4: be discarded, but they can't enter into commerce because they're
• 27:59
  Speaker 4: going to trying to prevent it from becoming this incentivized theme.
• 28:04
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and a guy from the industry, from the troll industry,
• 28:07
  Speaker 1: pointed out to me that they're sending halibu to food banks.
• 28:12
  Speaker 4: Some okay, So one of the big problems with PSC
• 28:16
  Speaker 4: these prohibited species, king salmon and halibut get the most airtime.
• 28:21
  Speaker 4: They're the most controversial, essentially, but they are also caught
• 28:25
  Speaker 4: as juveniles. A lot of this straw by catch is
• 28:28
  Speaker 4: juvenile fish. So the average halibate as caught as bycatch
• 28:32
  Speaker 4: a few years ago in the Bearing Sea was four
• 28:33
  Speaker 4: point seventy five pounds, so oh, we call him ping
• 28:37
  Speaker 4: pong paddle halibit. So the average king salmon was about
• 28:40
  Speaker 4: five pounds, so we think.
• 28:41
  Speaker 1: Of that poundages wind up being a little bit misleading.
• 28:46
  Speaker 4: Yeah, but we also in strictly in terms of what
• 28:49
  Speaker 4: goes to food banks, we think of like, wow, a
• 28:51
  Speaker 4: food bank would love to get this one hundred pound
• 28:53
  Speaker 4: halibut or this thirty five pound king salmon. Think how
• 28:56
  Speaker 4: many people that would feed. But that's not what shows up.
• 28:59
  Speaker 4: What we see something which yields, you know, two pounds
• 29:02
  Speaker 4: of fish and in the or fish flesh and in
• 29:05
  Speaker 4: the case halibit, those fish are being cut down essentially
• 29:09
  Speaker 4: just a couple of years before they would spawn the
• 29:10
  Speaker 4: first time. And the salmon are you know, being cut
• 29:13
  Speaker 4: down before they've ever spawned. And so so while the
• 29:18
  Speaker 4: food bank conversation is valid and maybe that's better than
• 29:21
  Speaker 4: them being dumped over, they a couple of years ago
• 29:24
  Speaker 4: they had this report that they donated about three hundred
• 29:26
  Speaker 4: thousand pounds of fish in that one year versus one
• 29:29
  Speaker 4: hundred and forty one million pounds of total by catch,
• 29:33
  Speaker 4: so they get a tax write off for it.
• 29:35
  Speaker 3: It's a great pr blitz.
• 29:36
  Speaker 4: You can open up an email to a stranger with it,
• 29:38
  Speaker 4: or talk to somebody in DC and say, we get
• 29:41
  Speaker 4: this by catch, but we donate a lot of you know,
• 29:43
  Speaker 4: we donated one hundred thousand pounds, but they might have
• 29:45
  Speaker 4: had seven million pounds of a bycatch of this halib
• 29:49
  Speaker 4: or halibu and salmon combined, so down tends to fall apart.
• 29:53
  Speaker 4: But they with this PSC limit, so they made this
• 29:57
  Speaker 4: acknowledgment that, yeah, you guys have kind of in discriminate.
• 30:00
  Speaker 4: You're gonna have some hal but sometimes you're gonna have
• 30:01
  Speaker 4: some salmon. We don't want to shut you down every
• 30:04
  Speaker 4: time you have it. But they're never supposed to catch it.
• 30:06
  Speaker 4: And so it would be like if Fish and Wildlife
• 30:10
  Speaker 4: Service said that they were going to allow duck hunters
• 30:14
  Speaker 4: to take two bald eagles per year or something, you know,
• 30:16
  Speaker 4: like this, Actually there was an eagle flying behind the ducks.
• 30:18
  Speaker 4: This guy shot on accident. He's not going to go
• 30:21
  Speaker 4: to federal prison for the first couple, but if it
• 30:24
  Speaker 4: gets beyond that, it's a problem. But in no point
• 30:27
  Speaker 4: at the end of the year, if nobody had gotten
• 30:28
  Speaker 4: the eagle quota, would somebody go out and point blank
• 30:32
  Speaker 4: shoot two bald eagles? You know, that's just not the
• 30:34
  Speaker 4: intent of this regulation. But what we've seen with TRALL
• 30:38
  Speaker 4: is that they take this prohibited species catch kind of
• 30:42
  Speaker 4: a granted. They say, we know we can catch forty
• 30:44
  Speaker 4: five thousand king salmon this year, so we don't care
• 30:47
  Speaker 4: if we get up to forty four point five thousand,
• 30:50
  Speaker 4: as long as it doesn't shut us down. Or they
• 30:51
  Speaker 4: say we need to use this psc to fully catch
• 30:55
  Speaker 4: our limit type thing. But that's just a big wander
• 30:58
  Speaker 4: away from what it had originally been created for.
• 31:01
  Speaker 1: Got it and roughly how many have you know? Another
• 31:04
  Speaker 1: thing we got to set up is lay out where
• 31:07
  Speaker 1: we're talking about. So you said areas of the southeast,
• 31:10
  Speaker 1: the practice has already been the practice has been banned
• 31:14
  Speaker 1: in the areas of the southeast for over twenty years.
• 31:16
  Speaker 2: Southeast Alaska.
• 31:17
  Speaker 1: Correct, So it's currently like areas in the golf of Alaska.
• 31:20
  Speaker 1: And someone looks at the map, imagine like that big
• 31:24
  Speaker 1: basin you know on the western edge. You got the
• 31:29
  Speaker 1: illusions coming down on the eastern edge.
• 31:32
  Speaker 2: You guys.
• 31:32
  Speaker 3: Pro tip.
• 31:33
  Speaker 2: Yeah, there you go, there's pro tip. Hold that up.
• 31:35
  Speaker 2: But for people listening, how you can make it. It's
• 31:40
  Speaker 2: not as good as how you.
• 31:40
  Speaker 1: Can make a Michigan with your hand, but you can
• 31:42
  Speaker 1: make a decent Alaska with your hand.
• 31:44
  Speaker 3: So the yeah is this point towards camera.
• 31:48
  Speaker 2: Fills that aiming at the camera, Yeah, it is. You're
• 31:50
  Speaker 2: in there.
• 31:50
  Speaker 3: I was trying to pull up a real picture of
• 31:52
  Speaker 3: Alaska to help you guys. Yeah, but it might it
• 31:54
  Speaker 3: might take a.
• 31:54
  Speaker 4: Sick worring the So this is roughly the state of Alaska.
• 31:58
  Speaker 4: So this is southeast Alasta, comes down towards Canada and Seattle,
• 32:01
  Speaker 4: this is the Aleutian Chain, and it sends out towards Russia.
• 32:04
  Speaker 4: Anchorage is about right here, but most of the troll
• 32:07
  Speaker 4: happens in the Gulf of Alaska, so a little bit
• 32:09
  Speaker 4: south of Anchorage and Homer and then a big part
• 32:12
  Speaker 4: of it in the Bearing Sea, which is where like
• 32:13
  Speaker 4: the deadliest catch crabbing is. But you're right, it was
• 32:18
  Speaker 4: banned in southeast Alaska, which is a pretty interesting story
• 32:22
  Speaker 4: because they historically they'd never really there hadn't been big
• 32:26
  Speaker 4: troll fisheries in southeast Alaska. It's a pretty rocky bottom.
• 32:30
  Speaker 4: They didn't have the population to fish that they wanted,
• 32:32
  Speaker 4: et cetera, et cetera.
• 32:33
  Speaker 1: But was that what kind of keeps them onto there,
• 32:35
  Speaker 1: just like the fjord kind of the fjord geology and
• 32:38
  Speaker 1: hydrology of the area.
• 32:39
  Speaker 4: Well, the Gulf of Alaska has it too, but really
• 32:42
  Speaker 4: it's the fishable populations of these like low value non
• 32:47
  Speaker 4: like pollock and founder just weren't there. So it h
• 32:51
  Speaker 4: But where it came to a head is the most
• 32:53
  Speaker 4: of these boats that fish Troll and Alaska in the summertime,
• 32:57
  Speaker 4: we'll do their off season down in Seattle, want Washington.
• 33:01
  Speaker 4: And so they had this incident very particular one moment
• 33:04
  Speaker 4: where one of these boats had left Seattle, Washington, it
• 33:07
  Speaker 4: came up into southeast Alaska. It was legal to fish there,
• 33:11
  Speaker 4: and I don't know if they wanted to see what
• 33:13
  Speaker 4: was down there, they wanted to test their net or
• 33:14
  Speaker 4: whatever they're fishing legally, and so they unrolled their net
• 33:18
  Speaker 4: fishing for a day and they essentially caught the entire
• 33:20
  Speaker 4: rockfish quota for all of this area in a single day,
• 33:25
  Speaker 4: which means nobody else can fish for them this year.
• 33:28
  Speaker 4: And so that, as you can imagine, put up this
• 33:31
  Speaker 4: hell storm of conflict. And so they eventually got them banned.
• 33:36
  Speaker 3: Because they obviously that was bad.
• 33:38
  Speaker 4: But in that instance it was a little bit different
• 33:41
  Speaker 4: because they didn't really want to fish there anyways. You know,
• 33:44
  Speaker 4: it was kind of an accident that they'd hit this limit.
• 33:47
  Speaker 4: And so while that does set precedent that it can
• 33:50
  Speaker 4: happen in Alaska, and like the regulatory channels are there,
• 33:53
  Speaker 4: we're seeing a way different thing when we start talking
• 33:55
  Speaker 4: about this idea of it being banned or heavily restricted
• 33:59
  Speaker 4: in these main areas.
• 34:00
  Speaker 2: Okay, so so.
• 34:01
  Speaker 1: Hit me with goulf of Alaska and Bearing Sea. Hit
• 34:04
  Speaker 1: me with a little bit more on what's getting caught
• 34:07
  Speaker 1: on the on the halib It front.
• 34:09
  Speaker 3: So the sorry you gotta keep talking your mind, Yeah, sorry,
• 34:13
  Speaker 3: the uh we're cool.
• 34:14
  Speaker 2: On the map, people would see it.
• 34:16
  Speaker 1: You'd be crazy if a dude like one, if a
• 34:19
  Speaker 1: new prime minister, what are they got in Canada for
• 34:21
  Speaker 1: a president prime minister If he's like man from not On,
• 34:24
  Speaker 1: it's goal for Canada.
• 34:29
  Speaker 3: Don't get into it.
• 34:30
  Speaker 4: The uh So, the most of the Halibit bycatch currently
• 34:34
  Speaker 4: happens in the Bearing Sea and that comes from this.
• 34:37
  Speaker 3: They call it the Amendment eighty Bottom trawl Fleet.
• 34:40
  Speaker 4: It had been created uh to specifically target these bottom
• 34:43
  Speaker 4: fish out there.
• 34:45
  Speaker 3: Uh.
• 34:45
  Speaker 4: And they get pretty close to four million pounds of
• 34:48
  Speaker 4: reported by catch each year. But when they report that,
• 34:53
  Speaker 4: that's halibut bycatch halibut by catch mortality. So this is
• 34:57
  Speaker 4: what you've gotten into in that news clip of they
• 35:01
  Speaker 4: don't they don't necessarily assume that all fish caught in
• 35:04
  Speaker 4: troll that comes up and is then released is going
• 35:08
  Speaker 4: to die. And so they had kind of trall had
• 35:12
  Speaker 4: co authored a study with federal regulators a few years
• 35:14
  Speaker 4: ago that essentially it used to be assumed that every
• 35:17
  Speaker 4: time they had a halibut come up in this net
• 35:19
  Speaker 4: might be packed in with one hundred thousand pounds of
• 35:21
  Speaker 4: other fish, it's been towed for four or five hours.
• 35:25
  Speaker 4: They used to just get dumped straight into the fishold,
• 35:27
  Speaker 4: and they would assume that all those halibu died. But
• 35:30
  Speaker 4: they came up with another program called the deck sword
• 35:32
  Speaker 4: in program, where instead of dumping the net straight into
• 35:34
  Speaker 4: the fishold, they would instead dump it out on the
• 35:37
  Speaker 4: deck of the boat and then crew members have about
• 35:39
  Speaker 4: half an hour to go through and throll back as
• 35:42
  Speaker 4: many halibut as they can, and if they participate in
• 35:45
  Speaker 4: this program, they assume only about fifty percent of the
• 35:48
  Speaker 4: halibut die. But from a sport fishing perspective, I mean,
• 35:55
  Speaker 4: we've seen that's a real tough one. We you know,
• 35:59
  Speaker 4: we have rivers in Alaska where if we are doing
• 36:02
  Speaker 4: catch release fishing for a salmon and we lift it
• 36:04
  Speaker 4: all the way out of the water to take a picture,
• 36:06
  Speaker 4: that's a crime. You know, that's illegal for us because
• 36:09
  Speaker 4: we could have killed that fish. Essentially, So when you
• 36:12
  Speaker 4: start looking at a halibate that's been packed in one
• 36:14
  Speaker 4: hundred thousand pounds with this net, stepped on, sorted through
• 36:18
  Speaker 4: for half an hour, I mean just pulling the net
• 36:19
  Speaker 4: out of the water takes half an hour, and then
• 36:21
  Speaker 4: you got another half an hour.
• 36:23
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't know it. No, But.
• 36:27
  Speaker 1: Again, man, I've had you know, fair bit of exposure,
• 36:32
  Speaker 1: you know, to hell. But over the years that that
• 36:34
  Speaker 1: that's tough for me. It is, I don't really know.
• 36:36
  Speaker 1: I mean that a survival rate of fifty percent seems difficult.
• 36:40
  Speaker 4: It is, and so a lot of other nations don't
• 36:43
  Speaker 4: allow that. So a lot of them will do what
• 36:45
  Speaker 4: they call full retention of bycatch. They say, if it
• 36:48
  Speaker 4: came up in a trawl net, we're assuming it's dead.
• 36:51
  Speaker 4: Even fins are wiggling a little bit. So you guys
• 36:54
  Speaker 4: have to bring it all back to shore. We're going
• 36:56
  Speaker 4: to go through all of it in this neutral facility.
• 36:58
  Speaker 4: So it's not like there's an observer out there with
• 37:00
  Speaker 4: you know, six crew members hanging over their shoulder. They
• 37:03
  Speaker 4: just say, if it came up in the trail on net,
• 37:05
  Speaker 4: it's dead.
• 37:06
  Speaker 3: You guys bring it back to shorts so we can
• 37:07
  Speaker 3: get an accurate count.
• 37:08
  Speaker 4: Got it, But Alaska doesn't do it like that, and
• 37:10
  Speaker 4: especially on hal of it, it doesn't do it like that.
• 37:13
  Speaker 3: So what we've seen.
