Well, take the show with a grain of salt since "Deadliest Catch" is television, and with that automatically comes that it's overdramatized and not fully representative of the day-to-day. My experiences were pretty ordinary--you get so into the 24/7 routine that the men literally lose track of the days. I only could tell them because I had to daily fill out forms about my data, and they always were dated. Otherwise, hell, I'd have had no clue either.
The fish numbers up there are excellent. Serious commercial fishing in the Bering Sea is only about 20 to 30 years old, so it's never really been off the radar for environmental consciousness. After the irreversible disaster in the Atlantic that the North American and European nations had caused, the US basically said, "Won't happen up in Alaska" when they set up quotas and such.
Quotas are deliberately small compared to the amount of fish out there, and all the boats carry observers like me at least at some point (small boats 1/3 of the time, big ones always) to collect the data to assess the health of the fish stocks and manage the quota for coming years.
It's one of the most productive fisheries in the world. To give you some idea, by far the largest fishery there is that of walleye pollock. One pollock factory boat can haul a net of 100 metric tons of fish probably twice or three times a day. Multiply that by the 20 pollock factory boats that are licensed in the Bering Sea, working 7 days a week, for seven to eight months of the year. Juggle that math around a bit, and then keep in mind that's just scratching the surface of the total pollock out there.
So yes, there're huge stocks, and to protect that, it's deliberately one of the best and most tightly managed fisheries out there. It's always in change to improve more as well. For example, next year's A-season (Jan to April), new and stricter regulations come into play for the sole and flounder trawl fleet as to requiring them to keep and utilize a greater percent of their incidental bycatch fish to reduce the waste.
I read a book by a British journalist called "End of the Line" and was pretty appalled by the lousy management of so many other fisheries, or the fact that some British fishermen are still illegally fishing the Atlantic cod and just saying they don't give a fuck that the species is nearly extinct.
Europe is still increasing quotas of overfished stocks, not to mention that with their native waters depleted, they've moved on to exploiting Africa's coastal waters for their fish for pennies on the dollar payment to the native government in a horrible kind of neo-colonialism--and of course that's another enviromental disaster waiting to happen besides.
So as I constantly hear how bad we supposedly are in environmentalism, fisheries is one area where I am proud to say that America is far, far ahead of Europe.
OK, getting off my soapbox now!
As for whales, while I was up there I saw orcas, bowheads, a fin whale, and a humpback. There're many others too. I also got to see various kinds of seals and sea lions when we were fishing up in the Arctic ice pack edge, which was pretty cool.
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dancing_serpent
(no subject)
Date: 2007-04-19 03:05 pm (UTC)The fish numbers up there are excellent. Serious commercial fishing in the Bering Sea is only about 20 to 30 years old, so it's never really been off the radar for environmental consciousness. After the irreversible disaster in the Atlantic that the North American and European nations had caused, the US basically said, "Won't happen up in Alaska" when they set up quotas and such.
Quotas are deliberately small compared to the amount of fish out there, and all the boats carry observers like me at least at some point (small boats 1/3 of the time, big ones always) to collect the data to assess the health of the fish stocks and manage the quota for coming years.
It's one of the most productive fisheries in the world. To give you some idea, by far the largest fishery there is that of walleye pollock. One pollock factory boat can haul a net of 100 metric tons of fish probably twice or three times a day. Multiply that by the 20 pollock factory boats that are licensed in the Bering Sea, working 7 days a week, for seven to eight months of the year. Juggle that math around a bit, and then keep in mind that's just scratching the surface of the total pollock out there.
So yes, there're huge stocks, and to protect that, it's deliberately one of the best and most tightly managed fisheries out there. It's always in change to improve more as well. For example, next year's A-season (Jan to April), new and stricter regulations come into play for the sole and flounder trawl fleet as to requiring them to keep and utilize a greater percent of their incidental bycatch fish to reduce the waste.
I read a book by a British journalist called "End of the Line" and was pretty appalled by the lousy management of so many other fisheries, or the fact that some British fishermen are still illegally fishing the Atlantic cod and just saying they don't give a fuck that the species is nearly extinct.
Europe is still increasing quotas of overfished stocks, not to mention that with their native waters depleted, they've moved on to exploiting Africa's coastal waters for their fish for pennies on the dollar payment to the native government in a horrible kind of neo-colonialism--and of course that's another enviromental disaster waiting to happen besides.
So as I constantly hear how bad we supposedly are in environmentalism, fisheries is one area where I am proud to say that America is far, far ahead of Europe.
OK, getting off my soapbox now!
As for whales, while I was up there I saw orcas, bowheads, a fin whale, and a humpback. There're many others too. I also got to see various kinds of seals and sea lions when we were fishing up in the Arctic ice pack edge, which was pretty cool.