[6] B.C. Fishers Expect Big Cuts From Treaty Changes

The brunt of the 30-percent Canadian harvest cut negotiated in recent salmon treaty talks is expected to be borne by the 160-boat commercial troll fleet that plies the waters off Vancouver Island.

But the $30-million cost, which the U.S. federal government will supply, is not expected to simply buy out fishing licenses. It will also compensate businesses adversely affected by the future cuts, said Larry Rutter, one of the U.S. commissioners involved in the 18-month-long talks.

Salmon licenses for commercial trollers in that area are worth around $100,000 apiece on the current market. Rutter said the U.S. contribution may seem like a lot of money, but he pointed out that it wasn't much compared to the $170 million in disaster aid that Congress approved for West Coast fishers in mid-May to keep the fleet and businesses alive after the drastic decline in chinook returns to the Sacramento River. The U.S. aid was tacked on to the farm bill passed by Congress, which last week overrode a veto by President Bush.

Commercial fishers in Canada are at the short end of the political stick, compared to their U.S. brethren. After a major overhaul of the management of salmon fisheries was completed in the late 1990s, their troll fleet became last in line for annual chinook allocations, behind native fishers and sportfishers.

It's a situation that could doom the fleet, said Kathy Scarfo of the West Coast Trollers Association. "We take the full hit," she told the Toronto-based newspaper The Globe and Mail. "So if there are 100,000 fish [to be caught] off the west coast of Vancouver Island, the recreational fleet will take 50,000, the natives will get 5,000 . . . and if they take 30 percent off the top that leaves 15,000 [for the troll fleet] and that would support about 15 boats."

Scarfo didn't mention the funding provided by the new treaty to test a mark-selective fishery for hatchery fish, which could boost catches by releasing more wild fish headed for both B.C. and Lower 48 spawning beds.

B.C. hatcheries would have to clip more of their hatchery chinook before it would work, Rutter told NW Fishletter.

The Vancouver Island troll fleet fishes earlier than during previous harvest regimes--a change designed to keep them from hammering their own weak chinook stocks. But the increase in winter and early spring harvest has put more pressure on Columbia River tules and Puget Sound chinook that graze off the B.C. coast.

In 2006, the Vancouver Island fleet caught only 104,000 chinook, but they hooked a lot of U.S. fish that the current salmon model used by the two countries doesn't figure in.

The model, like the treaty, needs an overhaul to reflect the changes in fishery timing. It also needs better spawning data from Oregon and Washington fish agencies. Currently, it tends to underestimate abundance when stocks are building, and overestimate abundance when they are declining.

Some of the money generated by the recent talks will go to improve it.

The Pacific Salmon Commission's chinook technical committee discovered last winter that its estimate of overall chinook abundance was lower than they thought last year when they pegged harvest allocations.

That meant Alaskans caught about 60,000 more chinook than they should have last year, given post-season abundance indexes. That's about 20 percent of their allowable catch of treaty chinook.

Northern B.C. trollers also caught about 35,000 chinook more than real abundance would have suggested, and Vancouver Island fishers caught about 20,000 more than the post-season analysis would have allowed.

Troller representative Scarfo told NW Fishletter that her group has managed to keep their federal government from acting on the treaty recommendations until next fall. In the meantime, they all calling for independent oversight of the whole process.

Scarfo isn't convinced that if the southern B.C. trollers give up 30 percent of their chinook quota, there will be any reduced harvest on the U.S. side of the border to ultimately benefit spawning stocks. "Don't pretend to be saving fish, since it's just a re-allocation scheme in the long run," she said.

Canadian harvest managers just shut down the West Coast Vancouver Island fishery out of concern for an upper Fraser chinook run, but they refused to share recent DNA harvest data with the public, Scarfo said. -B. R.

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