transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:08] This is The MeatEater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless.

Speaker 2:
[00:15] We hunt The MeatEater Podcast.

Speaker 1:
[00:18] You can't predict anything. Brought to you by First Light. When I'm hunting, I need gear that won't quit. First Light builds. No compromised gear that keeps me in the field longer. No shortcuts, just gear that works. Check it out at firstlight.com. That's firstlite.com. All right, everybody, we got a hot one today coming out of Alaska. Real controversial issue, it turns out. We're going to talk about trawling. We're going to talk about fisheries, fisheries management, habitat issues, all leading out of a lot of conversations that people have been hearing about, having about declining king salmon numbers, declining halibut numbers. Guys, if you go up to sport fishing in Alaska, you dream of going up to fish halibut and salmon in Alaska, this is an issue you got to pay attention to. Where this conversation came out of is on the news show. We recently covered this, I don't want to call it an emerging controversy around trawling and impacts to fisheries and Bycatch and all these conversations. This is an age-old discussion. This is an age-old discussion. It's a discussion that plays along in any region where you have declining fisheries and people have to start looking at, there's the pie, the fishery, who's drawing from the fishery and what is leading to fishery declines. Oftentimes, in these conversations, the conversations will turn to what fisheries are having the greatest ecological impact. And those discussions take place, okay? Trawling is an age-old controversy. There's places in Alaska where you used to be able to trawl. We're going to talk about all these definitions, so don't worry. There's places in Alaska you used to be able to trawl and the fisheries bench shut down, okay? On the news show, we were talking about an increased focus among fishermen on the impacts of the trawling industry in Prince William Sound, or the Gulf of Alaska in general, okay? The Bering Sea. And whether or not this commercial fishery is linked to declines in salmon and halibut numbers, we're just talking about this on the news show, all right? Talking about how it's a heated up political issue. Man, that led to a lot of feedback for a lot of listener feedback. We heard from a bunch of sport fishermen, charter captains. We heard from halibut long liners. We heard from salmon purse sayers, right? Talking about the damages of the trawling industry. And then we heard from a lot of people from the trawling industry, talking about basically, hey, it ain't our fault. The numbers are wrong. The numbers are misleading. This is all coming from outside interest. There's nothing to see here. Okay. So I thought based on the amount of conversation that our conversation generated, I wanted to dig in on this a little bit. So number one guest we're having on right now is David Bayes. Okay. David Bayes is a leader of a Facebook group called Stop Alaskan Trawler Bycatch. He is a former, he's a fishing guide in Alaska. Used to have his own charter outfit still, still in the business. He was the 2024 Sam McDowell award winner. He's the former chair of the Alaska Charter Association and the Homer, Homer Charter Association and a former member of the Homer area, Alaska department of fish and game advisory committee. All right. Welcome David.

Speaker 2:
[04:22] Yeah, I appreciate it.

Speaker 1:
[04:23] Thanks for coming on, man.

Speaker 2:
[04:24] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[04:25] So start out, start out. We're going to get into all these definitions. Okay. And that was a terrible intro, but we'll start the intro out. How did you get started fishing in Alaska?

Speaker 2:
[04:37] So I was born and raised there in Homer. And I mean, that was what you did as a kid in the 80s. We had people in town or just any free weekend. We grew up next to the Anchor River. You know, it was 200 yards away. You could walk down there. So that was, that was all I wanted to do, you know, fish on trap every second of it. And we were in the right spot for it.

Speaker 1:
[04:58] Okay. And so you gradually got into the charter business, targeting Halibut.

Speaker 2:
[05:03] Yeah. So I, you know, I've been into fishing, but when I turned 16, that was my first moment that I had a driver's license and could get myself to work essentially. So that was the first year that I started in the charters. And then while I was in college, I bought a boat, started a business, had that about 20 years and sold that recently. But I still work for the new owners, which are essentially people who have the boat.

Speaker 1:
[05:28] Okay, so you're from Homer. Next question. Are you a billionaire?

Speaker 2:
[05:33] Not that I know of.

Speaker 1:
[05:34] Okay. Because that's important to ask. Because when we brought up on the news show, when we brought up the controversy around trawling and targeting forage fish, targeting billions of pounds of forage fish, the related impacts of bycatch on large game fish, halibut, salmon, whether or not there is a relationship between this fishery, this industrial fishery, whether there's a relationship between that and declining numbers of halibut, declining numbers of salmon, we were assured by many people that this narrative is being pushed by outside billionaires. Okay? So I just wanted to make sure you're not a billionaire, but you're from Homer.

Speaker 2:
[06:26] From Homer.

Speaker 1:
[06:27] And you started your Facebook page, where?

