Ep. 864: Is Trawling Destroying Alaska's Fisheries?

Steven Rinella https://www.instagram.com/stevenrinella/?hl=en talks with David Bayes https://www.facebook.com/groups/181111123119023/. Topics discussed: The Stop Alaska Trawler Bycatch group https://www.facebook.com/groups/181111123119023/; the incomprehensible size of trawling nets; pulling up a quarter of a million pounds of fish with one trawl net sweep; a floating factory; the impact of bottom trawling and how many countries have banned it; what you're really not supposed to be catching; as good as dead if caught in a trawl net; different regs between the Bering Sea and the Gulf of Alaska; population impacts on pollock, salmon, and many other species; the huge concern of the seafloor being destroyed and lost; and more. Connect with Steve https://www.themeateater.com/authors/steven-rinella and The MeatEater Podcast Network https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork Steve on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/stevenrinella and Twitter https://twitter.com/stevenrinella?lang=en MeatEater on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/meateater, Facebook https://www.facebook.com/StevenRinellaMeatEater/, Twitter https://twitter.com/MeatEaterTV?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor, and YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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• 3:08Steven Rinella?

  All right, everybody, we got a hot one today coming out of Alaska. Real controversial issue, it turns out. We're going to talk about trawling. Okay, we're going to talk about fisheries, fisheries management, habitat issues, all leading out of a lot of conversations that people have been hearing about, having about declining king salmon numbers, declining halibut numbers. Guys, if you go up to fish, sport fishing in Alaska, you dream of going up to fish halibut and salmon in Alaska. This is an issue you got to pay attention to. Where this conversation came out of is on the news show, we recently covered this, I don't want to call it an emerging controversy around trawling and impacts to fisheries and

• 3:51Steven Rinella?

  bycatch and all these conversations. This is an age-old, this is an age-old discussion. Okay, this is an age-old discussion. It's a discussion that sort of plays along in any region where you have declining fisheries and people have to start looking at, there's like the pie, right, the fishery, who's drawing from the fishery and what is leading to fishery declines. Oftentimes in these conversations, the conversations will turn to what fisheries are having the greatest ecological impact. And those discussions take place, okay? Trawling is an age-old controversy. There's places in Alaska where you used to be able to trawl.

• 4:35Steven Rinella?

  We're going to talk about all these definitions, so don't worry. There's places in Alaska you used to be able to trawl and the fisheries been shut down, okay? On the news show, we were talking about an increased focus among fishermen on the impacts of the trawling industry in Prince William Sound.

• 4:55Steven Rinella?

  Or the Gulf of Alaska in general, okay? The Bering Sea. Uh, and whether or not this, this commercial fishery is linked to declines in salmon and halibut numbers. And we're just talking about this on the news show. All right. Talking about how it's a heated up political issue. Man, that led to a lot of feedback for a lot of listener feedback. We heard from a bunch of, uh, sport fishermen, charter captains. We heard from halibut long liners. We heard from salmon purse sayners, right? Talking about the damages of the trawling industry. And then we heard from a lot of people from the trawling industry. Talking about basically, hey, it ain't our fault.

• 5:39Steven Rinella?

  The numbers are wrong. The numbers are misleading. Um, this is all coming from outside interest. There's nothing to see here. Okay? So I thought, uh, based on the amount of conversation that our conversation generated, I wanted to dig in on this a little bit. Um, so number one guest we're having on right now is David Bayes. Okay. David Bayes is a leader of a Facebook group called Stop Alaskan Trawler Buy Catch. He is a former, um, he, he's a fishing guide in Alaska. Used to have his own charter outfit, still, still in the business.

• 6:23Steven Rinella?

  Um, he was a 2024 Sam McDowell Award winner. He's a former chair of the Alaska Charter Association and the Homer, Homer Charter Association and a former member of the Homer Area Alaska Department of Fish and Game Advisory Committee. All right. Welcome, David. Yeah, I appreciate it. Thanks for coming on, man. Yeah. So start out, uh, start out, we're going to get into all these definitions, okay? And that was a terrible intro, but we'll start the intro out.

• 7:00Steven Rinella?

  How'd you get started fishing in Alaska?

• 7:02Speaker 04

  So I was born and raised there in Homer and uh, I mean, that was what you did as a kid in the eighties.

• 7:08Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 7:09Speaker 04

  If we had people in town or just any free weekend, we grew up next to the Anchor River. You know, it was 200 yards away. You could walk down there. So that was uh, that was all I wanted to do, you know, fish on trap every second of it and we were in the right spot for it.

• 7:23Steven Rinella?

  Okay. And so you gradually got into the charter business targeting halibut?

• 7:28Speaker 04

  Yeah. So I uh, you know, I was big into fishing, uh, but when I turned 16, that was my first moment that I had a driver's license and could get myself to work essentially. So that was the first year that I uh, started into charters. And then uh, while I was in college, I bought a boat, started a business, had that about 20 years. And uh, sold that recently, but I still work for um, the new owners essentially are uh, people that have the boat. So.

• 7:53Steven Rinella?

  Okay. So you're from Homer?

• 7:55Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 7:56Steven Rinella?

  Next question, are you a billionaire?

• 7:58Speaker 04

  Not that I know of.

• 7:59Steven Rinella?

  Okay. Because uh, that's important to ask because when we brought up on the news show, when we brought up the controversy around trawling and targeting forage fish, okay? Targeting, you know, whatever billions of pounds of forage fish. The related impacts of bycatch on large game fish, halibut, salmon. Whether or not there is a relationship between, between this fishery, this industrial fishery, whether there's a relationship between that and declining numbers of halibut, declining numbers of salmon, we were assured by many people

• 8:39Steven Rinella?

  that this is being, that this narrative is being pushed by outside billionaires. Okay. So I just wanted to make sure you're not a billionaire, but you're from Homer.

• 8:51Speaker 04

  From Homer.

• 8:51Steven Rinella?

  Okay. And you started your Facebook page where?

• 8:55Speaker 04

  So I didn't actually start it. Jody Mason had started it. I'm a moderator. I do most of the posts on there. But Jody Mason is another charter operator and Homer. So, um, yeah, one of the other admins on there is the executive director of the Alaska Outdoor Council.

• 9:10Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 9:10Speaker 04

  I do charter boats. Jody does charter boats. But it came to a head because before they set charter halibut limits each year, they take trawl bycatch of halibut off the top. So when you're talking about that pie each year gets bigger and smaller with fish populations. Every fish that trawl takes out of it shrinks that pie down. And so it got to where us on charter boats taking out people with rod and reel fishing. They said, well, we're going to cut you guys back by about 30% to protect the resource, but we take 2 million pounds of halibut a year spread out across all these anglers. And at that time, trawl was dumping, you know, five, six million pounds of juvenile halibut per year. So close to a million individual fish. Um, and so then it just creates this hypocrisy of

• 9:55Speaker 04

  what do you mean? They can waste more than we catch, you know, like this. And we're being told that we're cut back for conservation. So.

• 10:01Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Let's, let's, let's, let's back way up because not way up, but you're doing great. What is a trawler? Like, like what is a trawler? What is a bottom trawler? What is a, a, a mid ocean trawler? Can you, can you lay this out?

• 10:16Speaker 04

  Yeah. So it, uh, well, to start it off, you have to think about scale of boats. So when we think about fishing boats, you know, we think of a lot of people have seen like the time band on Deadliest Catch. That's a the biggest fishing boat they can imagine. It's huge. For most of us, it's about 113 feet long. Uh, but the biggest trawler fishing in Alaska now is 376 feet long. So if you put that in a Super Bowl stadium, it would go from goalpost to goalpost and it's about six stories high. So, um, when you think of volume of of fish that a boat like that catches, they catch about a half a million pounds of fish per day. They can hold about 5 million pounds of fish in their boat.

• 10:58Speaker 04

  Um, so as we talk about trawl specifically, we're talking huge numbers, billions of pounds of catch, millions of pounds of bycatch. But, uh, the way they fish is you'll often hear them referred to as draggers as the other.

• 11:08Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, that's, that's a term I'm familiar with is draggers, but then it was.

• 11:14Steven Rinella?

  You have a little problem where, uh, you have a problem where I talked like we previewed this subject on the new show.

• 11:21Speaker 04

  Hmm hmm hmm.

• 11:22Steven Rinella?

  So then I got a lot of people and I need to be, I need to be honest here, right? I had a lot of people explain that the way I characterize some of the questions like that I mischaracterized some issues.

• 11:34Speaker 04

  Hmm hmm hmm.

• 11:35Steven Rinella?

  So I think I, like, I'm familiar with people calling them draggers, but then I was introduced to the idea that that's not, that's not the industry term.

• 11:45Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think the industry term, they don't like it because it is sensed as derogatory or there's been so many shutdowns of drag fisheries across the United States. But we actually see one good example of this. There's a industry group in Alaska that used to be, it was like the Alaska Whitefish Draggers Association.

• 12:03Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 12:04Speaker 04

  Something like that, but they changed their name to something like a cooperative, you know, where they dropped the dragger name essentially.

• 12:10Steven Rinella?

  Okay, I got it.

• 12:11Speaker 04

  Ten or fifteen years ago, but they didn't change their gear, they didn't change their boat and change their bycatch much, but they just got rid of the word dragger.

• 12:18Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, okay, so, so, so get into the gear, yeah.

• 12:21Speaker 04

  Yeah, so they pull, for not saying dragger, they pull, they drag a big, a huge net. So the biggest ones, they say you can fit, uh, four, seven, forty-seven jets plus the Eiffel Tower on its side into this net. So there again, when you and I think of fishing and fishing boats and what extraction of a natural resources, this is almost incomprehensible. They'll pull up like a quarter million pounds of fish in one sweep essentially with this net. Um, but it has, it has a chain or cable along the bottom to weight it and on those biggest ones, that's about a quarter mile wide. So if that's dragging on the bottom, then you're cutting about a quarter mile wide swath

• 13:00Steven Rinella?

  No kidding.

• 13:01Speaker 04

  Of seafloor, yeah. So they say the biggest ones will tell about six square miles of seafloor per boat per day. Um, there's probably forty of these factory trawlers fishing in Alaska, they have a long season, so if you say forty boats, six miles per day, fishing two hundred days per year. The number of square acres of seafloor potentially covered is just unimaginable astronomically. I think it's forty eight thousand square miles.

• 13:27Steven Rinella?

  They could hit six square miles.

• 13:28Speaker 04

  If you do it that way. Yeah, yeah, because they fish twenty four hours a day. It's this floating factory ship essentially.

• 13:33Steven Rinella?

  That makes my halibut jig sing. That makes it seem impotent, man.

• 13:37Speaker 04

  They do complain about, they complain about crab pots in these regulatory meetings and say, "You guys anchored here, you know, or you dropped a crab pot," and ignore that, that they're fishing this way.

• 13:48Speaker 04

  But the, anyway, so, so huge nets and they, there's kind of two divisions that they're cut into. One is the bottom trawl that will target fish that always live on the bottom. So like flounder and sole.

• 14:00Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 14:00Speaker 04

  Those are made to always be on the bottom. They kick the fish up, scare them into the net. And bottom trawl across the world has this bad name, you know, that's what's associated mostly with draggers. Entire nations have banned it. I think Bali and Hong Kong are no bottom trawl at all. There's a lot of European nations are kicking it out of their marine protected areas. Bottom trawl is a bad word. It always has been. There's really not much debate on that. People at home can Google like impact of bottom trawl and pick it up. You don't have to take my word for it. There's ten thousand results that say this is an ecological disaster.

• 14:35Steven Rinella?

  And, and that, that, on bottom trawling, just so we're understanding the gear right, like, like legitimate bottom trawling, where you're legitimately dragging.

• 14:46Steven Rinella?

  The argument is not only the fish, right, like not only a, not only a relatively indiscriminate harvest mechanism, but also bottom damage, seafloor damage.

• 15:00Speaker 04

  Correct.

• 15:00Steven Rinella?

  That's the, that, that's like, that's kind of what drives the argument against bottom trawling or dragging.

• 15:07Speaker 04

  Absolutely. And so we see, so I was saying, there's two types of trawl. So we see those bottom draggers that are always hard on bottom. They've been banned a lot of places in the world. Alaska, in fact, has, I think about sixty percent of Alaska has been closed down to bottom trawling because we acknowledge that it's this kind of ecological disaster. It kills the coral, it kills the fish on the bottom, all the habitat. But then there's this other category of trawl, which they call mid-water trawl.

• 15:34Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 15:34Speaker 04

  And so that's primarily used for the pollock fisheries up there, which is about a three billion pound extraction per year. Not a lot of people know what pollock is. It's essentially like the bait fish of the. The North Pacific and they uh that fishery actually began because they were targeting roe, which is caviar essentially um to sell to these other nations. So.

