Sushihunter
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http://www.canada.com/victoriatimescolonist/story.html?id=88cf9186-7eb1-4ba8-903c-26ac3b599901
End of the line
Trollers on the west coast of Vancouver Island say a proposed salmon treaty will kill their livelihood -- if it isn't already doomed by declining stocks
Times Colonist
Sunday, July 20, 2008
UCLUELET-Doug Kimoto's grandfather homesteaded in Clayoquot Sound in the early 1900s, back when the government wanted Japanese immigrants to live where they fished.
Kimoto's dad was a fishermen, too, though he sold his boat just before being uprooted and shipped east during the Second World War.
The family, including six-month-old Doug, moved back to the Island in 1950, after Ottawa finally allowed Japanese-Canadians to return to the coast. Doug's dad bought a brand-new troller, the 42-foot La Perouse, that he heard was being built in Brentwood Bay. It's the boat that Doug, now 58, still runs today.
Not that he's going anywhere. A conservation closure has left La Perouse tied to the dock -- again. A few years ago, believing the politicians who said there would be enough salmon to keep the West Coast's much-reduced fleet thriving, Kimoto invested upward of $200,000 refurbishing the boat. "And here I sit, waiting to fish," he says. So far, he's been on the water 12 days this year and has made $5,000.
The trollers feel betrayed, particularly now that Canadian and U.S. negotiators have agreed to a salmon treaty that, if ratified, will cut the commercial chinook catch by half on the west coast of the Island. Already consigned to the margins, the trollers feel they're being muscled into extinction by the same politicians and bureaucrats who promised their survival.
The thing is, how can fishermen survive without fish? With or without the treaty, salmon stocks are in such rough shape that some trollers say it's the end of the line.
Trollers, the stubby little hook-and-line workhorses of the commercial fleet, are emblematic of the coast, postcard-pretty backdrops for every camera-toting tourist who wanders down a Vancouver Island dock.
That, the fishermen say, is the problem. Traditionally, trollers here would be 30 kilometres offshore right now, fishing Big Bank or some other salmon-rich area. But the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, citing conservation needs, closed the chinook fishery on the west coast of the Island in mid-June.
Someone counted 41 trollers tied up in Ucluelet that day. It was the same in Tofino, Ahousat, Port Alberni, Bamfield, Zeballos, Opitsaht -- 160 trollers up and down the west coast of the Island.
That's all that remains of a troll fleet that was 1,800 strong as late as the early 1990s. Then came the Mifflin Plan of 1996, in which the federal government bought back commercial licences in an attempt to pare the fleet to match declining salmon stocks.
A succession of fisheries ministers promised the trollers who remained that they could catch enough fish to make a living. It hasn't worked out that way.
Doug Kimoto is a good example. He's been fishing since 1963, when he began working as a deckhand for his father. That's all the crew you would usually find on a troller. They're snug vessels: La Perouse has a bed in the hold up front, a tiny galley with an oven that also heats the boat in the winter. Charts, lures, electronic fish-finders, coffee mugs, cannonball weights -- everything has its place. Trollers don't use nets; they fish with what are basically giant fishing rods, three on either side of the boat, with up to a dozen or so lures per line.
They used to go out eight, 10 days at a time, but now it's three or four -- the customers will pay more for fresher fish. It's not easy to unload though. It used to be that a boat could simply pull up to a fish packer, unload his catch, take on some ice, and chug off again. Now they have to unload by appointment, since there aren't enough fish to keep the packing plants staffed full-time.
And it's not just the fish plants. Ucluelet is down to one fuel dock from three. Port Alberni no longer has a place to buy marine fuel. Ucluelet's electronics store is gone; the repairman is now in Errington, way over by Parksville. "You're losing the whole infrastructure," Kimoto says.
Prices aren't bad -- $8 a pound for a big chinook last winter, falling to $5 by the time DFO closed the fishery in June. Trollers do a lot more fishing in winter now, the idea being to nibble away at a number of chinook runs year-round rather than gobble up a bunch at once. Even after all these years, the electricity runs up Kimoto's back when a fish hits a line. "You never lose that thrill," he says, standing at the wheel in a sweatshirt reading Trolling: A Proud Heritage.
But the chances to get that thrill are fewer and fewer. Kimoto has only caught those $5,000 worth of chinook this year. He's not allowed to keep other salmon: Coho have been off-limits for a dozen years, and so have sockeye for the past couple of seasons.
