Hold the Commercials Accountable 4

If you have listened to the show for very long then you have surely heard me say that mandatory lost net reporting is long overdue.  Well ladies and gentlmen we now have a chance to make it right.  Let me introduce House Bill 1717, this bill would amend RCW 77.12.870.  The RCW as it is currently written encourages lost net reporting but does not require it.  The problem with the bill as it is currently written is that the commercial fishing industry does not report it's lost gear.  There hasn't been a commercial fisher report a lost net since 2005 and in this past year alone there has been 11 newly lost nets found.

Habitat lost to a ghost net.

We have seen complete closures for rockfish in the entire Puget Sound this year as many of our rockfish have been listed as either threatened or endangered.  The major offender to rockfish according to the NMFS Puget Sound Biological Opinion is the ghost or lost net problem.  Over the last 2 years NW Staits Commission has removed almost 3,000 nets from Puget Sound but what good will this effort do if the commercial fishing industry is unwilling to even report future offences?   With this bill, they will be required to report so that a database can be kept to allow easier future removal of harmful derelict gill nets. 

To give you an idea of the damage these nets cause, let's look at a few numbers.  As of May 31, 2010 NW Straits had freed over 438 acres of marine habitat, removed 1,921 derelict crab pots, found 148,931 animals, and found over 215 different species dead in nets.  Some of these included birds mammals and untold species of fish.  There is no way to estimate how many animals these nets have killed over time.

How many fish and crab has this net killed over the years?

I have to thank CCA for taking up this fight as they continue to take bite after bite out of the elephant.  When Bear Holmes and I served on the Puget Sound Rockfish Advisory Board we pushed really hard to get a recomendation to require mandatory reporting as part of the plan.  With this success Bear Holmes continued to push through the CCA GRC and his persistence paid off as CCA took the ball and ran with it.  They worked with Representatives Fitzgibbon, Rolfes, Chandler, Dunshee, Orcutt, Appleton, Van De Wege, and Hinkle to re-write the RCW and introduce House Bill 1717.  A special thanks to those representatives for doing the right thing.

Even though CCA has put the ball on the goal line, we need to be the ones to push it over for a touchdown.  As it stands right now, this bill is in Representative Blake's committee and we need to apply pressure so that this bill get's a hearing.  We're close but we have to finish.  If we don't, then the $4,000,000 in stimulus funds that NW Straits used to start clearing Puget Sound of harmful ghost nets will be wasted.

As a side note, this bill also encourages reporting of both commercial and recreational crab gear.  Let's show these guys how to behave by setting the example if we unfortunately loose a pot.