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Sea change: deal saves California fishing industry; Storm clouds over California’s fishing industry are lifting after conservationists struck a unique deal with trawlermen, offering to preserve their dwindling livelihoods on the condition that they swap their destructive dragnets for lines and hooks

Posted by: Maven on June 5, 2009 at 2:56 pm

From the Telegraph.uk:

Roger Cullen is tired but happy. He has just unloaded 1,500lb of black cod on the dock at Morro Bay after a long night in an open boat. When he left port and steamed north up towards Big Sur, the sea along the rocky central California coast was glassy calm, the sun was beating down and weekenders were out driving convertibles, camper vans and riding customised Harleys along the spectacular coast road, Highway 1, stopping occasionally to point their cameras at formations of low-flying pelicans and elephant seals moulting on the beach at San Simeon.

But when California’s Central Valley heats up, cold air from the ocean is sucked towards the land. The fog comes off the Pacific and stretches its fingers into the parched valleys of the central California coast. A brisk westerly got up as well as the fog, and Cullen and his crew of baiter and boy found themselves in horrible weather. After 24 hours of rolling about in a confused sea on the deck of their 30ft boat, Dorado, they are delighted to be back in home port – though its distinctive rock and three-stack gas-fired power station are still almost invisible in the enveloping mist. Keen to get home and sleep, they unload in 15 minutes.

Tired as he is, though, Cullen still wants to tell us about the fishing because it was really good. His catch – from baited lines with 1,200 hooks dropped into 1,800ft of water 15 miles off the beach – will gross $3,300. But he caught more than he bargained for: when he winched up the lines he found he had not only too many black cod but also a by-catch of thornyheads, all of which the rules say must be released alive. Unhooking fish and returning them drained more energy out of the two men and the boy. Cullen is still in good humour, though. ‘It’s nice to have a day like that. There’s such abundant resources out there that it amazes me.’

It wasn’t always so. Like so many other fisheries in the world, the United States’ west coast has been through a bad patch. Poor management and overfishing means incomes are down $60 million a year from their peak in the 1980s. Unlike many collapsed fisheries in the world, though, west coast stocks have begun to come back. Partly this is the result of US federal law, which imposes science-based catch limits and closures to protect fish habitat – unlike the EU’s Common Fisheries Policy, which pays scant regard to scientific advice and for which protecting fish habitat is so far an alien concept. Partly, around Morro Bay, halfway between San Francisco and Los Angeles, the recovery is the result of a further initiative: a partnership between fishermen and the world’s largest private conservation group, the Nature Conservancy.

Read more from the Telegraph.uk by clicking here.

June 5, 2009 · Filed Under Oceans & Beaches

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