Fisheries reporter Hal Bernton visited a Bering Sea factory trawler to see how its crew caught and processed pollock — and how the captain works to keep salmon bycatch low.
Deckhand Martin Vasquez walks through a pile of fish as they transfer from the net to holds underneath the deck of the Northern Hawk factory trawler on Sunday, Aug. 6, 2023 in the Bering Sea. The trawlers are not entirely to blame — warming oceans due to human-caused climate change are almost certainly a factor — but they have drawn the ire of salmon advocates from Western Alaska to Washington D.C.
And while Bernton has reported from the decks of much smaller boats, he says the factory trawlers are like floating cities.: This is a 341-foot vessel that I went out on, the Northern Hawk, with a crew of 129 people. And most of them work below the deck in a fish factory that, basically when the fishing is reasonable, operates 24 hours a day.
Now it is kind of complicated, because a lot of the chum they catch would actually go back to Asia. But about 18 to 20% of these fish, depending on the year, would be returning to western Alaska. So there’s no cap on how many of those fish they can catch. And there’s a tremendous interest, and pressure, from tribal groups and others to basically set some limits on how many chum can be caught. And the pressure is really on these guys.
And of course, the CDQ groups and the tribes, some of them are representing the same regions and in very different capacities now, so there’s a lot of more tension between CDQs and the tribes that plays out in these meetings of the North Pacific Fishery Management Council, which is set up by Congress to go ahead and recommend and set harvest rules that are then finalized through NOAA Fisheries. Unfortunately, it’s a long convoluted process.
A University of Alaska Fairbanks team last month found about 100 chum salmon that were spawning or had just spawned in the Anaktuvuk and Itkillik rivers.
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