Managers look at cod in weeks before federal fishery openings

Kayla Desroches/KMXT

The catch limits for Pacific cod in 2018 may be too low, and the number of participants too high, for some federal fisheries to open in the next couple of weeks.

NOAA inseason manager Josh Keaton says, because of the cod quota decrease, seasonal allocations may be a lot smaller than the fisheries are used to operating under.

“There are several quota categories – we call them quota categories, but they’re allocations to individual gear groups or fishermen. In some of those instances, that amount has been reduced to an amount that may not be able to support an actual directed fishery.”

He says managers don’t know final quota numbers until the North Pacific Fishery Management Council’s December meeting. And after that, they get just a few weeks before they can figure out participation and open the federal fisheries on Jan 01.

At the meeting this year, the Council cut the cod quota by 80 percent due to limited resource.

“What we have to do as inseason managers is determine is there enough cod and what is the amount of effort, or the number of vessels, that are likely to participate so we can make decisions whether to open that fishery for, say, an open-ended time period as we normally would or, hey, we only have enough cod quota to open for three days.”

It remains to be seen.

Since the Council’s meeting, Kodiak stakeholders and representatives have been planning on how to deal with the upcoming losses for the groundfish fisheries.

Kodiak fisheries analyst Heather McCarty voiced a common concern that some participants may not even be aware of the issues with cod in the Gulf of Alaska.

“You know, there are many crew members, folks who normally work on these vessels, who might be planning on it, who haven’t heard the news and who haven’t been at the meetings and haven’t seen the newspapers who might be expecting employment and maybe going to town or staying in town or whatever – planning on working on these vessels. And there may be little, and in some cases no, opportunities.”

McCarty said the cod decline and the quota reductions are likely to have long-lasting effects in the years to come.