IPHC Interim Meeting

[SerengetiGuide]

Listened to the webcast yesterday, amount they are suggesting for BC is the same as last year essentially (4.96million lbs compared to 4.98 million last year), where as we ended up with around 7 mill. One thing to keep in mind is I believe our one of our arguments for more than the suggested was that WPUE of the commercial fishery in BC was trending up and very strong. The crazy part is last year it spiked up again SIGNIFICANTLY and is by far the highest WPUE in any area on the west coast. Not sure how that will affect it...weird IPHC test vessels still have such low WPUE relative to the commercial fishery (clearly not throwing their strings in the right spots ). Anyway, this is the update, coastwide the trend was upward on halibut biomass as well as spawning biomass compared to last year from what I saw.

 

[searun]

Yup. Expected that. IPHC science guys are not going to give up the ghost easily. Did you notice them dangling the carrot of sharply increased biomass in future years if we just listened to their recommendations. Data trending for Area 2B is not fitting their model....hmmm. I do appreciate the difficulty predicting animal populations where there are so many variables affecting their abundance. However, there does seem to be something to Canada's approach to managing bycatch that is contributing to the result...maybe. Hopefully the Conference Board Membership can pull another rabbit out of the hat again this year.

 

[cuttlefish]

IPHC vessels are required to set on specific stations year in and year ouut. Ergo, unlike the commercial fleet, they are unable to target locations with high biomass. The IPHC does it this way to eliminate some variability which might creep in if their test vessels just fished for high WPUE.

 

[SpringVelocity]

sounds like tac is nearly the same so that may allow some flexibility to tweak what's currently in place....

 

[Hali killer]

sounds like tac is nearly the same so that may allow some flexibility to tweak what's currently in place....

Read it again. Our tac last year was around 7 million lbs. They want us to cut it down to 4.96 million lbs this year. They wanted us to cut it down to about that last year.

 

[searun]

Correct, and but for the efforts of the Conference Board members we would have seen significant reductions. Like I mentioned the IPHC science guys licked their wounds and re-grouped for this year. Big challenges ahead.

 

[Hali killer]

Correct, and but for the efforts of the Conference Board members we would have seen significant reductions. Like I mentioned the IPHC science guys licked their wounds and re-grouped for this year. Big challenges ahead.

Who is on this Conference Board?

 

[fish4all]

This was the conference board for 2012 it is usaly the same organizations

http://www.iphc.int/meetings/2012am/2012draftConferenceBoardReport.pdf

 

[searun]

I couldn't find a list of the specific attendees, but here's the list of organizations (2014):

http://www.iphc.info/Public Docs/2014ConferenceBoardReport.pdf