Speaker 2:
[06:30] So I didn't actually start it. Jody Mason had started it. I'm a moderator. I do most of the posts on there. But Jody Mason is another charter operator in Homer. So yeah, one of the other admins on there is the executive director of the Alaska Outdoor Council. I do charter boats. Jody does charter boats. But it came to a head because before they set charter halibut limits each year, they take trawl bycatch of halibut off the top. So when you're talking about that pie, each year gets bigger and smaller. With fish populations, every fish that trawl takes out of it, shrinks that pie down. And so we got to where us on charter boats, taking out people with rod and reel fishing, they said, well, we're going to cut you guys back by about 30% to protect the resource. But we take 2 million pounds of halibut a year spread out across all these anglers. And at that time, trawl was dumping 5, 6 million pounds of juvenile halibut per year, so close to a million individual fish. And so then it just creates this hypocrisy of, what do you mean they can waste more than we catch? And we're being told that we're cut back for conservation.

Speaker 1:
[07:35] So yeah, let's back way up, because not way up, but you're doing great. What is a trawler? Like, like, what is a trawler? What is a bottom trawler? What is a mid ocean trawler? Can you lay this out?

Speaker 2:
[07:51] Yeah. So it, well, to start it off, you have to think about scale boats. So when we think about fishing boats, you know, we think of a lot of people have seen like the time band on the deadliest catch. It's the biggest fishing boat they can imagine. It's huge for most of us. It's about 113 feet long. But the biggest trawler fishing in Alaska now is 376 feet long. So if you put that in a Superbowl stadium, it would go from goalpost to goalpost, and it's about six stories high. So when you think of volume of fish that a boat like that catches, they catch about a half a million pounds of fish per day. They can hold about five million pounds of fish in their boat. So as we talk about trawl specifically, we're talking huge numbers, billions of pounds of catch, millions of pounds of bycatch. But the way they fish is you'll often hear them referred to as draggers as the other name.

Speaker 1:
[08:44] That's the term I'm familiar with, is draggers. But then you have a little problem where we previewed this subject on the new show. So then I got a lot of people, and I need to be honest here, right? I had a lot of people explain that the way I characterized some of the questions, like that I mischaracterized some issues. So I think I'm familiar with people calling them draggers. But then I was introduced to the idea that that's not the industry term.

Speaker 2:
[09:20] Yeah, I think the industry term, they don't like it because it is sensed as derogatory. There's been so many shutdowns of drag fisheries across the United States. But we actually see one good example of this. There's an industry group in Alaska that used to be, it was like the Alaska Whitefish Draggers Association or something like that. But they changed their name to something like a cooperative, you know, where they dropped the dragger name essentially 10 or 15 years ago. But they didn't change their gear, they didn't change their boat, they didn't change their bycatch much, but they just got rid of the word dragger.

Speaker 1:
[09:53] Yeah, okay, so get into the gear, yeah.

Speaker 2:
[09:56] Yeah, so they pull, we're not saying drag, they pull, they drag a big, a huge net. So the biggest ones, they say you can fit four 747 jets plus the Eiffel Tower on its side into this net. So there again, when you and I think of fishing and fishing boats and what extraction of a natural resource is, this is almost incomprehensible. We'll pull up like a quarter million pounds of fish in one sweep essentially with this net. But it has a chain or a cable along the bottom to weight it. And on those biggest ones, that's about a quarter mile wide. So if that's dragging on the bottom, then you're cutting about a quarter mile wide swath of seafloor. Yeah. So they say the biggest ones will tell about six square miles of seafloor per boat per day. There's probably 40 of these factory trawlers fishing in Alaska. They have a long season. So if you say 40 boats, six miles per day fishing, 200 days per year, the number of square acres of seafloor potentially covered is just unimaginable. Astronomical. I think it's 48,000 square miles.

Speaker 1:
[11:01] If they could hit six square miles.

Speaker 2:
[11:03] If you do it that way. Yeah. Yeah. Cause they fish 24 hours a day. It's this floating factory ship.

Speaker 1:
[11:08] That makes my halibut jigs. That makes it seem impotent.

Speaker 2:
[11:11] They do complain about crab pots in these regulatory meetings and say, you guys anchored here, you know, or you dropped a crab pot and ignore that they're fishing this way. Anyway, so huge nets and there's kind of two divisions that they're cut into. One is the bottom trawl that will target fish that always live on the bottom. So like flounder and sole. Those are made to always be on the bottom. They kick the fish up, scare them into the net and bottom trawl across the world has this bad name. You know, that's what's associated mostly with draggers, entire nations have banned it. I think Bali and Hong Kong are no bottom trawl at all. There's a lot of European nations are kicking it out of their marine protected areas. Bottom trawl is a bad word. It always has been. There's really not much debate on that. People at home can Google like impact bottom trawl and pick it up. You don't have to take my word for it. There's 10,000 results that say, this is an ecological disaster.

Speaker 1:
[12:10] And that on bottom trawling, just so we're understanding the gear, right? Like legitimate bottom trawling where you're legitimately dragging. The argument is not only the fish, right? Like not only a relatively indiscriminate harvest mechanism, but also bottom damage, seafloor damage.

Speaker 2:
[12:35] Correct.

Speaker 1:
[12:37] That's kind of what drives the argument against bottom trawling or dragging.

