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August 8, 2006

Unlikely Partners Create Plan to Save Ocean Habitat Along With Fishing

By JON CHRISTENSEN

MORRO BAY, Calif. — Fishery closings are generally not greeted as good news in ports like this.

Angry protests are more likely. So to find an environmentalist and two commercial fishermen quietly conspiring on the bridge of a fishing boat docked in Morro Bay as a far-reaching prohibition on bottom trawling went into effect on the West Coast this summer was unusual, to say the least.

The environmentalist, Chuck Cook, said he had been called a “conservation Nazi” in some ports. And Gordon Fox, who has been dragging fish and shrimp from the bottom of the Pacific Ocean for nearly 30 years, admitted the conversation would be “perceived by some in the industry to be sleeping with the enemy.”

Together with other fishermen and conservationists, Mr. Cook and Mr. Fox have fashioned a plan that they hope will preserve the fish and, just as important to both of them, fishing here off the central coast of California. It is a complicated deal centered on a simple quid pro quo, Mr. Cook said.

The trawlers in Morro Bay agreed to join the Nature Conservancy and Environmental Defense, an organization that advocates market-based solutions, in proposing three “no-trawl zones.” They would cover nearly 6,000 square miles of ocean between here and Monterey Bay, an area roughly the size of Connecticut.

In exchange, the Nature Conservancy agreed to buy fishing permits and boats from fishermen, like Mr. Fox, who want to get out of the trawling business, trade their boats for smaller vessels, and try to find more selective, sustainable ways to continue fishing.

“It’s a good time to make a change,” Mr. Fox said. And Mr. Cook, who is buying Mr. Fox’s boat and trawling permit for the Nature Conservancy, could not agree more.

When Mr. Fox looks back at the 100-foot-wide net on the stern of his 62-foot steel drag boat, the South Bay, he sees an obsolete tool designed for an old task: conquering the Pacific Coast fisheries after the United States’ exclusive economic zone was extended to 200 miles from shore in the late 1970’s.

Like hundreds of others of its kind, Mr. Fox’s boat did its job all too well, scooping up truckloads of fish in one swoop.

“We had the cheapest fish in the world,” Mr. Fox said. “And it’s the reason we don’t have a good fishing resource.”

The very success of the bottom-trawling fleet has been the cause of its failure: the precipitous decline of a variety of bottom-dwelling rockfish and groundfish and the prohibition of trawling across vast areas up and down the West Coast.

The deal struck by conservationists and fishermen follows a chart laid out by the National Research Council in a 2002 report on the devastating effect of repeatedly dragging nets across seafloor habitat.

“That’s been our bible on this project,” Mr. Cook said of his well-worn copy of the study, which surveyed years of research on trawling. Its recommendations included closing vulnerable areas of the ocean floor to bottom trawling and reducing fishing outside protected areas in tandem, rather than as separate strategies, as had been done in the past.

When the fishermen and conservationists agreed on the Morro Bay plan, it sailed through the normally contentious regulatory process at the Pacific Marine Fisheries Council and the National Marine Fisheries Service.

“It’s genius,” said Stephen Copps, a senior policy analyst in the northwest regional office of the fisheries service, which regulates fishing in federal waters and approved the plan in March.

“The hardest thing to do in fisheries management is to close an area to protect habitat,” Mr. Copps said. “Things have been so polarized between environmentalists and fishermen.”

The Morro Bay agreement was accepted as part of a coastwide plan to protect nearly 150,000 square miles of “essential fish habitat” from the Mexico to Canada.

What made the deal so unusual were the private buyout to reduce trawling and the collaboration between fishermen and conservationists, Mr. Copps said.

“This is an experiment,” he said, “using private money to offset the social and economic costs of marine conservation.”

But he hopes the experiment “propagates beyond this region,” he said.

While the deal was done quietly, it was made possible by a traditional noisy conflict: a lawsuit by an environmental group, Oceana, against the National Marine Fisheries Service, accusing it of failing to designate adequate habitat for West Coast groundfish like Dover, petrale sole, black cod and rockfish.

A judge ordered the agency to prepare an environmental impact statement. That opened the door for Mr. Cook and Rod Fujita, a marine scientist with Environmental Defense, to ask trawlers to join them in submitting an alternative plan.

When it was accepted as the preferred alternative, the court granted the environmental groups access to proprietary information about the trawl tracks that fishermen follow. Fishing captains are required to record their exact locations using global positioning system monitors from the moment they lower their nets until they haul them back onboard. Often covering up to 20 miles in a 6-to-10-hour tow, those tracks provided a precise picture of fishing and a key to the solution the National Research Council had recommended.

Scientists at the Nature Conservancy and Environmental Defense overlaid the tracks on maps of underwater features like canyons and ridges, home to a wide variety of species vulnerable to nets.

“We had the science, and we had the trawl tracks,” Mr. Cook said. “And when you have those two pieces of information, you’re going to get it kind of right.”

Using computer-based models, the scientists mapped out three areas that they judged could adequately protect two-thirds of the overall biodiversity along the ocean shelf off the coast of central California. Then Mr. Cook and Mr. Fujita negotiated with the Morro Bay fishermen.

After they went back and forth a few times, the irregular shapes of the areas that resulted were “designed to miss and leave open the sweet spots,” Mr. Fujita said, acknowledging that fishermen who continue to trawl “need to stay alive.”

Mr. Fujita and Mr. Cook said they wanted to see fishing survive, but with a sharp reduction in trawling. So far, Mr. Cook has made deals to buy five out of six of the trawling permits in Morro Bay at a cost of several hundred thousand dollars each. And he is negotiating with 10 fishermen on a similar deal to protect areas off Monterey Bay and Half Moon Bay to the north. He hopes to reduce trawling in these waters by more than half.

That leaves him with a quandary, however. If he succeeds in closing deals on as many as 15 boats and permits, the Nature Conservancy may soon be the largest holder of trawling permits on the West Coast.

“But we don’t want to trawl,” Mr. Cook said. Instead, the conservancy hopes to bank half the permits, he said, and lease the rest back to fishermen under rules that would put constraints on the fishing gear that could be used, the locations that could be fished, and the species that could be caught.

This would be much like land-based conservation easements that allow farming or logging, for example, while prohibiting development. It would be the first time such a restriction would be used in fishing, Mr. Cook said.

The lease proposal appeals to Christopher Kubiak, another Morro Bay fisherman who sold his trawling vessel and permit to the Nature Conservancy.

Mr. Kubiak is developing a proposal with Mr. Fujita to allow commercial fishermen’s organizations in Morro Bay and nearby Port San Luis to manage the trawl quotas they lease from the conservancy, while switching gear from trawl nets to fishing with hooks and traps, so that they can more selectively fish for abundant species and allow other stocks to recover.

Mr. Kubiak said fishermen needed to find low-volume, high-value fisheries of the past. He looks north to the San Francisco Bay Area and sees millions of people still hungry for fish.

“There’s definitely a market,” he said. “Quality is one thing people are interested in.” But they are interested in “how it’s caught, too,” Mr. Kubiak added.

“Not with this,” he said, gesturing toward the trawl net on the back of Mr. Fox’s boat. “They don’t want anything to do with this.”

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