• 37:15
  Speaker 4: Up there is they get about so last year, I
• 37:17
  Speaker 4: think it was four point three million pounds of hal
• 37:19
  Speaker 4: of it by catch mortality.
• 37:21
  Speaker 3: So those are the ones they assumed dead.
• 37:23
  Speaker 4: Closer to eight million pounds would have been brought up
• 37:25
  Speaker 4: onto the deck.
• 37:27
  Speaker 3: They threw them all back and they assumed about half
• 37:28
  Speaker 3: of them.
• 37:28
  Speaker 1: With Okay, so let's let's hoverund that number from it,
• 37:31
  Speaker 1: and you tell me the number again, like the agreed
• 37:34
  Speaker 1: upon number.
• 37:35
  Speaker 3: Four point three million pounds.
• 37:36
  Speaker 1: Okay, four point three million assumes a fifty percent survival
• 37:39
  Speaker 1: rate kicked off the deck, thrown off the deck back
• 37:42
  Speaker 1: into the water.
• 37:43
  Speaker 4: Well, the survival rate's already been applied to that four
• 37:46
  Speaker 4: point three million. So those are the ones that definitely died.
• 37:48
  Speaker 4: Another four point three million got released and were assumed
• 37:51
  Speaker 4: to have lived or around there.
• 37:53
  Speaker 1: All right, So the agreed upon dead the agreed upon
• 37:56
  Speaker 1: dead pile?
• 37:57
  Speaker 2: How big that in that region? How big?
• 38:03
  Speaker 1: What is the commercial harvest on halibut of intentional halbut catch?
• 38:07
  Speaker 4: So it in that region is pretty small. I don't
• 38:10
  Speaker 4: have that number memorized, but I do have the data
• 38:13
  Speaker 4: on the as of twenty fifteen, average bycatch halibate they
• 38:17
  Speaker 4: got in that region was four point seven six pounds
• 38:20
  Speaker 4: per fish, And so that makes about eight hundred and
• 38:23
  Speaker 4: fifty thousand fish that they assumed died last year through
• 38:26
  Speaker 4: this bycatch. And that is more individual halibate than the
• 38:30
  Speaker 4: entire state of Alaska all other halibut fisheries combined.
• 38:34
  Speaker 2: More individual halibut.
• 38:35
  Speaker 4: Individual halibu and the halibut spawn at kind of like
• 38:39
  Speaker 4: the males and females start at different ages, but like
• 38:42
  Speaker 4: seven to ten pounds per fish. And so when we
• 38:45
  Speaker 4: talked to biologists about this, they'll say, oh, we kind
• 38:49
  Speaker 4: of have this deal where if you you can never
• 38:51
  Speaker 4: assume that one fish taken out of a population would
• 38:54
  Speaker 4: have affected the total population because there's a good chance
• 38:57
  Speaker 4: a fish dies. Sure, I find that hard to believe.
• 39:01
  Speaker 4: With five pound halibut. You know, when a halibut egg
• 39:04
  Speaker 4: is laid, yeah, ninety nine percent of them die, or
• 39:05
  Speaker 4: when a halibut's in the larval stage, another ninety nine
• 39:08
  Speaker 4: percent of them die or whatever. But once you get
• 39:10
  Speaker 4: up to this five pound fish that's about two feet long,
• 39:13
  Speaker 4: it's buried in the mud and it's just almost made
• 39:16
  Speaker 4: it to work and spawned.
• 39:17
  Speaker 2: The annual survival rate is going up for sure. Yeah.
• 39:20
  Speaker 4: Yeah, So so that's a tough one to look at.
• 39:23
  Speaker 3: And they'd actually, what sized again, does a halbt start
• 39:26
  Speaker 3: to spawn like seven to ten pounds?
• 39:28
  Speaker 1: Why why is there why is there so much emphasis
• 39:32
  Speaker 1: on protecting Like like just if you I'm just talking
• 39:37
  Speaker 1: to listeners here, if you go when you see one
• 39:39
  Speaker 1: hundred and fifty pound halibit or someone like catches a
• 39:42
  Speaker 1: one to fifty a one seventy one, like those are females, right,
• 39:48
  Speaker 1: and that is a and people will talk about like
• 39:51
  Speaker 1: there's anglers will encourage you to cut those fish loose,
• 39:56
  Speaker 1: even if you're allowed to have them, because be like,
• 39:57
  Speaker 1: those are your big spawners s. Is it just because
• 40:02
  Speaker 1: the volume of eggs they're putting off is so great?
• 40:05
  Speaker 3: Yeah?
• 40:05
  Speaker 1: Or do you think that that's not really a good
• 40:07
  Speaker 1: way of looking at it, that you need to save
• 40:08
  Speaker 1: the big halbit because those females are producing the eggs.
• 40:12
  Speaker 4: Well, so I look at it both ways. So this
• 40:15
  Speaker 4: charter business i'd owned, we used to have this. I
• 40:17
  Speaker 4: called it the Release the Beast program. If somebody would
• 40:19
  Speaker 4: let a halibu over two hundred and fifty pounds go,
• 40:22
  Speaker 4: I'd give them a free fishing trip the next year
• 40:24
  Speaker 4: to encurag Really people who do this, and they say
• 40:27
  Speaker 4: that a fish that size is laying about four million
• 40:29
  Speaker 4: eggs per year. So yeah, they got a lot of eggs.
• 40:32
  Speaker 4: But the reality is from a biological side, the most
• 40:36
  Speaker 4: of the halibut cot over about twenty pounds are females,
• 40:40
  Speaker 4: and those have.
• 40:41
  Speaker 3: Over twenty yeah, yeah.
• 40:43
  Speaker 4: Those have the potential to spawn, you know, maybe twenty
• 40:47
  Speaker 4: five more times in their life. Say they're going to
• 40:50
  Speaker 4: live to be forty years old or whatever. It is
• 40:52
  Speaker 4: versus the big fish. They have a lot of eggs
• 40:55
  Speaker 4: per spawn, but maybe they've only got five years left
• 40:58
  Speaker 4: to live essentially. And so the halibut biologists take, we've
• 41:02
  Speaker 4: they've been pinned down on this because this is a
• 41:04
  Speaker 4: big you know, social issue in Alaska.
• 41:06
  Speaker 3: You guys are terrible because you killed this big fish.
• 41:09
  Speaker 4: But when we ask the IPHC about it, this specific
• 41:11
  Speaker 4: Alibert Commission, they say, we don't think there's any impact
• 41:14
  Speaker 4: to actual halibut populations because they're just not that many
• 41:18
  Speaker 4: big fish and they're not going to spawn them anymore times.
• 41:21
  Speaker 4: But that also takes genetics out of it. So I
• 41:24
  Speaker 4: I mean, and that's why I've done this program of
• 41:26
  Speaker 4: like we'll give you a free trip, because these are
• 41:28
  Speaker 4: the fish that have you know, beat the odds and
• 41:30
  Speaker 4: they've made it and survived and.
• 41:34
  Speaker 3: Anyway, So it can go both ways.
• 41:35
  Speaker 1: But they like that that the fact that these fish
• 41:38
  Speaker 1: are getting large is a demonstration of fitness viability. So
• 41:44
  Speaker 1: allowing these big fish to be in the in the
• 41:48
  Speaker 1: population and contributing genetics of the population, you argue, like
• 41:52
  Speaker 1: you could be like helping perpetuate traits that lead to longevity.
• 41:58
  Speaker 4: You could, I mean, yeah, it's like the conversation of
• 42:00
  Speaker 4: like selective deer and elk harvest type thing, selecting for genetics,
• 42:05
  Speaker 4: but by the same token, we've killed a lot of them,
• 42:08
  Speaker 4: and I leave it up to the fisherman's choice, you know.
• 42:11
  Speaker 2: But a seven pound female helbit is kicking off.
• 42:16
  Speaker 4: Eggs seven years old, so that gets them up to
• 42:19
  Speaker 4: around maybe fifteen pounds.
• 42:21
  Speaker 1: Okay, yeah, okay, so she starts she can start producing
• 42:24
  Speaker 1: eggs at about seven years of age.
• 42:26
  Speaker 4: Correct, And I think it might be the males that
• 42:28
  Speaker 4: start at age seven and the female start at age ten.
• 42:30
  Speaker 3: But anyways, yeah, yeah.
• 42:32
  Speaker 4: It's pretty spawning is not relegated to giants absolutely, like
• 42:36
  Speaker 4: a twenty.
• 42:36
  Speaker 1: Pound helb, but it could be a sexually viable spawning female.
• 42:39
  Speaker 3: Absolutely, Yeah, okay, understood, understood.
• 42:42
  Speaker 1: Yeah, all right, now, what about so we talked about
• 42:44
  Speaker 1: the Bearing Sea, tell me about the Gulf of Alaska.
• 42:48
  Speaker 4: So the Gulf of Alaska has troll fisheries too, but
• 42:52
  Speaker 4: they're typically not as big, but they One of the
• 42:56
  Speaker 4: big issues we were runn into in the off Alaska
• 43:01
  Speaker 4: is that they the Golf of the Alaska and bar
• 43:03
  Speaker 4: and See have different regulatory regulations, different rules to fish by,
• 43:09
  Speaker 4: and one of the big hot button issues in the
• 43:10
  Speaker 4: Gulf of Alaska is that there they have these dedicated
• 43:14
  Speaker 4: bottom troll fleet. So some of the dirtiests they hard
• 43:17
  Speaker 4: on the bottom all the time, ripping up habitat. But
• 43:20
  Speaker 4: they only have an observer rate of about twenty to
• 43:23
  Speaker 4: thirty percent, and so you'll hear troll in the Bearing
• 43:27
  Speaker 4: Sea will say we have a two hundred percent observer rate,
• 43:29
  Speaker 4: we have one hundred percent observer rate, or this model
• 43:31
  Speaker 4: of sustainability, but they conveniently ignore that. Right next door
• 43:36
  Speaker 4: is this other fleet where they only send an observer
• 43:39
  Speaker 4: along for about one out of three trips, and so
• 43:43
  Speaker 4: there's been this kind of widespread insinuation from former crew
• 43:47
  Speaker 4: and current crew there that it becomes cheaper for a
• 43:51
  Speaker 4: boat operator there to essentially throw a trip when the
• 43:53
  Speaker 4: observers along, then a risk with the observer, then risk
• 43:57
  Speaker 4: at the observer sees what they actually catch, and then
• 43:59
  Speaker 4: extrap plate set out to the entire season, because if
• 44:02
  Speaker 4: they catch, you know, two thousand king salmon and this
• 44:06
  Speaker 4: one day when the observer's along, then the observer says, well,
• 44:09
  Speaker 4: the other seventy percent of the trip, you're probably catching
• 44:11
  Speaker 4: two thousand king salmon too.
• 44:12
  Speaker 3: Which risk is shutting them down.
• 44:14
  Speaker 4: So there's this pretty wide insinuation that instead of actually
• 44:17
  Speaker 4: going out and fishing hard or fishing for a full trip,
• 44:20
  Speaker 4: you'd set the net out once before midnight, fish for
• 44:23
  Speaker 4: a couple hours, you know a spot you wouldn't normally fish,
• 44:25
  Speaker 4: set it out again after midnight, fish for a couple hours,
• 44:29
  Speaker 4: and then say, yeah, we had two days of observed fishing,
• 44:32
  Speaker 4: now we have eight days without it type thing?
• 44:34
  Speaker 2: Got it? How much of these fish moving? Like, what
• 44:37
  Speaker 2: are we understanding about that?
• 44:39
  Speaker 1: If you're let's say, I mean like kind of the
• 44:42
  Speaker 1: hal a Bit charter mecca, right, Like if someone's going
• 44:46
  Speaker 1: to go up to Alaska and I and they want
• 44:48
  Speaker 1: to be.
• 44:49
  Speaker 2: Like, what's the best Halibit area I could go to?
• 44:51
  Speaker 1: I think a lot of people are gonna be like,
• 44:52
  Speaker 1: go to the you know Homer Man, It's like he
• 44:54
  Speaker 1: seems like Halbert capital of the state, right, That's what
• 44:57
  Speaker 1: the sign says.
• 44:57
  Speaker 2: So our bearings, how much of these fish moving?
• 45:01
  Speaker 1: Are king salmon that are running rivers in the Gulf
• 45:04
  Speaker 1: of Alaska Southeast Alaska? Are those kings ever winding up
• 45:07
  Speaker 1: in the Bering Sea and vice versa? Are there hal
• 45:11
  Speaker 1: a bit that are spawning in the Bearing Sea, that
• 45:15
  Speaker 1: maybe we're spending time in the Gulf of Alaska. Are
• 45:18
  Speaker 1: these are these trading fish.
• 45:20
  Speaker 4: Totally, and so they are. Halibut's one of the easiest
• 45:23
  Speaker 4: examples of that. So they make this assumption to halibut
• 45:27
  Speaker 4: biologists that essentially the entire popular halibut population of Alaska
• 45:31
  Speaker 4: and Canada move out to like three thousand feet of
• 45:34
  Speaker 4: water to spawn in the winter, all their eggs and
• 45:37
  Speaker 4: stuff mixed there, and then the trending currents carry them
• 45:40
  Speaker 4: up to the Bearing Sea and that is where the
• 45:43
  Speaker 4: larva settles. So they have these what they call designated
• 45:46
  Speaker 4: halibut nursery zones in the Bearing Sea. And then they
• 45:49
  Speaker 4: say as the fish get older, they have a clockwise migration,
• 45:52
  Speaker 4: so they move south and east.
• 45:54
  Speaker 1: So back up from it, they're spawning in three thousand
• 45:58
  Speaker 1: feet of water.
• 45:59
  Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, and we've seen them, you know, I've seen
• 46:01
  Speaker 4: like ready to spawn fish in a couple hundred feet
• 46:04
  Speaker 4: of water too, but that's.
• 46:05
  Speaker 2: These they can spawn three thousands.
• 46:07
  Speaker 4: I think it's like ducks migrating, like some of them
• 46:09
  Speaker 4: migrate every.
• 46:10
  Speaker 3: Time, and then you have local ducks, yes, got it.