Speaker 2:
[12:42] Absolutely. And so we see, so I was saying there's two types of trawl. So we see those bottom draggers that are always hard on bottom. They've been banned a lot of places in the world. Alaska, in fact, has, I think about 60 percent of Alaska has been closed down to bottom trawling because we acknowledge that it's this kind of ecological disaster. It kills the coral, it kills the fish on the bottom, all the habitat. But then there's this other category of trawl, which they call midwater trawl.

Speaker 1:
[13:09] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[13:09] And so that's primarily used for the pollock fisheries up there, which is about a 3 billion pound extraction per year. Not a lot of people know what pollock is. It's essentially like the bait fish of the North Pacific. And that fishery actually began because they were targeting roe, which is caviar essentially, to sell to these other nations.

Speaker 1:
[13:30] So they're targeting pollock roe or herring roe?

Speaker 2:
[13:32] Pollock roe.

Speaker 1:
[13:33] Oh, really?

Speaker 2:
[13:34] Yeah, so they push back hard now and say, we're feeding the world, but the origin of this fishery was for caviar essentially. And it's still a huge driver. They get about $5 per pound for the pollock roe versus about $0.10 per pound for pollock flesh.

Speaker 1:
[13:50] Dude, that's okay. I just wanted to touch on this a minute because I don't want to forget to talk about this. When you think about fish harvested, commercial fish, or when you think about walking in into a fish shop, I don't care where you go buy a fish. Let's say you go into, I don't know, Whole Foods or something and you go look at fish. I always look into those cases as the way it's justifying my fishing because I'm like, Homme, these fish we catch, you know, you'd be like, sablefish, $20 something a pound, halibut, whatever pound, salmon, whatever pound. It makes me feel like, I feel like going to my wife like, I was going to say, is your wife watching this? You should, I should fish more.

Speaker 2:
[14:32] Yeah, we're making money.

Speaker 1:
[14:33] And so you see the value of like what we think of as the fish that we serve on a plate to our family when it comes to as a product that looks like fish, the high value of that. And fishermen getting, you know, fishermen getting at the dock, we get accustomed to fishermen getting at the dock, $2 per pound, $5 per pound, $7 per pound, $10 per pound, right? So like a valuable resource. I remember having burgers and a beer with a Pollock guy down in Seattle. He was based out of Seattle and he ran one of these big Pollock processor boats.

Speaker 2:
[15:06] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[15:06] Okay. He was the captain on one. And I remember sitting there and he's talking about, we do good when the price goes up a couple of pennies. And this isn't the exact number, but I'm not far off on the number. As I'm sitting there with him ahead of him going up, he was saying like, if it like five, this isn't far off at five cents a pound. It's a bummer. At eight cents a pound, it's good.

Speaker 2:
[15:37] It's bonanza. Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[15:38] And I'm never thinking like, how could there be, how could there be a fish in the ocean that is so unvaluable? Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[15:48] Well, and so that's what brings us to why they use trawlers in the first place and why we don't see trawlers everywhere is that they really shine on super low-value high-volume fish, which coincidentally ends up being like a lot of the baitfish type species. That's what's super plentiful. But their case is that they could never catch enough pounds of it to make money off of it unless they were dragging it up, you know, six square miles of the seafloor per day type deal or 200,000 pounds at a time. But what we really found to be the scandal, if you will, in all of this is that, so we said that bottom trawl is bad, it's banned a lot of places. There's really not much argument about that. Even the bottom trawlers in Alaska just kind of hunker down as this conversation happens because the more people find out that it even exists up there, the more people want it banned. That's just established across the world.

Speaker 1:
[16:43] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[16:45] But kind of the, like I say, the sandal of it is that we've actually found out that the midwater nets now are on bottom 20 to 100 percent of the time. But where that really, the rubber meets the road on that is that those midwater nets are allowed to fish in these critical habitat areas where bottom trawl has been banned. So the fish regulators understand that these huge nets are on the bottom sometimes all the time. But they haven't taken this next step to ban them from where bottom trawling is banned, which is this huge disconnect.

Speaker 1:
[17:18] So to help me understand the midwater thing and, and, and I'm not, I'm anything but like, talk to me like I'm five years old, but I'm a five-year-old who looks at Pollock schools on fish finders. If you're in 200 feet of water and you're looking at a Pollock school, this is just, I mean, this is like very anecdotal, okay? If I'm looking at a school of Pollock and 200 feet of water, that school of Pollock is stacked in maybe the bottom 10, 12 feet.

Speaker 2:
[17:48] Frequently, yeah.

Speaker 1:
[17:49] So, but, but what, like, how do you define mid ocean? Does it mean like, don't touch the bottom or does it like, if you're in varying depths, like what is the definition of that?

Speaker 2:
[18:00] Well, so that's where it's, this sounds unbelievable, but it's essentially not defined, or they call it midwater because they will sometimes lift the nets up off the bottom. So it's not the fish, the difference between bottom trawl for target species like flounder and sole is that those fish always live in the mud, buried in the bottom.

Speaker 1:
[18:19] So you're scraping them out of the mud.

Speaker 2:
[18:21] They drop that net to the bottom 100 percent of the time. Pollock spend a whole bunch of their time within, you know, one, two, three, four, five feet to the bottom. But they'll also sometimes raise up.

