And the biggest news from the sector was about Arne Fuglvog.
Former Crew Members Attempted to Turn in Fuglvog
When Senator Murkowski’s fisheries aide pulled out from consideration for an influential job in the Obama Administration two years ago, he said it was because the process was taking too long. It turns out Arne Fuglvog was under investigation by the very agency he would have run.
Fuglvog pleaded guilty last month to breaking commercial fishing law before joining Murkowki’s staff, and resigned from his Senate job right before the charges became public. His admission to falsifying catch records shook the commercial fishing industry in Alaska, where Fuglvog had served on influential councils.
Now former crew members are coming forward saying they tried to turn Fuglvog in to authorities for illegal fishing for years, and felt like they were ignored.
As early as 2007, two of Arne Fuglvog’s crew members tried to alert authorities to his illegal fishing. One would not go on the record for fear of being blacklisted by the fishing community but the other is talking on tape for the first time. Dan Pryse was reluctant, but agreed to meet at a diner near his home in the Lower 48.
He gives an example of how they’d fish someplace like the central Gulf of Alaska instead of where they were supposed to, west of Kodiak.
“It’s over a 20 hour run, so to run out there will cost you thousands of dollars in fuel,” Pryse said. “There’s no numbers of fish there, so what you can do in a 10 hour period in central Gulf will take you a week west of Kodiak, plus it’s gonna cost you an extra $5,000-$10,000 in expenses.”
“So to save that and to save time so we could get home, he could get to his meetings, we were all into it because it got us home sooner too.”
Pryse worked on the vessel the Kamilar for 16 years, starting when Arne Fuglvog’s dad was in charge. He stayed on board when Arne took over until Pryse lost his job in 2005. He says the crewman who replaced him had his own quotas to fish, which meant the boat could catch more.
He got upset watching Fuglvog rise through the ranks of the fishing management world, sitting on major councils that allowed him to shape policy and gain influence. Yet Pryse knew that even as Fuglvog was held up as a model fisherman, he’d been breaking the rules for over a decade.
Fuglvog went to Washington to work for Senator Murkowski on fisheries issues in the fall of 2006, and the following spring, Dan Pryse started calling law enforcement.
At first he was scared, using anonymous pay phones and trying to find out if he would get in trouble. But he says the feds told him they weren’t in the habit of hanging out to dry the people who helped them.
On May 11, 2007 alone, Pryse’s phone records show nine calls to National Marine Fisheries law enforcement in Alaska.
He says initially the feds seemed interested. A crew member who shared Pryce’s concerns and knew he was blowing the whistle tipped Pryse off in June 2007 that the Kamilar was docking in Petersburg with illegal fish.
Now, Arne Fuglvog was not on board – he’d gone to Washington, leaving in charge a hired skipper. But Pryse says evidence on the boat could’ve exposed information about when Fuglvog was captain.
“I called Marine Fisheries and told them here’s your opportunity to get the log books, get the computer, and find out I was telling the truth,” Pryse said. “All they had to do was a standard boarding, if they did a regular detail boarding they’d find the illegal fish, and it would give them probable cause to do everything that they needed to do to get the information.”
One day later, federal officers with National Marine Fisheries, or NMFS, boarded the boat and seized rockfish and halibut that weren’t reported on the fish ticket. The crew said they were for personal use, not to sell, but it was a lot – the rockfish weighed 1,300 pounds after being headed and gutted.
They’d hid the catch, packing the rockfish in two totes that were covered in cocoa mats to make them look unused.
The feds and state slapped the skipper and boat with about $11,000 in penalties for misdemeanors and violations, including lying to an official. But in the course of the investigation, an Alaska Wildlife Trooper interviewed a crew member who provided some damning information.
The deckhand had been aboard the Kamilar for over 20 years and said, “this has happened every year. Once or twice a year.” He talked about taking bycatch off the boat at night or offloading to tenders that wouldn’t be boarded by authorities.
He said he knew it wasn’t right, but that if he’d blown the whistle he would have been out of a job.
NMFS officials won’t say whether those comments prompted follow-up or if they were looking at a bigger problem than the isolated offense of taking home bycatch. But Dan Pryse says they contacted him.
“It was very shortly after, with a day or a couple days, they called and asked me to wear a wire,” Pryse said. “They asked me if I would wear a hidden mic and contact Arne, and I just told them no, the main reason was because Arne and I weren’t friends, I was pissed at him for taking my job.”
“I told him no, it won’t do any good and there’s no point to it. Plus it would tip the hand I thought.”
After that Pryse heard nothing. He says when he called NMFS he was told a variety of things including that the case was being pursued by the state. But no news on what the feds were doing about his accusations against Fuglvog, which were much bigger than failing to report home pack on a fish ticket. Pryse’s phone records show at least 16 calls to NMFS law enforcement that fall.
“The next time I called, they told me that their supervisors, the people in charge of Juneau Enforcement Office, they said their boss told them that the case was over, they had done a complete and thorough investigation, they could find no wrong doing, and that the case was closed,” Pryse said.
