It’s time to protect Prince William Sound from trawling

In mid-December, the Board of Fish will consider four important trawl-related proposals. Three of them were submitted by the Chenega IRA Council, a federally recognized tribe, and one was submitted by the Alaska Outdoor Council. These are not two groups we have ever seen united on an issue before, which says something about the strength, breadth, and depth of support against wasteful trawl bycatch.

All of the proposals focus on Prince William Sound trawlers, the sole state-managed pelagic trawl fishery. According to Alaska statute, “contact with the bottom is prohibited” in this  “pelagic,” or “midwater” fishery, yet bottom-dwelling species like shortraker rockfish, rougheye rockfish, octopus, halibut, squid and sharks, as well as Chinook salmon and other nonpelagic species, come up in their trawl nets every year as bycatch.  

The Prince William Sound trawl fishery has zero observers. Instead, trawlers travel to processors in Kodiak. There, the processor, which also owns trawlers, is tasked with verifying the species and amount the vessel has bycaught, then submitting that information to the State.

The Chinook bycatch are usually juveniles, between two and three pounds. We don’t know their home river, as there has been no genetic testing of this state-managed trawl fishery’s bycatch. 

Alaskans have stood up to trawling before. In the 1990s, a trawler homeported in Seattle dropped a practice tow as it passed through Southeast Alaskan waters on its way north, catching Southeast fishermen’s entire quota of rockfish for the year and closing the small-boat rockfish fishery. 

In response, in 1998, Southeast Alaskans won the fight to have trawling banned in all waters off their coast.

Here in Prince William Sound a quarter century later, local people watch as trawlers drag these waters, catching non-target species and dragging the ocean floor. King salmon returns across the state have plummeted. Fisheries are being shuttered. Traditional ways of life are in crisis. And yet the trawl industry in Alaska continues to make billions by ruthlessly extracting massive amounts of marine life, not just pollock, out of our waters.

The state’s continued defense of trawlers is baffling given these statistics — as well as this most wasteful fishery’s annual bycatch of 141 million pounds of marine life, the obvious injustice of trawlers bycatching and dumping overboard dead tens of thousands of Chinook when Alaska Native peoples and rural residents on the Yukon River and many other places in Alaska are forbidden to catch even one, and the indisputable fact that supposed “midwater” trawlers regularly drag and destroy the ocean floor in protected areas. 

Trawling’s vast unpopularity, with 70% of Alaskans supporting a federal ban on trawling off our coast, makes the state’s continued and vocal defense of trawlers even more perplexing.

Businesses are coming together against wasteful trawl bycatch and in support of a healthy Prince William Sound. Fish Alaska and 13 other Alaskan businesses sent a letter of support for these proposals to the Alaska Board of Fisheries.

Like so many Alaskans, Prince William Sound residents have seen the impact trawlers have on Alaska’s fishing grounds. It is our hope that the upcoming proposals under consideration by the Board of Fish can take a clear step toward addressing this problem.