Speaker 1:
[18:33] Okay.

Speaker 2:
[18:34] And so they have this weird deal where they say it's not illegal to drag a midwater net on bottom. But the only reason that would be illegal or the only reason they say it was on bottom for regulatory purpose is if it pulls up 20 or more crab. It's a weird deal in a single drag of the net. But they say if it pulled up 19 crab, that it wasn't on the bottom. And so it's this crazy regulatory concept that just doesn't really hold up.

Speaker 1:
[19:01] So being on bottom or not is defined by how many crabs are you catching because we know the crabs aren't mid-level.

Speaker 2:
[19:09] Correct.

Speaker 1:
[19:09] I got you.

Speaker 2:
[19:10] But they, if you start digging into their bycatch numbers, over the last five years, this Bering Sea Pollock fleet had 345 metric tons of starfish that they brought up to the deck of the boat as bycatch. And they have about 40 million pounds of this flounder and sole, these fish that live hard on the bottom. And so then you start to see these conundrums. And so in about 2020, 2021, there was this big crab crash. You might have seen the headlines of like 10 billion crab lost in the Bering Sea.

Speaker 1:
[19:38] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[19:39] So the same regulatory agency that-

Speaker 1:
[19:41] But that was related to water temperature, wasn't it?

Speaker 2:
[19:44] Maybe.

Speaker 1:
[19:46] I don't know.

Speaker 2:
[19:47] Yeah. That was, that's the official standpoint. And there's water temperature change. But what that triggered was this fisheries management that regulates crab in the Bering Sea also regulates trawl. And so their crab scientists, the crab science side of it started to look into this. And they found out that the trawlers were actually fishing in this closed to bottom trawl area of the Bering Sea, this crab nursery or crab habitat area. And that was where this document came out that well, it was the midwater trawl captains themselves, the pollock captains that said, we know our nets on bottom 20 to 100 percent of the time. But we can't get in trouble for that because regulators knew it too. Like this isn't new news, this is just how we fish. But that has set off this chain reaction obviously of, well, we have all these areas closed off of Alaska to protect habitat, because we don't want bottom trawls there, but they're not closed to midwater trawls dragging on bottom. So that gets super important because when we start to look at like essential fish habitat and how much of the seafloor has never been touched by a net, all these areas closed to bottom trawl, we say are pristine 100 percent habitat essentially. But the reality is that the midwater nets have been hard on bottom there for a long time. Then it just really throws off all the calculations and you get into like, how can this fisheries regulatory agency make this miss? Or how can we know that they're on bottom but not regulate it that way? That's where we get into revolving door and like trawlers on the regulatory agency and on and on all the way up to Washington DC. So that's been a huge can of worms that Alaska has been going through lately.

Speaker 1:
[21:30] Yeah. I want to talk for a minute about, we talked about the equipment. Explain, explain the bycatch issue to me. Like how much bycatch is actually there. And as we talk about this, there's a couple of things I'd like us to hit on in no particular order. You get it. Maybe you can tell me that we talked about some staggering amount of bycatch but industry people pointed out to me that the bulk of it is cod. Well, the bulk of it is jellyfish. They're like, well, it's jellyfish and cod. There's a question about waste and the industry is like, well, we're permitted to retain a lot of this stuff, so we're not actually pitching it. It's mostly jellyfish which are unregulated. Then at some point, I want to get into the question of, well, I'm going to say that. I want to get into the question of king salmon. Where they're getting caught, where they're coming from. But first, explain. The reason I want to talk about bycatch is because I want to narrow one on the fish itself. The pollock, right? Because anyone who's, any kid who went through the most basic science class, science classes, the food chain idea, right? You have a large prey species, large number of prey species, they get eaten by bigger fish, the bigger fish get eaten by bigger fish. And so there's this question of, in addition to a conversation about bycatch, there should be a conversation about the stability of the food base. So forage fish, right? And what the impacts of removing all these forage fish might be. So put that on hold while we get into the bycatch thing. Help me understand the bycatch issue, okay? If it's all jellyfish, what's the problem?

Speaker 2:
[23:30] So they say, so there's, it gets fuzzy here again. You're not going to like this. There's two categories of bycatch. One is observed bycatch, which is the stuff that comes up onto the boat. Somebody digs through the catch, extrapolate out the numbers and say, you guys definitely killed X amount of pounds of X amount of species.

Speaker 1:
[23:49] These observers are federal observers.

Speaker 2:
[23:52] Correct. Yeah, they're required by the feds, but they usually work through like an independent intermediary agency that staffs them, like a staffing group. Okay, okay. So there's two categories. There's the observed numbers, those come up to the deck, they get counted, those are pretty good numbers. Then there's also the unobserved bycatch. So we talked about these nets might drag six square miles of seafloor in a day, but nobody's calculating how much stuff got knocked down or killed or dredged up, bottom sediment that doesn't make it up on the boat to be quantified. Other countries have taken stabs at that. There's been some research to find out how much biomass is in one square feet of mud in the Bering Sea, et cetera. But the USA, in that sense, just says, we don't think it exists or they ignore it.