Some trollers are licensed for halibut and dogfish, too, but that means buying or renting quota (the right to catch a certain amount of a particular species) plus investing in the monitoring equipment required by DFO. Access to tuna has been restricted; besides, the El Niña effect has pushed them way out to sea, and who can afford the fuel to chase fish that far?
It costs $1,600 just to fuel Kimoto's boat. Going into drydock every couple of years costs $1,500 to $2,000. Just tying up the boat at the government dock costs $150 a month. Then there's the money he invested in renovating La Perouse a few years back. That boat will be pretty much worthless if Canada implements the chinook treaty, he says. Ditto for a salmon licence that might have fetched $160,000 on the open market two years ago.
"I'm in dire straits here," he says.
The salmon treaty, a renewal of the 10-year U.S.-Canada agreement that took effect in 1999, has trollers embittered. If ratified by the governments of both countries, it would see the chinook catch on the west coast of Vancouver Island cut by 30 per cent. The impact on trollers would be much greater than that, since they would take the entire hit; the recreational fishery would be untouched, as would a small native food fishery. Nor would trollers in northern B.C. waters be affected. Commercial fishermen on the west coast of the Island say they're the victims in a backroom deal designed to push them into oblivion.
Not so, says DFO. It's true that the trollers would shoulder the entire reduction, but that just reflects a policy that gives the sports fishery priority for chinook and coho, while giving the commercial sector first crack at sockeye, pinks and chum.
Paul Macgillivray, DFO's associate regional director general, also says the Americans insisted on the chinook cut, as their Endangered Species Act requires that kind of action. Seventy-five per cent of the chinook caught on the west coast of the Island come from rivers in Oregon, Washington and northern California, where salmon returns are in jeopardy. "That was a big deal for the U.S."
In exchange, Canada negotiated a 15 per cent cut in Alaska's chinook catch, saving fish that originate in southern B.C. rivers such as the Cowichan and Fraser. The deal would also see the U.S. pay $30 million to mitigate the economic impact of the cuts on the west coast of Vancouver Island.
How the $30 million will be spent -- licence buy-backs, perhaps, or paying fishermen not to fish -- won't be determined until after consultation, Macgillivray says. The U.S. and Canadian governments won't ratify the agreement until this fall at the earliest.
And yes, there should still be trollers on the water once all is done, though how many is unclear, he says. "The chinook returns that we're seeing are sufficient to have a viable troll fishery."
Kathy Scarfo, who speaks for the trollers, disagrees. Trollers already gave up half of their catch in the last negotiations. "We've reached the breaking point if we take any further reductions."
Even if the U.S. government approves the $30 million -- which is far from certain -- it isn't enough, she says. The value of the trollers' boats and licences alone is $60 million. When the California and Oregon fisheries were shut down for a year in 2006, the U.S. came up with $170 million to offset the losses. That's $170 million for one year, as opposed to $30 million for, well, probably forever.
Canada is getting the shaft, she says, sacrificing trollers because the Americans are unwilling to deal with the real problem, which is the way they've screwed up their salmon rivers. The salmon the trollers forgo will just be caught by someone else, and even those that get through won't be able to spawn in rivers that have become unnavigable. "This isn't conservation," Scarfo says.
The feeling that they are being turned into scapegoats is common among trollers, who detect the hand of a powerful sportfishing lobby at play. It ticks them off to see sportfishermen head out to sea while the trollers remain tied up.
Willem Offerein, one of the younger commercial fishermen at age 45, was painting his 43-foot troller Nawanie at the government dock in Ucluelet the other day when a charter boat went by. The charter operator, pointing to Offerein, turned to his boatload of tourists and said "look, another endangered West Coast species."
The comment did not improve the humour of Offerein, who has 10 children -- four boys, six girls -- to feed. It used to be that when salmon runs were poor, you could fish ling cod. In fact, Offerein has a quota that lets him catch 6,000 pounds of cod. But at $1.50 a pound, that wouldn't even cover the cost of the monitoring equipment DFO would require him to carry.
"For $9,000 worth of fish, I've got to buy a camera for $10,000." The camera, mounted on the boat, would automatically record the catch when the gear is hauled in. Then there's the cost of buying extra quota for halibut and other species. The sportfishery doesn't have any of that stuff to worry about.
Yet this has hardly been a banner year for the sportfishing industry, either. Marinas are empty. Fuel costs are keeping boats parked in driveways. It's not like fishing guides are getting rich, either.
And that leads to the underlying reality: Even if the treaty gets scrapped, many feel the fishery is doomed.
"There's no future here," says Ucluelet-born troller Mike Smith, who first took to the water at age 16. Now 62, he's about average age for a dying breed.