• 15:56Steven Rinella?

  They're targeting pollock roe or herring roe?

• 15:58Speaker 04

  Pollock roe.

• 15:58Steven Rinella?

  Oh, really?

• 15:59Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. So it's uh they push back hard now and say, we're feeding the world, but the origin of this fishery was for caviar essentially. And it's still a huge driver. That's they get about five pound, five dollars per pound for the pollock roe versus about 10 cents per pound for pollock flesh.

• 16:15Steven Rinella?

  Dude, that that's the okay. I I just wanted to touch on this minute because I don't want to forget to talk about this is uh. When you think about fish harvested, commercial fish, or like when you think about walking in into a fish shop.

• 16:32Steven Rinella?

  I don't care where you go buy fish. Let's say you go into, I don't know, Whole Foods or something and you go look at fish. I always I always look into those cases as a way of justifying my fishing.

• 16:43Steven Rinella?

  Cause I'm like, homie, this fish, like these fish we catch, you know, you'd be like sablefish, 20 something dollars a pound. Halibut, whatever pound, salmon, whatever pound. It makes me feel like I feel like going to my wife like.

• 16:54Speaker 04

  I was gonna say, is your wife watching this?

• 16:55Steven Rinella?

  You should, I should fish more.

• 16:57Speaker 04

  Yeah, we're making money.

• 16:58Steven Rinella?

  Um, and so you see the value of like what we think of as the fish that we serve on a plate to our family when it comes to us as a product that looks like fish. The high value of that and fishermen getting, you know, fishermen getting at the dock. We get accustomed to fishermen getting at the dock. $2 per pound, $5 per pound, $7 per pound, $10 per pound, right? So like a valuable resource. I remember having burgers and a beer with a pollock guy down in Seattle. He was based out of Seattle. And he ran one of these big pollock processor boats.

• 17:31Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 17:31Steven Rinella?

  Okay. He was the captain on one. And I remember sitting there and he's talking about, we do good. When the price goes up a couple pennies. And, and this isn't the exact number, but I'm not far off on the number. As I'm sitting there with him, ahead of him going up, he was saying like, if it like five, this isn't far off. At five cents a pound, it's a bummer. At eight cents a pound.

• 18:02Steven Rinella?

  It's good.

• 18:02Speaker 04

  It's bonanza, yeah.

• 18:03Steven Rinella?

  And I'm never thinking like, how could there be, how could there be a fish in the ocean?

• 18:10Steven Rinella?

  That is so unvaluable.

• 18:12Speaker 04

  Yeah. Well, and so that's what brings us to why they use trawlers in the first place and why we don't see trawlers or draggers everywhere is that they really shine on super low value, high volume fish, which coincidentally ends up being like a lot of the bait fish type species. That's what's super plentiful, but their case is that they could never catch enough pounds of it to make money off of it unless they were dragging it up, you know, six square miles of the seafloor per day type deal or 200,000 pounds at a time.

• 18:44Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 18:45Speaker 04

  Um, but what we've really found to be the scandal, if you will, in all of this is that, so we said that bottom trawl is bad. It's banned a lot of places. There's really not much argument about that. Even the bottom trawlers in Alaska just kind of hunker down as this conversation happens because the more people find out that it even exists up there, the more people want it banned. That's just established across the world.

• 19:08Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 19:10Speaker 04

  But kind of the, like I say, the scandal of it is that we've actually found out that the mid-water nets now are on bottom 20 to 100% of the time. But where that really, the rubber meets the road on that is that those mid-water nets are allowed to fish in these critical habitat areas where bottom trawl has been banned. So the fish regulators understand that these huge nets are on the bottom, sometimes all the time.

• 19:37Speaker 04

  But they haven't taken this next step to ban them from where bottom trawling is banned. Which is this huge disconnect.

• 19:43Steven Rinella?

  So to help me understand the mid-water thing. And, and, and I'm, I'm anything but like, um, talk to me like I'm five years old.

• 19:52Steven Rinella?

  But I'm a five-year-old who looks at Pollock schools on Fish Finders. Um, if you're in 200 feet of water and you're looking at a Pollock school. This is just, I mean, this is like very anecdotal. Okay. If I'm looking at a school of Pollock in 200 feet of water, that school of Pollock is stacked in maybe the bottom 10, 12 feet.

• 20:13Speaker 04

  Frequently, yeah.

• 20:14Steven Rinella?

  So, but, but what, like, how do you define mid ocean? Does it mean like, don't touch the bottom or does it, like, if you're in varying depths, like, wh- what is the definition of that?

• 20:25Speaker 04

  Well, so that's where it's, you're, this sounds unbelievable, but it's essentially not defined. Or they call it mid-water because they will sometimes lift the nets up off the bottom. So it's not. The fish, the difference between bottom trawl for target species like flounder and sole is that those fish always live in the mud buried in the bottom.

• 20:44Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, you're scraping them out of the mud.

• 20:46Speaker 04

  They drop that net to the bottom 100% of the time. Pollock spend a whole bunch of their time within, you know, one, two, three, four, or five feet to the bottom. But they'll also sometimes raise up.

• 20:58Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 20:59Speaker 04

  Um, and so they, uh, they have this weird deal where they say it's not illegal to drag a mid-water net on bottom. But the only reason it would be illegal or the only reason they say it was on bottom for regulatory purpose is if it pulls up 20 or more crab. It's a weird deal.

• 21:15Steven Rinella?

  Oh, okay.

• 21:16Speaker 04

  In a single drag of the net, but they say if it pulled up 19 crab, that it wasn't on the bottom. Um, and so it's this crazy regulatory concept that just doesn't really hold up.

• 21:26Steven Rinella?

  So being on bottom or not is defined by how many crabs are you catching? Because we know the crabs aren't mid-level.

• 21:34Speaker 04

  Correct.

• 21:34Steven Rinella?

  I got you.

• 21:35Speaker 04

  But they, if you start digging into their bycatch numbers, over the last five years, this Bering Sea Pollock fleet had 345 metric tons of starfish that they brought up to the deck of the boat as bycatch. Um, and they have about 40 million pounds of this flounder and sole, these fish that live hard on the bottom. And so then you start to see these conundrums. And so, um, in about 2020, 2021, there was this big crab crash. You might've seen the headlines of like 10 billion crab lost in the Bering Sea. So the same regulatory agency that- But that was related to water temperature, wasn't it? Maybe. Maybe, yeah. Okay, I don't know. Yeah, that was, that's the official standpoint. And there's water temperature change.

• 22:16Speaker 04

  But what that triggered was this Fisheries Management that regulates crab in the Bering Sea also regulates trawl. And so their crab scientists, the crab science side of it, started to look into this. And they found out that the trawlers were actually fishing in this closed to bottom trawl area of the Bering Sea, this crab nursery or crab habitat area. Okay. And that was where this document came out that, well, it was the mid-water trawl captains themselves, the pollock captains, that said, "We know our nets on bottom 20 to 100% of the time," you know, it said. "But we can't get in trouble for that because regulators knew it too. Like, this isn't new news. This is just how we fish."

• 22:57Speaker 04

  But that has set off this chain reaction, obviously, of, well, we have all these areas closed off of Alaska to protect habitat because we don't want bottom trawls there, but they're not close to mid-water trawls dragging on bottom. And so that gets super important because when we start to look at, like, essential fish habitat and how much of the seafloor has never been touched by a net, all these areas closed to bottom trawl, we say are pristine 100% habitat, essentially. But the reality is that the mid-water nets have been hard on bottom there for a long time. And so then it just really throws off all the calculations and you get into like, well, how can this Fisheries Regulatory Agency

• 23:38Speaker 04

  make this miss, you know, or how can we know that they're on bottom but not regulate it that way? And that's where we get into revolving door and like trawlers on the regulatory agency and on and on, all the way up to Washington DC. So that's been a huge can of worms that Alaska's been going through lately. Yeah.

• 23:56Speaker 00

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• 25:54Steven Rinella?

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• 27:18Steven Rinella?

  And as we talk about this, there's a couple of things I'd like us to hit on in no particular order.

• 27:25Steven Rinella?

  You get it, maybe you can tell me that we talked about some staggering amount of buy catch, but industry people pointed out to me that the bulk of it is cod. Well, the bulk of it's jellyfish. They're like, well, it's jellyfish and cod. There's a question about waste and, and the industry is like, well, we don't, we're allowed, we're permitted to retain a lot of this stuff, so we're not actually pitching it. It's mostly jellyfish, which are unregulated.

• 27:56Steven Rinella?

  And then at some point I want to get into the question of, of, well, I'm gonna say that. I want to get into the question of king salmon. Okay. Where they're getting caught, where they're coming from. But first, explain.

• 28:11Steven Rinella?

  The reason I want to talk about bycatch is because I want to narrow in on the fish itself. Okay. Um, the pollock, right? Because. You know, and anyone who's, you know, any, any kid who went through like the most basic science class, science classes for the food chain idea. Right? You have a, a, a large prey species, large number of prey species. They get eaten by bigger fish. The bigger fish can eat by bigger fish. And so there's this question of. In addition to a conversation about bycatch, there's a, there should be a conversation about. The stability of the food base. So forage fish, right? And, and what the impacts of removing all these forage fish might be. So put that on hold while we get into, to the, the bycatch thing. Help me understand, um.

• 28:57Steven Rinella?

  The bycatch issue. Okay? I, if it, if it's all jellyfish, what's the problem?

• 29:04Speaker 04

  So they say, so there's, it gets fuzzy here again. You're not going to like this. They, uh, there's two categories of bycatch. Uh, one is observed bycatch, which is the stuff that comes up onto the boat. Somebody digs through the catch, extrapolate out the numbers and say. You guys definitely killed X amount of pounds of X amount of species.

• 29:23Steven Rinella?

  And the, these observers are, are federal observers.

• 29:26Speaker 04

  Correct. Yeah. They're required by the feds, but they usually work through like an independent intermediary agency that staffs them like a staffing group.

• 29:34Steven Rinella?

  Okay, okay.

• 29:35Speaker 04

  Um, they, uh, so there's two categories. There's the observed numbers. Those come up to the deck. They get counted. Those are pretty good numbers. Uh, but then there's also the unobserved bycatch. So we talked about these nets might drag six square miles of seafloor in a day. But nobody's calculating, you know, how much stuff got knocked down or killed or dredged up bottom sediment that doesn't make it up on. The boat to be quantified. Other countries have taken stabs at that. There've been some research to find out how much biomass is in one square feet of mud in the Bering Sea, et cetera. But the USA in that sense just says. We don't think it exists, or they ignore it. Okay. Anyway. They want to stick to what's observed. Yeah. Got it. But that benefits trawl quite a bit to do it that way. Understood.

• 30:19Speaker 04

  The, uh, um, so the observed bycatch, uh, they told us that over the last 10 years, all trawl groups in Alaska combined have 141 million pounds of bycatch per year. So that's about 16,000 pounds per hour. It's about 1 million pounds every two and a half days. It's three and a half billion pounds since I graduated high school in 2021. Okay. Um, so you're talking massive. Tell me the annual number again? Uh, 141 million pounds per year. Of, of sea life? Yeah, correct. All species combined. Yeah. And so they, so you'll, uh, and it's a pretty, it's an indiscriminate gear type. That's why trawl works is that it scoops up a bunch of stuff.

• 31:01Speaker 04

  You bring it up to the deck. Sometimes the government says you can't keep that fish. Sometimes the fish isn't valuable. Sometimes it's jellyfish that doesn't have a commercial market. Um, but kind of like if you looked at, you know, dragging a net through a wheat field or whatever, you know, there's honeybees and stuff that you would throw out. But when you start taking huge millions of pounds of stuff out of any ecosystem, you can run into trouble. And I don't know if jellyfish is that, but they're there, you know, and they've made it a hair many thousands of years there. Um, but the really big, um, you know, the highlighted species or the more controversial species are what they call prohibited species catch, PSC. Okay.

• 31:40Speaker 04

  Um, and so those are typically either the more slow growing or commercially valuable, or often the fish which are already allocated to other industries. So like when we fish for Halibut Alaska, if money is involved, so if you're a, a long liner that catches them to sell at the store, a charter fisherman, taking people out. We have these real super tight limits of, you know, 1.999 million pounds or whatever it is. They float up and down each year. And there's this acknowledgement that if trawl wastes some of its bycatch, then we can't, it's going to affect these other industries. So they say, trawl, you can't have them at all. And there's a conversation about, well, maybe trawl should be able to sell them. But then the concern is, so last year halibut fishermen were getting about eight dollars per pound at the dock for halibut. But pollock is worth about 10 cents.