• 46:12
  Speaker 4: But the anyways, Yeah, So essentially the biological assumption is
• 46:16
  Speaker 4: that the vast majority of halibut begin their life as
• 46:20
  Speaker 4: larva settling in the Bearing Sea. Then they go clockwise,
• 46:23
  Speaker 4: which brings them to the Gulf of Alaska, brings them
• 46:25
  Speaker 4: to Southeast Alaska, brings them to Canada, Washington, Oregon, all
• 46:29
  Speaker 4: the way down. And so when we talk about how
• 46:32
  Speaker 4: there's four million pounds of juvenile halibut being wasted a
• 46:36
  Speaker 4: straw bycatch in the Bearing Sea each year, that means
• 46:39
  Speaker 4: we're hitting homer in the Gulf Alaska. Southeast Prince of Wales,
• 46:43
  Speaker 4: Canada gets really grabby about this. Washington Oregon have like
• 46:48
  Speaker 4: a halibut season of just a couple of days now
• 46:50
  Speaker 4: because the population is doing so poorly. And so each
• 46:54
  Speaker 4: year when they set these harvest limits, all these these
• 46:57
  Speaker 4: other countries and these other areas are saying, oh my god,
• 47:00
  Speaker 4: you gotta we can't waste this manyhow but in the
• 47:02
  Speaker 4: Bearing Seas.
• 47:03
  Speaker 3: Here because it affects all of us.
• 47:05
  Speaker 4: But we've seen the troll industry kind of become this
• 47:08
  Speaker 4: powerhouse in our regulatory agencies, and they say, well, we
• 47:11
  Speaker 4: make a lot of money from it.
• 47:12
  Speaker 3: You can't can't shut that down.
• 47:13
  Speaker 1: You know, and what about the kings salmon, for instance,
• 47:17
  Speaker 1: are they they're moving?
• 47:18
  Speaker 4: Yeah, so you can pull up various charts where they
• 47:22
  Speaker 4: definitely moving.
• 47:22
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 47:23
  Speaker 4: So we'll see them go from like the Gulf of
• 47:24
  Speaker 4: Alaska into the Burying Sea and feed. You see the
• 47:26
  Speaker 4: ones from like Oregon, Washington, and Canada will come up
• 47:30
  Speaker 4: into the Gulf of Alaska and feed, and they all
• 47:33
  Speaker 4: have this like four year loop. And then there's a
• 47:37
  Speaker 4: lot of fish from the Bearing Sea area that go
• 47:39
  Speaker 4: and do a loop in.
• 47:40
  Speaker 3: The Bearing Sea.
• 47:41
  Speaker 4: But one of the things we've seen with king salmon
• 47:44
  Speaker 4: coastwise or the entire you know, Oregon all the way
• 47:47
  Speaker 4: up to Nome, is that they're doing very poorly. And
• 47:51
  Speaker 4: they before we started to see them crash all the
• 47:54
  Speaker 4: way or fisheries be shut down. We've seen this huge
• 47:57
  Speaker 4: shrinking size of age. So the fish of over you know,
• 48:00
  Speaker 4: we used to see these hundred pound king salmon out
• 48:02
  Speaker 4: of the Columbia River, one hundred pound king salmon out
• 48:04
  Speaker 4: of Kenai River, eighty pound kings out of the Yukon River,
• 48:07
  Speaker 4: and before they quit coming back at all, we're seeing
• 48:10
  Speaker 4: them get smaller, smaller, smaller, smaller. And we've seen the
• 48:13
  Speaker 4: same thing with halibu. So halibut size at age, how
• 48:16
  Speaker 4: big they are, depending on how old they are, has
• 48:20
  Speaker 4: decreased by over half.
• 48:21
  Speaker 3: Over the last thirty years.
• 48:24
  Speaker 4: And so that really points people towards a food source issue.
• 48:27
  Speaker 4: And that again is where you get into pollock, as
• 48:29
  Speaker 4: this forge fish of the North Pacific that you know,
• 48:33
  Speaker 4: maybe three billion pounds a year isn't sustainable. And so
• 48:37
  Speaker 4: then we can come into this conversation of.
• 48:39
  Speaker 1: Yeah, this moves is beyond this move is beyond the
• 48:41
  Speaker 1: bycatch chasing this food issue, right.
• 48:44
  Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, and also the habitat issue. So when I
• 48:47
  Speaker 4: look at it, I see there's three points. One is
• 48:49
  Speaker 4: that the bycatch the raw pounds, which they can defend
• 48:52
  Speaker 4: and say, oh it might have been jellyfish, or as
• 48:55
  Speaker 4: a percentage, this isn't that much of a particular river. Okay,
• 48:58
  Speaker 4: we can give them that. But then you get into
• 49:00
  Speaker 4: the food issue of we're seeing fish and seabirds. They
• 49:04
  Speaker 4: said the crabs starved to death during that warm water event.
• 49:08
  Speaker 4: Halibut sizeded age, salmon size at age. There's an issue
• 49:12
  Speaker 4: with gray whales not getting enough food in the bearing
• 49:14
  Speaker 4: seed of finish their migration to Mexico and back they've
• 49:17
  Speaker 4: had big starving events with those, and then we look
• 49:21
  Speaker 4: at how could this be, Well, we're taking three billion
• 49:24
  Speaker 4: pounds of bait fish out of the year or out
• 49:27
  Speaker 4: of the water every year, and we're also the third
• 49:30
  Speaker 4: part of this is what the seafloor habitats, what kind
• 49:33
  Speaker 4: of hits we're doing there. So you've got the raw
• 49:35
  Speaker 4: pounds of by catch bait fish coming off the bottom
• 49:38
  Speaker 4: of the food chain, and then the seafloor impact of
• 49:40
  Speaker 4: dragging say six six miles of sea floor every day.
• 49:44
  Speaker 1: But you and me both know that a population can
• 49:49
  Speaker 1: have what we call a sustainable yield, meaning you can
• 49:55
  Speaker 1: let's just put this in the simplest terms. Let's say
• 49:57
  Speaker 1: you sneak onto the local golf course and fish back,
• 50:00
  Speaker 1: all right, and you like to make fried large mouth sandwiches.
• 50:05
  Speaker 1: If you if you're frying three large mouths out of
• 50:08
  Speaker 1: this golf course pond every year, you might realize that
• 50:12
  Speaker 1: over the years you can catch three large mouths just
• 50:16
  Speaker 1: as quick as any other year, and that you eating
• 50:19
  Speaker 1: those large mouth sandwiches seems to be have no impact
• 50:22
  Speaker 1: on the population in that pond, Meaning if you didn't
• 50:25
  Speaker 1: catch those three large mouths, they're probably about the same
• 50:27
  Speaker 1: amount of large mouse in that pond.
• 50:29
  Speaker 2: The pond's going to produce blank ponds of large mouths.
• 50:32
  Speaker 1: You have a sustainable yield, Okay, Like, what what evidence
• 50:38
  Speaker 1: is there that it is having a population level impact
• 50:44
  Speaker 1: on pollock? Like are they needing to fish longer and
• 50:47
  Speaker 1: harder to catch the pollock? Are they needed to use
• 50:50
  Speaker 1: to change tactics? Are they needing to move to new
• 50:53
  Speaker 1: areas that haven't been previously exploited, Like, is there some
• 50:56
  Speaker 1: evidence that that they're putting a hurt on the pollock
• 50:59
  Speaker 1: and that it's not sustainable yield?
• 51:01
  Speaker 4: Well, so the place. So you have to look at
• 51:05
  Speaker 4: kind of the progression of ships over time. So you know,
• 51:10
  Speaker 4: fifty years ago, we had low horsepower engines, They couldn't
• 51:13
  Speaker 4: toe as big of a net. We didn't have near
• 51:15
  Speaker 4: the electronics that we have now, We didn't have starlink,
• 51:18
  Speaker 4: we didn't have like this real time communication between ships,
• 51:23
  Speaker 4: and we were catching about the same amount of pollock
• 51:25
  Speaker 4: then as we are now, but we weren't seeing other
• 51:29
  Speaker 4: species that depend on pollock starve to death simultaneously. But
• 51:33
  Speaker 4: now we fast forward fifty years and we're seeing the
• 51:37
  Speaker 4: size and age of the pollock are quite a bit smaller,
• 51:39
  Speaker 4: which has been a precursor to a lot of other
• 51:41
  Speaker 4: fisheries crashes as the fish get smaller and smaller and
• 51:44
  Speaker 4: smaller and go. We've seen Charlo's complained about that. But
• 51:49
  Speaker 4: the technology that we're using to catch essentially the same
• 51:52
  Speaker 4: amount of fish is through the roof. You imagine the
• 51:55
  Speaker 4: last twenty years of where the boats have gone. And
• 51:59
  Speaker 4: I don't have data on how many toes they do
• 52:01
  Speaker 4: or how many days they have to fish, but that
• 52:03
  Speaker 4: had come up. We talked about, like that Bearing Sea
• 52:06
  Speaker 4: crab crash. They had a tough time catching crab that year,
• 52:09
  Speaker 4: and so they were fishing assumably new places and longer
• 52:13
  Speaker 4: and more days. You know, so all those kind of
• 52:17
  Speaker 4: factor in. But this year in particular, they'd done this
• 52:21
  Speaker 4: survey of the pollock and they said in the Bearing
• 52:24
  Speaker 4: Sea that the total pollock population had dropped by about
• 52:26
  Speaker 4: thirty percent. But they didn't reduce the troll harvest pollock
• 52:31
  Speaker 4: by thirty percent. They said, you guys catch the same amount,
• 52:34
  Speaker 4: but if that means everything else, you know, all these
• 52:37
  Speaker 4: predator fish rely on everything that's left. The humans didn't
• 52:41
  Speaker 4: lose thirty percent of the pollock all the predator fish
• 52:43
  Speaker 4: lost thirty percent, you know that that has to come
• 52:46
  Speaker 4: out of somewhere, and they they as soon there's about
• 52:50
  Speaker 4: eight billion pounds of pollock in the in the Bearing
• 52:54
  Speaker 4: Sea each year is this population, and we're harvesting about
• 52:58
  Speaker 4: three billion pounds of it. So wow, it's not like
• 53:01
  Speaker 4: you're leaving ninety nine percent.
• 53:02
  Speaker 3: In the water.
• 53:03
  Speaker 4: You know, you're at like forty percent or so, so
• 53:06
  Speaker 4: there's not much room for error. And troll will make
• 53:09
  Speaker 4: this case that you know, we talked about this three
• 53:13
  Speaker 4: hundred and seventy five foot boat. It might cost one
• 53:15
  Speaker 4: hundred million dollars to be built. They say, we can't
• 53:18
  Speaker 4: fish less because we have these huge boat payments and
• 53:20
  Speaker 4: every day we're tied up to the dock. It means
• 53:23
  Speaker 4: that we're losing money. You know. We just our businesses
• 53:26
  Speaker 4: can't survive on that. But that's a pretty poor way
• 53:29
  Speaker 4: to manage a wild resource. You know, Like imagine we
• 53:31
  Speaker 4: said that we don't tell guides that with big horn sheep,
• 53:34
  Speaker 4: you know, or whatever it may be, if the sheep
• 53:36
  Speaker 4: were having a bad year, then you guys are tied up.
• 53:39
  Speaker 4: And we're seeing that in Alaska that sport fishermen on
• 53:42
  Speaker 4: the Yukon subsistence on the Yukon sport fishermen for halib it.
• 53:45
  Speaker 4: Everybody else is getting cut back big time to protect
• 53:47
  Speaker 4: the resource. But Troll's been able to make this economic
• 53:51
  Speaker 4: case of well we lose our boat, you know, where
• 53:53
  Speaker 4: the banks would default on us or whatever it may be.
• 53:57
  Speaker 2: Job loss whatever. Yeah.
• 53:58
  Speaker 1: Yeah, But then but that you don't see as much
• 54:01
  Speaker 1: of that conversation in.
• 54:07
  Speaker 2: Other commercial fisheries that are suffering as well.
• 54:09
  Speaker 4: Right, Yeah, well they try, but they they don't seem
• 54:13
  Speaker 4: to have the sympathetic ear from.
• 54:15
  Speaker 3: The fish regulators.
• 54:16
  Speaker 4: Yeah, And so that brings up another interesting point with
• 54:20
  Speaker 4: how these fisheries are managed. There's a federal board which
• 54:24
  Speaker 4: regulates these trawl fisheries and the majority of that is
• 54:27
  Speaker 4: made up of people who are vested in the troll industry.
• 54:31
  Speaker 4: So example is one of them is a vice president
• 54:34
  Speaker 4: of a group which lobbies are as an industry rep
• 54:37
  Speaker 4: for troll. Another one is a CFO of a group
• 54:40
  Speaker 4: that has trok what they're out there fishing for these
• 54:42
  Speaker 4: pollock and those are the guys in charge of making
• 54:44
  Speaker 4: this decision of well should we cut back the pollock
• 54:47
  Speaker 4: catch because they just drop thirty percent yep. And they
• 54:50
  Speaker 4: say they're impartial, they say it wouldn't matter. But then
• 54:53
  Speaker 4: there's this question of could they keep their job if
• 54:55
  Speaker 4: they cut their employers fish harvest back by thirty percent,
• 54:59
  Speaker 4: you know, And that doesn't that doesn't line up. And
• 55:01
  Speaker 4: they're again fishing on a wild population under the sea
• 55:04
  Speaker 4: where we can't see it. We're just taking huge risks
• 55:07
  Speaker 4: on maybe we're right, maybe we're wrong, but we're just
• 55:10
  Speaker 4: teetering on this edge of if we're wrong one time,
• 55:13
  Speaker 4: it could have a big ramification.
• 55:14
  Speaker 2: You know, you brought up the Yukon River.
• 55:16
  Speaker 1: Let me let me hit you with some feedback I got.
• 55:22
  Speaker 1: I had made the statement on the news show. I
• 55:24
  Speaker 1: had made a statement when I was just digging into
• 55:28
  Speaker 1: this subject. I've been aware of it, but I was
• 55:29
  Speaker 1: digging into it. I made the statement about how the
• 55:32
  Speaker 1: draggers are killing more kings as bike This is my words, Okay,
• 55:37
  Speaker 1: the draggers are killing more kings meaning king salmon. The
• 55:41
  Speaker 1: draggers are killing more kings as by catch. Then make
• 55:44
  Speaker 1: it to the upper Yukon.
• 55:47
  Speaker 2: So what I was.
• 55:47
  Speaker 1: Referring to is in numbers, right, there's more king salmon
• 55:51
  Speaker 1: getting caught as by catch. By the troll industry than
• 55:56
  Speaker 1: the number of salmon that make it to the upper Yukon. Now,
• 56:01
  Speaker 1: the reason the Yukon is is an important consideration here
• 56:06
  Speaker 1: is people in the Yukon. On the Yukon River, there's
• 56:11
  Speaker 1: a ten thousand year old king salmon fishery there, okay.
• 56:16
  Speaker 1: But in recent years people have been prohibited from fishing
• 56:20
  Speaker 1: kings at all in the Yukon.
• 56:23
  Speaker 2: Right, so there's been.