Pulling the plug on the fishery won't save the salmon, he says. They've already tried that, and the numbers keep dropping anyway. The real problem is the habitat crisis. How are the salmon supposed to spawn when their rivers are dammed and drained, so heavily tapped for irrigation that the water doesn't even reach the ocean? "Yet nobody's doing anything about it."
Fisheries authorities must step in to get fish breeding in the rivers, says Smith. "They have to start enhancing. The salmon are not going to come back unless they intervene, and they're not doing that."
Then there's predation by other species. Harbour seals and sea lions wipe out salmon right in the estuary. Sea lions have learned to stalk the fishboats, knowing it's easier to catch a salmon that's already hooked. Just ask Smith what it's like to watch a sea lion gobble an $8-a-pound fish right off of your line.
So, no, people like Smith and Kimoto don't see a sunny horizon as they motor out of Ucluelet harbour.
As they head out, a whalewatching boat comes in, followed by the MV Frances Barkley with a cargo of tourists from Port Alberni. Ucluelet is fortunate that it was able to reinvent itself. It's a hospitality-industry town now, full of funky bistros, surf shops, art galleries and roadside signs urging visitors to avail themselves of everything from sunset bear-watching trips to "luxury rainforest cottages."
Logging and commercial fishing are being left behind. You can count the remaining commercial fishermen from Ucluelet on the fingers of one hand. Ditto for Tofino. The boats cramming the harbour on this day belong to fishermen from all over the Island.
Other Island towns will have a tougher time if the fishery disappears. About a third of the trollers come from aboriginal communities, very few of which offer luxury rainforest cottages, or luxury anything for that matter. The just-ratified Mah-nulth treaty includes licences for natives, but those permits could well be worthless.
Smith says fishing has offered a good life, given him the chance to see some rare and beautiful things. "I've seen three whales jumping at once." Humpbacks, big ones. He's seen blue sharks, named for the rich colour of their backs, not the brilliant white of their bellies. He's seen saucer-shaped sunfish lying on their sides on the surface, only to flip up and speed away.
Rare sights indeed, just like a troller on the west coast of Vancouver Island, lines in the water, pulling in a fish.
© Times Colonist (Victoria) 2008
Jim's Fishing Charters
www.JimsFishing.com
http://ca.youtube.com/user/Sushihunter250
End of the line
Trollers on the west coast of Vancouver Island say a proposed salmon treaty will kill their livelihood -- if it isn't already doomed by declining stocks
Times Colonist
Sunday, July 20, 2008
UCLUELET-Doug Kimoto's grandfather homesteaded in Clayoquot Sound in the early 1900s, back when the government wanted Japanese immigrants to live where they fished.
Kimoto's dad was a fishermen, too, though he sold his boat just before being uprooted and shipped east during the Second World War.
The family, including six-month-old Doug, moved back to the Island in 1950, after Ottawa finally allowed Japanese-Canadians to return to the coast. Doug's dad bought a brand-new troller, the 42-foot La Perouse, that he heard was being built in Brentwood Bay. It's the boat that Doug, now 58, still runs today.
Not that he's going anywhere. A conservation closure has left La Perouse tied to the dock -- again. A few years ago, believing the politicians who said there would be enough salmon to keep the West Coast's much-reduced fleet thriving, Kimoto invested upward of $200,000 refurbishing the boat. "And here I sit, waiting to fish," he says. So far, he's been on the water 12 days this year and has made $5,000.
The trollers feel betrayed, particularly now that Canadian and U.S. negotiators have agreed to a salmon treaty that, if ratified, will cut the commercial chinook catch by half on the west coast of the Island. Already consigned to the margins, the trollers feel they're being muscled into extinction by the same politicians and bureaucrats who promised their survival.
The thing is, how can fishermen survive without fish? With or without the treaty, salmon stocks are in such rough shape that some trollers say it's the end of the line.
Trollers, the stubby little hook-and-line workhorses of the commercial fleet, are emblematic of the coast, postcard-pretty backdrops for every camera-toting tourist who wanders down a Vancouver Island dock.
That, the fishermen say, is the problem. Traditionally, trollers here would be 30 kilometres offshore right now, fishing Big Bank or some other salmon-rich area. But the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, citing conservation needs, closed the chinook fishery on the west coast of the Island in mid-June.
Someone counted 41 trollers tied up in Ucluelet that day. It was the same in Tofino, Ahousat, Port Alberni, Bamfield, Zeballos, Opitsaht -- 160 trollers up and down the west coast of the Island.
