Alaska Dude Fishing

Greetings Fishies!

As you know the F/V Aleutian Ballad is being converted into a passenger vessel in order to give you the experience of commercial fishing.

Now you can:

Experience Bristol Bay!
The world's last great wild salmon fishery.
Commercial fishing adventure on the coast of Alaska's Bering Sea!

For more information:
Alaska Dude Fishing on Nushagak Bay with AlaskanWild

Stay tuned!
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AIR STATION SITKA RESCUES THREE

Greetings Fishies!

Here is a press release from the Coast Guard Air Station Sitka:

JUNEAU, Alaska - A Coast Guard helicopter from Sitka rescued three people from the trawling vessel Sea Bear at 11:44 a.m. Thursday.

After running aground in the vicinity of Klag Bay, the crew of the Sea Bear launched their skiff and made it to a nearby shore.

After arriving on scene the Coast Guard HH60 helicopter transported the captain and crew of Sea Bear safely to Sitka.

This is actually a troller, not a trawler. Many will mistake the two terms as they can sound the same when spoken.

Stay tuned!

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Congress looks at fishing deaths

Hello Fishies!

The following is a portion of Wesley Loy’s blog The Highliner, with additional links. Loy writes for the Anchorage Daily News and is usually the first to get fishing industry information and get it right:

Fishing for a living can get you killed.

Congress, the industry, the U.S. Coast Guard and many others have worked for decades to improve safety, and they’ve made a lot of progress. But the work continues.

The House Subcommittee on Coast Guard and Maritime Transportation is holding a hearing on commercial fishing vessel safety beginning at 10 a.m. Wednesday in Washington, D.C. Here’s an agenda.

The industry has seen a string of tragedies in recent months, including the capsizing of the sablefish longliner Ocean Challenger off Sand Point last October, killing three of four crewmen. read more »

Note the comments in that section.

Stay tuned!

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As real as it gets

Hello Fishies!

Last night’s episode of Deadliest Catch finally managed to capture just how dangerous commercial fishing can be.

Equipment failure and operator error can occur on the best kept boats with the most experienced of crews. As you have seen over the years, almost no boat escapes some sort of breakdown. A broken propeller fluke such as that on the Cornelia Marie happens with more frequency than you might expect. Usually it is because the boat runs over something, such as a log, floating just below the water’s surface.

The rescue of the crewman from the Trail Blazer was as real as it gets. The raw terror amongst the men of the Time Bandit as they desperately sought to retrieve Josh from the water was not an act. I do not know if there is footage of the actual rescue itself, if there is I hope that it is shown. It appeared that Russ got into a Mustang immersion suit (Ocean Commander Immersion Suit with Harness :: Mustang Survival) and harness; this would enable him to be sent over the side and help the drowning man. If that is what happened, that is a brave and heroic deed, one that not many would even consider let alone try.

While this in no way demeans the valiant actions of the Time Bandit crew, this rescue did not happen in the middle of the crab season as the producers of the show would lead you to believe. These boats were in fact finished fishing and heading for home.

The name of the boat that the crewman fell from is the F/V Trail Blazer. It is a good boat, and its owners have a long and successful history with many stories to tell. Did you notice that the name of the boat was blurred out? I wonder why that was....but then again, maybe not!

Stay tuned!

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FISHING BOAT CAPSIZES NEAR LA PUSH, WASH.

Hello Fishies!

Coast Guard press release:

SEATTLE - A 63-foot fishing vessel with three people aboard capsized Saturday near La Push, Wash.

At 2:14 p.m., the crew of the fishing vessel Lady Cecilia contacted the Coast Guard to report that the Miss Mary capsized 24 miles west of Cape Johnson.

Minutes later, an HH-65 Dolphin helicopter crew from Air Station Port Angeles, Wash., and a 47-foot motor lifeboat crew from Station Quillayute River were launched to assist.

After the master of the Lady Cecilia reported that his crew had rescued the crew of the Miss Mary, the Coast Guard helicopter and motor lifeboat were diverted to respond to a separate case involving a vessel taking on water.

The Lady Cecilia reported that the three crewmen were uninjured and later transported them safely to shore.

The capsized vessel is believed to have sunk sometime Saturday night approximately 22 miles off the coast, leaving a sheen 50 yards wide and two miles long in a location inside the boundary of the Olympic Coast National Marine Sanctuary.

The Miss Mary has the potential to hold 1,500 gallons of diesel fuel.

The Coast Guard and the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration are continuing to monitor the site.