Speaker 1:
[24:38] Look up. They want to stick to what's observed.

Speaker 2:
[24:41] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[24:41] Got it.

Speaker 2:
[24:42] But that benefits trawl quite a bit to do it that way.

Speaker 1:
[24:44] Understood.

Speaker 2:
[24:46] So the observed bycatch, they told us that over the last 10 years, all trawl groups in Alaska combined have 141 million pounds of bycatch per year. So that's about 16,000 pounds per hour. That's about 1 million pounds every two and a half days. It's three and a half billion pounds since I graduated high school in 2021.

Speaker 1:
[25:06] Okay.

Speaker 2:
[25:07] So you're talking massive.

Speaker 1:
[25:09] Tell me the annual number again.

Speaker 2:
[25:11] 141 million pounds per year.

Speaker 1:
[25:14] Of sea life?

Speaker 2:
[25:15] Yeah. Correct. All species combined. Yeah. It's an indiscriminate gear type. That's why trawl works is that it scoops up a bunch of stuff. You bring it up to the deck. Sometimes the government says you can't keep that fish. Sometimes the fish isn't valuable. Sometimes it's jellyfish that doesn't have a commercial market. But if you looked at dragging a net through a wheat field or whatever, there's honeybees and stuff that you would throw out. But when you start taking huge millions of pounds of stuff out of any ecosystem, you can run into trouble. I don't know if jellyfish is that, but they're there and they made it however many thousands of years there. But the really big, the highlighted species or the more controversial species are what they call prohibited species catch, PSC. Okay. So those are typically either the more slow growing or commercially valuable or often the fish which are already allocated to other industries. So when we fish for halibut in Alaska, if money is involved, if you're a long liner that catches them to sell at the store, a charter fisherman taking people out, we have these real super tight limits of 1.999 million pounds or whatever it is. They float up and down each year and there's this acknowledgement that if trawl wastes some of his bycatch, then it's going to affect these other industries. So they say, trawl, you can't have them at all. There's a conversation about, well, maybe trawl should be able to sell them. But then the concern is, so last year halibut fishermen were getting about $8 per pound at the dock for halibut. But pollock is worth about $0.10. So there's this concern that if you allow them to catch these super valuable fish and sell them because we caught them anyways, then that you essentially incentivize that.

Speaker 1:
[27:00] Sure.

Speaker 2:
[27:01] You'll see them shifting from, well, we accidentally caught this, but it was worth more.

Speaker 1:
[27:04] If you just did a micro shift to pick off more halibut, you had the incentive to do it. Why not do it?

Speaker 2:
[27:12] I mean, you're talking about like, maybe I'm asked for close to 1000% more if you go from 10 cents a pound to a fish that's worth $10. So anyways, but they don't want trawl to catch any prohibited species at all. But fisheries regulators over time have gotten this claim from trawl of, well, the nets are so big, we have to use big nets to make money. We just can't help it. So they have made these acknowledgments that, okay, we're going to give you a limit of how many king salmon you can catch per year, limit of how many halibut. We don't want you to catch them. You're not supposed to catch them. You're not supposed to target them. But we acknowledge that it might happen. So this for...

Speaker 1:
[27:51] But you can't have them.

Speaker 2:
[27:53] But yeah. So they say that they either can be donated or they can be discarded, but they can't enter into commerce because they're going to try to prevent it from becoming this incentivized thing.

Speaker 1:
[28:04] Yeah. A guy from the industry, from the trawl industry pointed out to me that they're sending halibut to food banks.

Speaker 2:
[28:12] Some. So one of the big problems with PSC, these prohibited species, king salmon and halibut get the most air time. They're the most controversial essentially, but they are also caught as juveniles. A lot of the straw bycatch is juvenile fish. So the average halibut as caught as bycatch, a few years ago in the Bering Sea was 4.75 pounds. So we call them ping pong paddle halibut. So the average king salmon was about 5 pounds. So we think of that.

Speaker 1:
[28:42] So poundages wind up being a little bit misleading.

Speaker 2:
[28:46] Yeah. But we also in strictly in terms of what goes to food banks, we think of like, wow, a food bank would love to get this 100 pound halibut or this 35 pound king salmon. Think of how many people that would feed. But that's not what shows up. What we see is something which yields two pounds of fish or fish flesh. And in the case of halibut, those fish are being cut down essentially just a couple of years before they would spawn the first time. And the salmon are being cut down before they've ever spawned. And so while the food bank conversation is valid and maybe that's better than them being dumped over, they a couple of years ago, they had this report that they donated about 300,000 pounds of fish in that one year versus 141 million pounds of total bycatch. So they get a tax write-off for it. It's a great PR blitz. You can open up an email to a stranger with it or talk to somebody in DC and say, we get this bycatch, but we donate a lot of, we donated 100,000 pounds, but they might have had seven million pounds of a bycatch of this halibut or halibut and salmon combined. So that one tends to fall apart. But with this PSC limit, so they made this acknowledgement that, yeah, you guys have indiscriminate nets, you're going to have some halibut, sometimes you're going to have some salmon. We don't want to shut you down every time you have it, but they're never supposed to catch it. So it would be like if Fish and Wildlife Service said that they were going to allow duck hunters to take two bald eagles per year or something. It's like this action, there was an eagle flying behind the ducks, this guy shot on accident. He's not going to go to federal prison for the first couple, but if it gets beyond that, it's a problem. But in no point at the end of the year, if nobody had gotten the eagle quota, would somebody go out and point blank shoot two bald eagles? That's just not the intent of this regulation. But what we've seen with trawl is that they take this prohibited species catch kind of for granted. They say, we know we can catch 45,000 king salmon this year, so we don't care if we get up to 44.5 thousand, as long as it doesn't shut us down. Or they say, we need to use this PSC to fully catch our limit type thing. But that's just a big wander away from what it had originally been created for.