That's all that remains of a troll fleet that was 1,800 strong as late as the early 1990s. Then came the Mifflin Plan of 1996, in which the federal government bought back commercial licences in an attempt to pare the fleet to match declining salmon stocks.
A succession of fisheries ministers promised the trollers who remained that they could catch enough fish to make a living. It hasn't worked out that way.
Doug Kimoto is a good example. He's been fishing since 1963, when he began working as a deckhand for his father. That's all the crew you would usually find on a troller. They're snug vessels: La Perouse has a bed in the hold up front, a tiny galley with an oven that also heats the boat in the winter. Charts, lures, electronic fish-finders, coffee mugs, cannonball weights -- everything has its place. Trollers don't use nets; they fish with what are basically giant fishing rods, three on either side of the boat, with up to a dozen or so lures per line.
They used to go out eight, 10 days at a time, but now it's three or four -- the customers will pay more for fresher fish. It's not easy to unload though. It used to be that a boat could simply pull up to a fish packer, unload his catch, take on some ice, and chug off again. Now they have to unload by appointment, since there aren't enough fish to keep the packing plants staffed full-time.
And it's not just the fish plants. Ucluelet is down to one fuel dock from three. Port Alberni no longer has a place to buy marine fuel. Ucluelet's electronics store is gone; the repairman is now in Errington, way over by Parksville. "You're losing the whole infrastructure," Kimoto says.
Prices aren't bad -- $8 a pound for a big chinook last winter, falling to $5 by the time DFO closed the fishery in June. Trollers do a lot more fishing in winter now, the idea being to nibble away at a number of chinook runs year-round rather than gobble up a bunch at once. Even after all these years, the electricity runs up Kimoto's back when a fish hits a line. "You never lose that thrill," he says, standing at the wheel in a sweatshirt reading Trolling: A Proud Heritage.
But the chances to get that thrill are fewer and fewer. Kimoto has only caught those $5,000 worth of chinook this year. He's not allowed to keep other salmon: Coho have been off-limits for a dozen years, and so have sockeye for the past couple of seasons.
Some trollers are licensed for halibut and dogfish, too, but that means buying or renting quota (the right to catch a certain amount of a particular species) plus investing in the monitoring equipment required by DFO. Access to tuna has been restricted; besides, the El Niña effect has pushed them way out to sea, and who can afford the fuel to chase fish that far?
It costs $1,600 just to fuel Kimoto's boat. Going into drydock every couple of years costs $1,500 to $2,000. Just tying up the boat at the government dock costs $150 a month. Then there's the money he invested in renovating La Perouse a few years back. That boat will be pretty much worthless if Canada implements the chinook treaty, he says. Ditto for a salmon licence that might have fetched $160,000 on the open market two years ago.
"I'm in dire straits here," he says.
The salmon treaty, a renewal of the 10-year U.S.-Canada agreement that took effect in 1999, has trollers embittered. If ratified by the governments of both countries, it would see the chinook catch on the west coast of Vancouver Island cut by 30 per cent. The impact on trollers would be much greater than that, since they would take the entire hit; the recreational fishery would be untouched, as would a small native food fishery. Nor would trollers in northern B.C. waters be affected. Commercial fishermen on the west coast of the Island say they're the victims in a backroom deal designed to push them into oblivion.
Not so, says DFO. It's true that the trollers would shoulder the entire reduction, but that just reflects a policy that gives the sports fishery priority for chinook and coho, while giving the commercial sector first crack at sockeye, pinks and chum.
Paul Macgillivray, DFO's associate regional director general, also says the Americans insisted on the chinook cut, as their Endangered Species Act requires that kind of action. Seventy-five per cent of the chinook caught on the west coast of the Island come from rivers in Oregon, Washington and northern California, where salmon returns are in jeopardy. "That was a big deal for the U.S."
In exchange, Canada negotiated a 15 per cent cut in Alaska's chinook catch, saving fish that originate in southern B.C. rivers such as the Cowichan and Fraser. The deal would also see the U.S. pay $30 million to mitigate the economic impact of the cuts on the west coast of Vancouver Island.
How the $30 million will be spent -- licence buy-backs, perhaps, or paying fishermen not to fish -- won't be determined until after consultation, Macgillivray says. The U.S. and Canadian governments won't ratify the agreement until this fall at the earliest.
And yes, there should still be trollers on the water once all is done, though how many is unclear, he says. "The chinook returns that we're seeing are sufficient to have a viable troll fishery."