The cause of the incident is under investigation.

Stay tuned!

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NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC SPECIAL REALLY STINKS

Hello Fishies!

That is the banner across the cover of this month’s Pacific Fishing Magazine. The page six article in their Department of Televised Abominations is titled: Television’s Bristol Bay special stinks (Or, you can take the cow out of the cowboy, but never the boy).

Quotes from a fisherman by the name of Fritz Johnson make up the bulk of the article. In it he states: “A better title of the show should have been Ass***** of the Sea. If the producers’ intent was to highlight the worst aspects of the 19^th century commercial fishery, they succeeded.”

The editors of the magazine go on to agree with Johnson and describe it so: A few dozen boats play bump-and-grind while crowding the Naknek river line. Instead of skill, these skippers rely on intimidation and blunt instruments (their boats) to set as close to the line as possible, without drifting over it.

All you need, according to National Geographic, is a big boat and a loud voice.

The writer is upset that you were not shown things such as setting at the right time in the right place, carefully calculating wind, tide and time. Johnson says “They ignored the universe of issues surrounding sustainability, the environment, and Alaskan fishing cultures in favor of a myopic, egomaniacal, and greed-driven view of the industry.”

I both agree and respectfully disagree. What NG showed you was, in fact, what goes on not only out on the line, but all the way up and down the river. NG focused on the most dramatic portions that they could as we all know that is what sells.

Been there, seen that.

Stay tuned!

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Crabber Blames Rationalization for Near-Tragedy

Hello Fishies!

From this month's Pacific Fishing Magazine:

KODIAK -- Longtime Kodiak fisherman Bill Prout blames individual processor quotas (IPQ) for a recent near-disaster when his boat, the Nordic Viking, along with four other boats, became stuck in tightly packed ice March 28 for 14 hours near St. Paul in the Pribilofs. [more...]

Stay tuned!

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Whoa!

Greetings Fishies!

I finally got a response from Blake's family and permission to post this from the family website:

Season Two - King crab filmed October 2006, aired April 2006

I don't necessarily blame Discovery Channel for the editing that was done on this series. That finger I point at Original Productions. Why they chose to present the story line they did is beyond me, perhaps they felt they needed a human piñata in order to help with the ratings. As you will see, they knew the truth. Maybe they need to preface the show with something like "dramatized for effect".

First let me ask you one question. How did you react when you had the biggest disappointment in your life handed to you?

Contrary to public opinion thanks to some very creative editing, Blake did not leave. He was upset, he swallowed it and he went on back to work. Despite being denied what he had been promised, he remained on the Maverick and completed the season. Justin threatened to leave the boat if Blake was made captain. What many do not know is that would have left the boat short handed with no way to replace the crewman. Blake could have done that, I think that there are some who would have. He could have got off in St Paul and left the Maverick high and dry, but what would that have accomplished? Instead he acted like a man and he stayed and finished the season.

Justin was the only one on board that did not want Blake in the captains seat. Blake has been running boats since he was 18, he is now 27. As far as we know, no one has ever refused to go to sea with him.

Now about that Opilio season and the real reason Blake was not there.

Blake's father was diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer in 2005. He endured a 6 hour surgery and a very long and difficult recovery. Blake was running the Maverick for herring tendering at that time, but he flew down to run the Evening Star for black cod and halibut for us.

It was during the king crab season that Jeff had to have a second surgery. That left him totally unable to run our dungeness crab operation and Blake committed to handling it for us. Dungie season traditionally begins Dec. 1, and runs for several months. The states did not allow it to open as the crab had not filled out their shells from the earlier molt. In fact, the season did not open until mid-January, six weeks late.

The opilio season was in full swing at that time and with the new ratz rules, the Maverick had to catch and deliver by a certain date. The intention was to have Blake up to Alaska by that time, but due to the delay in the dungeness season, that was not possible and Rick fished the boat.

**********

My God, just how callous are these pukes?

They said they will have an update to their site soon and you can find that at:

F/V Evening Star

Stay tuned

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Can you say LAWSUIT?

Hello Fishies!

What a fiasco! And reading the message boards makes it clear that many were sucked into the drama and completely fooled.

The license that is being taken with this show seems to know no bounds. One shot shows some weather with Rowe’s voice over declaring it ever so dangerous, while the next shows crews working the deck in tee-shirts. Huh?

Some of the boats are pulling nothing but blanks and yet they are moving up the crab count board. Huh?