• 32:25Speaker 04

  So there's this concern that if you allow them to catch these super valuable fish and sell them because we caught them anyways, then that you essentially incentivize that.

• 32:34Steven Rinella?

  Sure.

• 32:35Speaker 04

  You'll see them shifting from, well, we accidentally caught this, but it was worth more.

• 32:38Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, even if you just did a micro, like just a micro shift.

• 32:42Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 32:42Steven Rinella?

  To pick off more halibut and you had the incentive to do it, like, why not do it?

• 32:46Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, you're talking about like, maybe I'm asked for a close to 1,000% more, you know, if you go from 10 cents a pound to a fish that's worth $10. So anyways, these, but when they, they don't want trawl to catch any prohibited species at all. But fisheries regulators over time have gotten this claim from trawl of, well, the nets are so big, we have to use big nets to make money. We just can't help it. And so they have made these acknowledgements that, okay, we're going to give you a limit of how many king salmon you can catch per year, a limit of how many halibut. We don't want you to catch them. You're not supposed to catch them. You're not supposed to target them. But we acknowledge that it might happen.

• 33:23Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 33:24Speaker 04

  So this for, you know.

• 33:25Steven Rinella?

  But you can't have them.

• 33:27Speaker 04

  But yeah, so they say that they either can be donated or they can be discarded, but they can't enter into commerce because they're again, they're trying to prevent it from becoming this incentivized thing.

• 33:38Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. And a guy from the industry, from the trawl industry pointed out to me that they're sending halibut to food banks.

• 33:45Speaker 04

  Some.

• 33:47Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 33:47Speaker 04

  They, so one of the big problems with PSC, these prohibited species, king salmon and halibut get the most airtime. They're the most controversial essentially, but they are also caught as juveniles. A lot of this trawl bycatch is juvenile fish. So the average halibut as caught as bycatch a few years ago in the Bering Sea was 4.75 pounds.

• 34:09Steven Rinella?

  Oh.

• 34:10Speaker 04

  We call them ping pong paddle halibut. So the average king salmon was about five pounds. So we think of that.

• 34:16Steven Rinella?

  So the poundages wind up being a little bit misleading.

• 34:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, but we also in strictly in terms of what goes to food banks, we think of like, wow, a food bank would love to get this 100 pound halibut or this 35 pound king salmon. Think of how many people that would feed. But that's not what shows up. What we see is something which yields, you know, two pounds of fish and then the, or fish flesh. And in the case halibut, those fish are are being cut down essentially just a couple of years before they would spawn the first time and the salmon are, you know, being cut down before they've ever spawned.

• 34:49Steven Rinella?

  Good.

• 34:49Speaker 04

  And so, uh, so while the like food bank conversation is valid and maybe that's better than them being dumped over, they, a couple of years ago, they had this report that they donated about 300,000 pounds of fish in that one year versus 141 million pounds of total by catch. So they get a tax write-off for it. It's a great PR blitz. You can open up an email to a stranger with it or talk to somebody in DC and say, we get this by catch, but we donate a lot of, you know, we donated 100,000 pounds, but they might've had seven million pounds of a bycatch of this halibut or halibut and salmon combined. So down tends to fall apart. But they, uh, with this PSC limit, so they made this acknowledgement

• 35:31Speaker 04

  that, yeah, you guys have kind of indiscriminate nets. You're going to have some halibut sometimes. You're going to have some salmon. We don't want to shut you down every time you have it, but they're never supposed to catch it. And so it would be like if Fish and Wildlife Service said that they were going to allow duck hunters to take two bald eagles per year or something, you know, like this action. There was an eagle flying behind the ducks. This guy shot on accident. He's not going to go to federal prison for the first couple, but if it gets beyond that, it's a problem. But at no point at the end of the year, if nobody had gotten the eagle quota, would somebody go out and point blank shoot two bald eagles, you know?

• 36:07Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 36:08Speaker 04

  That's just not the intent of this regulation. But what we've seen with trawl is that they take this prohibited species catch kind of for granted. They say, we know we can catch 45,000 king salmon this year, so we don't care if we get up to 44.5,000, as long as it doesn't shut us down. Or they say, we need to use this PSC to fully catch our limit type thing. But that's just a big wander away from what it had originally been created for.

• 36:35Steven Rinella?

  Got it. And roughly how many, you know, the way we got it set up is layout where we're talking about. So you said areas of the southeast, the practice has already been, the practice has been banned in the areas of the southeast for over 20 years, southeast Alaska.

• 36:51Speaker 04

  Correct.

• 36:51Steven Rinella?

  So it's currently like areas in the Gulf of Alaska. And if someone looks at the map, imagine like that big basin, you know,

• 37:01Steven Rinella?

  On the, on the western edge, you got the Aleutians coming down. On the eastern edge,

• 37:05Speaker 04

  You want an Alaska pro tip?

• 37:07Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, there you go. There's pro tip. Hold that up. But for people listening, yeah.

• 37:11Speaker 04

  The, uh.

• 37:12Steven Rinella?

  How, you can, you can make an Alas- it's not as good as how you can make a Michigan with your hand, but you can make a decent Alaska with your hand.

• 37:17Speaker 04

  So the, uh, yeah. Is this pointing towards camera?

• 37:21Steven Rinella?

  I don't know, Phil, is that aiming at the camera? Yeah, it is. You're in there. I was trying to pull up a real picture of Alaska to help you guys out, but it might, it might take a sec.

• 37:28Speaker 04

  Boring. The, uh, so this is roughly the state of Alaska. So this is southeast Alaska. It comes down towards Canada and Seattle. This is the Aleutian chain and it sends out towards Russia. Anchorage is about right here. Uh, but most of the trawl happens in the Gulf of Alaska. So a little bit south of Anchorage and Homer. And then a big part of it in the Bering Sea, which is where like the deadliest catch crabbing is. Um, but you're right. It was banned in southeast Alaska, which is a pretty interesting story because they, historically, they'd never really, there hadn't been big trawl fisheries in southeast Alaska. It's a pretty rocky bottom. They didn't have the populations of fish that they wanted, et cetera, et cetera. But.

• 38:07Steven Rinella?

  Well, is that what kind of keeps them out of there? Just like the, the fjord, kind of the fjord geology and hydrology of the area?

• 38:13Speaker 04

  Well, the Gulf of Alaska has it too, but really it's the, the fishable populations of these like low value, non, like pollock and flounder just weren't there. So it, uh, but where it came to a head is the, most of these boats that fish trawl in Alaska in, uh, summertime will do their off season down in Seattle, Washington.

• 38:34Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 38:35Speaker 04

  And so they had this incident, very particular one moment where one of these boats had left Seattle, Washington. It came up into southeast Alaska. It was legal to fish there. And I don't know if they wanted to see what was down there. They wanted to test their net, whatever. They're fishing legally. And so they unrolled their net, fishing for a day, and they essentially caught the entire rockfish quota for all of this area in a single day.

• 38:58Steven Rinella?

  You kidding me?

• 38:59Speaker 04

  Which means nobody else can fish for them this year. And so that, as you can imagine, put up this hellstorm of conflict. And so they eventually got them banned because they, obviously that was bad. But in that instance, it was a little bit different because they didn't really want to fish there anyways. You know, it was kind of an accident that they'd hit this limit. And so while that does set precedent that it can happen in Alaska and like the regulatory channels are there, we're seeing a way different thing when we start talking about this idea of it being banned or heavily restricted in these main areas.

• 39:34Steven Rinella?

  Okay. So, so hit me with Gulf of Alaska and Bering Sea. Hit me with a little bit more on what's getting caught on the halibut front.

• 39:43Speaker 04

  So the, uh, sorry, you gotta keep talking on your mic. Yeah, sorry. The, uh,

• 39:48Steven Rinella?

  We're cool on the map. People can see it. You know, it'd be crazy if a dude like one, if a new prime minister, what have they got in Canada for a president, prime minister? If he's like, man, from now on, it's Gulf of Canada.

• 40:03Speaker 04

  Don't get into it. The, uh, so the, uh, most of the halibut bycatch currently happens in the Bering Sea. And that comes from this, they call it the Amendment 80, bottom trawl fleet that had been created to specifically target these bottom fish out there. And they get pretty close to four million pounds of reported bycatch each year. But when they report that, that's

• 40:27Steven Rinella?

  Halibut bycatch?

• 40:28Speaker 04

  Halibut bycatch, mortality. And so this is what you'd gotten into in that news clip of they don't, uh, they don't necessarily assume that all fish caught in trawl that comes up and then is then released is going to die. And so they had kind of, trawl had co-authored a study with federal regulators a few years ago, that essentially it used to be assumed that every time they had a halibut come up in this net, might be packed in with a hundred thousand pounds of other fish, it's been towed for four or five hours. Um, they used to just get dumped straight into the fish hold and they would assume that all those halibut died.

• 41:03Steven Rinella?

  Good.

• 41:04Speaker 04

  But they came up with another program called the deck sorting program where instead of dumping the net straight into the fish hold, they would instead dump it out on the deck of the boat and then crew members have about half an hour to go through and throw back as many halibut as they can. Uh, and if they participate in this program, they assume only about 50% of the halibut die. But, uh,

• 41:25Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, man.

• 41:27Speaker 04

  But from a sport fishing perspective, I mean, we've seen.

• 41:29Steven Rinella?

  That's a tough one, dude.

• 41:30Speaker 04

  That's a real tough one.

• 41:31Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 41:32Speaker 04

  We, uh, you know, we have rivers in Alaska where if we are doing catch and release fishing for a salmon and we lift it all the way out of the water to take a picture, that's a crime, you know, that's illegal for us because we could have killed that fish essentially. So when you start looking at a halibut that's been packed in a hundred thousand pounds with this net, stepped on, sorted through for half an hour. I mean, just pulling the net out of the water takes half an hour and then you got another half an hour.

• 41:57Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, I don't know. I don't know, but I'm,

• 42:01Steven Rinella?

  again, man, I've had, you know,

• 42:05Steven Rinella?

  fair bit of exposure, you know, to halibut over the years. That, that, that's tough for me.

• 42:09Speaker 04

  It is.

• 42:09Steven Rinella?

  But I don't really know. I mean, the, the, the, the survival rate of 50% seems, seems difficult.

• 42:14Speaker 04

  It is. And so a lot of other nations don't allow that. So a lot of them will do what they call full retention of bycatch. They say if it came up in a trawl net, we're assuming it's dead, even if it's fins are wiggling a little bit. So you guys have to bring it all back to shore. We're going to go through all of it in this neutral facility. So it's not like there's an observer out there with, you know, six crew members hanging over their shoulder. Um, they just say if it came up in the trawl net, it's dead. You guys bring it back to shore so we can get an accurate count.

• 42:42Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 42:43Speaker 04

  But Alaska doesn't do it like that. And especially on halibut, it doesn't do it like that. So what we've seen. Uh, up there is they get about, so last year, I think it was 4.3 million pounds of halibut bycatch mortality. So those are the ones they assumed dead.

• 42:56Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 42:57Speaker 04

  Closer to eight million pounds would have been brought up onto the deck. Uh, they threw them all back and they assumed about half of them were.

• 43:03Steven Rinella?

  Okay. So let, let's hover on that number for a minute. And you tell me the number again, like the agreed upon number.

• 43:09Speaker 04

  4.3 million pounds.

• 43:10Steven Rinella?

  Okay. 4.3 million assumes a 50% survival rate. Kicked off the deck, thrown off the deck, back into the water.

• 43:17Speaker 04

  Well, this is, the survival rate's already been applied to that 4.3 million. So those are the ones that definitely died. Another 4.3 million got released and were assumed to have lived or around there.

• 43:27Steven Rinella?

  All right. So the agreed upon dead, the agreed upon dead pile.

• 43:31Speaker 04

  Mm hmm.

• 43:31Steven Rinella?

  How big in that, in that region? How big, what is the commercial harvest on halibut of intentional halibut catch?

• 43:41Speaker 04

  So it in that region is pretty small. I don't have that number memorized, but I do have the data on the, uh, as of 2015, the average bycatch halibut they got in that region was 4.76 pounds per fish.

• 43:55Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 43:56Speaker 04

  Um, and so that makes about 850,000 fish that they assumed died last year through this bycatch.

• 44:01Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 44:02Speaker 04

  And that is more individual halibut than the entire state of Alaska, all other halibut fisheries combined.

• 44:08Steven Rinella?

  More individual halibut.

• 44:09Speaker 04

  Individual halibut. And the halibut spawn at kind of like, uh, the males and females start at different ages, but like seven to 10 pounds per fish. And so when we talked to biologists about this, they'll say, oh, we kind of have this deal where if you, uh, you can never assume that one fish taken out of a population would have affected the total population. Cause there's a good chance a fish dies.