Speaker 1:
[31:01] Got it. And roughly how many ha- And you know, another thing we got to set up is layout where we're talking about. So you said areas of the Southeast, the practice has already been- The practice has been banned in the areas of the Southeast for over 20 years, Southeast Alaska.

Speaker 2:
[31:17] Correct, yeah.

Speaker 1:
[31:17] So it's currently like areas in the Gulf of Alaska. And if someone looks at the map, imagine like that big basin, you know, on the western edge, you got the Aleutians coming down on the eastern edge.

Speaker 2:
[31:31] You got- You want an Alaskan pro tip?

Speaker 1:
[31:33] Yeah, there you go. There's pro tip. Hold that up. But for people listening-

Speaker 2:
[31:36] I don't know if you can see it. The-

Speaker 1:
[31:38] How do you, you can make an Alask- It's not as good as how you can make a Michigan with your hand, but you can make a decent Alaska with your hand.

Speaker 2:
[31:43] So the- Yeah. Is this pointing towards the camera?

Speaker 1:
[31:47] I don't know, Phil, is that aiming at the camera?

Speaker 2:
[31:49] Yeah, it is.

Speaker 1:
[31:50] You're in there.

Speaker 2:
[31:50] I was trying to pull up a real picture of Alaska to help you guys out, but it might take a sec. So this is roughly the state of Alaska. So this is Southeast Alaska. It comes down towards Canada and Seattle. This is the Aleutian chain that it sends out towards Russia. Anchorage is about right here. But most of the trawl happens in the Gulf of Alaska, so a little bit south of Anchorage and Homer, and then a big part of it in the Bering Sea, which is where the deadliest catch crabbing is. But you're right, it was banned in Southeast Alaska, which is a pretty interesting story because historically there hadn't been big trawl fisheries in Southeast Alaska. It's a pretty rocky bottom. They didn't have the population to fish that they wanted, et cetera, et cetera.

Speaker 1:
[32:33] Was that what kind of keeps them out of there? Just like the fjord, kind of the fjord geology and hydrology of the area?

Speaker 2:
[32:39] Well, the Gulf of Alaska has it too, but really it's the fishable populations of these like low value, like pollock and flounder just weren't there. But where it came to a head is most of these boats that fish trawl in Alaska in summertime, will do their off season down in Seattle, Washington.

Speaker 1:
[33:00] Okay.

Speaker 2:
[33:01] So they had this incident, very particular one moment, where one of these boats had left Seattle, Washington. It came up into Southeast Alaska. It was legal to fish there. I don't know if they wanted to see what was down there, they wanted to test their net or whatever, if they were fishing legally. And so they unrolled their net, fishing for a day, and they essentially caught the entire rockfish quota for all of this area in a single day.

Speaker 1:
[33:24] You're kidding me.

Speaker 2:
[33:25] Which means nobody else can fish for them this year. And so that, as you can imagine, put up this hell storm of conflict. And so they eventually got them banned because they, obviously that was bad, but in that instance, it was a little bit different because they didn't really want to fish there anyways. It was kind of an accident that they'd hit this limit. And so while that does set precedent that it can happen in Alaska, and like the regulatory channels are there, we're seeing a way different thing when we start talking about this idea of it being banned or heavily restricted in these main areas.

Speaker 1:
[34:00] Okay. So hit me with Gulf of Alaska and Bering Sea. Hit me with a little bit more on what's getting caught on the halibut front.

Speaker 2:
[34:09] So the...

Speaker 1:
[34:10] Sorry, dude, you got to keep talking on your mic.

Speaker 2:
[34:12] Yeah, sorry.

Speaker 1:
[34:14] We're cool on the map. People can see it. You know, it'd be crazy if a dude like one of the new prime minister... What do they got in Canada for a president, prime minister? If he's like, man, from now on, it's Gulf of Canada.

Speaker 2:
[34:29] Don't get into it. So most of the halibut bycatch currently happens in the Bering Sea. And that comes from this. We call it the Amendment 80 bottom trawl fleet that had been created to specifically target these bottom fish out there. And they get pretty close to four million pounds of reported bycatch each year. But when they report that, that's...

Speaker 1:
[34:53] Halibut bycatch.

