Chance salmon catches allowed

PORTLAND – An unprecedented shutdown will keep fishermen from taking chinook salmon from much of the coastline off California and Oregon this summer. But whiting trawlers will continue to land them by accident.

Whiting, or hake, is the codlike fish used in imitation crabmeat and other processed fish products.

Catching whiting in nets up to 700 feet long, trawlers sometimes also snare the salmon. Fish caught this way are called “bycatch.”

The whiting fishery this summer will be allowed to haul in 11,000 or more chinook along the West Coast without penalty, the Pacific Fishery Management Council has decided.

Whiting fishermen and federal managers say that’s well within safe limits and tiny compared with the roughly 185,000 commercial chinook harvested along the West Coast last year.

It’s also a minuscule part of a whiting haul that made Oregon’s whiting landings 50 percent more valuable in 2007 than commercial landings of salmon.

Bycatch salmon delivered to fish processors often go to food banks.

“Does it really make sense to shut down the second-largest fishery off the coast for the catch of a few hundred (threatened or endangered) fish? In general, the council has come down on the side of no,” said Frank Lockhart, sustainable fisheries administrator in the National Marine Fisheries Service’s Northwest office.

But environmentalists and the salmon trollers shut down for the season see a double standard. Regulators closed the direct ocean chinook fishery in April with the mantra that “every fish matters.”

When they head to sea in mid-June, whiting boats will still have flexibility on the number of salmon they can catch incidentally. High numbers will trigger a federal review rather than an automatic shutdown. Regulators didn’t reduce that “soft cap,” despite the closure of other fisheries.

“We feel there should be a hard cap with salmon – if you reach this many salmon, you’re done,” said Paul Merz, a longtime salmon troller out of Charleston. “And in a year like this where we have no fishery, that number should be really small.”

In 2006, a year after salmon bycatch spiked, regulators proposed having the Pacific Fishery Management Council set tougher standards, including a hard cap of 14,000 fish. But the bycatch dropped the next two years, and regulators abandoned the idea.