Kathy Scarfo, who speaks for the trollers, disagrees. Trollers already gave up half of their catch in the last negotiations. "We've reached the breaking point if we take any further reductions."
Even if the U.S. government approves the $30 million -- which is far from certain -- it isn't enough, she says. The value of the trollers' boats and licences alone is $60 million. When the California and Oregon fisheries were shut down for a year in 2006, the U.S. came up with $170 million to offset the losses. That's $170 million for one year, as opposed to $30 million for, well, probably forever.
Canada is getting the shaft, she says, sacrificing trollers because the Americans are unwilling to deal with the real problem, which is the way they've screwed up their salmon rivers. The salmon the trollers forgo will just be caught by someone else, and even those that get through won't be able to spawn in rivers that have become unnavigable. "This isn't conservation," Scarfo says.
The feeling that they are being turned into scapegoats is common among trollers, who detect the hand of a powerful sportfishing lobby at play. It ticks them off to see sportfishermen head out to sea while the trollers remain tied up.
Willem Offerein, one of the younger commercial fishermen at age 45, was painting his 43-foot troller Nawanie at the government dock in Ucluelet the other day when a charter boat went by. The charter operator, pointing to Offerein, turned to his boatload of tourists and said "look, another endangered West Coast species."
The comment did not improve the humour of Offerein, who has 10 children -- four boys, six girls -- to feed. It used to be that when salmon runs were poor, you could fish ling cod. In fact, Offerein has a quota that lets him catch 6,000 pounds of cod. But at $1.50 a pound, that wouldn't even cover the cost of the monitoring equipment DFO would require him to carry.
"For $9,000 worth of fish, I've got to buy a camera for $10,000." The camera, mounted on the boat, would automatically record the catch when the gear is hauled in. Then there's the cost of buying extra quota for halibut and other species. The sportfishery doesn't have any of that stuff to worry about.
Yet this has hardly been a banner year for the sportfishing industry, either. Marinas are empty. Fuel costs are keeping boats parked in driveways. It's not like fishing guides are getting rich, either.
And that leads to the underlying reality: Even if the treaty gets scrapped, many feel the fishery is doomed.
"There's no future here," says Ucluelet-born troller Mike Smith, who first took to the water at age 16. Now 62, he's about average age for a dying breed.
Pulling the plug on the fishery won't save the salmon, he says. They've already tried that, and the numbers keep dropping anyway. The real problem is the habitat crisis. How are the salmon supposed to spawn when their rivers are dammed and drained, so heavily tapped for irrigation that the water doesn't even reach the ocean? "Yet nobody's doing anything about it."
Fisheries authorities must step in to get fish breeding in the rivers, says Smith. "They have to start enhancing. The salmon are not going to come back unless they intervene, and they're not doing that."
Then there's predation by other species. Harbour seals and sea lions wipe out salmon right in the estuary. Sea lions have learned to stalk the fishboats, knowing it's easier to catch a salmon that's already hooked. Just ask Smith what it's like to watch a sea lion gobble an $8-a-pound fish right off of your line.
So, no, people like Smith and Kimoto don't see a sunny horizon as they motor out of Ucluelet harbour.
As they head out, a whalewatching boat comes in, followed by the MV Frances Barkley with a cargo of tourists from Port Alberni. Ucluelet is fortunate that it was able to reinvent itself. It's a hospitality-industry town now, full of funky bistros, surf shops, art galleries and roadside signs urging visitors to avail themselves of everything from sunset bear-watching trips to "luxury rainforest cottages."
Logging and commercial fishing are being left behind. You can count the remaining commercial fishermen from Ucluelet on the fingers of one hand. Ditto for Tofino. The boats cramming the harbour on this day belong to fishermen from all over the Island.
Other Island towns will have a tougher time if the fishery disappears. About a third of the trollers come from aboriginal communities, very few of which offer luxury rainforest cottages, or luxury anything for that matter. The just-ratified Mah-nulth treaty includes licences for natives, but those permits could well be worthless.
Smith says fishing has offered a good life, given him the chance to see some rare and beautiful things. "I've seen three whales jumping at once." Humpbacks, big ones. He's seen blue sharks, named for the rich colour of their backs, not the brilliant white of their bellies. He's seen saucer-shaped sunfish lying on their sides on the surface, only to flip up and speed away.
Rare sights indeed, just like a troller on the west coast of Vancouver Island, lines in the water, pulling in a fish.
© Times Colonist (Victoria) 2008
Jim's Fishing Charters
www.JimsFishing.com
http://ca.youtube.com/user/Sushihunter250