Speaker 2:
[34:54] Halibut bycatch mortality. And so this is what you've gotten into in that news clip of they don't necessarily assume that all fish caught in trawl that comes up and is then released is going to die. And so they had kind of... Trawl had co-authored a study with federal regulators a few years ago that essentially it used to be assumed that every time they had a halibut come up in this net, it might be packed in with 100,000 pounds of other fish. It's been towed for four or five hours. They used to just get dumped straight into the fish hold, and they would assume that all those halibut died. But they came up with another program called the deck sorting program where instead of dumping the net straight into the fish hold, they would instead dump it out on the deck of the boat, and then crew members have about half an hour to go through and throw back as many halibut as they can. If they participate in this program, they assume only about 50 percent of the halibut die. But from a sport fishing perspective, I mean, we've seen-

Speaker 1:
[35:55] That's a tough one, dude.

Speaker 2:
[35:56] That's a real tough one. We have rivers in Alaska where if we are doing catch-and-release fishing for a salmon and we lift it all the way out of the water to take a picture, that's a crime. That's illegal for us because we could have killed that fish essentially. So when you start looking at a halibut that's been packed in 100,000 pounds with its net, stepped on, sorted through for half an hour. I mean, just pulling the net out of the water takes half an hour, and then you got another half an hour.

Speaker 1:
[36:23] Yeah, I don't know. It seems I don't know, but again, man, I've had a fair bit of exposure to halibut over the years. That's tough for me.

Speaker 2:
[36:35] It is.

Speaker 1:
[36:35] But I don't really know. I mean, the survival rate of 50% seems difficult.

Speaker 2:
[36:40] It is. And so a lot of other nations don't allow that. So a lot of them will do what they call full retention of bycatch. They say if it came up in a trawl net, we're assuming it's dead, even if the fins are wiggling a little bit. So you guys have to bring it all back to shore. We're going to go through all of it in this neutral facility. So it's not like there's an observer out there with, you know, six crew members hanging over their shoulder. They just say if it came up in the trawl net, it's dead. You guys bring it back to shore so we can get an accurate count.

Speaker 1:
[37:08] Got it.

Speaker 2:
[37:09] But Alaska doesn't do it like that. And especially on halibut, it doesn't do it like that. So what we've seen up there is they get about, so last year, I think it was 4.3 million pounds of halibut bycatch mortality. So those are the ones they assume dead. Closer to 8 million pounds would have been brought up onto the deck. They threw them all back and they assumed about half of them live. Okay.

Speaker 1:
[37:29] So let's hover on that number for a minute. And you tell me the number again. Like the agreed upon number.

Speaker 2:
[37:35] 4.3 million pounds.

Speaker 1:
[37:36] Okay. 4.3 million assumes a 50% survival rate kicked off the deck, thrown off the deck back into the water.

Speaker 2:
[37:43] Well, the survival rates already been applied to that 4.3 million. So those are the ones that definitely died. Another 4.3 million got released and were assumed to have lived for a round there.

Speaker 1:
[37:53] All right. So the agreed upon dead pile. How big in that region, how big, what is the commercial harvest on halibut of intentional halibut catch?

Speaker 2:
[38:07] So it in that region is pretty small. I don't have that number memorized, but I do have the data on the, as of 2015, the average bycatch halibut they got in that region was 4.76 pounds per fish.

Speaker 1:
[38:21] Okay.

Speaker 2:
[38:22] And so that makes about 850,000 fish that they assumed died last year through this bycatch.

Speaker 1:
[38:27] Okay.

Speaker 2:
[38:27] And that is more individual halibut than the entire state of Alaska, all other halibut fisheries combined.

Speaker 1:
[38:34] More individual halibut.

Speaker 2:
[38:35] More individual halibut. And the halibut spawn at kind of like, the males and females start at different ages, but like seven to 10 pounds per fish. And so when we talk to biologists about this, they'll say, oh, we kind of have this deal where if you, you can never assume that one fish taken out of a population would have affected the total population because there's a good chance a fish dies.

Speaker 1:
[38:58] Sure, yeah.

Speaker 2:
[38:59] But I find that hard to believe with five pound halibut. You know, when a halibut egg is laid, yeah, 99 percent of them die or when the halibut is in the larval stage, another 99 percent of them die or whatever. But once you get up to this five pound fish, that's about two feet long, it's buried in the mud and it's just almost made it to where it can spawn the first time.

Speaker 1:
[39:17] Annual survival rate is going up.

Speaker 2:
[39:19] For sure. Yeah. Yeah. So that's a tough one to look at. And they'd actually-

Speaker 1:
[39:24] What size, again, does a halibut start to spawn?

Speaker 2:
[39:27] Like seven to 10 pounds.

Speaker 1:
[39:30] Why is there so much emphasis on protecting like, like just if you- I'm just talking to listeners here. If you go, when you see a 150 pound halibut or someone like catches a 150, a 170, those are females, right? And that is a- and people will talk about, like, this- anglers will encourage you to cut those fish loose. Even if you're allowed to have them because be like, those are your big spawners.

Speaker 2:
[39:59] Sure.