• 44:32Steven Rinella?

  Sure. Yeah.

• 44:33Speaker 04

  But I find that hard to believe with a five pound halibut, you know, when a halibut egg is laid, yeah, 99% of them die. Or when the halibut's in the larval stage, another 99% of them die or whatever. But once you get up to this five pound fish, that's about two feet long. It's buried in the mud and it's just almost made it to where it can spawn.

• 44:51Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. It's annual survival rate is going up.

• 44:53Speaker 04

  For sure. Yeah. Yeah. So, um, so that's a tough one to look at and they'd actually.

• 44:58Steven Rinella?

  How, how, what size again, does the halibut start to spawn?

• 45:01Speaker 04

  Like seven to 10 pounds.

• 45:02Steven Rinella?

  Why, why is there, why is there so much emphasis on protecting like?

• 45:09Steven Rinella?

  Like just if you, I'm just talking to listeners here, if you go, when you, when you see a hundred and fifty pound halibut, or someone like catches a one fifty, a one seventy, like, those are females, right? And that is a, and people will talk about, like, there's,

• 45:27Steven Rinella?

  anglers will encourage you to cut those fish loose. Even if you're allowed to have them because be like, those are your big spawners.

• 45:33Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 45:34Steven Rinella?

  Um, is it just because the volume of eggs they're putting off is so great?

• 45:39Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 45:39Steven Rinella?

  Or do you think that that's not really a good way of looking at it? That you need to save the big halibut because those females are producing the eggs?

• 45:46Speaker 04

  Well, so I look at it both ways. So this charter business I'd owned, we used to have this, I called it the Release the Beasts program. If somebody would let a halibut over two hundred and fifty pounds go, I'd give them a free fishing trip the next year to encourage people to do this. And they say that a fish that size is laying about four million eggs per year. So, yeah, they got a lot of eggs in them. But the reality is, from a biological side, the, most of the halibut caught over about twenty pounds are females. And those have-

• 46:15Steven Rinella?

  Over twenty?

• 46:16Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. And those have the potential to spawn, you know, maybe twenty-five more times in their life. Um, say they're gonna live to be forty years old, or whatever it is. Versus the big fish, they have a lot of eggs per spawn, but maybe they've only got five years left to live, essentially. And so the halibut biologists take, we've, they've been pinned down on this because this is a big, you know, social issue in Alaska. You guys are terrible because you killed this big fish. But when we asked the IPHC about it, this Pacific Halibut Commission, they say, we don't think there's any impact to actual uh, halibut populations because there are just not that many big fish, and they're not gonna spawn that many more times. But-

• 46:55Steven Rinella?

  Oh.

• 46:56Speaker 04

  That also takes genetics out of it. So I, I mean, and that's why I've done this program of like, we'll give you a free trip, because these are the fish that have, you know, beat the odds and they've made it and survived and-

• 47:06Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 47:08Speaker 04

  Anyway, so it can go both ways, but they

• 47:10Steven Rinella?

  Like that, that, the large, that the fact that these fish are getting large is a demonstration of fitness, viability, so allowing these big fish to be in the, in the population, contributing genetics to the population, you argue, like, you could be like, helping perpetuate traits that lead to longevity.

• 47:32Speaker 04

  You could, I mean, yeah, it's like the conversation of like selective deer and elk harvest type things, selecting for genetics, um, but by the same token, we've killed a lot of them and I leave it up to the fisherman's choice, you know?

• 47:45Steven Rinella?

  But, but a, but a seven pound female halb is kicking off eggs?

• 47:51Speaker 04

  Seven years old, so that gets them up to around fif- maybe fifteen pounds.

• 47:55Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 47:56Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 47:56Steven Rinella?

  Okay, so she starts, she can start producing eggs at about seven years of age?

• 48:00Speaker 04

  Correct, and I think it might be the males that start at age seven and the females start at age ten, but anyways, yeah, yeah.

• 48:06Steven Rinella?

  But it's, spawning is not relegated to giants.

• 48:09Speaker 04

  Absolutely correct.

• 48:10Steven Rinella?

  Like a twenty pound halb could be a sexually viable spawning female.

• 48:13Speaker 04

  Absolutely, yeah.

• 48:14Steven Rinella?

  Okay, understood, understood.

• 48:16Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 48:16Steven Rinella?

  All right, now what about, so we talked about the Bering Sea, what, what, tell me about the, the, the Gulf of Alaska?

• 48:22Speaker 04

  So, the Gulf of Alaska has trawl fisheries too, but, uh, they're typically not as big, but they, uh, one of the big issues we run into in the Gulf of Alaska is that they, the Gulf of Alaska and Bering Sea have different regulatory regulations, different rules to fish by, um, and one of the big hot button issues in the Gulf of Alaska is that there, they have these dedicated bottom trawl fleet, so some of the dirtiest, they hard on the bottom all the time, ripping up habitat, but they only have an observer rate of about twenty to thirty percent, and so you'll hear trawl in the Bering Sea will say, we have a two hundred percent observer rate, we have a hundred percent observer rate, we're this model of sustainability.

• 49:07Speaker 04

  But they conveniently ignore that right next door is this other fleet where they only send an observer along for about one out of three trips. Okay. And so there's been this kind of widespread insinuation from former crew and current crew there that it becomes cheaper for a boat operator there to essentially throw a trip when the observer's along than a risk what the observer, than risk that the observer sees what they actually catch and then extrapolates that out to the entire season. Okay. Because if they catch, you know, 2,000 king salmon on this one day when the observer's along, then the observer says, well, the other 70% of the trip, you're probably catching 2,000 king salmon too, which risks shutting them down. Got it. So there's this pretty wide insinuation that instead of actually going out and fishing

• 49:52Speaker 04

  hard or fishing for a full trip, you'd set the net out once before midnight, fish for a couple hours in a spot you wouldn't normally fish, set it out again after midnight, fish for a couple hours, and then say, yeah, we had two days of observed fishing, now we have eight days without it type thing. Got it.

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• 52:45Speaker 04

  That's what the sign says, yeah.

• 52:47Steven Rinella?

  So are bearings, how much are these fish moving? Are king salmon that are running rivers in the Gulf of Alaska, Southeast Alaska? Are those kings ever winding up in the Bering Sea? And vice versa, are there halibut that are spawning in the Bering Sea that maybe were spending time in the Gulf of Alaska? Are these trading fish?

• 53:10Speaker 04

  Totally.

• 53:10Steven Rinella?

  They are, okay.

• 53:11Speaker 04

  Halibut's one of the easiest examples of that. So they make this assumption, the halibut biologists, that essentially the entire halibut population of Alaska and Canada move out to like 3,000 feet of water to spawn in the winter.

• 53:25Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 53:25Speaker 04

  All their eggs and stuff mix there. And then the trending currents carry them up to the Bering Sea. And that is where the larvae settle. So they have these, what they call designated halibut nursery zones in the Bering Sea. And then they say as the fish get older, they have a clockwise migration. So they move south and east.

• 53:43Steven Rinella?

  So back up for a minute. They're spawning in 3,000 feet of water?

• 53:48Speaker 04

  Yeah. Yeah, and we've seen them, you know, I've seen like ready to spawn fish in a couple hundred feet of water too.

• 53:54Steven Rinella?

  Sure.

• 53:54Speaker 04

  But that's the-

• 53:55Steven Rinella?

  I guess they can spawn in 3,000 feet.

• 53:56Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think it's like ducks migrating, like some of them migrate every time and then you have local ducks.

• 54:01Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, got it.

• 54:01Speaker 04

  But the, uh, anyways, yeah, so essentially the biological assumption is that the vast majority of halibut begin their life as larvae settling in the Bering Sea.

• 54:11Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 54:11Speaker 04

  Then they go clockwise, which brings them to the Gulf of Alaska, brings them to Southeast Alaska, brings them to Canada, Washington, Oregon, all the way down. And so when we talk about-

• 54:20Steven Rinella?

  Really?

• 54:21Speaker 04

  How there's four million pounds of juvenile halibut being wasted, a straw by catch in the Bering Sea each year, that means we're hitting Homer in the Gulf of Alaska, Southeast Prince of Wales, Canada gets really crabby about this. Um, Washington and Oregon have like a halibut season of just a couple of days now because the-

• 54:41Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 54:41Speaker 04

  Population's doing so poorly.

• 54:43Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 54:43Speaker 04

  And so each year when they set these harvest limits, all these, these other countries and these other areas are saying, oh my God, you gotta, we can't waste this many halibut in the Bering Sea each year because it affects all of us.

• 54:54Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 54:54Speaker 04

  Um, but we've seen the trawl industry kind of become this powerhouse in our regulatory agencies and they say, well, we make a lot of money from it. You can't, can't shut that down, you know?

• 55:03Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. And what about the kings? Salmon, for instance, are they, they're moving?

• 55:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, so you can, uh, pull up various charts where they, definitely moving, yeah. So we'll see them go from like the Gulf of Alaska into the Bering Sea and feed. You see the ones from like Oregon, Washington and Canada will come up into the Gulf of Alaska and feed. And they, they all have this like four year loop. Um, and then, uh, there's a lot of fish from the Bering Sea area that go and do a loop in the Bering Sea. But one of the things we've seen with king salmon coast wise or the entire, you know, Oregon, all the way up to Nome, is that they're doing very poorly and they, before we started to see them crash all the way or fisheries be shut down, we've seen this huge shrinking size at age. So the fish have over, you know, we used to see these hundred pound king salmon out of the Columbia River,

• 55:52Speaker 04

  a hundred pound king salmon out of Kenai River, 80 pound kings out of Yukon River. And before they quit coming back at all, we're seeing them get smaller, smaller, smaller,

• 56:01Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 56:01Speaker 04

  smaller.

• 56:01Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 56:01Speaker 04

  And we've seen the same thing with halibut. So halibut size at age, how big they are, depending on how old they are, has decreased by over half over the last thirty years.

• 56:12Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 56:12Speaker 04

  And so that really points people towards a food source issue. And that again is where you get into pollock as this forage fish of the North Pacific that, you know, maybe three billion pounds a year isn't sustainable. And so then we

• 56:26Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 56:27Speaker 04

  come into this conversation of

• 56:28Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, this moves us beyond, this moves us beyond the buy catch

• 56:30Speaker 04

  I was chasing this the whole time.

• 56:32Steven Rinella?

  To the food issue, right?

• 56:33Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 56:33Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 56:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, and also the habitat issue. So when I look at it, I see there's three points. One is that the buy catch, the raw pounds, which they can defend and say, oh, it might have been jellyfish, or as a percentage, this isn't that much of a particular river. Okay, we can give them that. But then you get into the food issue of we're seeing fish and seabirds, they said the crabs starved to death during that warm water event.

• 56:57Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 56:58Speaker 04

  Halibut size at age, salmon size at age, there's an issue with gray whales, not getting enough food in the Bering Sea to finish their migration to Mexico and back. They've had big starving events with those. And then we look at, well, how could this be? Well, we're taking three billion pounds of bait fish out of the year, or out of the water every year. And then we're also, the third part of this is what the seafloor habitats, what kind of hits we're doing there. So you've got the raw pounds of buy catch, bait fish coming off the bottom of the food chain, and then the seafloor impact of dragon, say, six, six miles of seafloor every day.

• 57:33Steven Rinella?

  But you, you and me both know that, that a, a population can have what we call a sustainable yield.

• 57:40Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 57:41Steven Rinella?

  Meaning, you can, um, let's just put this in the simplest terms. Let's say you sneak onto the local golf course and fish bass, all right? And you like to make fried largemouth sandwiches. If you, if you're frying three largemouths out of this golf course pond every year, you might realize that over the years, you can catch three largemouths just as quick as any other year.

• 58:07Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 58:07Steven Rinella?

  And that you eating those largemouth sandwiches seems to be having no impact on the population in that pond.

• 58:13Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 58:13Steven Rinella?

  Meaning, if you didn't catch those three largemouths, there's probably about the same amount of largemouths in that pond. The pond's gonna produce blank pounds of largemouths. You have a sustainable yield.

• 58:23Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 58:23Steven Rinella?

  Okay? Like, what, what evidence is there? That, that it is having a population level impact on pollock? Like, are they needing to fish longer and harder to catch the pollock? Are they needing to use, to change tactics? Are they needing to move to new areas that haven't been previously exploited? Like, is there some evidence that, that they're putting a hurt on the pollock and that it's not sustainable yield?

• 58:50Speaker 04

  Well, so, the place, so, you have to look at, kind of, the progression of ships over time. So, you know, 50 years ago, we had low horsepower engines, they couldn't tow as big of a net, we didn't have near the electronics that we have now, we didn't have Starlink, we didn't have, like, this real-time communication between ships. Um, and we were catching about the same amount of pollock then as we are now.

