Representatives Peltola and Carter introduce Domestic Seafood Production Act to support U.S. fishing communities

Casey Willson August 1, 2024, Press Releases

The Act enhances seafood processing infrastructure and capacity in coastal communities, while blocking the development of industrial finfish farms in federal waters.

On July 30, 2024, Congresswoman Mary Peltola (D-AK-At Large) and Congressman Troy Carter (D-LA-2) introduced the Domestic Seafood Production Act (DSPA), legislation aimed at supporting seafood and mariculture processing in the United States, particularly in fishing communities with a demonstrated need.

“In Alaska, so many communities rely on fish and seafood production both for subsistence and good-paying jobs,” said Rep. Peltola. “My bill would support our local fishing and maritime communities while strengthening our domestic seafood supply chain.”

Through competitive grants, the Act would fund community development projects to improve local processing of seafood from wild-capture fisheries and mariculture, defined as the cultivation of shellfish and aquatic plants. It would also prohibit federal agencies from developing offshore finfish aquaculture in United States federal waters without congressional approval.

Read Full Press Release Here

A public serv-fish announcement: You should be eating more black cod.

Northern Journal

By Nathaniel Herz

Aug 30, 2024

Alaska caught black cod is oily and delicious, and it's selling at rock bottom prices right now in part because of the devaluation of the Japanese yen.

I do not ever attempt to buy or sell individual shares of publicly traded companies — I’m too financially incompetent. Consequently, I would not ever suggest turning to Northern Journal for personal financial advice or stock tips.

However, this is a column wholly dedicated to telling you, quite assuredly, how you can personally profit from the weak Japanese yen, which recently hit its lowest value against the U.S. dollar in decades.

Run, do not walk, to your nearest fish market to buy some black cod — a species that’s being sold for cheap in U.S. markets as its Japanese customer base has eroded.

In due course over the next thousand words, I will provide you with ample scientific background and narrative justification for why you should eat more of this underrated, undervalued denizen of the deepwater Pacific. (If you are a fisherman or fishing community resident whose freezer is already full of black cod, sorry for my patronizing tone; you can skip this column.)

Such is my confidence that I will first make you an aggressive proposal:

If you have never tried black cod before, go and get some. It is selling for $9.99 a pound at Costco in Anchorage, the same as fresh silver salmon.

Read Full Article Here

Federal appeals court ruling eliminates — for now — legal threat facing Southeast Alaska fishers

Alaska Beacon

By James Brooks

August 16th, 2024

A three-judge panel at 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has overturned a lower-court decision that could have temporarily halted troll fishing for salmon in Southeast Alaska.

The appellate court decision, announced Friday, clears the way for the region’s troll fishery to continue. It had been threatened by a lawsuit from the Washington-based Wild Fish Conservancy, an environmental group.

The group filed suit in 2020, arguing that National Marine Fisheries Service rules applied to the fishery were inadequate when it came to protecting endangered killer whales that live in Puget Sound.

A U.S. District Court judge in Washington state agreed with the group, ruling in May 2023 that the biological opinion — a document that underpins fishing rules — was inadequate. Southeast Alaska’s troll fishery would be shut down as a consequence.

Read full report here

Charter fishermen blamed for closure of Alaska’s summer king salmon troll season

Seafood Source

By: Cliff White, published in Supply & Trade

August 16th, 2024

The August king salmon season in Southeast Alaska will not happen after Alaska Department of Fish and Game (ADF&G) determined there was a catch overage in the first retention period earlier this summer.

Commercial trollers caught 82,000 kings in the first season, above the target of 66,700, forcing ADF&G to end fishing on 8 July. While the agency’s 2024 preseason forecast estimated commercial fishermen would be left with 15,000 kings to catch in the second season in August, sport fishermen caught around 52,000 kings, exceeding their allocation by 14,000 fish. Following a controversial management plan approved in 2023, that total was deducted from the commercial troll allocation.

Read full article here

Tenure Rights/USA: By, and from, the Sea

International Collective in support of Fishworkers

Samudra Reports

By: Brittany Tholan and Linda Behnken

June 2024

Permit banks and collective ownership in Alaska return individual fishing rights to the collective, harking back to the early days of fishing

More than 12,000 years ago, people on Haida Gwaii, an archipelago off British Columbia about 48 km south of Alaska, were cooking salmon. They are the earliest known humans to do so.

As with all early human societies who lived by the sea and off it, the first relationship with the ocean beyond the northwest coast was one of collective tenure. There were locally-derived systems of norms, rules and practices that evolved over time and gained social legitimacy. Men caught halibut via hook-and-line from canoes; women fileted, deboned and dried the fish. The Haida, Tlingit and Tsimshian peoples of present-day southeast Alaska fashioned large, v-shaped hooks out of wood to snare fish up to 500 pounds (227 kg). Potlaches, traditional feasts that involved dancing, fed, impressed and welcomed guests. The rights of Alaska Natives to access, steward and honour relate to, safeguard and/or share (for example) elements of their coastal territories and culture that have fluctuated over time, Tribal members have continued to work hard to keep their cultural traditions alive.