• 56:25
  Speaker 1: Like a closure of some subsistence practices because there aren't
• 56:30
  Speaker 1: enough kings to sustain the fishery. An industry person pointed
• 56:36
  Speaker 1: out to me, He says, it's the statement's not accurate. Now,
• 56:42
  Speaker 1: I want to clarify a point here, I said. I
• 56:45
  Speaker 1: said the numbers, okay. I didn't say that they were
• 56:48
  Speaker 1: catching more Yukon fish than are making to the Yukon.
• 56:50
  Speaker 2: But they're catching more kings than make it to the Yukon.
• 56:53
  Speaker 1: But the person pointed out, they do genetic testing on kings, Okay.
• 56:59
  Speaker 1: He says, the Bering Sea pollock fishery had a chinook
• 57:04
  Speaker 1: bycatch of eleven thousand, eight hundred and fifty five king salmon.
• 57:10
  Speaker 1: They're claiming only twenty seven of those fish came from
• 57:17
  Speaker 1: the Yukon River, Okay, the Gulf of Alaska pollock fishery,
• 57:21
  Speaker 1: they caught eighteen thousand, four hundred and thirty two kings.
• 57:28
  Speaker 1: Their claim zero came out of the Yukon Okay. So
• 57:34
  Speaker 1: this is twenty twenty three numbers, thirty thousand, two hundred
• 57:38
  Speaker 1: and eighty seven chinook, of which twenty seven.
• 57:45
  Speaker 2: Came out of the Yukon.
• 57:48
  Speaker 1: And that year twenty twenty three, he's saying that at
• 57:53
  Speaker 1: the pilot station sonar they were counting in the Yukon
• 57:58
  Speaker 1: fifty eight thousand, five hundred twenty nine fish. So the
• 58:02
  Speaker 1: total Alaska pollock fishery killed and eighty seven chinooks in
• 58:08
  Speaker 1: twenty twenty three, twenty twenty three numbers, and in that
• 58:13
  Speaker 1: year they saw fifty eight thousand, five hundred and twenty
• 58:16
  Speaker 1: nine fish.
• 58:17
  Speaker 2: That's the escapement. Okay, escapement not incoming? Right? What do
• 58:25
  Speaker 2: you make of this? Oh?
• 58:26
  Speaker 3: No, escapement is what returns?
• 58:28
  Speaker 2: Oh? So okay?
• 58:28
  Speaker 1: So okay, okay, So escapement is incoming fish? Yeah, I
• 58:31
  Speaker 1: got it, Okay, understood therefacation.
• 58:34
  Speaker 4: Never repeat this, But I think the Trawal guy's right
• 58:36
  Speaker 4: on this one point. So they where are those fish from?
• 58:42
  Speaker 2: If they're not out of the Yukon.
• 58:43
  Speaker 4: Well, it's a huge I mean, so if you think
• 58:45
  Speaker 4: of Alaska, people don't get this. But if you superimpose
• 58:49
  Speaker 4: the state of Alaska over the lower forty eight of
• 58:52
  Speaker 4: the US, the east side is over in like New
• 58:55
  Speaker 4: York City, and the west side is over to California
• 58:57
  Speaker 4: and goes from Canada to Mexico. So just the state
• 59:00
  Speaker 4: of Alaska has more shoreline than the entire rest of
• 59:03
  Speaker 4: the United States combined.
• 59:05
  Speaker 1: I mean, Phil, can you pull up that deal where
• 59:07
  Speaker 1: they show Alaska overlaid on the lower forty eight.
• 59:10
  Speaker 2: Yeah, with the illusions and whatnot go on.
• 59:16
  Speaker 4: So there's thousands of rivers what I'm getting at, And
• 59:20
  Speaker 4: there's they encounter fish from other countries. Russia has fish
• 59:24
  Speaker 4: that come in, but they An interesting part of this
• 59:29
  Speaker 4: is that you'll see troll kind of play with these
• 59:32
  Speaker 4: big numbers where it suits them. But they might say
• 59:35
  Speaker 4: that only one percent or less than one percent comes
• 59:37
  Speaker 4: into the Yukon River, which is one out of five
• 59:40
  Speaker 4: hundred rivers in western Alaska, all of which are essentially
• 59:43
  Speaker 4: shut down to kingsam and fishing preemptively to save the resource.
• 59:48
  Speaker 4: But then they'll say that about fifty percent of the
• 59:50
  Speaker 4: kings they catch are from western Alaska rivers. So they
• 59:53
  Speaker 4: pull it out and say that, well, this one we
• 59:55
  Speaker 4: didn't get very many, but close to half of them
• 59:57
  Speaker 4: total came out of this general area.
• 1:00:00
  Speaker 1: Yeah, but that doesn't I appreciate The clarification of the
• 1:00:06
  Speaker 1: caers me to agree with these Yeah, I guess it
• 1:00:10
  Speaker 1: brings this up.
• 1:00:12
  Speaker 2: And this I don't want to say that this is
• 1:00:14
  Speaker 2: the crux of it, but it brings us up. You
• 1:00:17
  Speaker 2: spent your.
• 1:00:18
  Speaker 1: Life fishing, hunting, trapping. Okay, so you're familiar, like you
• 1:00:21
  Speaker 1: know that when again, to go to the pie analogy,
• 1:00:29
  Speaker 1: you have any different thing. What are we're talking about
• 1:00:32
  Speaker 1: mule deer, we're talking about king salmon, ce, cucumbers, whatever
• 1:00:39
  Speaker 1: the hell anything.
• 1:00:41
  Speaker 2: You're going to have the.
• 1:00:42
  Speaker 1: Pie, which is the total population that can be harvested,
• 1:00:46
  Speaker 1: and then you're going to have who's getting their pieces
• 1:00:49
  Speaker 1: of the pie. And the thing I've picked up in
• 1:00:52
  Speaker 1: my career of paying attention to this and I'm and
• 1:00:54
  Speaker 1: I participate just right along with everybody else. There's a
• 1:00:58
  Speaker 1: human tendency when the pie shrinks, there's a human tendency
• 1:01:02
  Speaker 1: to look at other people's usage, to look at their
• 1:01:05
  Speaker 1: piece and go your piece, like, your piece is too big.
• 1:01:11
  Speaker 1: It could be if it's if it's elk. What are
• 1:01:15
  Speaker 1: we gonna say, Oh, it's the non residents, it's the guides,
• 1:01:20
  Speaker 1: it's the whoever, right, There's this human tendency to usually
• 1:01:24
  Speaker 1: look and blame other people like no one usually goes like, Man,
• 1:01:28
  Speaker 1: I've looked in the mirror long and hard, and I'm
• 1:01:30
  Speaker 1: the reason I'm not seeing big bulls. You know you're
• 1:01:33
  Speaker 1: gonna go like, oh no, it's Minnesotans are the reason
• 1:01:37
  Speaker 1: you're not seeing big bulls. The guides are the reason
• 1:01:40
  Speaker 1: you're not seeing big bulls. The out of state landowners
• 1:01:43
  Speaker 1: are the reason you're not seeing big bulls.
• 1:01:44
  Speaker 2: It's not you.
• 1:01:47
  Speaker 1: So on this question, I think you get where, like
• 1:01:52
  Speaker 1: it's empirically true. Yeah, no serious person, Like, no serious person.
• 1:02:00
  Speaker 1: This is me talking, but I've had a lot of conversations.
• 1:02:02
  Speaker 1: No serious person is going to say that we're not
• 1:02:05
  Speaker 1: seeing a major pie shrinkage for sure.
• 1:02:09
  Speaker 3: On King Salmon, I got a couple of things to
• 1:02:11
  Speaker 3: bail you out on this.
• 1:02:12
  Speaker 2: Well, let me finish the point. It's it's it's empirically true.
• 1:02:18
  Speaker 1: Okay, It's like an objective reality that we are seeing
• 1:02:22
  Speaker 1: a shrinking pie on hall of it. Right, no serious
• 1:02:27
  Speaker 1: person is going to come and say that that king
• 1:02:29
  Speaker 1: salmon numbers are better than ever in the Pacific. No
• 1:02:34
  Speaker 1: serious person would say that. So if if we agree
• 1:02:38
  Speaker 1: on that, like to what degree and I'm just asking
• 1:02:42
  Speaker 1: you this question, I'm getting into a question to believe me, Like,
• 1:02:46
  Speaker 1: to what degree is it that that? To what level
• 1:02:49
  Speaker 1: of confidence? Can we look and be like, it's like,
• 1:02:52
  Speaker 1: that is the issue? Trall is the issue, and to
• 1:02:58
  Speaker 1: what is it? Like is it that that it's death
• 1:03:00
  Speaker 1: of a thousand cuts?
• 1:03:02
  Speaker 2: Right? Maybe maybe Trall is a little bit of a problem.
• 1:03:05
  Speaker 2: Maybe Charter is a little bit of a problem.
• 1:03:09
  Speaker 1: Acidification of the oceans a little bit of a problem,
• 1:03:13
  Speaker 1: warming oceans, and climate change a.
• 1:03:15
  Speaker 2: Little bit of a problem.
• 1:03:17
  Speaker 1: We're but we're pointing and trying to be like, no,
• 1:03:20
  Speaker 1: it's it's actually your fault. It's not these other issues.
• 1:03:22
  Speaker 1: It's your fault in you alone. Right, how do you
• 1:03:25
  Speaker 1: speak to that question?
• 1:03:27
  Speaker 3: For sure?
• 1:03:27
  Speaker 4: So that brings us back to kind of these three
• 1:03:29
  Speaker 4: points with Trall. So they'll talk about bycatch, they'll talk
• 1:03:32
  Speaker 4: about genetics in the Yukon River. But if you're going
• 1:03:35
  Speaker 4: to make an analogy about that, like big horn sheep
• 1:03:39
  Speaker 4: in the Missouri Breaks. So you could say that somebody
• 1:03:42
  Speaker 4: wanted to strip mine the brakes or whatever, they wanted
• 1:03:45
  Speaker 4: to mow down all the sage brush out there for
• 1:03:49
  Speaker 4: whatever reason to make a parking lot. They could start
• 1:03:52
  Speaker 4: doing that. They stretch a chain between two bulldozers, they
• 1:03:54
  Speaker 4: start to rip up the Missouri River breaks, and they
• 1:03:57
  Speaker 4: might only have that bulldozer or that chain only run
• 1:04:00
  Speaker 4: into two big horn sheep in a year and kill them.
• 1:04:04
  Speaker 3: But when they.
• 1:04:05
  Speaker 4: Destroy all the habitat and destroy all the food, then
• 1:04:08
  Speaker 4: the entire population suffers. And so that's where we keep
• 1:04:10
  Speaker 4: coming back to this pollock as a bait fish, and
• 1:04:13
  Speaker 4: we're not seeing just king salmon shrink or not come back.
• 1:04:17
  Speaker 4: We're seeing it across a dozen different species marine mammals, whales,
• 1:04:21
  Speaker 4: fur seals, king salmon, chum, salmon, and they. And there's
• 1:04:26
  Speaker 4: also this conversation of well, of course you guys aren't
• 1:04:29
  Speaker 4: catching many fish out of the Yukon River.
• 1:04:31
  Speaker 3: The entire fishery crashed. I mean, yea, yeah, that's yeah.
• 1:04:37
  Speaker 4: I'm not I'm not turning down many blonde girls because
• 1:04:40
  Speaker 4: there's not many blond girls that want to go out
• 1:04:41
  Speaker 4: me in first. But you know, like this cause and
• 1:04:43
  Speaker 4: effect here, but the a good year on the Yukon
• 1:04:47
  Speaker 4: River used to be like five hundred thousand fish.
• 1:04:49
  Speaker 3: It used to be ten times bigger.
• 1:04:51
  Speaker 4: So functionally, this fishery has already crashed, you know, And yeah,
• 1:04:56
  Speaker 4: your bycatch of it has gone down proportionally, but it's
• 1:04:59
  Speaker 4: not necessarily because you're fishing cleaner, not because you're effective
• 1:05:02
  Speaker 4: at avoiding them, but just because the fish aren't there.
• 1:05:06
  Speaker 4: And so what we actually saw with Trall a couple
• 1:05:08
  Speaker 4: times in the last five years is all one year
• 1:05:11
  Speaker 4: in the Baring Sea, I think they had eight thousand
• 1:05:13
  Speaker 4: kings as bycatch. One year they had ten thousand. This
• 1:05:15
  Speaker 4: is a year long, their whole thing. And so they're
• 1:05:18
  Speaker 4: telling us, God, we are good at avoiding king salmon
• 1:05:21
  Speaker 4: now as everything else is crashed. But this year, in
• 1:05:23
  Speaker 4: about two months, I think they've already got eleven thousand kings.
• 1:05:26
  Speaker 4: So maybe there's more kings around. But they're not necessarily
• 1:05:29
  Speaker 4: fishing cleaner, they're just kind of I can't profiting or
• 1:05:33
  Speaker 4: getting fortunate off of these low returns. And if you
• 1:05:36
  Speaker 4: start to look at like a thirty year history, I
• 1:05:40
  Speaker 4: don't have the number in front of me, but those
• 1:05:41
  Speaker 4: bycatchy short reports statewide show about one point one million
• 1:05:45
  Speaker 4: kings lost as troll bycatch, which there's a lot of
• 1:05:49
  Speaker 4: other fisheries the fish for king salmon too. But when
• 1:05:51
  Speaker 4: you combine that raw bi catch plus that they're losing
• 1:05:55
  Speaker 4: their food source, plus that were towing these midwater nets
• 1:05:58
  Speaker 4: on bottom and reckon the seafloor habitat, then you get
• 1:06:01
  Speaker 4: kind of this perfect trifecta. And there's definitely a conversation
• 1:06:05
  Speaker 4: about ocean ascidification, other fleets, climate warming, climate change, whatever
• 1:06:10
  Speaker 4: you want to call it, but they a lot of
• 1:06:13
  Speaker 4: that is uncontrollable by humans, are uncontrollable in the short term.
• 1:06:17
  Speaker 4: But trall could be fixed tomorrow, you know, or rained in,
• 1:06:21
  Speaker 4: but not without economic pain to the people doing it.
• 1:06:24
  Speaker 4: So there's a select group that's making a ton of
• 1:06:27
  Speaker 4: money off of this, billions of dollars, and they say, well,
• 1:06:30
  Speaker 4: even if we are kind of the most obvious outlier here,
• 1:06:34
  Speaker 4: the most controllable variable, you can't cut us back because
• 1:06:37
  Speaker 4: we're making a lot of.
• 1:06:39
  Speaker 3: Money off of it.
• 1:06:40
  Speaker 4: Yeah, And where that really connects is that, to.
• 1:06:44
  Speaker 2: Be clear, they don't say we're making a lot of
• 1:06:47
  Speaker 2: money off it. They say, we're creating a.