• 59:16Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 59:17Speaker 04

  Um, but we weren't seeing other species that would depend on pollock starve to death simultaneously. But now, we fast-forward 50 years, and we're seeing the size and age of the pollock are quite a bit smaller, which has been a precursor to a lot of other fisheries.

• 59:31Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 59:32Speaker 04

  Crashes, as the fish get smaller and smaller and smaller. And go, we've seen, uh, trawlers complain about that. Um, but the, the technology that we're using to catch essentially the same amount of fish is through the roof. You imagine the last 20 years of, of where the boats have gone. Um, and I don't have data on how many toes they do, or how many days they have to fish, but that had come up. Um, we talked about, like, that Bering Sea crab crash, they had a tough time catching crab that year, and so they were fishing, assumably, new places and longer and more days, you know? Um, so, all those kind of factor in, but the, this year in particular, they'd, uh, done this survey of the pollock, and they said, in the Bering Sea, that the total pollock population had dropped by about 30%.

• 1:00:17Speaker 04

  Um, but they didn't reduce the trawl harvest of pollock by 30%. They said, "You guys catch the same amount, but..." If that means everything else, you know, all these predator fish rely on everything that's left, the humans didn't lose thirty percent of their pollock, every, all the predator fish lost thirty percent, you know, that has to come out of somewhere.

• 1:00:36Steven Rinella?

  Understood.

• 1:00:37Speaker 04

  Um, and they, uh, they assume there's about eight billion pounds of pollock in the, in the Bering Sea each year, um, is this population and we're harvesting about three billion pounds of it, so.

• 1:00:49Steven Rinella?

  Wow.

• 1:00:50Speaker 04

  It's not like you're leaving ninety-nine percent in the water, you know, you're at like forty percent or so.

• 1:00:55Steven Rinella?

  God.

• 1:00:56Speaker 04

  So there's not much room for error. And trawl will make this case that, you know, we talked about this three hundred and seventy-five foot boat, it might cost a hundred million dollars to be built. They say we can't fish less because we have these huge boat payments and every day we're tied up to the dock, means that we're losing money, you know, we just, our businesses can't survive on that. Um, but that's a pretty poor way to manage a wild resource, you know, like imagine we said that, we don't tell guides that with bighorn sheep, you know, or whatever it may be, if the sheep were having a bad year.

• 1:01:26Steven Rinella?

  Yo.

• 1:01:27Speaker 04

  Then you guys are tied up and we're seeing that in Alaska, that support fishermen on the Yukon, subsistence on the Yukon, support fishermen for halibut, everybody else is getting cut back big time to protect the resource, but trawl's been able to make this economic case of, well, we, we lose our boat, you know, or the banks would default on us, or.

• 1:01:44Steven Rinella?

  Yo.

• 1:01:45Speaker 04

  Uh, whatever it may be.

• 1:01:46Steven Rinella?

  Job loss, whatever, yeah.

• 1:01:47Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:01:48Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. But then, but that, you don't see as much of that conversation in, in, uh, other commercial fisheries that are suffering as well, right?

• 1:01:59Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, they try, but they just, they don't seem to have the, the sympathetic ear from the fish regulators.

• 1:02:05Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:06Speaker 04

  Uh, and so that brings up another interesting point with how these fisheries are managed. There's a federal board which regulates these trawl fisheries and the majority of that is made up of people who are vested in the trawl industry. So, an example is one of them is a vice president of a, a group which lobbies or is an industry rep for trawl, another one is a CFO of a, a group that has trawl quota, they're out there fishing for these pollock. And those are the guys in charge making this decision of, well, should we cut back the pollock catch because they just dropped thirty percent?

• 1:02:38Steven Rinella?

  Yo.

• 1:02:39Speaker 04

  And they say they're impartial, they say it wouldn't matter, but. Then there's this question of could they keep their job if they cut their employers fish harvest back by 30%, you know, and that doesn't, that doesn't line up. And there again, fishing on a wild population under the sea where we can't see it, we're just taking huge risks on maybe we're right, maybe we're wrong, but we're just teetering on this edge of if we're wrong one time, it could have big ramifications.

• 1:03:03Steven Rinella?

  You know, you, you brought up the Yukon River. Let me, let me hit you with some feedback I got.

• 1:03:11Steven Rinella?

  I had made the statement on the news show, I had made a statement, um, when I, when I was just digging into the subject. I've been aware of it, but I was digging into it. I made the statement about how the draggers are killing more kings as by, this is my words, okay? The draggers are killing more kings, meaning king salmon. The draggers are killing more kings as bycatch than make it to the upper Yukon. So what I was referring to is in numbers, right? There's more king salmon getting caught as bycatch by the trawl industry than the number of salmon that make it to the upper Yukon. Now, the reason the

• 1:03:51Steven Rinella?

  Yukon is, is an important consideration here is people in the Yukon, on the Yukon River, there's, there's a 10,000 year old king salmon fishery there.

• 1:04:03Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:04:04Steven Rinella?

  Okay. But in recent years, people have been prohibited from fishing kings at all in the Yukon, right? So there's been like a, a, a closure of some subsistence practices because there aren't enough kings to sustain the fishery.

• 1:04:22Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:04:24Steven Rinella?

  An industry person pointed out to me, he says, the statement's not accurate. Now, I, I want to clarify a point here. I said, I said the numbers, okay? I didn't say that they were catching more Yukon fish than are making to the Yukon, but they're catching more kings than make it to the Yukon. But the person pointed out, they do genetic testing on kings, okay? He says the Bering Sea Pollock Fishery had a Chinook bycatch of 11,855 king salmon.

• 1:05:00Steven Rinella?

  They're claiming only 27 of those fish came from the Yukon River. Okay, the Gulf of Alaska Pollock fishery, they caught 18,432 kings.

• 1:05:18Steven Rinella?

  Their claim, zero came out of the Yukon. Okay, so the, so this is 2023 numbers.

• 1:05:26Steven Rinella?

  30,287 Chinook.

• 1:05:31Steven Rinella?

  Of which 27

• 1:05:34Steven Rinella?

  came out of the Yukon. And that year, 2023.

• 1:05:42Steven Rinella?

  He's saying that at the pilot station sonar, they were counting in the Yukon 58,529 fish. So the, the, the total Alaska Pollock fishery killed 30,287 Chinooks. In 2023, 2023 numbers. Um, and in that year, they saw 58,529 fish. That's the escapement. Okay, escapement, not incoming, right? Um, what do you make of this?

• 1:06:15Speaker 04

  Oh, no escapement is what returns.

• 1:06:17Steven Rinella?

  Oh, so, okay, so, okay, okay. So escapement is incoming fish.

• 1:06:20Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:06:21Steven Rinella?

  I got it. Okay, understood. Thanks for clarification.

• 1:06:23Speaker 04

  Never repeat this, but I think the troll guy is right on this one point. So they, uh,

• 1:06:29Steven Rinella?

  Where are those fish from? If they're not out of the Yukon.

• 1:06:33Speaker 04

  Well, it's a huge, I mean, so if you think of Alaska, people don't get this, but if you superimpose the state of Alaska over the lower 48 of the US, the east side is over in like New York City and the west side is over to California and it goes from Canada to Mexico. So the just the state of Alaska has more shoreline than the entire rest of the United States combined.

• 1:06:54Steven Rinella?

  Let me interrupt you. Phil, can you pull up that deal where they show Alaska overlaid on the lower 48?

• 1:06:59Speaker 01

  Uh, yeah, sure.

• 1:07:00Steven Rinella?

  With the illusions and whatnot?

• 1:07:03Steven Rinella?

  Go on.

• 1:07:04Speaker 04

  The, uh, so they, uh, so there's thousands of rivers, is what I'm getting at.

• 1:07:09Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:07:09Speaker 04

  And there's, uh, they encounter fish from other countries. Russia has fish that come in. Um, but they, uh, an interesting part of this is that you'll see trawl kind of play with these big numbers where it suits them, but they might say that only 1% or less than 1% comes into the Yukon River, which is one out of 500 rivers in western Alaska, all of which are essentially shut down to king salmon fishing preemptively to save the resource. But then they'll say that about 50% of the kings they catch are from western Alaska rivers. So they pull it out and say that, well, this one, we didn't get very many, but close to half of them total came out of this general area, essentially.

• 1:07:49Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, but, but that doesn't, I, I appreciate the clarification and the point there.

• 1:07:55Speaker 04

  This hurts me to agree with these.

• 1:07:57Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. I, I guess it, it brings this up.

• 1:08:02Steven Rinella?

  And this, I don't want to say that this is the crux of it, but it brings this up. You, you spent your life fishing, hunting, trapping, okay, so you're familiar, like you know that

• 1:08:14Steven Rinella?

  when, again, to go to the pie analogy.

• 1:08:19Steven Rinella?

  You have any different thing, whatever we're talking about, mule deer, we're talking about

• 1:08:25Steven Rinella?

  king salmon, sea cucumbers, whatever the hell, anything. You're gonna have the pie, which is the total population that can be harvested. And then you're gonna have who's getting their pieces of the pie. And the thing I've picked up in my career of paying attention to this, and I'm, and I participate just right along with everybody else, there's a human tendency. When the pie shrinks, there's a human tendency to look at other people's usage, to look at their piece. And go, your piece, like your piece is too big. It could be, if it's, if it's elk, what are we gonna say? Oh, it's the non-residents. It's the guides.

• 1:09:10Steven Rinella?

  It's the whoever, right? There's this human tendency to usually look and blame other people. Like, no one usually goes like, man, I've looked in the mirror long and hard and I'm the reason I'm not seeing big bulls. You know, you're gonna go like, oh, no. It's Minnesotans are the reason you're not seeing big bulls. The guides are the reason you're not seeing big bulls. The out of state landowners are the reason you're not seeing big bulls. It's not you. Um, so on this question,

• 1:09:40Steven Rinella?

  I think you get where like, it, it is, it's empirically true.

• 1:09:43Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:09:44Steven Rinella?

  No serious person, like no serious person. This is me talking, but I've had a lot of conversations. No serious person is gonna say that we're not seeing a major pie shrinkage.

• 1:09:57Speaker 04

  For sure.

• 1:09:58Steven Rinella?

  On King Salmon.

• 1:09:59Speaker 04

  I got a couple of things to bail you out on this.

• 1:10:02Steven Rinella?

  Well, let me finish the point.

• 1:10:03Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:10:05Steven Rinella?

  It's, it's, it's empirically true. Okay, it's like an objective reality that we are seeing a shrinking pie on Halibut.

• 1:10:15Steven Rinella?

  Right? No serious person is gonna come and say that, that King Salmon numbers are better than ever in the Pacific. No serious person would say that. So if, if we agree on that, like, to what degree? And I'm just asking you this question. I'm getting to a question, believe me, like, to what degree is it that, that, to what level of confidence can we look and be like, it's like, that is the issue? Trawl is the issue.

• 1:10:47Steven Rinella?

  And to what is it like? Is it that it's death of a thousand cuts? Right? Maybe, maybe trawl is a little bit of a problem. Maybe charter is a little bit of a problem. Uh, acidification of the oceans, a little bit of a problem. Uh, warming oceans and climate change, a little bit of a problem. But we're, but we're pointing and, and trying to be like, no, it's, it's actually your fault. It's not these other issues. It's your fault and you alone. Right? How do you speak to that question?

• 1:11:16Speaker 04

  For sure. So that brings us back to kind of these three points with trawl. So they'll talk about bycatch. They'll talk about genetics in the Yukon River. But if you're going to make an analogy about that, like big horn sheep in the Missouri breaks. So you could say that somebody wanted to strip mine the breaks or whatever. They wanted to mow down all the sagebrush out there. Um, for whatever reason, to make a parking lot. They could start doing that. They stretch a chain between two bulldozers. They start to rip up the Missouri River breaks and they might only have, that bulldozer or that chain might only run into two big horn sheep in a year and kill them. But when they destroy all the habitat and they destroy all the food,

• 1:11:57Speaker 04

  then the entire population suffers. And so that's where we keep coming back to this pollock as a bait fish. And we're not seeing just king salmon shrink or not come back. We're seeing it across a dozen different species, marine mammals, whales, fur seals, king salmon, chum salmon. And they, uh, and there's also this conversation of, well, of course you guys aren't catching many fish out of the Yukon River. The entire fishery crashed. I mean,

• 1:12:23Steven Rinella?

  They're not, they're not there to be caught.