And that whole edited radio crab/revenge piece. What a load of hooey. I was amazed that they showed the CM removing about a thousand bucks worth of crab from another fisherman’s pot. Uh fishies, that is a crime.

People sure turned into a pack of jackals over the whole thing. Is it believing what they want to believe or what they think they saw? Even when Captain Blake posted this to the forums people still chose not to believe him:

this is blake painter. i think everyone should know

how much B.S. there is on this show. you all should

pay close attention to the edditing done in order for

original productions to achieve the desired drama

(even at the cost of peoples career's)the so desire

for ratings!the drama with phil and i tonight was a

collection of 20days worth of footage,strategically

spliced together to get what they wanted!if you pay

attention you can see one side of the conversation is

in the dark and on a telephone,where as i am on a

radio and in the daylight.not to mention the radio on

channel 9 is a hailing channel!im fed up with the b.s.

of the whole show, i dont understand why straight

forward footage of us fishing isnt enuf . the last 2

seasons have become a soap opera!you wont be seeing

the maverick on season 4 if there is one!but thank you

to all of you who have possitive feed back. Blake

To me the editing was so poorly done; I can not believe anyone actually fell for it. Phil is talking to some one on a phone, hangs up the handset, and next shot he is talking on it again. Blake is talking on a radio and yes Channel 9 is a hailing channel. You have daylight and nighttime going on in the same conversation and the usual clothing issues we all have noticed in the past.

No one should have to defend themselves when they have been wronged. The damage that was done last year when his dad had cancer was bad enough, but this adds insult to injury. I hope he sues the ever lovin’ crap out of ‘em.

Stay tuned!

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DOJ Advice

Hello Fishies!

I have brought you information regarding processor quotas and the arbitration system. These items are in place and functioning poorly. Below you will find that NOAA asked for and recieved an analysis from the Department of Justice about these items.

The DOJ advised against it and they did it anyway!

STATEMENT OF J. BRUCE MCDONALD
DEPUTY ASSISTANT ATTORNEY GENERAL
ANTITRUST DIVISION

Before the

COMMITTEE ON COMMERCE, SCIENCE, AND TRANSPORTATION

UNITED STATES SENATE

CONCERNING

THE ECONOMIC IMPLICATIONS OF SEAFOOD PROCESSOR QUOTAS

PRESENTED ON FEBRUARY 25, 2004

Mr. Chairman and Members of the Committee, I am pleased to be here on behalf of the Antitrust Division to discuss our comments on the Alaska crab rationalization plan developed by North Pacific Fishery Management Council.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) asked the Antitrust Division last year to comment on the crab rationalization program that had been proposed by the Council. In particular, NOAA asked us to comment on the likely effects on competition of the rationalization plan and to identify antitrust issues associated with the plan's price arbitration system.

To prepare a response to NOAA, we reviewed the rationalization plan, interviewed industry participants, and examined economic research on rationalization programs. In a letter of August 27, 2003, we discussed the conclusions we were able to draw on the competitive effects of the proposed plan, which I will summarize here.

Individual Fishing Quotas

Annual limits or quotas are an important part of sound fishery management and conservation. Given the need for an annual quota, in our letter we recommended that NOAA support replacing the current fishery-wide quota system, which generates a dangerous and wasteful "race to fish" as soon as the season opens, with Individual Fishing Quotas, or IFQ. IFQ would be more efficient than the current industry-wide quota, and would be an effective way to eliminate the race to fish.

Under the IFQ system, crab harvesters with IFQ could catch their quota at any time during the legal season, replacing the rush beginning on opening day as each harvester hurries to bring in as many crabs as possible before the window closes, which is the primary problem of the current system. Under the IFQ system, harvesters would not need the excessive investment in equipment, boats, and crew needed in a race to fish; more importantly, IFQ would allow harvesters to proceed without the dangerous rush that today's system encourages.

We stated that while auctioning the initial IFQ might further improve economic efficiency, the Council's proposal to give the IFQ to established harvesters as compensation for overcapacity was also an acceptable approach, as long as the IFQ were easily transferable. We emphasized that making the IFQ easily transferable was important for maximizing healthy competitive incentives for harvesters.

Individual Processor Quotas

We recommended that NOAA oppose the individual processor quotas, or IPQ, element of the Council's proposed program. Processor quotas would impose new regulatory requirements that produce anticompetitive results in the processing market.