• 1:06:49
  Speaker 3: Lot of jobs.
• 1:06:50
  Speaker 4: Ah, yes, they do say that they yeah, so, And
• 1:06:55
  Speaker 4: where it gets really interconnects. And this is something a
• 1:06:57
  Speaker 4: lot of people don't realize is that the Fisheries Made
• 1:07:00
  Speaker 4: Management Council in Alaska, which regulates trall exists under Noah Fisheries.
• 1:07:04
  Speaker 4: So you hear about Noah, like save the whales, save
• 1:07:06
  Speaker 4: the turtles, Noah Weather, But they don't realize that Noah
• 1:07:10
  Speaker 4: is a division of the Department of Commerce in DC.
• 1:07:13
  Speaker 4: And so we think of every time that troll starts
• 1:07:18
  Speaker 4: to make this economic claim and says, if we don't
• 1:07:20
  Speaker 4: catch the pollock, the Russians will, or we're gonna this
• 1:07:22
  Speaker 4: is going to create a trade deficit between the USA
• 1:07:24
  Speaker 4: and other nations. You know, the US Fish and Wildlife
• 1:07:28
  Speaker 4: Service or Department of Interior EPA probably wouldn't bite on that.
• 1:07:31
  Speaker 4: They'd say, we got to protect the fish first, and
• 1:07:34
  Speaker 4: then how much money you guys make comes later. But
• 1:07:37
  Speaker 4: when you present that to the Department of Commerce, they say,
• 1:07:40
  Speaker 4: that's a pretty good point. We're we're not going to
• 1:07:42
  Speaker 4: make the USA lose money on this, even if Alaska
• 1:07:45
  Speaker 4: only gets fractions of that money. Totally, you know, and
• 1:07:48
  Speaker 4: so then you set up kind of this like Alaska
• 1:07:50
  Speaker 4: versus Washington, d C. How do you want these natural
• 1:07:53
  Speaker 4: resources used? It would be like, so one example is
• 1:07:58
  Speaker 4: that troll claim is that it only drags about one
• 1:08:01
  Speaker 4: point four percent of the entire bearing sea. They say,
• 1:08:04
  Speaker 4: our impact is really small. But anybody that has fish
• 1:08:08
  Speaker 4: knows that not all fishing ground is equal. There's seamounts,
• 1:08:10
  Speaker 4: there's ledges, there's the super productive areas.
• 1:08:14
  Speaker 2: And so I fish less than one percent of the area.
• 1:08:16
  Speaker 1: I fish less than one percent of the area where
• 1:08:18
  Speaker 1: I fish by fish for the fish.
• 1:08:19
  Speaker 3: Are for sure, that's it.
• 1:08:21
  Speaker 4: And so that would be like say that this logging
• 1:08:23
  Speaker 4: or mining company came and made this claim to the
• 1:08:26
  Speaker 4: Department of Commerce that hey, we want to log one
• 1:08:29
  Speaker 4: point four percent of North America, Like that's it.
• 1:08:32
  Speaker 3: All this other forest will be here.
• 1:08:34
  Speaker 4: Yeah, but if you look at how much forest is
• 1:08:37
  Speaker 4: contained within like Washington or sorry, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, Utah,
• 1:08:42
  Speaker 4: that's about one and a half percent. So you effectively
• 1:08:45
  Speaker 4: wipe out the entire Rocky Mountain elk population.
• 1:08:48
  Speaker 3: And so that's where these percentages becomes gated.
• 1:08:51
  Speaker 2: I wasn't familiar with that one.
• 1:08:53
  Speaker 4: Yeah, anyways, so it h. Yeah, you can, you can
• 1:08:58
  Speaker 4: play with percentages where it is advantageous to you. But
• 1:09:01
  Speaker 4: there again, it's this wild population that does have all
• 1:09:03
  Speaker 4: these external factors on it, and we know that they're
• 1:09:06
  Speaker 4: causing problems and going to cause problems. So common sense
• 1:09:10
  Speaker 4: says that we should slow down the manageable take of that,
• 1:09:13
  Speaker 4: the human harvest, because we acknowledge that there's these bumps
• 1:09:16
  Speaker 4: in the roads. It's just like if you're driving down
• 1:09:18
  Speaker 4: the highway, if you don't slow down when it gets bumpy,
• 1:09:20
  Speaker 4: you wreck your car. You know, we're not seeing that
• 1:09:23
  Speaker 4: in fisheries, management of these troll fleets. The road is
• 1:09:26
  Speaker 4: doing this through everything else, all these external factors and
• 1:09:29
  Speaker 4: Charles saying we've got to go full speed ahead will
• 1:09:31
  Speaker 4: never crash. But common sense doesn't agree with that.
• 1:09:34
  Speaker 1: How worried are you about the How worried are you
• 1:09:37
  Speaker 1: about the industry coming after you?
• 1:09:38
  Speaker 2: Real hard? Like you personally?
• 1:09:41
  Speaker 4: Well, yeah, that's yeah, I H it's definitely a concern.
• 1:09:46
  Speaker 4: The UH and I so I get tangled up in
• 1:09:50
  Speaker 4: We talked about there's this stop Alaska Controller Facebook group.
• 1:09:53
  Speaker 4: It's got about fifty five thousand people in it. The
• 1:09:56
  Speaker 4: state of Alaska only has seven hundred and fifty thousand people,
• 1:09:59
  Speaker 4: not everybody in groups from Alaska, but it's a huge
• 1:10:02
  Speaker 4: voting block contingent. And my real drive is that I
• 1:10:07
  Speaker 4: want to see these common sense rules be enforced, and
• 1:10:10
  Speaker 4: then if that means it puts troll out of business,
• 1:10:12
  Speaker 4: somewhere down the road, say that they right now, we
• 1:10:14
  Speaker 4: talked about these halibut nurseries. Nobody can fish for halibut
• 1:10:17
  Speaker 4: there because we're going to protect the halibut on their nurseries,
• 1:10:20
  Speaker 4: but trell control there so they can have bycatch of
• 1:10:23
  Speaker 4: halibut because they're not targeting them, but it's an area
• 1:10:26
  Speaker 4: shut down for everybody else. And we talked about these
• 1:10:28
  Speaker 4: midwater trolls can fish in areas closed to bottom trelll
• 1:10:31
  Speaker 4: because we're trying to protect the habitat there. But they
• 1:10:34
  Speaker 4: say if they got kicked out of there with their
• 1:10:36
  Speaker 4: midwater nets, that they'd go out of business. And they
• 1:10:38
  Speaker 4: make this argument successfully to the Department of Commerce. But
• 1:10:42
  Speaker 4: no other sports matter, No other group gets to exist
• 1:10:46
  Speaker 4: under these rules. So that's what really gets me is
• 1:10:49
  Speaker 4: I want to see these enforced common sense. If trell
• 1:10:52
  Speaker 4: can still continue to fish under that and thrive, then
• 1:10:56
  Speaker 4: that opened up a new conversation of do we want
• 1:10:58
  Speaker 4: them in the state, Is this a good for society,
• 1:11:00
  Speaker 4: et cetera. But if it shuts them down through enforcing
• 1:11:04
  Speaker 4: common sense regulations.
• 1:11:05
  Speaker 3: Then so be it.
• 1:11:06
  Speaker 4: And I take a lot of heat for that because
• 1:11:08
  Speaker 4: I think they know that they would effectively be shut
• 1:11:11
  Speaker 4: down if those common sense REGs went into effect. But
• 1:11:15
  Speaker 4: they don't get a pass on this, not with a
• 1:11:16
  Speaker 4: wild resource, you know, and not in Alaska where so
• 1:11:19
  Speaker 4: many people depend on I mean fisher's culture there essentially.
• 1:11:23
  Speaker 1: And this fishery has been this fishery has been booted
• 1:11:26
  Speaker 1: out of various places over the years.
• 1:11:29
  Speaker 4: Yeah, so they most of the If you really go
• 1:11:32
  Speaker 4: back in the history books, there's a really neat book
• 1:11:34
  Speaker 4: called an Unnatural History of the Sea, and it has
• 1:11:37
  Speaker 4: a section on trawling, and it says that the first
• 1:11:40
  Speaker 4: references to trolling in history were where they were banned.
• 1:11:44
  Speaker 4: And so you see in like the I think it's
• 1:11:46
  Speaker 4: thirteen seventy six in Europe was the first mention of
• 1:11:49
  Speaker 4: this troll net which would be drug along and indiscriminately
• 1:11:53
  Speaker 4: catch everything, and it was banned then, so seven hundred
• 1:11:57
  Speaker 4: years ago, close to it. Then the next instance from
• 1:12:00
  Speaker 4: the fifteen hundreds, where there it had become a capital offense.
• 1:12:04
  Speaker 4: So they killed two people who had added chains to
• 1:12:06
  Speaker 4: the bottom of their drag nets. But as the fishing,
• 1:12:13
  Speaker 4: you know, productivity of the oceans decreased, and as more
• 1:12:16
  Speaker 4: money got into fisheries, that lobbying came with it, you know,
• 1:12:21
  Speaker 4: and so and with that was this detachment of where
• 1:12:25
  Speaker 4: fisheries regulators live a relative to where the fishing happened.
• 1:12:28
  Speaker 4: So when we talk about a troll fishery, we're talking
• 1:12:32
  Speaker 4: to senators in Washington, d C. Or you know, this
• 1:12:35
  Speaker 4: DC political machine that has no idea of what troll is,
• 1:12:39
  Speaker 4: what Alaskan issues are. Besides that, the troll lobbyists show
• 1:12:42
  Speaker 4: up in their office every day and say.
• 1:12:44
  Speaker 2: They've already gotten their here.
• 1:12:45
  Speaker 4: We've made a lot of billions off of this. You know,
• 1:12:47
  Speaker 4: you can't shut it down. These guys are crazy. We
• 1:12:49
  Speaker 4: only caught thirty three kings out of the Yukon this year.
• 1:12:51
  Speaker 4: Don't ask us about the haliba, don't ask us about
• 1:12:54
  Speaker 4: whether or not these are a bait fish.
• 1:12:56
  Speaker 3: And that has been effective.
• 1:12:58
  Speaker 4: But we also see that a lot of time it
• 1:13:00
  Speaker 4: comes wrapped with this campaign check of like don't worry
• 1:13:03
  Speaker 4: about it.
• 1:13:03
  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, and then this fishery is mostly out of Seattle.
• 1:13:09
  Speaker 4: It is, so there is about ten percent.
• 1:13:13
  Speaker 3: So when they.
• 1:13:15
  Speaker 4: The USA and really the world has done what they
• 1:13:18
  Speaker 4: call rationalizing commercial fisheries. So it used to be that
• 1:13:21
  Speaker 4: it was open entry. You if you owned a boat,
• 1:13:23
  Speaker 4: you'd go pay ten dollars to register and anybody could
• 1:13:26
  Speaker 4: go out and fish like crazy until the quota was got.
• 1:13:29
  Speaker 3: Then everybody quit.
• 1:13:30
  Speaker 4: But that created this race for fish where even if
• 1:13:33
  Speaker 4: the weather was terrible, if we had two days to
• 1:13:35
  Speaker 4: catch where we'd catch, we'd go and maybe somebody'd sink
• 1:13:38
  Speaker 4: or die, and it flooded the canaries with fish all
• 1:13:40
  Speaker 4: at once.
• 1:13:40
  Speaker 2: It was.
• 1:13:42
  Speaker 4: It didn't work in that way. So they rationalized it
• 1:13:44
  Speaker 4: and said, hey, if you guys have always caught a
• 1:13:45
  Speaker 4: million pounds of pollock, you know, for these last five
• 1:13:48
  Speaker 4: qualifying years, then we're just going to say that for
• 1:13:51
  Speaker 4: the rest of forever, we're going to give you a
• 1:13:52
  Speaker 4: million shares of pollock. And sometimes that goes up, sometimes
• 1:13:55
  Speaker 4: it goes down, but you own it now, you can
• 1:13:57
  Speaker 4: buy it and you can sell it, which is a
• 1:13:59
  Speaker 4: crazy thing with natural I mean imagine.
• 1:14:01
  Speaker 3: They did that with elk. But they I forgot what
• 1:14:06
  Speaker 3: I was saying about.
• 1:14:07
  Speaker 2: Well, it's talking about where the fisheries based out of.
• 1:14:09
  Speaker 3: Oh yeah, all right.
• 1:14:10
  Speaker 4: So they so when they rationalize these trawl fisheries in Alaska,
• 1:14:14
  Speaker 4: most of the participants at that point, like in the
• 1:14:16
  Speaker 4: eighties early nineties, had been these big factory trawlers out
• 1:14:20
  Speaker 4: of Seattle, Washington. But they said, we're going to do
• 1:14:23
  Speaker 4: this ten percent set aside for communities that are actually
• 1:14:26
  Speaker 4: live in Alaska. They live next to this bearing sea,
• 1:14:29
  Speaker 4: they've fished on it for thousands of years, and we
• 1:14:31
  Speaker 4: don't want them to be aced out of this resource.
• 1:14:34
  Speaker 4: And so now we see some of those they're called
• 1:14:35
  Speaker 4: CDQ community Development Quota groups have about ten percent of
• 1:14:41
  Speaker 4: this total fishery.
• 1:14:42
  Speaker 2: We heard from some of these guys.
• 1:14:43
  Speaker 4: Yeah, and some of them have gone beyond ten percent
• 1:14:47
  Speaker 4: of it. So some of them leased their quote out
• 1:14:49
  Speaker 4: to these big Seattle boats, but some of them have
• 1:14:51
  Speaker 4: doubled down to buy their own trawlers. And as other
• 1:14:55
  Speaker 4: fisheries have crashed, essentially this pollock and this trall it
• 1:15:00
  Speaker 4: has become a larger and larger part of their portfolio.
• 1:15:03
  Speaker 4: So now it's like even if they're like the residents
• 1:15:07
  Speaker 4: of these communities are morally objecting to troll. They're invested
• 1:15:11
  Speaker 4: in this hundred million dollar both. They can't just go
• 1:15:13
  Speaker 4: fish for crab because crab are gone. They can't fish
• 1:15:15
  Speaker 4: for ally but salmon, those are gone. So they're in
• 1:15:18
  Speaker 4: kind of this use it or lose it scenario now,
• 1:15:22
  Speaker 4: which is just a crazy concept for a rural village
• 1:15:25
  Speaker 4: on the edge of the bearing seat. They kind of
• 1:15:28
  Speaker 4: got drug into it in that way.
• 1:15:30
  Speaker 2: Can I hate you with a conspiracy theory?
• 1:15:32
  Speaker 3: Do they?