• 1:12:26Speaker 04

  Yeah, I'm not, I'm not turning down many blonde girls because there's not many blonde girls that want to go out. I mean, first, but you know, like this cause and effect here, but the, uh, a good year on the Yukon River used to be like 500,000 fish. It used to be 10 times bigger. So functionally, this fishery has already crashed, you know? And yeah, your bycatch of it has gone down proportionally, but not necessarily because you're fishing cleaner, not because you're effective at avoiding them, but just because the fish aren't there. And so what we actually saw with trawl a couple of times in the last five years is, Oh, one year in the Bering Sea, I think they had 8,000 kings as bycatch. One year they had 10,000. This is in a year, a year long, their whole thing. And so they're telling us, God, we are good at avoiding

• 1:13:09Speaker 04

  king salmon now as everything else has crashed. But this year, in about two months, I think they've already got 11,000 kings. So maybe there's more kings around, but they're not necessarily fishing cleaner. They're just kind of, I can't, profiting or getting luck, fortunate off of these low returns. And if you start to look at like a 30-year history, um, I don't have the number in front of me, but those bycatch reports statewide show about 1.1 million kings lost as trawl bycatch, which there's a lot of other fisheries that fish for king salmon too. But when you combine that raw bycatch, plus that they're losing their food source, plus they were towing these mid-water nets on bottom and wrecking the seafloor habitat, then you get kind of this perfect trifecta.

• 1:13:52Speaker 04

  And there's definitely a conversation about ocean acidification, other fleets, climate warming, climate change, whatever you want to call it. But they, a lot of that is uncontrollable by humans or uncontrollable in the short term. But trawl is, could be fixed tomorrow, you know, or reined in, but not without economic pain to the people doing it. So there's a select group that's making a ton of money off this, billions of dollars. Um, and they say, well, even if we are kind of the most obvious outlier here, or the most controllable variable, you can't cut us back because we're making a lot of, a lot of money off of it.

• 1:14:29Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:29Speaker 04

  Um, and where that really connects is that so-

• 1:14:33Steven Rinella?

  To be clear, they don't say we're making a lot of money off it. They say we're creating a lot of jobs.

• 1:14:39Speaker 04

  Ah, yes, they, they do say that. They, uh, yeah, so, and where it gets really interconnects, and this is something a lot of people don't realize, is that the Fisheries Management Council in Alaska, which regulates trawl, exists under NOAA Fisheries. So you hear about NOAA like, save the whales, save the turtles, NOAA weather. Um, but they don't realize that NOAA is a division of the Department of Commerce in DC. And so we think of-

• 1:15:06Speaker 04

  Every time that trawl starts to make this economic claim and says if we don't catch the pollock, the Russians will, or we're gonna, this is gonna create a trade deficit between the USA and other nations. You know, the US Fish and Wildlife Service, or Department of Interior, EPA, probably wouldn't bite on that. They'd say, "We gotta protect the fish first, and then how much money you guys make comes later." But when you present that to the Department of Commerce, they say, "That's a pretty good point. We're not, we're not gonna make the USA lose money on this, even if Alaska only gets fractions of that money total, you know." And so then you set up kind of this like Alaska versus Washington DC. How do you want these natural resources used? It would be like, so, one example is that, uh, trawl claims that it only drags about

• 1:15:50Speaker 04

  1.4% of the entire Bering Sea. They say our impact is really small, but anybody that has fish knows that not all fishing ground is equal. There's sea mounts, there's ledges, there's these super productive areas.

• 1:16:03Steven Rinella?

  I fish less than 1% of the area. I fish less than 1% of the area where I fish, but I fish where the fish are.

• 1:16:09Speaker 04

  For sure, that's it. And so that would be like, say that this logging or mining company came and made this claim to the Department of Commerce that, "Hey, we wanna log 1.4% of North America." Like, that's it. All this other forest will be here. But if you, uh, look at how much forest is contained within like, Washington, or sorry, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, that's about 1.5%. So you effectively wipe out the entire Rocky Mountain elk population. And so that's where these percentages-

• 1:16:39Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, you can really start messing with numbers. But I wasn't familiar with that one.

• 1:16:42Speaker 04

  Yeah. Um, anyways, so it, uh, yeah, you can, you can play with percentages where it is advantageous to you, but there again, it's this wild population that does have all these external factors on it, and we know that they're causing problems and gonna cause problems. So common sense says that we should slow down the manageable take of that, the human harvest, uh, because we acknowledge that there's these bumps in the road. It's just like if you're driving down the highway, if you don't slow down when it gets bumpy, you wreck your car, you know? But we're not seeing that in fisheries management of these trawl fleets. The road is doing this through everything else, all these external factors, and trawl's saying, "We gotta go full speed ahead, we'll never crash." But common sense doesn't agree with that.

• 1:17:24Steven Rinella?

  How worried are you about the, how worried are you about the industry coming after you real hard? Like, you personally?

• 1:17:30Speaker 04

  Well, yeah, that's, yeah, I, uh- It's definitely a concern. The uh, and I um, so I get tangled up in, we talked about there's this Stop Alaska and Trawler Facebook group. It's got about 55,000 people in it. The state of Alaska only has 750,000 people. Not everybody in that group's from Alaska, but it's a huge voting block contingent. Um, and my real drive is that I want to see these common sense rules being enforced. And then if that means it puts trawl out of business somewhere down the road, say that they, right now, we talked about these halibut nurseries. Nobody can fish for halibut there because we're going to protect the halibut on their nurseries, but trawl can trawl there. So they can have bycatch of halibut because they're not targeting them. But it's an area

• 1:18:15Speaker 04

  shut down for everybody else. And we talked about these mid-water trawls can fish in areas closed to bottom trawls because we're trying to protect the habitat there. But they say if they got kicked out of there with their mid-water nets, that they'd go out of business. And they make this argument successfully to the Department of Commerce. But no other sports matter, no other group gets to exist under these rules, you know. So that's what really gets me is I want to see these enforced common sense. If trawl can still continue to fish under that and thrive, then that opens up a new conversation of do we want them in the state? Is this good for society, etc. But if it shuts them down through enforcing common sense regulations, then so be it. And I take a lot of heat for that because I think they know that they would

• 1:18:59Speaker 04

  effectively be shut down if those common sense regs went into effect.

• 1:19:03Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:04Speaker 04

  But they don't get a pass on this, not with a wild resource, you know, and not in Alaska where so many people depend on, I mean, fish's culture there essentially.

• 1:19:12Steven Rinella?

  And and this fishery has been, this fishery has been booted out of various places over the years.

• 1:19:18Speaker 04

  Yeah. So they uh, most of the, if you really go back in the history books, there's a really neat book called An Unnatural History of the Sea. And it has a section on trawling. And it says that the first references to trawling in history were where they were banned. And so you see in like the, I think it's 1376 in Europe, was the first mention of this trawl net, which would be drug along and indiscriminately catch everything. Um, and it was banned then. So 700 years ago, close to it. Um, then the next reference is from the 1500s where there it had become a capital offense. So they killed two people who had added chains to the bottom of their

• 1:19:57Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 1:19:57Speaker 04

  drag nets. Um, but as the fishing, you know, productivity of the oceans decreased and as more money got into fisheries, um, the lobbying came with it, you know, and so, and with that was this detachment of where fisheries regulators live relative to where the fishing happened. So when we talk about a trawl fishery, we're talking to senators in Washington DC or, you know, this DC political machine that has no idea of what trawl is, what Alaskan issues are. Besides that the trawl lobbyists show up in their office every day and say,

• 1:20:33Steven Rinella?

  They've already gotten their year.

• 1:20:34Speaker 04

  We've made a lot of billions off of this, you know, you can't shut it down. These guys are crazy. We only caught 33 kings out of the Yukon this year. Don't ask us about the halibut. Don't ask us about whether or not these are bait fish. Um, and that has been effective, but we also see that a lot of times it comes wrapped with this campaign check of like, don't worry about it.

• 1:20:52Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, yeah. And then, uh, this fishery is mostly out of Seattle?

• 1:20:59Speaker 04

  It is. So there is a, uh, about 10%. So when they, uh, the USA and really the world has done what they call rationalizing commercial fisheries. So it used to be that it was open entry. You, if you owned a boat, you'd go pay $10 to register and anybody could go out and fish like crazy until the quota was got, then everybody quit. But that created this race for fish where even if the weather was terrible, if we only had two days to catch what we catch, we'd go and maybe somebody'd sink or die and it flooded the canneries with fish all at once. It was a, it didn't work in that way. So they rationalized it and said, hey, if you guys have always caught a million pounds of pollock, you know, for these last five qualifying years, then we're just going to say that for the rest of forever, we're going to give you a million shares of pollock.

• 1:21:43Speaker 04

  And sometimes that goes up, sometimes it goes down, but you own it now. You can buy it and you can sell it, which is a crazy thing with a natural, I mean, imagine if they did that with elk.

• 1:21:53Speaker 04

  But they, uh, I forgot what I was talking about. Well, it's something about where the fisheries based out of. Oh, yeah. All right. So they, uh, so when they rationalize these trawl fisheries in Alaska, most of the participants at that point, like in the eighties, early nineties, had been these big factory trawlers out of, uh, Seattle, Washington. But they said, we're going to do this 10% set aside for communities that are actually live in Alaska. They live next this Bering Sea. Okay. They've fished on it for thousands of years and we don't want them to be aced out of this resource. And so now we see some of those, they're called CDQ, Community Development quota groups, um, have about 10% of this total fishery. We heard from some of these guys. Yeah, yeah. And they'll, and some of them have gone beyond 10% of it. So some

• 1:22:37Speaker 04

  of them lease their quota out to these big Seattle boats, but some of them have doubled down to buy their own trawlers. Um, and as other fisheries have crashed, essentially, uh, this pollock and this trawl quota has become a larger and larger part of their portfolio. So now it's like, the, even if they're, like the residents of these communities are morally objecting to trawl, they're invested in this hundred million dollar boat. They can't just go fish for crab because crab are gone. They can't fish for halibut, salmon, those are gone. So they're in kind of this use it or lose it scenario now. Yeah. Um, which is just a crazy concept for a rural village on the edge of the Bering Sea. Um, they kind of got dragged into it in that way.

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• 1:25:42Steven Rinella?

  The conspiracy theory is it's not about fisheries. It's like it somehow is using fisheries to get Alaskans worked up politically to seek broader political change and that no one really cares about these fish. They just want to push in a different political agenda and this is this, you're not here about fish.

• 1:26:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, so that

• 1:26:10Steven Rinella?

  I mean, how, how, how right am I?

• 1:26:12Speaker 04

  Well, so you're definitely so trawl, like we talked about from the very start. Bottom trawl and now these mid-water trawls that it's been found out that they're on bottom. There's a worldwide push to shut down bottom trawl and it's been around for decades. You mentioned this poll that Alaska did said 74% of Alaskans wanted this total ban.

• 1:26:31Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, I don't understand that poll and someone dismissed it saying it was a push poll.

• 1:26:35Speaker 04

  Oh.

• 1:26:35Steven Rinella?

  Like it was a manipulative poll. I don't know. I'd like to see the polling data. I haven't seen it.

• 1:26:39Speaker 04

  I got a website. The, uh, anyways, but it, uh, I think you'll see like in the comment sections on your video, this not quite universal support, but if there's 2,000 comments, you'll see 25 from trawl reps that get paid to interact and write comments. And the rest of them are, you know, Alaskans and people that have dealt with trawl fisheries and gotten a short end of the stick that are really vehemently against it.

• 1:27:02Steven Rinella?

  Well, that, and I'm not, and I'm not, um, I'm not criticizing anyone that rode in, but the people that we rode in

• 1:27:15Steven Rinella?

  in defense of, of big trawl or a venture of the trawl industry, the people that rode in are in the industry.

• 1:27:22Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:27:24Steven Rinella?

  But that might be because they're the ones that, that, that they're the ones that have a understanding of it, but I, I, I'm not hearing from, I'm not hearing from anglers. I'm not hearing from rod and reel fishermen.

• 1:27:40Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:27:40Steven Rinella?

  Defending it.