Read full article here

Bringing Salmon home to the Columbia River

The Tyee

By: Mark Thomas, Chief Keith Crow, and Jason Andrew

August 15th, 2024

An Indigenous-led, cross-border approach has seen great successes. But it needs BC and Canada’s ongoing financial support.

The Columbia River was once the source of the greatest salmon runs in the world. Millions of life-giving sockeye and giant chinook swam upriver to spawn each year.

The beloved performing arts showcase is back this September on Granville Island.

The Columbia’s headwaters are in British Columbia. The upper 40 per cent of the river winds through the province before entering the U.S. in Washington state and emptying into the Pacific in Oregon.

An epic 2,000-kilometre journey.

But massive dams, beginning with Grand Coulee in Washington, have blocked salmon from returning to the headwaters of the Columbia River for almost a century. In the 1960s, under the Columbia River Treaty, more dams were built without consultation with our Indigenous nations on our unceded territories in B.C.

Read more here

Dream of Crewing an Alaskan Fishing Boat? Start Here

The Tyee

By Brendan Jones

June 28th, 2024

As a student at Vermont’s Middlebury College, Lea LeGardeur loved being on the water. Her diminutive size, booming voice and natural ability with the rudder made her a fit for the coxswain position with the Middlebury men’s rowing team. She spent 2 1/2 years steering the group.

“I got accustomed to spending time with guys twice my size.”

Which proved an asset for LeGardeur, who, after teaching geography at Middlebury, decided to commercial fish in Alaska.

LeGardeur’s break came when she discovered the Alaska Longline Fishermen’s Association, or ALFA, based in the small fishing town of Sitka, Alaska. The organization had an extensive record of fighting foreign fishing, trawling and depletion of resources. ALFA had recently secured a grant to fund its Crew Training Program, or CTP.

READ FULL ARTICLE HERE

Progress Report: Update on the Sitka Community Boatyard at GPIP

July 19, 2024

The City of Sitka is moving toward the construction phase of a haul out and boatyard at the Gary Paxton Industrial Park.  Below is an update from the July 18, 2024 GPIP meeting provided by Jeremy Serka of Sitka Custom Marine.  Jeremy is under contract with ALFA to assist with boatyard development and fleet outreach.

Michael Harmon, the cities engineer working on the haulout project, described how the City settled on the final scope of work to be completed by the contractors. The final price is $9,281,000 and is set as a “do not exceed” limit for the contractors: Western Marine, K and E Sitka, and Sitka Electric.

PND- preconstruction, permitting and design services = $1,347,537 or 14% of the project,

Western Marine- piers = $6,279.362 or 68% of the project

Travel Hoist purchase = $1,377,800 or 15% of the project

Construction management and CBS indirect costs = $276,341 or 3% of the project.

The scope of the project was reduced due to unexpected pile depths. The following was cut from the project: Total cost around one million dollars.

·      Concrete and hydronic heater coils for wash pad ($500,000). The sump and filtration will be installed but a temporary liner (tarp) will need to be use when washing boats. There is currently no funding for this item but some talk of maybe a potential operator supplying the liner.

·      Electrical hook up and lighting at wash pad ($165,000) – the engineers designed a light pedestal that had some large outlets for plugging in spider boxes to provide power to adjacent vessels near the wash pad.

·      Special investigations and testing: ( $80,000) – there are a handful of potential environmental inspections that could be required ; such as concerns with sea stars and bubble curtain mitigation.

·      Civil / storm drains and expansion of yard around piers to accommodate parking and access to floating dock. ( $310,000)  The engineers had two more storm drains in the uplands to aid in the filtration of any runoff from the yard. Now they will need to grade the yard into one primary storm drain. The overall footprint of the waterside fill was shortened. The extended fill would have extended towards the creek side of the piers to give more room for parking and loading ramp for people exiting their vessel onto a dock.

Possible sources of money to finish phase 1 or contingency .

·      GPIP funds that were never allocated, or money left over for certain projects, may include $100,000 that was allocated towards wash pad in the early days of the project.

·      Interest that has accrued on the 8.1 million hospital money. The money has been earning 4% interest over the last two years, which equates to $648,000. Thor Christianson suggested that these funds should go towards the project; the city administrator appeared to disagree.

Permitting

Permitting is set to be finished in October and is currently in the public comment process. There is some worry that Sitka Tribe may have some opposition to the project as this has happened in the past. Objections could delay the start of construction.