• 1:15:35
  Speaker 1: The conspiracy theory is that this isn't about salmon. The
• 1:15:40
  Speaker 1: conspiracy theory is it's not about fisheries. It's like it's
• 1:15:44
  Speaker 1: somehow is using fisheries to get Alaskans worked up politically
• 1:15:53
  Speaker 1: to seek broader political change, and that no one really cares.
• 1:15:56
  Speaker 2: About these fish.
• 1:15:58
  Speaker 1: They just want to push in a different political agenda,
• 1:16:02
  Speaker 1: and this is this you're not here about fish?
• 1:16:06
  Speaker 4: Yeah, so that's I mean, how right am I? Well,
• 1:16:10
  Speaker 4: so you're definitely so troll. Like we talked about from
• 1:16:14
  Speaker 4: the very start bottom trawl and now these midwater trolls
• 1:16:17
  Speaker 4: that it's been found out that they're on bottom. There's
• 1:16:20
  Speaker 4: a worldwide push to shut down bottom trawl and it's
• 1:16:23
  Speaker 4: been around for decades. You mentioned this pole that Alaska
• 1:16:26
  Speaker 4: did said seventy four percent of Alaskans wanted a total ban.
• 1:16:29
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I don't understand that poll. And someone dismissed it
• 1:16:32
  Speaker 1: saying it was a push pole. Oh, it was a
• 1:16:34
  Speaker 1: manipul of the pole.
• 1:16:34
  Speaker 2: I don't know. I'd like to see the polling data.
• 1:16:36
  Speaker 2: I have seen it.
• 1:16:37
  Speaker 4: I got a website the uh Anyways, but I think
• 1:16:41
  Speaker 4: you'll see, like in the comment sections on your video,
• 1:16:43
  Speaker 4: this not quite universal support. But if there's two thousand comments,
• 1:16:47
  Speaker 4: you'll see twenty five from troll reps that get paid
• 1:16:51
  Speaker 4: to interact and write comments, and the rest of them
• 1:16:53
  Speaker 4: are you know, Alaskans and people that have dealt with
• 1:16:56
  Speaker 4: troll fisheries and gotten the shorten of stick that are
• 1:16:58
  Speaker 4: really v against it.
• 1:17:01
  Speaker 1: Well that and I'm not and I'm not I'm not
• 1:17:05
  Speaker 1: criticizing anyone that rode in, but the people that we
• 1:17:10
  Speaker 1: rode in in defense of big troll or offense of
• 1:17:16
  Speaker 1: the troll industry, and the people that rode in are
• 1:17:18
  Speaker 1: in the industry. Yeah, but that might be because they're
• 1:17:24
  Speaker 1: the ones that that that they're the ones that have
• 1:17:27
  Speaker 1: an understanding of it. But I'm not hearing from I'm
• 1:17:32
  Speaker 1: not hearing from anglers. I'm not hearing from rod and
• 1:17:36
  Speaker 1: reel fishermen. Yeah, defending it.
• 1:17:40
  Speaker 3: Yeah, that's uh.
• 1:17:41
  Speaker 4: You'll never hear anybody that wakes up tomorrow and says,
• 1:17:43
  Speaker 4: you know what, I'm in fav I think bottom trall
• 1:17:45
  Speaker 4: is a good, you go friendly way of catching fish.
• 1:17:49
  Speaker 4: And so what I was getting at with troll has
• 1:17:53
  Speaker 4: a big problem that everybody already dislike bottom troll before
• 1:17:57
  Speaker 4: they figured out it happened in Alaska. The midwater nets
• 1:18:00
  Speaker 4: around the bottom, so they are kind of bottom trawl.
• 1:18:03
  Speaker 4: So to me, strategically, their last possible move that they
• 1:18:06
  Speaker 4: could make would be to try to make this a
• 1:18:08
  Speaker 4: political issue. Alaska is this historically red state super resource extraction.
• 1:18:15
  Speaker 4: People worked in oil extracting resources or they're in fishing
• 1:18:19
  Speaker 4: extracting resources, and so anytime you get into this, anytime
• 1:18:23
  Speaker 4: somebody can say, well, these are the eco terrorists or
• 1:18:25
  Speaker 4: these are the greenies coming in trying to control us,
• 1:18:29
  Speaker 4: then they have this opportunity, and I think Troll sees
• 1:18:32
  Speaker 4: that as their one last ditch move. But what they're
• 1:18:36
  Speaker 4: forgetting is that the Republican side is big into conservation.
• 1:18:40
  Speaker 4: I mean, we've pebble mind had come through, like Trump Junior.
• 1:18:44
  Speaker 4: You see these stories out of Africa where hunters had
• 1:18:47
  Speaker 4: preserved the land that was this big success story, on
• 1:18:50
  Speaker 4: and on, and so I fish too. There's this extent
• 1:18:54
  Speaker 4: of like we want to check the fish so that
• 1:18:57
  Speaker 4: we can kill the fish, which has some irony obviously,
• 1:19:00
  Speaker 4: but we want it to be sustainable, and we want
• 1:19:01
  Speaker 4: our kids to kill the fish too. And what we
• 1:19:04
  Speaker 4: really want is the habitat and the bait fish left
• 1:19:07
  Speaker 4: intact so that that can happen indefinitely and no other
• 1:19:10
  Speaker 4: fishery impacts those factors near like troll does. It's kind
• 1:19:15
  Speaker 4: of like you could, so you're managing deer in a forest.
• 1:19:19
  Speaker 4: You could hunt these white tails down until there was
• 1:19:21
  Speaker 4: one buck and one dough left in this entire forest.
• 1:19:23
  Speaker 4: Stop hunting, and in ten years you'd probably have a
• 1:19:26
  Speaker 4: decent deer population. But if you cut down the forest
• 1:19:29
  Speaker 4: and paved over it in the process, you lose those
• 1:19:32
  Speaker 4: deer forever. And so that's the concern with troll, and
• 1:19:35
  Speaker 4: especially at the bottom like the seafloor impact, And that's
• 1:19:40
  Speaker 4: not tough to understand from most people.
• 1:19:42
  Speaker 2: You know, No, it's not man it's not.
• 1:19:47
  Speaker 1: So what if you had to make like let's say,
• 1:19:50
  Speaker 1: let's say you were emperor of the world all of
• 1:19:52
  Speaker 1: a sudden, it's a good idea, Okay, your emperor of Alaska, Like,
• 1:19:57
  Speaker 1: hit me with what based on your research, what you
• 1:20:02
  Speaker 1: hear from people, your personal opinion, what do you feel
• 1:20:05
  Speaker 1: is a what do you feel is a reasonable in
• 1:20:08
  Speaker 1: your mind, a reasonable step to take, well, either to
• 1:20:13
  Speaker 1: validate or invalidate the notion that is that this is
• 1:20:18
  Speaker 1: partially responsible for the collapse the fisheries collapse we're seeing
• 1:20:21
  Speaker 1: around I won't say collapse on Albert, but the degradation
• 1:20:26
  Speaker 1: of the Halbert fishery, the collapse of the King Salmon fishery.
• 1:20:29
  Speaker 2: Right, how would you find out whether that's true?
• 1:20:33
  Speaker 1: If you're going to jump into management changes, what would
• 1:20:36
  Speaker 1: you propose, Like, what do you think a next step
• 1:20:38
  Speaker 1: would be?
• 1:20:39
  Speaker 4: So I want to see the common sense stuff checked
• 1:20:43
  Speaker 4: off first. And so this is twenty twenty six is
• 1:20:48
  Speaker 4: an election for our new governor in Alaska. And that's
• 1:20:51
  Speaker 4: important to this issue because the governor of Alaska chooses
• 1:20:54
  Speaker 4: a majority of the voting members on this federal and
• 1:20:57
  Speaker 4: PFMC Fisheries Council that regulates troll, and what we've seen
• 1:21:01
  Speaker 4: with the past governor is this trill vested group would
• 1:21:05
  Speaker 4: donate one hundred thousand to his campaign and then he
• 1:21:07
  Speaker 4: would put you know, the vice president of this corporation
• 1:21:10
  Speaker 4: on this council to regulate troll. And it's a majority
• 1:21:13
  Speaker 4: goes vote system on there. So if it's dominated by troll,
• 1:21:17
  Speaker 4: it doesn't make matter, if it makes sense, doesn't matter
• 1:21:19
  Speaker 4: if it's ethical. If they vote in favor of it,
• 1:21:22
  Speaker 4: then we're stuck with it essentially. And so first step
• 1:21:25
  Speaker 4: for me is that we need to have a governor
• 1:21:27
  Speaker 4: that commits that they're not going to put active trill
• 1:21:30
  Speaker 4: reps on this regulator accounts anymore, or at least people
• 1:21:33
  Speaker 4: who are are neutral. You know, I don't want it
• 1:21:36
  Speaker 4: full of a super green side. I don't want it
• 1:21:37
  Speaker 4: full of an ecological side, because I fish too, but
• 1:21:40
  Speaker 4: they at least need to not be making hundreds of
• 1:21:42
  Speaker 4: thousands of dollars personally for dursery. And so once you
• 1:21:45
  Speaker 4: get that in there, then you can start putting forward
• 1:21:48
  Speaker 4: these motions of hey, we need to if we've acknowledged
• 1:21:52
  Speaker 4: that there's Bearing Sea Halibut nurseries and trall is still
• 1:21:55
  Speaker 4: allowed in there. It needs to be banned right there.
• 1:21:58
  Speaker 4: They can still fish everywhere else, but we're going to kick.
• 1:22:00
  Speaker 3: Them out of there.
• 1:22:01
  Speaker 4: There needs to be an acknowledgment that pollock or a
• 1:22:04
  Speaker 4: forage fish. So forage fish get these special considerations.
• 1:22:07
  Speaker 2: What do they regarded it as right now?
• 1:22:10
  Speaker 4: A long story as it just target species. And there's
• 1:22:13
  Speaker 4: this weird deal in federal regulation where a fish can't
• 1:22:15
  Speaker 4: simultaneously be regulated as a forage fish and as a
• 1:22:18
  Speaker 4: target species. And so Tarll successfully makes this case that
• 1:22:23
  Speaker 4: you know, there's studies out there that say eighty five
• 1:22:24
  Speaker 4: percent of the forage base in the Bearing Sea is
• 1:22:27
  Speaker 4: made of pollock. They say that the number two most
• 1:22:30
  Speaker 4: commonly eaten thing for chinoo salmon and the Bearing Sea
• 1:22:33
  Speaker 4: in twenty twenty four was pollock.
• 1:22:35
  Speaker 3: It's huge for halibut, huge for whales.
• 1:22:37
  Speaker 2: Well, was the number one.
• 1:22:40
  Speaker 3: Capelin or needlefish something like that. The uh.
• 1:22:44
  Speaker 4: Anyways, so there's this there's all these documentations saying that
• 1:22:47
  Speaker 4: it's this crucial link, but they the NPFMC, essentially this
• 1:22:52
  Speaker 4: troll regulated body, says it's not going to explore that
• 1:22:56
  Speaker 4: because there's also this understanding that if they started to
• 1:22:59
  Speaker 4: take that and consider and say that, well, maybe the
• 1:23:01
  Speaker 4: halibut are smaller, maybe the king salmon are smaller because
• 1:23:03
  Speaker 4: they don't have enough pollock. That would create a cutback
• 1:23:06
  Speaker 4: and limit for how much pollock the trollopef you can catch.
• 1:23:10
  Speaker 4: So they fight that tooth and nail. But there again,
• 1:23:12
  Speaker 4: it's a super common sense thing, and if it failed,
• 1:23:16
  Speaker 4: you know, after five years of study, then I get that.
• 1:23:19
  Speaker 4: But it at nice at least needs to be brought
• 1:23:21
  Speaker 4: to the table, So I'd kick them out of the
• 1:23:24
  Speaker 4: halibut nurseries. I'd say, we've got to ask this question
• 1:23:27
  Speaker 4: of whether pollock should be a forage fish. Another big
• 1:23:30
  Speaker 4: one that we've run into is that a lot of
• 1:23:32
  Speaker 4: the bycatch limits were set twenty years ago when the
• 1:23:36
  Speaker 4: fish were a lot more abundant. So with king salmon
• 1:23:40
  Speaker 4: and the Bearing Sea specifically, fifteen years ago they said
• 1:23:43
  Speaker 4: that if they're a bunch of king salmon around, you
• 1:23:46
  Speaker 4: guys can catch sixty thousand of them as bycatch, or
• 1:23:48
  Speaker 4: if there's not as many king salmon around, you can
• 1:23:50
  Speaker 4: catch forty five thousand as bycatch. But in the fifteen
• 1:23:54
  Speaker 4: years since that they've crashed down to essentially nothing. You know,
• 1:23:57
  Speaker 4: most people can't fish for them in a river because
• 1:24:00
  Speaker 4: that has been adjusted. But the forty five thousand, yeah,
• 1:24:02
  Speaker 4: is still sitting up there and we've seen that with would.
• 1:24:06
  Speaker 1: It be weird if that number want up being higher
• 1:24:08
  Speaker 1: than the number of kings?
• 1:24:10
  Speaker 4: Well, yeah, So that brings up a really big philosophical
• 1:24:13
  Speaker 4: debate of if there's only one king salmon left, who
• 1:24:17
  Speaker 4: has the ethical right to catch it? Should it be
• 1:24:20
  Speaker 4: the subsistence user that lives in the middle of nowhere
• 1:24:23
  Speaker 4: on the Yukon River or should it be a trawler
• 1:24:25
  Speaker 4: to waste it when it's five pounds? And that's a
• 1:24:27
  Speaker 4: really easy question for people to answer, and unfortunately we're
• 1:24:32
  Speaker 4: we're drifting off in that direction, you know. So those
• 1:24:36
  Speaker 4: would be some really big ones. The other one is
• 1:24:38
  Speaker 4: this issue of we at the start of this we
• 1:24:39
  Speaker 4: talked about there's two types of bycatchers. Observed by catch
• 1:24:42
  Speaker 4: and there's unobserved by catch, and we said that Charles
• 1:24:46
  Speaker 4: says they only impact about one and a half percent
• 1:24:48
  Speaker 4: of the Bearing Sea, But the Bearing Sea is incredibly huge.
• 1:24:53
  Speaker 4: So the one point four percent of the Eastern Barren
• 1:24:55
  Speaker 4: Sea is I think three hundred and ninety billion square
• 1:24:58
  Speaker 4: feet And if you start to look at how much
• 1:25:01
  Speaker 4: life is in a square foot of seafloor. It's like
• 1:25:04
  Speaker 4: if you're on a trout stream and you walk lift
• 1:25:06
  Speaker 4: up a river. Everything darts out of there. But you
• 1:25:09
  Speaker 4: can apply different levels of what might live there. Say
• 1:25:12
  Speaker 4: it's five grams per square foot, you come up with
• 1:25:15
  Speaker 4: essentially billions of pounds of unobserved bycatch. So this is
• 1:25:18
  Speaker 4: the stuff kicked up by the mud drug over by
• 1:25:21
  Speaker 4: the nets. But since it doesn't make it to the
• 1:25:22
  Speaker 4: deck of the boat, we just pretend it doesn't exist.