Proponents of IPQ expressed two arguments in favor of IPQ. First, they say that processors and harvesters should be treated equally; if the new program is to compensate harvesters for past overcapitalization, it should compensate processors, too. Moreover, they were concerned that processors with excess capacity would, in an attempt to fill that capacity, bid more for crabs; this would shift the historic division of rents toward harvesters to the detriment of processors. Second, they were concerned that without IPQ, processors that are less competitive would fare poorly in the market; this, in turn, could harm local economies that depend on crab processing.

We appreciate the concerns that motivated the Council to propose IPQ. We acknowledged in our letter that eliminating the race to fish should eliminate processors' need for the excess investment in equipment that has been necessary to hurriedly process a crab harvest that harvesters delivered over a very short season. We proposed that, if the Council concluded it was desirable that processors be compensated for their past overinvestment, this could be addressed more directly and efficiently, rather than constructing an artificial marketplace in which competition is inhibited. We predicted that the effect on price that processors were concerned about would be temporary, that once excess capacity was curtailed for both harvesting and processing, prices would move back to more competitive levels.

We explained that IPQ would eliminate beneficial competition between processors and inhibit product innovation and efficient use of resources. If a processor were entitled to a fixed share of the harvest, then the processor would have less incentive to invest in new equipment or otherwise work to cut costs or improve quality, as those efforts would not be rewarded with greater market share. Moreover, we noted, IPQ were not needed to address the overcapitalization and safety concerns that would be addressed by replacing the fishery-wide quota with IFQ. Finally, we were concerned that the Council's plan limited transferability of IPQ out of any community, which would only prolong the inefficiencies resulting from IPQ.

In short, any quota system distorts the operation of a free market. Although a harvest quota of some sort is necessary for stock management, IFQ is better than the current system because it directly improves safety as well as eliminating incentives to overinvest in harvesting and processing capacity. Adding IPQ further distorts the market's operation, and introduces competitive harm, without offering similar kinds of competitive benefits.

Binding Arbitration

The third element of the Council's proposed program, binding arbitration, was evidently designed to prevent a new quota system from shifting the historic division of rents between harvesters and processors that has developed under the current quota system. The Council proposed a binding arbitration system for harvesters and processors who could not agree on price in independent negotiations. This process would begin before the fishing season with the announcement by a jointly-selected arbitrator of a non-binding benchmark price, based on information provided by all participants to the arbitrator, to be used for guidance in negotiations and later arbitrations. Then, any harvester who has been unable to negotiate a contract with a processor could initiate a binding arbitration with any processor to which the harvester was willing to sell and who had remaining capacity under its quota.

The Antitrust Division recommended that NOAA oppose the arbitration proposal as a poor substitute for competitive pricing. In addition, as NOAA requested, we described the possible antitrust violations that could result — but would not necessarily result — from conduct by arbitration participants and from the information sharing that was contemplated by the arbitration program.

First, we cautioned that any agreement among processors with respect to price could be viewed as a per se violation of section 1 of the Sherman Act. We read the Council's proposal as envisioning that each processor would make its own independent decisions about its use of arbitration: whether to use the benchmark price as a starting point for negotiations, whether to put harvesters to arbitration before forming a contract. Each binding arbitration would involve only one processor and would determine only that processor's prices. We stated that it would be critical for processors to act independently, and not coordinate with other processors, to avoid potential antitrust liability for collusion.

We noted that because of the Fishermen's Collective Marketing Act, these restrictions would not apply to harvesters as long as they were acting through a cooperative. Harvesters in cooperatives may bargain jointly and may agree on the basis for negotiations without risking antitrust liability. We cautioned, however, that an FCMA cooperative could not act jointly with non-FCMA cooperative harvesters, and that the courts had never addressed whether an integrated harvester/processor could be eligible for FCMA immunity.

Second, we cautioned that sharing information in conjunction with arbitration, including information from other arbitrations, could violate the antitrust laws. An agreement among competitors to share information regarding price and output, even through the conduit of an arbitrator, can have the effect of dampening competition, and if so can be illegal under the Sherman Act even in the absence of a direct agreement on price. Although harvesters participating in an FCMA cooperative could share such information within their cooperative, they too would risk antitrust liability if they shared such information outside the cooperative.

Other Issues

In our analysis, we did not evaluate factors outside our legal authority and expertise in antitrust and competition policy, such as the goals of protecting jobs in historic fishing villages or balancing the regulatory effects evenly among harvesters and processors. We certainly recognize that these are legitimate issues for policymakers, but they are beyond the purview of the Antitrust Division.

Stay tuned!

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