• 1:27:42Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's, uh, you'll never hear anybody that wakes up tomorrow and says, you know what? I'm in favor. I think bottom trawl is a good. Eco-friendly way of catching fish. And so what I was getting at with trawl has a big problem that everybody already disliked bottom trawl before they figured out it happened in Alaska. The mid-water nets are on the bottom, so they're kind of bottom trawl. So to me strategically, their last possible move that they could make would be to try to make this a political issue. Alaska is this historically red state, super resource extraction, people work in oil, extracting resources, or they're in fishing, extracting resources. And so anytime you get into

• 1:28:24Speaker 04

  this, anytime somebody can say, well, these are the eco terrorists, or these are the greenies coming in trying to control us, then they have this this opportunity. And I think trawl sees that as their one last ditch move. But what they're forgetting is that the Republican side is big into conservation. I mean, we've, Hebel Mine had come through like Trump Jr., you see these stories out of Africa where hunters had preserved the land that was this big success story, on and on. And so I fish too. There's this extent of like, we want to protect the fish so that we can kill the fish, which has some irony, obviously. But we want it to be sustainable, and we want our kids to kill the fish too. And what we really want is the habitat and the bait

• 1:29:08Speaker 04

  fish left intact so that can happen indefinitely. And no other fishery impacts those factors near like trawl does. It's kind of like you could, so you're managing deer in a forest, you could hunt these whitetails down until there was one buck and one doe left in this entire forest, stop hunting, and in 10 years, you'd probably have a decent deer population. But if you cut down the forest and paved over it in the process, you lose those deer forever. And so that's the concern with trawl, and especially the bottom, like the seafloor impact. And that's not tough to understand for most people.

• 1:29:45Steven Rinella?

  No, it's not, man. It's not. So what, if you had to make, like, let's say, let's say you were emperor of the world all of a sudden.

• 1:29:55Speaker 04

  It's a good idea.

• 1:29:56Steven Rinella?

  Okay. Or you're emperor of Alaska. Like, like, hit me with what,

• 1:30:02Steven Rinella?

  Based on your research, what you hear from people, your, your personal opinion, what do you feel is a, what, what do you feel is a reasonable in your mind, a reasonable step to take? Well, either to validate or invalidate the notion that this is, that this is partially responsible for the collapse, the fisheries collapse we're seeing around. I won't say collapse on halibut, but the degradation of the halibut fishery, the collapse of the king salmon fishery, right? How, how would you find out whether that's true? If you were going to jump into management changes, what would you propose? Like, like what do you think a next step would be?

• 1:30:40Speaker 04

  So I, uh, I want to see the common sense stuff checked off first. And so this is, uh, 2026 is a election for our new governor in Alaska. And that's important to this issue because the governor of Alaska chooses a majority of the voting members on this federal NPFMC Fisheries Council that regulates trawl. And what we've seen with the past governor is this trawl vested group would donate a hundred thousand to his campaign and then he would put, you know, the vice president of this corporation on this council to regulate trawl. Um, and it's a majority goes vote system on there. So it's dominated by trawl. It doesn't make matter if it makes sense, doesn't matter if it's ethical.

• 1:31:22Speaker 04

  Uh, if they vote in favor of it, then we're stuck with it essentially. And so first step for me is that we need to have a governor that commits that they're not going to put active trawl reps on this regulatory council anymore, or at least people who are, are neutral. You know, I don't want it full of a super green side. I don't want it full of an ecological side because I fish too, but they at least need to not be making hundreds of thousands of dollars personally for the fishery. And so once you get that in there, then you can start putting forward these motions of, hey, we need to, if we've acknowledged that there's Bering Sea halibut nurseries, uh, and trawl is still allowed in there, it needs to be banned right there. They can still fish everywhere else, but we're going to kick them out of there. Uh, there needs to be an acknowledgement that pollock are a forage fish.

• 1:32:07Speaker 04

  So forage fish get these special considerations.

• 1:32:10Steven Rinella?

  What are they regarded as right now?

• 1:32:12Speaker 04

  Long story, uh, as a just target species and there's this weird deal in federal regulation where a fish can't simultaneously be regulated as a forage fish and as a target species. And so trawl successfully makes this case that, you know, there's studies out there that say eighty-five percent of the forage base in the Bering Sea is made of pollock. They say that, uh, the number two most commonly eaten thing for Chinook salmon in the Bering Sea in twenty twenty-four was pollock. Uh, it's huge for halibut, huge for whales.

• 1:32:39Steven Rinella?

  What was the number one?

• 1:32:40Speaker 04

  Uh, gosh, caplin or needlefish, something like that. The, uh, anyway, so there's this, uh, there's all this documentation saying that it's this crucial link. Um, but they, the NP FMC, essentially the straw-regulated body, says it's not going to explore that because there's also this understanding that if they started to take that into consideration and say that, well, maybe the halibut are smaller, maybe the king salmon are smaller because they don't have enough pollock, that would create a cutback in limit for how much pollock the trawl will seek to catch. Um, so they fight that tooth and nail, but there again, it's a super common sense thing. Um, and if it failed, you know, after five years of study, then, then I get that, but it at least, at least needs to be brought to the

• 1:33:23Speaker 04

  table. So I'd kick them out of the halibut nurseries. I'd say, we gotta ask this question of whether pollock should be a forage fish. Um, another big one that we've run into is that a lot of the bycatch limits were set twenty years ago when the fish were a lot more abundant.

• 1:33:40Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:33:40Speaker 04

  So with king salmon in the Bering Sea specifically, fifteen years ago, they said that, uh, if there are a bunch of king salmon around, you guys can catch sixty thousand of them as bycatch. If there's not as many king salmon around, you can catch forty-five thousand as bycatch. But in the fifteen years since that, they've crashed down to essentially nothing, you know? Most people can't fish for them in a river because.

• 1:34:01Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, and that hasn't been adjusted.

• 1:34:03Speaker 04

  But the forty-five thousand, yeah, is still sitting up there.

• 1:34:06Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:06Speaker 04

  Um, and we've seen that with.

• 1:34:08Steven Rinella?

  Wouldn't it be weird if that number wound up being higher than the number of kings?

• 1:34:12Speaker 04

  Well, yeah, so that brings up a really big philosophical debate of um if there's only one king salmon left, who has the ethical right to catch it? Should it be the subsistence user that lives in the middle of nowhere on the Yukon River? Or should it be a trawler to waste it when it's five pounds? And that's a really easy question for people to answer.

• 1:34:31Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 1:34:32Speaker 04

  And unfortunately, we're we're drifting off in that direction, you know?

• 1:34:36Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:37Speaker 04

  Um, so those would be some really big ones. The other one is, uh, this issue of we at the start of this, we talked about there's two types of bycatchers, observed bycatch and there's unobserved bycatch.

• 1:34:45Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:46Speaker 04

  And, uh, we said that trawl says they only impact about one and a half percent of the Bering Sea. But the Bering Sea is incredibly huge. So the 1.4% of the Eastern Bering Sea is, I think, 390 billion square feet. And if you start to look at how much life is in a square foot of seafloor, um, it's like if you're on a trout stream and you walk, lift up a river, everything darts out of there. But you can apply different levels of what might live there, say it's five grams per square foot. You come up with essentially billions of pounds of unobserved bycatch. So this is the stuff kicked up by the mud, drug over by the nets, but since it doesn't make it to the deck of the boat, we just pretend it doesn't exist.

• 1:35:28Speaker 04

  Um, but other nations have taken that on and we could be taking it on too if there was the will within this regulatory body to say, hey, maybe this is a problem, but there again, trawl knows that it's a real big problem if we start to quantify it or go down that rabbit hole.

• 1:35:42Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 1:35:43Speaker 04

  And so they essentially roadblock it at a DC or a regulatory level. Um, so that's my push is that I think there's all these common sense concepts that just need to be explored. They have to it, we have to have a regulatory system which allows us to bring these concerns to the table and take a look at them. And right now we don't have that.

• 1:36:01Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Uh, last question is is there a possibility, is your current governor term limited out or what's going on?

• 1:36:09Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:36:09Steven Rinella?

  So, so someone new is coming in.

• 1:36:11Speaker 04

  Correct.

• 1:36:12Steven Rinella?

  And is there a chance that, that with the, that is there a chance that both parties would have a candidate? That was committed to looking at this?

• 1:36:22Speaker 04

  Absolutely.

• 1:36:23Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:23Speaker 04

  So they, uh, Alaska doesn't open primary. Uh, so right now we have, I think, nineteen people that have.

• 1:36:30Steven Rinella?

  Really?

• 1:36:31Speaker 04

  Put their name in the hat, yeah.

• 1:36:32Steven Rinella?

  Are you in there? No?

• 1:36:34Speaker 04

  They had gotten, they, uh, so nineteen people have put their name in the hat and I think we've heard from half of them that have taken essentially an anti trawl stance or said.

• 1:36:43Steven Rinella?

  From both sides, Republican and Democrat.

• 1:36:45Speaker 04

  Correct, yeah, yeah, and independent.

• 1:36:47Steven Rinella?

  No.

• 1:36:47Speaker 04

  Um.

• 1:36:48Steven Rinella?

  So there's, there's a possibility that in the end, the final ballot could come out and, and each side of that ballot could be saying, I'm committed to looking into this issue and taking some regulatory steps. That's possible.

• 1:37:00Speaker 04

  Correct, and so that is what has got trawl through the roof because those governor candidates, when they say they're against trawl, they don't have to say that they're going to shut it down tomorrow. All they have to do is say that they're just not going to put trawlers on this regulatory board anymore, or at least not a majority of them. And just that simple threat is enough to put, to have the hackles way up on trawl.

• 1:37:23Steven Rinella?

  And that's why we're hearing about this so much right now.

• 1:37:25Speaker 04

  Absolutely, they don't think they can continue to win and they don't think they can continue to catch the volume of fish anymore if somebody besides trawlers start to regulate the fishery in a more common sense

• 1:37:36Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:36Speaker 04

  way, so, and I think there's a good chance that that is where we're headed is that we're gonna have a Democrat and an independent and a Republican governor that have all said, hey, we're gonna, we're gonna put different people on this regulatory council and, and what shakes out shakes out, so.

• 1:37:51Steven Rinella?

  Hmm. Hmm. So let me say this, man, I said, my last question, here's my real last question. Let's say trawl practices were, that the harvest was adjusted, the halibut nursery was off limits and you saw, we saw a recovery of fish.

• 1:38:10Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 1:38:10Steven Rinella?

  Okay, so ten years down the road, twenty years down the road, we see a recovery. And it's recovered and people are like, hey, um, w- we're back in a strong position. Let's revisit, maybe it's time to have the, maybe it's time to invite the trawl industry back into, you know, into these waters.

• 1:38:28Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 1:38:29Steven Rinella?

  What would be your attitude about that?

• 1:38:31Speaker 04

  Well, we'd have to, so we've actually seen that start to happen some. So you talked earlier about how we've had these big crashes in the US. So Grand Banks cod in the mid 90s, early 90s had crashed all the way. We saw west coast ground fish, early 2000s crash all the way. And so now we're 25, 35 years later than that, and they're just starting to open those fisheries up again. The fish have started to come back a little bit, nothing compared to historic rates. But when we look at the regulations that they put on trawlers down there, it is insane compared to what we see in Alaska. So that's become this frustrating disconnect for us because it's still federal NOAA fisheries regulating all of them. But

• 1:39:15Speaker 04

  after they crash, they say, oh, my God, we could never let you guys get away with that kind of bycatch, or we couldn't send you out with an observer, or we're not going to assume that half the halibut survive. You bring it all back to the dock, and we're going to check it ourselves. But in Alaska, they say, everything's great, just keep doing what you're doing.

• 1:39:31Steven Rinella?

  That is interesting, man, because those fisheries, I mean, those fisheries you named are places that crashed hard.

• 1:39:37Speaker 04

  And we actually see a fair amount of boats now fishing in Alaska with the same owners, same boats, same crew, probably not the same crew after 30 years, but same ownership structure have come from like, there's a fleet in Alaska that's home ported in Rockport, Maine. And if you look at the company timeline and their history, they had fished up until the early 90s. And then they said, well, then we decided to send our fleet to Alaska. But what they don't mention is that the cod fishery they were fishing on crashed, and they were forced to go somewhere else or lose their boats.

• 1:40:09Steven Rinella?

  They became like a refugee.

• 1:40:10Speaker 04

  Yeah. And that, that's been another big deal with this, this concept of a factory trawler is it's essentially a floating, pretty self-sufficient city. And so even now, the factory trawlers fishing in Alaska, most of the crew isn't from there. I think 97% of the crew is non-Alaskan. So they fly to this boat, they live on it for two weeks, they work, they fish, they come home. And they don't really care where that boat is. That boat could be in Nicaragua, it could be in the Arctic, or the Antarctic, or wherever. It's not like you and I go out and fish in this pond in our backyard. They're flying to the boat, they work, and it's this mobile city that moves around. So because of that,

• 1:40:52Speaker 04

  trawl has never had to have this local investment. You know, if you and I lose our fish in the backyard, or we lose the elk in Montana, You know, that might be the end of our fishing or hunting, but uh when you're from this like factory platform, you just move to another continent or you move to another area and you keep doing what you're doing. It doesn't impact you in the same way. And you're not worried about what your kids are gonna do because your kids could fly somewhere else too, so.