• 1:25:26
  Speaker 4: But other nations have taken that on, and we could
• 1:25:28
  Speaker 4: be taking it on too if there was the will
• 1:25:30
  Speaker 4: within this regulatory body to say, hey, maybe this is
• 1:25:33
  Speaker 4: a problem. But there again, troll knows that it's a
• 1:25:36
  Speaker 4: real big problem if we start to quantify it or
• 1:25:39
  Speaker 4: go down that rabbit hole, and so they essentially roadblock
• 1:25:42
  Speaker 4: it at a DC or a regulatory level. So that's
• 1:25:46
  Speaker 4: my push is that I think there's all these common
• 1:25:48
  Speaker 4: sense concepts that just need to be explored. They we
• 1:25:53
  Speaker 4: have to have a regulatory system which allows us to
• 1:25:55
  Speaker 4: bring these concerns to the table and take a look
• 1:25:57
  Speaker 4: at them, and right now we don't have that.
• 1:26:01
  Speaker 1: Last question is is there a possibility is your current
• 1:26:04
  Speaker 1: governor term limited out or what's going on?
• 1:26:07
  Speaker 2: Yeah, so someone new is coming in?
• 1:26:09
  Speaker 3: Correct?
• 1:26:10
  Speaker 2: And is there a.
• 1:26:11
  Speaker 1: Chance that that with the the is there a chance
• 1:26:14
  Speaker 1: that both parties would have a candidate.
• 1:26:19
  Speaker 3: That was committed to looking at this Absolutely?
• 1:26:21
  Speaker 4: Yeah, so they Alaska doesn't open primary.
• 1:26:25
  Speaker 3: So right now we have I think nineteen people.
• 1:26:27
  Speaker 2: That have really are you in there?
• 1:26:31
  Speaker 4: No, thy god? No, So nineteen people have put their
• 1:26:35
  Speaker 4: name in the hat, and I think we've heard from
• 1:26:37
  Speaker 4: half of them that have taken essentially an anti troll stance.
• 1:26:41
  Speaker 2: Or from both sides Republican and Democratic.
• 1:26:43
  Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, and independent.
• 1:26:46
  Speaker 1: So there's there's a possibility that in the end, the
• 1:26:49
  Speaker 1: final ballot could come out in each side of that
• 1:26:53
  Speaker 1: ballot could be saying I'm committed to looking into this
• 1:26:56
  Speaker 1: issue and taking some regulatory steps that's possible.
• 1:26:58
  Speaker 3: Correct.
• 1:26:59
  Speaker 4: And so that is what has got troll through the roof,
• 1:27:02
  Speaker 4: because those governor candidates, when they say they're against strall,
• 1:27:05
  Speaker 4: they don't have to say that they're going to shut
• 1:27:07
  Speaker 4: it down tomorrow. All they have to do is say
• 1:27:09
  Speaker 4: that they're just not going to put trallers on this
• 1:27:11
  Speaker 4: regulatory board anymore or at least not a majority of them,
• 1:27:14
  Speaker 4: and just that simple threat is enough to put to
• 1:27:19
  Speaker 4: have the hackles way up on Trill.
• 1:27:21
  Speaker 2: And that's why we're hearing about this so much.
• 1:27:23
  Speaker 4: Absolutely so they don't think they can continue to win,
• 1:27:25
  Speaker 4: and they don't think they can continue to catch the
• 1:27:28
  Speaker 4: volume of fish anymore if somebody besides Trallers start to
• 1:27:32
  Speaker 4: regulate the fishery in a more common sense way. So,
• 1:27:35
  Speaker 4: and I think there's a good chance that that is
• 1:27:37
  Speaker 4: where we're headed, is that we're going to have a
• 1:27:39
  Speaker 4: Democrat and an independent and a Republican governor that have
• 1:27:42
  Speaker 4: all said, hey, we're gonna we're gonna put different people
• 1:27:45
  Speaker 4: on this regulatory council.
• 1:27:47
  Speaker 3: And what shakes out shakes out.
• 1:27:49
  Speaker 2: So let me say this man, let me I said
• 1:27:53
  Speaker 2: that was my last question. Here's my real last question.
• 1:27:57
  Speaker 1: Let's say trill practices were the harvest was adjusted, the
• 1:28:03
  Speaker 1: Halbert Nursery was off limits, and you saw we saw
• 1:28:06
  Speaker 1: a recovery of fish. Okay, so ten years down in row,
• 1:28:10
  Speaker 1: twenty years down road, we see a recovery and it's
• 1:28:13
  Speaker 1: recovered to people are like, hey, we're back in a
• 1:28:17
  Speaker 1: strong position.
• 1:28:19
  Speaker 2: Let's revisit.
• 1:28:20
  Speaker 1: Maybe it's time to have the maybe it's time to
• 1:28:22
  Speaker 1: invite the troll industry back into you know, into these waters.
• 1:28:27
  Speaker 2: What would be your attitude about that.
• 1:28:29
  Speaker 4: Well, we'd have to. So we've actually seen that start
• 1:28:33
  Speaker 4: to happen some. So you talked earlier about how we've
• 1:28:37
  Speaker 4: had these big crashes in the US. So Grand Banks
• 1:28:39
  Speaker 4: Cot in the mid nineties early nineties had crashed all
• 1:28:43
  Speaker 4: the way. We saw West Coast ground fish early two
• 1:28:46
  Speaker 4: thousands crash all the way. And so now we're twenty
• 1:28:49
  Speaker 4: five thirty five years later than that and they're just
• 1:28:52
  Speaker 4: starting to open those fisheries up again. The fish have
• 1:28:55
  Speaker 4: started to come back a little bit, nothing compared to
• 1:28:57
  Speaker 4: historic rates. But when we look at the regulations that
• 1:29:00
  Speaker 4: they put on trawlers down there, it is insane compared
• 1:29:04
  Speaker 4: to what we see in Alaska. So that's become this
• 1:29:07
  Speaker 4: frustrating disconnect for us because it's still federal Noah Fisheries
• 1:29:11
  Speaker 4: regulating all of them. But after they've crashed, they say,
• 1:29:14
  Speaker 4: oh my god, we could never let you guys get
• 1:29:16
  Speaker 4: away with that kind of bycatch, or we couldn't send
• 1:29:18
  Speaker 4: you out with an out an observer, or we're not
• 1:29:20
  Speaker 4: going to assume that half the halibut survive, you bring
• 1:29:22
  Speaker 4: it all back to the dock, and we're going to
• 1:29:24
  Speaker 4: check it ourselves. That in Alaska they say, everything's great,
• 1:29:28
  Speaker 4: just keep doing what you're doing.
• 1:29:29
  Speaker 1: That is interesting, man, because those fisheries, I mean, those
• 1:29:33
  Speaker 1: fisheries you named are places that crashed hard.
• 1:29:36
  Speaker 4: And we actually see a fair amount of boats now
• 1:29:38
  Speaker 4: fishing in Alaska with the same owners, same boats, same crew,
• 1:29:43
  Speaker 4: probably not the same crew after thirty years, but same
• 1:29:46
  Speaker 4: ownership structure have come from. Like there's a fleet in
• 1:29:49
  Speaker 4: Alaska that's homeported in Rockport, Maine, and if you look
• 1:29:52
  Speaker 4: at the company time one on their history, they had
• 1:29:55
  Speaker 4: fished up until the early nineties and they said, well
• 1:29:57
  Speaker 4: then we decided to send our fleet to a lab.
• 1:30:00
  Speaker 4: But what they don't mention is that the codfishery they
• 1:30:03
  Speaker 4: were fishing on crash and they were forced to go
• 1:30:05
  Speaker 4: somewhere else.
• 1:30:06
  Speaker 3: Or lose their boats.
• 1:30:07
  Speaker 2: It became a refugee.
• 1:30:09
  Speaker 4: Yeah, And that's been another big deal with this This
• 1:30:13
  Speaker 4: concept of a factory trawler is it's essentially a floating,
• 1:30:16
  Speaker 4: pretty self sufficient city. And so even now the factory
• 1:30:21
  Speaker 4: trawlers fishing in Alaska, most of the crew isn't from there.
• 1:30:25
  Speaker 4: I think ninety seven percent of the crew is non Alaskan.
• 1:30:28
  Speaker 4: So they fly to this boat, they live on it
• 1:30:31
  Speaker 4: for two weeks, they work, they fish, they come home,
• 1:30:34
  Speaker 4: and they don't really care where that boat is. That
• 1:30:36
  Speaker 4: boat could be in Nicaraguar, it could be in the
• 1:30:39
  Speaker 4: Arctic or the Antarctic or wherever. It's not like you
• 1:30:42
  Speaker 4: and I go out and fish in this pond in
• 1:30:44
  Speaker 4: our backyard. They're flying to the boat, they work, and
• 1:30:46
  Speaker 4: it's this mobile city that moves around. So because of that,
• 1:30:49
  Speaker 4: Trall has never had to have this local investment. You know,
• 1:30:53
  Speaker 4: if you and I lose our fish in the backyard,
• 1:30:55
  Speaker 4: or we lose the elk in Montana, you know, that
• 1:30:57
  Speaker 4: might be the end of our fishing or hunting. But
• 1:31:00
  Speaker 4: when you're from this like factory platform, you just move
• 1:31:03
  Speaker 4: to another continent or you move to another area and
• 1:31:05
  Speaker 4: you keep doing what you're doing. It doesn't impact you
• 1:31:07
  Speaker 4: in the same way. And you're not worried about what
• 1:31:09
  Speaker 4: your kids are going to do because your kids could
• 1:31:11
  Speaker 4: buy somewhere else too.
• 1:31:12
  Speaker 2: So yeah, you know, it's not a death sentence to
• 1:31:15
  Speaker 2: wipe an area out.
• 1:31:16
  Speaker 3: For sure, not in the same way.
• 1:31:17
  Speaker 4: And there again, that's crazy that you know, we have
• 1:31:22
  Speaker 4: a wild resource that we regulate in this way and
• 1:31:25
  Speaker 4: take this bigger risks with because we see all the protections,
• 1:31:28
  Speaker 4: you know, sage grouse or bighorn sheep or whatever it
• 1:31:30
  Speaker 4: may be. We're counting a single species and those we
• 1:31:33
  Speaker 4: can go out with the helicopter and look at. But
• 1:31:36
  Speaker 4: what happens in the ocean is a whole new.
• 1:31:37
  Speaker 2: Ball game, you know.
• 1:31:38
  Speaker 1: One of the craziest things. Just the final thought that
• 1:31:40
  Speaker 1: I was reading about this morning.
• 1:31:45
  Speaker 2: So these fish that.
• 1:31:50
  Speaker 1: The troll fish they're catching, they were x they're moving
• 1:31:53
  Speaker 1: them from the West coast over to.
• 1:31:56
  Speaker 2: New Brunswick, so they're moving them over to Cannon.
• 1:31:59
  Speaker 1: They're going through them on these fish are going through
• 1:32:01
  Speaker 1: the process fisher going through the Panama Canal. But there
• 1:32:05
  Speaker 1: was some like some regulatory advantage to using Canadian rail.
• 1:32:10
  Speaker 3: Yeah, the Canadian railroad scam.
• 1:32:12
  Speaker 1: Okay, there's some regulatory advantage to using Canadian rail Okay.
• 1:32:19
  Speaker 1: So these dudes they got in trouble for this. These
• 1:32:21
  Speaker 1: dudes hit on this scheme where they they load these
• 1:32:25
  Speaker 1: fish up. I think it was it Pollock. I think
• 1:32:26
  Speaker 1: it was Pollic or Harry, can't remember. They load these
• 1:32:29
  Speaker 1: fish up and take them by ship through the Panama
• 1:32:34
  Speaker 1: Canal up but when they get up there, when they
• 1:32:36
  Speaker 1: get to the Canada, they'd put them on a train
• 1:32:41
  Speaker 1: that would go one hundred feet back and forth, and
• 1:32:46
  Speaker 1: then they would take them off the train.
• 1:32:49
  Speaker 2: It went nowhere.
• 1:32:50
  Speaker 1: They loaded them and unloaded them in the same spot,
• 1:32:52
  Speaker 1: and the train traveled one hundred feet and they'd offload
• 1:32:56
  Speaker 1: them in order to be able to be that there
• 1:32:58
  Speaker 1: was a Canadian rail proud.
• 1:33:00
  Speaker 2: Yeah, they got busted.
• 1:33:04
  Speaker 1: It was funny reading about it is like, it seems
• 1:33:06
  Speaker 1: like such a weird little scheme, but it was. I
• 1:33:08
  Speaker 1: was reading about there's like this year's long investigation. It's
• 1:33:11
  Speaker 1: like how much you need to investigate that?
• 1:33:13
  Speaker 3: Well, they so that's that's the most.
• 1:33:16
  Speaker 2: It's like the most cynical things. So funny, dude.
• 1:33:20
  Speaker 1: Can imagine like working there and being like, oh, no, no,
• 1:33:22
  Speaker 1: what now I'm supposed to put these fish on this
• 1:33:24
  Speaker 1: train and move them a hundred feet back and take
• 1:33:26
  Speaker 1: them back off again.
• 1:33:27
  Speaker 2: Well.
• 1:33:27
  Speaker 4: I think that was actually part of the breaking story
• 1:33:29
  Speaker 4: was there was this videotape of this worker like laughing
• 1:33:32
  Speaker 4: at it's not even a train. You drive the entire
• 1:33:34
  Speaker 4: semi on this rollie card and it goes there, and
• 1:33:37
  Speaker 4: it goes back and then the semi drives off. But
• 1:33:40
  Speaker 4: they so that was American seafoods was at the center
• 1:33:43
  Speaker 4: of that.
• 1:33:43
  Speaker 2: That was the funniest story, man.
• 1:33:45
  Speaker 4: But they there's this Jones Act regulation that says if
• 1:33:48
  Speaker 4: you're shipping from the USA one port in the USA
• 1:33:52
  Speaker 4: to another port in the USA, you're required to use
• 1:33:54
  Speaker 4: American ships with American crew. But that is it's more
• 1:33:58
  Speaker 4: expensive to ship American maide or American in that way.