Marine travel lift purchase

A final price of $1,377,800 was settled on for the 150 ton lift from Kendrick Equipment. The machine is set to be built but the contract is still not signed because Kendrick Equipment must provide proof of a bond before the city can sign. We are waiting on them but they say it won’t hold up production.

RFQ ( Request for Qualifications) for haul out operations

·      The GPIP board approved sending the RFQ to the assembly for approval and then solicitation. The RFQ is simply looking for qualified individuals to develop the scope of work to be incorporated into an RFP that will eventually select an operator based on the lowest bid.

·      The administration suggested that there may be some out-of-town interest in running the yard. Bidders who meet the requirements of the RFQ will work with a city group to determine what should be included in the RFP.   The scope of work will include such things as:  pricing for the haul out, storage, electricity and washdown services, lease of available workspace, management of workspaces, maintenance of equipment and property, liability insurance. environmental reporting, billing, etc.

Farm Bill Progress to Support Fishing and Seafood Industries

National Fishermen

June 12th, 2024

NF staff

On Tuesday, June 11, Senate Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry Committee Ranking Member John Boozman released a Farm Bill framework that includes several provisions advancing significant and meaningful benefits to fishing and seafood businesses and communities.

Read here

OPINION: Peltola pulls for Alaska fishermen

Anchorage Daily News

By Linda Behnken

June 9, 2024

Fish news out recently shows us once again that Alaska’s fishermen have a rare champion in Rep. Mary Peltola. Mary introduced two bills that focus on funding NOAA’s bycatch reduction program and advancing critical regulations on trawl gear.

Wild seafood provides food security and livelihoods across the country, but nowhere is that more true than in Alaska. We are fortunate to have a leader who not only has her own boots in fisheries but is bold enough to drive hard conversations around our biggest challenges.

In the North Pacific, that includes bycatch management and habitat protection — not only as a foundation for sustainable management, but as a critical part of climate resilience. We’ve seen the complete collapse of two iconic Alaska crab species, and elimination of subsistence fishing on major rivers with communities highly dependent upon that food resource. We’ve witnessed the abrupt crash of Gulf of Alaska cod following the 2014-2016 marine heat wave. As fish stocks and ocean conditions change more quickly and more substantially than ever before, we need conservation tools that match the pace with that change to safeguard ocean health.

For years, subsistence, commercial, and recreational fishermen in Alaska have asked for meaningful action by the North Pacific Fishery Management Council to protect fish stocks and fish habitat. Countless constituents have voiced concern about the impacts of large-scale trawling on an ecosystem made increasingly vulnerable by climate change. And while the federal fisheries management process is slow and deliberate by design — and the nature of these issues has made it even more so — the hard truth is that the impacts are quickly out-pacing action, and we cannot afford to wait.

Along with most of Alaska’s fishermen, Rep. Peltola recognizes the need for action. She also recognizes the importance of management being ultimately driven by the regional management councils and their stakeholder processes. This is why her bills focus on empowering progressive regional change — by funding the Bycatch Reduction Engineering Program already championed by North Pacific fleets, and by calling on the councils to do the important work of clearly defining the functions and limitations of trawl gear.

The latter has been a particular point of concern for Alaskans over the past several years. Trawl fisheries make up 97% of the fishing footprint in the North Pacific. That means that if trawling has unassessed negative impacts on habitat or fish stocks, then the potential for harm is significant. This has become the most concerning in the regulation of trawl gear in contact with the ocean floor.

Pelagic trawl is often described as a “mid-water” trawl, operating off the seabed and away from the fragile habitats and organisms living there. This is theoretically why pelagic trawls are allowed to fish in areas and at times when bottom trawling is banned. The pelagic trawl fleet in the North Pacific primarily fishes for pollock, the largest food fishery on the planet. It turns out their nets also spend a great deal of time in contact with the ocean floor. In fact, Council analysis estimates as much as 60% of the time for catcher vessels, and as much as 100% of the time deployed for catcher processors.

North Pacific regulations do not limit the time that pelagic trawls may be in contact with the seabed, nor do they define pelagic trawl operations in the context of proximity to the seafloor. This is a critical gap in our sustainability matrix and Mary is trying to correct it.

As an Alaskan and a commercial fisherman, I’m grateful to have a Representative who sees the value and potential of our fisheries and takes meaningful steps to protect them. These dialogues push us to be leaders in sustainable fisheries, to learn from our challenges and innovate. This is the kind of work that will get fishing communities through unprecedented times, and it is what good stewardship looks like — hard conversations about how to adapt and improve today, so that we can all go fishing tomorrow.

Linda Behnken is a commercial fisherman from Sitka, and the Executive Director of the Alaska Longline Fishermen’s Association.

https://www.adn.com/opinions/2024/06/09/opinion-peltola-pulls-for-alaska-fishermen/