• 1:41:14Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, you know, it's not a death sentence to wipe an area out.

• 1:41:18Speaker 04

  Sure, not in the same way. And there again, that's uh crazy that, you know, we have a wild resource that we regulate in this way and take this bigger risks with because we see all the protections, you know, sage grouse or bighorn sheep or whatever it may be. We're we're counting a single species and those we can go with helicopter and look at, but um what happens in the ocean is a whole new ballgame.

• 1:41:40Steven Rinella?

  You know, one of the craziest things, just a final thought that I was reading about uh this morning.

• 1:41:47Steven Rinella?

  So these fish that the the the the the trawl fish they're catching, they were ex they're moving them from the west coast over to New Brunswick.

• 1:41:59Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 1:42:00Steven Rinella?

  So they're moving them over to Canada. They're going through the Panama. These fish are going through the can process fish are going through the Panama Canal.

• 1:42:05Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:42:06Steven Rinella?

  But there was some like some regulatory advantage to using Canadian rail.

• 1:42:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, the Canadian railroad scam.

• 1:42:14Steven Rinella?

  Okay. There's some regulatory advantage to using Canadian rail. Okay, so these dudes, they got in trouble for this. These dudes hit on this scheme where they they load these fish up. I think it was a pollock. I think it was a pollock, pollock or herring. I can't remember.

• 1:42:30Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:42:31Steven Rinella?

  They load these fish up and take them by ship through the Panama Canal up. But when they get up there, when they get to Canada, they'd put them on a train that would go one hundred feet back and forth.

• 1:42:46Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 1:42:48Steven Rinella?

  And then they would take them off the train. It went nowhere. They loaded them and unloaded them in the same spot and the train traveled a hundred feet. And they'd offload them in order to be able to to be that there was a Canadian rail product.

• 1:43:02Speaker 04

  They got, they got big trouble for that.

• 1:43:05Steven Rinella?

  They got busted. It was funny reading about it is like, it seems like such a weird little scheme. But I was, I was reading about, there's like this years long investigations. Like, how much do you need to investigate that?

• 1:43:15Speaker 04

  Well, they, uh, so that's.

• 1:43:17Steven Rinella?

  That's the most, it's like the most cynical thing I've ever heard of. It's so funny, dude. Can you imagine like working there and being like, home, I know what now? I'm supposed to put these fish on this train and move them a hundred feet back and take them back off again.

• 1:43:29Speaker 04

  Well, I think that was actually part of the breaking story was there was this videotape of this worker like laughing. It's not even a train. You drive the entire semi on this rolly cart and it goes there and it goes back and then the semi drives off. But they, uh, so that was American Seafoods was at the center of that.

• 1:43:45Steven Rinella?

  That was the funniest story, man.

• 1:43:47Speaker 04

  But they, uh, there's this Jones Act regulation that says if you're shipping from the USA, one port in the USA to another port in the USA, you're required to use American ships with American crew. Um, but that is, it's more expensive to ship American made or American in that way. So they dodged that by they'd use this, uh, but there's an exception to that that says if the fish lands in another country and it is transported somewhere on a rail, then it can come back into the USA and it never had to travel on this American ship.

• 1:44:19Steven Rinella?

  Oh.

• 1:44:20Speaker 04

  So they found this big savings of they'd send this foreign ship around to Canada, right? North, you know, forty miles north of the US border, drive the truck on the rolly cart, roll it back and forth on a train track, and then drive it back into the USA and dodge all this taxes.

• 1:44:35Steven Rinella?

  That's what they, okay, that, yeah. Dude, that was the, I had to laugh this morning drinking my coffee on the couch and I was reading about that scheme. Dude, that is just, just, it's just, you gotta laugh, man.

• 1:44:47Speaker 04

  But there's more to that story. So this American Seafoods, uh, there's this regulation that foreign interests can't own these shares of an American fishery.

• 1:44:57Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:44:58Speaker 04

  Um, but American Seafoods was started by this guy in Norway. It has a Norwegian CEO and the majority owner in it right now is a private equity company out of New York City that has, its parent company is over in Switzerland. So then you start to look at this essentially foreign country that's scamming the US out of using US workers. Uh, they had a bunch of EPA fines, um, et cetera, et cetera. So there again, when we think of. Guys that go fishing or when we hear from the trawl lobbyists that say we're just common fishermen too, you know. Sorry about. I'm not well spoken. I'm just this little low key fisherman.

• 1:45:36Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 1:45:36Speaker 04

  The biggest Pollock holder in the Bering Sea is American Seafoods that's half owned by private equity, you know, with backing in another nation, so.

• 1:45:44Steven Rinella?

  I'll be curious, man. I'll be curious as someone like after hearing your conversation, right? I'll be curious who reaches out. Um. That wants to explain.

• 1:45:57Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:45:57Steven Rinella?

  That wants to explain like if they if they want to explain the other side of this, or if it if it's just too. That they that that. If they find that it's better not to talk about it, I'll be curious to see what happens.

• 1:46:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's been really fascinating for me to watch this reaction in Alaska because like we say, nobody wakes up tomorrow and decides suddenly that they just love. Trawling. If you make money from it or your parent company makes money from it or a family member does. Then you'll see people that'll defend it and say, well, it's an economic engine. Maybe this isn't right. But nobody just converts, so.

• 1:46:31Steven Rinella?

  Would you ever do a debate?

• 1:46:33Speaker 04

  I don't know. The uh, the interesting thing to me is that. I don't really see it as a debatable. Issue, you know, there's this ethical. Component of this that's pretty hard. To get around, so. Um, you know, we could say you're we're going to debate whether hunting is ethical or not, and I know what your stance is going to be, and.

• 1:46:54Steven Rinella?

  Sure.

• 1:46:54Speaker 04

  If there's somebody from PETA, we know what. Their stance is going to be, and you guys could debate and they'd draw out a thousand facts and you'd draw out a thousand facts.

• 1:47:01Steven Rinella?

  No, I understand.

• 1:47:02Speaker 04

  And the people listening wouldn't get anything out of it. Um.

• 1:47:05Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:06Speaker 04

  So that's.

• 1:47:06Steven Rinella?

  They would talk about if I was debating someone from PETA, they would talk about a set of concerns that that I I'm not that they would talk about concerns that I.

• 1:47:14Speaker 04

  Give a damn about. Yeah, yeah.

• 1:47:16Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:16Speaker 04

  Yeah, and so and it's also that, you know, I do this. It's not fun anymore, but it was a, an important issue to me to take on personally. Um, and so I do it on my own time, on my own dollar, you know, but um, if you get up against like these multi-billion dollar corporations, they have entire teams of lawyer. They hire a lot of the fisheries regulatory people, they hire a lot of the Alaska Department of Fish and Game gets hired into their essentially lobbying wing.

• 1:47:46Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 1:47:47Speaker 04

  So if you go and talk to somebody about it, it's not like you and I talking about something we don't know. One side's got essentially a team of lawyers and all this data set on the back and it's me saying, but it's still not ethical, you know, it's still not ethical. So, um, it's interesting in that way. And I think we're going to see it come up in like these Alaska governor debates. I think there's a couple candidates there out of this nineteen that have started to do like some kind of pro trawl commercials. So I think we're going to see it come up in like these political debates there.

• 1:48:15Steven Rinella?

  Wow, wouldn't that be interesting?

• 1:48:16Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, it will be. They, uh, there was one, uh, Dave Bronson's one of the guys running for governor up there. And he said he was digging around this, uh, it's NBFMC, this federal fisheries council that regulates it. And one of the guys there told him anonymously that he said if they ever tried to regulate pollock as a forage fish, or if somebody from that regulatory agency brought that up, that they would lose their job or essentially be eliminated from that process because that's such a threat for them to have to consider that, hey, there's other stuff that eats pollock too. So.

• 1:48:47Steven Rinella?

  Well.

• 1:48:48Speaker 04

  Um, there's a lot going on in the background.

• 1:48:49Steven Rinella?

  Well, I'll be watching, man. I'll be curious.

• 1:48:51Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:48:52Steven Rinella?

  Um, it's been, it's a, it's a interesting debate. And I think that like I'm interested in it because I'm, it's, it's a fishery that I'm exposed to, it's a fishery that I love. A lot of people that I'm very close to are involved in, you know, built their lives around those fish. So I care about that. I'm also interested in it from when I made that point about when it comes to wildlife resources and we have shrinking pie or in some cases, expanding pies and, and what those wedges look like and, and who gets those wedges and, and that, understanding how those, that plays out.

• 1:49:32Steven Rinella?

  Whether it's, you know, understanding how that plays out, whether it's like bobcats in, in Nevada, um, you know, Sambar deer off an island in Florida, fish up in Alaska, whatever, like that question will always be relevant. And I think that, you know, I, I would like listeners to just pay attention to how it goes, how it goes in other places, what the debates look like, because eventually this kind of conversation is gonna, this is, this kind of conversation is coming to you about something, you know?

• 1:50:03Speaker 04

  And I think that's, uh, so that's been a big, like near and dear issue to me is that now there's this accusation that this is like a big green movement in Alaska or people from the outside want to come and force their conservation rules onto us. And I've, so we've had that Facebook group about six years. I'm the main person that posts on there. And I've had probably hundreds of messages or seen comments of people that say, hey, we have to get, I'm gonna make more enemies. We have to get Greenpeace in here. We have to get Peta in here or Sea Shepherd or whatever it may be. And I say, oh my God, no, like we don't, that's not how we want conservation to go. We're fishermen ourselves. We run this big risk of if this becomes too much of a headline issue and

• 1:50:45Speaker 04

  trough feeds off of this as it messages Alaskans. They run this fear factor deal of, hey, we're gonna get these guys in here that think fishing is unethical completely, and they're gonna shut it all down for you guys. But that is really not the vibe. You know, Mike

• 1:51:00Steven Rinella?

  I'm glad that's your instinct because a lot of people will be like, a lot of people will take whatever kind of partner they can find in something. And, and, um, and it can, it'll come around and, and, and bite you. Yeah. So we've been covering this situation on Catalina Island with them wanting to eradicate mule deer on Catalina Island. And you see like, like, uh, you know, maybe some hunter group being like, hey, we're kind of on the same opinion with Humane Society about this, you know, let's partner up. I'm like, dude, those guys will cut your throat first chance they get.

• 1:51:31Speaker 04

  For sure.

• 1:51:32Steven Rinella?

  Watch out for those hosers. Yeah. All right. Well, man, I appreciate you coming on the show and talking about it. I'm sure we'll talk about it more.

• 1:51:39Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:51:39Steven Rinella?

  I'm not gonna invite you down to do a debate because I think you're probably right. It probably wouldn't be too productive, but we'll see, man. Like if

• 1:51:46Speaker 04

  Oh, you'll get some letters.

• 1:51:47Steven Rinella?

  Well, no, and I might talk to somebody about it. It would have to depend. I'd have to kind of see what they had at stake, you know?

• 1:51:52Speaker 04

  Mm hmm.

• 1:51:53Steven Rinella?

  I'd a little bit want to know like what, what, what? What they felt was threatened.

• 1:51:58Speaker 04

  Hmm hmm.

• 1:51:59Steven Rinella?

  How personal it was, you know?

• 1:52:01Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, so I think the question to ask the other side is like, you know, with the mid-water nets on bottom, they say, hey, if we're not allowed to fish for pollock on the bottom with these mid-water nets, we'll go out of business. But does that really make sense to somebody to say that, you know, or they say, hey, if these pollock were regulated as a bait fish, because everything eats them, then that could put us out of business. And I think they need to be pushed on that of is that because you're getting paid, you know, millions of billions of dollars to catch these fish? Or is that because that's common sense and good conservation? And for me, it's when they exclude that to even say that, hey, we might, we're going to get fired from this fisheries regulation process if we even bring up the idea

• 1:52:45Speaker 04

  that pollock should be regulated as a forage fish. It's essentially corruption, you know, or it's not, it doesn't follow the intent of good governance that we all depend on and we live by, you know, so.

• 1:52:56Steven Rinella?

  Understood.

• 1:52:56Speaker 04

  As that starts to fall apart, it has ramifications for uh, wildlife everywhere.

• 1:53:01Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. All right, man. Um. David Bayes, he uh, is can be frequently found at the Stop Alaskan Trawler Buy Catch Facebook group. He can frequently be found fishing halibut out of Homer, Alaska.

• 1:53:18Speaker 04

  You should come up there.

• 1:53:19Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, we fish south there. I should though, because that's where the big ones are.

• 1:53:25Steven Rinella?

  All right, thanks for coming out, man.

• 1:53:26Speaker 04

  Yeah, thanks a lot.

• 1:53:53Steven Rinella?

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• 1:54:33Speaker 05

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