• 1:34:02
  Speaker 4: So they dodged that by they'd use this. But there's
• 1:34:06
  Speaker 4: an exception of that that says if the fish lands
• 1:34:08
  Speaker 4: in another country and it is transported somewhere on a rail,
• 1:34:12
  Speaker 4: then it can come back into the USA and it
• 1:34:14
  Speaker 4: never had to travel on this American ship. Oh so
• 1:34:18
  Speaker 4: they found this big savings of They'd send this foreign
• 1:34:20
  Speaker 4: ship around to Canada right north, you know, forty miles
• 1:34:24
  Speaker 4: the US border, drive the truck on the roly cart,
• 1:34:27
  Speaker 4: roll it back and forth on a train track, and
• 1:34:30
  Speaker 4: then drive it back into the USA and dodge all
• 1:34:32
  Speaker 4: this all taxes.
• 1:34:37
  Speaker 1: I had laughed this morning, drinking my coffee on the couch,
• 1:34:40
  Speaker 1: and I was reading about that scheme.
• 1:34:42
  Speaker 2: Do that is just just it's just you gotta laugh, man.
• 1:34:45
  Speaker 4: But there's more of that story. So this American Seafoods, Uh,
• 1:34:49
  Speaker 4: there's this regulation that foreign interest can't own these shares
• 1:34:54
  Speaker 4: of an American fishery. But American Seafoods was started by this
• 1:34:59
  Speaker 4: guy and Norway. It has a Norwegian CEO and the
• 1:35:03
  Speaker 4: majority owner in it right now is a private equity
• 1:35:05
  Speaker 4: company out of New York City that has its parent
• 1:35:09
  Speaker 4: company is over in Switzerland. So then you start to
• 1:35:12
  Speaker 4: look at this essentially foreign country that scamming the US
• 1:35:16
  Speaker 4: out of using US workers. They had a bunch of
• 1:35:19
  Speaker 4: EPA fines, et cetera, et cetera. So there again, when
• 1:35:23
  Speaker 4: we think of guys that go fishing, or when we
• 1:35:26
  Speaker 4: hear from the troll obviously say we're just common fishermen too.
• 1:35:29
  Speaker 4: You know, sorry about I'm not well spoken. I'm just
• 1:35:32
  Speaker 4: this little, low key fisherman. The biggest pollock holder in
• 1:35:36
  Speaker 4: the Bearing Sea is American Seafoods. That's half on by
• 1:35:39
  Speaker 4: private equity, you know, with backing in another nation.
• 1:35:41
  Speaker 1: So I'll be curious, man, I'll be curious, as someone
• 1:35:45
  Speaker 1: like after hearing your conversation, right, I'll be curious who
• 1:35:49
  Speaker 1: reaches out that wants to explain. Yeah, that wants to explain,
• 1:35:57
  Speaker 1: like if they if they want to explain the other
• 1:35:59
  Speaker 1: side of this, or if it's just too that, if
• 1:36:05
  Speaker 1: they find that it's better not to talk about it.
• 1:36:06
  Speaker 2: I'll be curious see what happens.
• 1:36:08
  Speaker 4: Yeah, it's been really fascinating for me to watch this
• 1:36:12
  Speaker 4: reaction in Alaska because, like we say, nobody wakes up
• 1:36:15
  Speaker 4: tomorrow and decide suddenly that they just love trawling. If
• 1:36:18
  Speaker 4: you make money from it, or your parent company makes
• 1:36:21
  Speaker 4: money from it, or a family member does, then you'll
• 1:36:23
  Speaker 4: see people that'll defend it and say, well it's an
• 1:36:25
  Speaker 4: economic engine. Maybe this isn't right, but nobody just converts.
• 1:36:29
  Speaker 2: So would you ever do a debate?
• 1:36:31
  Speaker 3: I don't know.
• 1:36:32
  Speaker 4: The interesting thing to me is that I don't really
• 1:36:36
  Speaker 4: see it as a debatable issue. You know, there's this
• 1:36:40
  Speaker 4: ethical component of this that's pretty hard to get around.
• 1:36:44
  Speaker 4: So you know, we could say you're going to debate
• 1:36:48
  Speaker 4: whether hunting is ethical or not, and I know what
• 1:36:51
  Speaker 4: your stance is going to be. And sure, if there's
• 1:36:53
  Speaker 4: somebody from PETO, we know what their stance is going
• 1:36:55
  Speaker 4: to be. And you guys could debate and they throw
• 1:36:57
  Speaker 4: out a thousand facts, and you throw out a thousand facts, understand,
• 1:37:00
  Speaker 4: and the people listening wouldn't get anything out of it.
• 1:37:03
  Speaker 1: Yeah, So that they would talk about if I was
• 1:37:06
  Speaker 1: debating some of Pete, they would talk about a set
• 1:37:09
  Speaker 1: of concerns that that I'm not concerns about.
• 1:37:13
  Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, yeah, and so. And it's also that you know,
• 1:37:17
  Speaker 4: I do this. It's not fun anymore, but it was
• 1:37:21
  Speaker 4: an important issue to me to take on personally, and
• 1:37:26
  Speaker 4: so I do it on my own time, on my
• 1:37:28
  Speaker 4: own dollar.
• 1:37:29
  Speaker 2: You know.
• 1:37:30
  Speaker 4: But if you get up against like these multi billion
• 1:37:33
  Speaker 4: dollar corporations, they have been tired teams of lawyer, They
• 1:37:37
  Speaker 4: hire a lot of the fisheries regulatory people, they hire
• 1:37:39
  Speaker 4: a lot of the lasket Department of Fishing. Game gets
• 1:37:42
  Speaker 4: hired into their essentially lobbying wing. So if you go
• 1:37:45
  Speaker 4: and talk to somebody about it, it's not like you
• 1:37:47
  Speaker 4: and I talking about something we don't know. Once I's
• 1:37:50
  Speaker 4: got essentially a team of lawyers and all this data
• 1:37:53
  Speaker 4: set on the back, and it's me saying, but it's
• 1:37:55
  Speaker 4: still not ethical, you know, it's still not ethical. So
• 1:37:58
  Speaker 4: it's interesting in that way, and I think we're going
• 1:38:00
  Speaker 4: to see it come up in like these Alaska governor debates.
• 1:38:03
  Speaker 4: I think there's a couple candidates there out of this
• 1:38:06
  Speaker 4: nineteen that have started to do like some kind of
• 1:38:08
  Speaker 4: pro troll commercials. So I think we're going to see
• 1:38:10
  Speaker 4: it come up in like these political debates there.
• 1:38:13
  Speaker 2: Why wouldn't that be interesting?
• 1:38:15
  Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, I will be.
• 1:38:17
  Speaker 4: There was one Dave Bronson's one of the guys running
• 1:38:20
  Speaker 4: for governor up there, and he said he was digging
• 1:38:22
  Speaker 4: around this. It's NBFMC, this Federal Fisheries Council that regulates it,
• 1:38:27
  Speaker 4: and one of the guys there told him anonymously that
• 1:38:30
  Speaker 4: he said, if they ever tried to regulate pollock as
• 1:38:33
  Speaker 4: a forage fisher, if somebody from that regulatory agency brought
• 1:38:36
  Speaker 4: that up, that they would lose their job or essentially
• 1:38:38
  Speaker 4: be eliminated from that process because that's such a threat
• 1:38:41
  Speaker 4: for them to have to consider that. Hey, there's other
• 1:38:43
  Speaker 4: stuff that he's pollock too, So there's a lot going
• 1:38:47
  Speaker 4: on in the background.
• 1:38:47
  Speaker 2: Well, I'll be watching, man, I'd be curious.
• 1:38:49
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it's been it's a it's an interesting debate, and
• 1:38:56
  Speaker 1: I think that, like I'm interested in it's a fishery
• 1:39:00
  Speaker 1: that I'm exposed to it's a fishery that I love.
• 1:39:02
  Speaker 1: A lot of people that I'm very close to are involved,
• 1:39:05
  Speaker 1: and you know, built their lives around those fish, So
• 1:39:08
  Speaker 1: I care about that. I'm also interested in it from
• 1:39:11
  Speaker 1: when I made that point about when it comes to
• 1:39:13
  Speaker 1: wildlife resources and we have shrinking pie or in some
• 1:39:18
  Speaker 1: cases expanding pies, and what those wedges look like, and
• 1:39:23
  Speaker 1: who gets those wedges, and that understanding how those that
• 1:39:28
  Speaker 1: plays out, whether it's you know, understanding how that plays out,
• 1:39:33
  Speaker 1: whether it's like Bobcats in Nevada, you know, Sam Bardier
• 1:39:39
  Speaker 1: off an Island in Florida, fish up in Alaska, whatever, like,
• 1:39:43
  Speaker 1: that question will always be relevant. And I think that,
• 1:39:46
  Speaker 1: you know, I would like listeners to just pay attention
• 1:39:49
  Speaker 1: to how it goes, how it goes in other places,
• 1:39:52
  Speaker 1: what the debates look like, because eventually this kind of
• 1:39:55
  Speaker 1: conversation is gonna this is this kind of conversation is
• 1:39:58
  Speaker 1: coming to you something you know, and.
• 1:40:01
  Speaker 4: I think that's so that's been a big, like near
• 1:40:04
  Speaker 4: and dear issue to me, is that now there's this
• 1:40:07
  Speaker 4: accusation that this is like a big green movement in
• 1:40:10
  Speaker 4: Alaska or people from the outside want to come and
• 1:40:12
  Speaker 4: force their conservation a reels onto us, and I've so
• 1:40:16
  Speaker 4: we've had that Facebook group about six years. I'm the
• 1:40:18
  Speaker 4: main person that posts on there, and I've had probably
• 1:40:21
  Speaker 4: hundreds of messages or seen comments of people that say, hey,
• 1:40:24
  Speaker 4: we have to get going to make more enemies. We
• 1:40:27
  Speaker 4: have to get green Peace in here, we have to
• 1:40:29
  Speaker 4: get Peta in here, Sea Shepherd or whatever it may be.
• 1:40:33
  Speaker 4: And I say, oh my god, no, like, we don't.
• 1:40:35
  Speaker 4: That's not how we want conservation to go. We're fishermen ourselves.
• 1:40:39
  Speaker 4: We run this big risk of if this becomes too
• 1:40:41
  Speaker 4: much of a headline issue and troll feeds off of
• 1:40:44
  Speaker 4: this as it messages Alaskans, they run this fear factor
• 1:40:48
  Speaker 4: deal of hey, we're going to get these guys in
• 1:40:50
  Speaker 4: here that think fishing is unethical completely and they're going
• 1:40:53
  Speaker 4: to shut it all down for you guys. But that
• 1:40:56
  Speaker 4: is really not the vibe. You know, Mike, to be glad.
• 1:40:59
  Speaker 1: I'm glad that you're in instinct because a lot of
• 1:41:01
  Speaker 1: people will be like a lot of people will take
• 1:41:03
  Speaker 1: whatever kind of partner they can find in something, and
• 1:41:07
  Speaker 1: and and it can it'll come around and bite. And
• 1:41:09
  Speaker 1: you ask, like we've been covering this situation on Catalina
• 1:41:12
  Speaker 1: Island with them wanting to eradicated on Catalina Island, and
• 1:41:15
  Speaker 1: you see like like, uh, you know, maybe some hunter
• 1:41:19
  Speaker 1: group being like, hey, we're kind of on the same
• 1:41:22
  Speaker 1: opinion with Humane Society about this.
• 1:41:23
  Speaker 2: You know, that's partner up.
• 1:41:25
  Speaker 1: I'm like, dude, those guys will cut your throw first
• 1:41:27
  Speaker 1: chance they get. Man, for sure, watch out for those hosers.
• 1:41:32
  Speaker 1: All right, Well, man, I appreciate you coming on the
• 1:41:34
  Speaker 1: show and talking about it. I'm sure we'll talk about
• 1:41:36
  Speaker 1: it more. I'm not gonna invite you down to do
• 1:41:38
  Speaker 1: a debate because I think you're probably right. It probably
• 1:41:40
  Speaker 1: won't be too productive, but we'll see.
• 1:41:42
  Speaker 3: Man Like if oh, you'll get some letters, well no, and.
• 1:41:45
  Speaker 2: I might talk to somebody about it. Would have to depend.
• 1:41:48
  Speaker 2: I'd have to kind of see what they had at stake,
• 1:41:50
  Speaker 2: you know.
• 1:41:51
  Speaker 1: I'm a little bit want to know, like what what
• 1:41:53
  Speaker 1: what what they felt was threatened, how personal it was,
• 1:41:59
  Speaker 1: you know.
• 1:41:59
  Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean so, I think the question to ask
• 1:42:02
  Speaker 4: the other side is like, you know, with the midwater
• 1:42:06
  Speaker 4: nets on bottom, they say, hey, if we're not allowed
• 1:42:08
  Speaker 4: to fish for pollock on the bottom with these midwater nets,
• 1:42:12
  Speaker 4: we'll go out of business. But does that really make
• 1:42:15
  Speaker 4: sense to somebody to say that, you know? Or they say, hey,
• 1:42:18
  Speaker 4: if these pollock were regulated as a bait fish because
• 1:42:21
  Speaker 4: everything eats them, then that could put us out of business.
• 1:42:24
  Speaker 4: And I think they need to be pushed on that
• 1:42:25
  Speaker 4: of is that because you're getting paid, you know, millions
• 1:42:28
  Speaker 4: of billions dollars.
• 1:42:29
  Speaker 3: To catch these fish?
• 1:42:30
  Speaker 4: Or is that because that's common sense and good conservation?
• 1:42:33
  Speaker 4: And for me, it's when they exclude that to even
• 1:42:37
  Speaker 4: say that, hey, we're going to get fired from this
• 1:42:39
  Speaker 4: fisheries regulation process if we even bring up the idea
• 1:42:43
  Speaker 4: that pollock should be regulated as a forage fish is
• 1:42:46
  Speaker 4: essentially corruption, you know, or it's not. It doesn't follow
• 1:42:49
  Speaker 4: the intent of good governance that we all depend on
• 1:42:52
  Speaker 4: and we live by, you know, so understood as that
• 1:42:55
  Speaker 4: starts to fall apart, it has ramifications for wildlife everywhere.
• 1:43:00
  Speaker 1: All right, man, David Bays he uh can be frequently
• 1:43:06
  Speaker 1: found at the Stop Alaskan Trawler by Catch Facebook group.
• 1:43:13
  Speaker 2: You can frequently be found fish in Halibitt, out of
• 1:43:15
  Speaker 2: home or Alaska.
• 1:43:16
  Speaker 1: You should come up there then we fish south there,
• 1:43:19
  Speaker 1: I should though, That's what the big one.
• 1:43:22
  Speaker 2: All right, Thanks for coming on many thanks Lon,