Speaker 1:
[40:01] Is it just because the volume of eggs they're putting off is so great?

Speaker 2:
[40:05] Yes.

Speaker 1:
[40:05] Or do you think that that's not really a good way of looking at it? That you need to save the big halibut because those females are producing the eggs?

Speaker 2:
[40:12] Well, so I look at it both ways. So this charter business I'd owned, we used to have this, I called it the Release the Beast program. If somebody would let a halibut over 250 pounds go, I'd give them a free fishing trip the next year to encourage people to do this. And they say that a fish that size is laying about four million eggs per year. So, yeah, they got a lot of eggs in them. But the reality is, from a biological side, the most of the halibut caught over about 20 pounds are females. And those have the potential to spawn maybe 25 more times in their life. Say they're going to live to be 40 years old or whatever it is. Versus the big fish, they have a lot of eggs per spawn, but maybe they've only got five years left to live, essentially. And so the halibut biologists take, they've been pinned down on this because this is a big social issue in Alaska. You guys are terrible because you killed this big fish. But when we asked the IPHC about it, the Pacific Halibut Commission, they say we don't think there's any impact to actual halibut populations because they're just not that many big fish and they're not going to spawn them anymore times. But that also takes genetics out of it. So I mean, and that's why I've done this program of like, I'll give you a free trip because these are the fish that have, you know, beat the odds and they've made it and survived and... Anyway, so it can go both ways, but they...

Speaker 1:
[41:36] Like that the fact that these fish are getting large is a demonstration of fitness viability. So allowing these big fish to be in the population and contributing genetics to the population, you argue, like, you could be, like, helping perpetuate traits that lead to longevity.

Speaker 2:
[41:58] You could. I mean, yeah, it's like the conversation of, like, selective deer and elk harvest type thing, selecting for genetics. But by the same token, we've killed a lot of them and I leave it up to the fishermen's choice, you know.

Speaker 1:
[42:11] But a seven-pound female halibut is kicking off eggs.

Speaker 2:
[42:17] Seven years old. So that gets them up to around maybe 15 pounds.

Speaker 1:
[42:21] Okay. Yeah. Okay. So she can start producing eggs at about seven years of age.

Speaker 2:
[42:26] Correct. And I think it might be the males that start at age seven and the females start at age 10. But anyways, yeah.

Speaker 1:
[42:31] Yeah. Spawning is not relegated to giants.

Speaker 2:
[42:35] Absolutely correct.

Speaker 1:
[42:36] Like a 20-pound halibut could be a sexually viable spawning female.

Speaker 2:
[42:39] Absolutely. Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[42:40] Okay. Understood. Understood.

Speaker 2:
[42:41] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[42:42] All right. Now what about, so we talked about the Bering Sea. Tell me about the Gulf of Alaska.

Speaker 2:
[42:48] So the Gulf of Alaska has trawl fisheries too, but they're typically not as big. But one of the big issues we run into in the Gulf of Alaska is that they, the Gulf of Alaska and Bering Sea have different regulatory regulations, different rules to fish by. One of the big hot button issues in the Gulf of Alaska is that there, they have these dedicated bottom trawl fleet. So some of the dirtiest, they hard on the bottom all the time, ripping up habitat. But they only have an observer rate of about 20-30 percent. So you'll hear trawl in the Bering Sea, people will say, we have a 200 percent observer rate, we have 100 percent observer rate, we're this model of sustainability. But they conveniently ignore that right next door is this other fleet, where they only send an observer along for about one out of three trips. So there's been this widespread insinuation from former crew and current crew there that it becomes cheaper for a boat operator there to essentially throw a trip when the observer is along, then risk what the observer sees what they actually catch, and then extrapolates that out to the entire season. Because if they catch 2000 king salmon on this one day when the observer is along, then the observer says, well, the other 70% of the trip, you're probably catching 2000 king salmon too, which risks shutting them down. So there's this pretty wide insinuation that instead of actually going out and fishing hard or fishing for a full trip, you'd set the net out once before midnight, fish for a couple of hours in a spot you wouldn't normally fish, set it out again after midnight, fish for a couple of hours, and then say, yeah, we had two days of observed fishing. Now we have eight days without it type thing.

Speaker 1:
[44:34] Got it. How much are these fish moving? Like what are we understanding about that? If you're, let's say, I mean, like kind of the halibut charter Mecca, right? Like if someone's going to go up to Alaska and they want to be like, what's the best halibut area I could go to? I think a lot of people are going to be like, go to the, you know, Homer, man. It's like hell, but it seems like hell, but capital of the state, right?

Speaker 2:
[44:56] That's what the sign says.

Speaker 1:
[44:57] So our bearings, how much of these fish moving? Are King salmon that are running rivers in the Gulf of Alaska, Southeast Alaska, are those kings ever winding up in the Bering Sea? And vice versa, are there halibut that are spawning in the Bering Sea that maybe we're spending time in the Gulf of Alaska? Are these trading fish?

Speaker 2:
[45:20] Totally, and so halibut is one of the easiest examples of that. So they make this assumption, the halibut biologists, that essentially the entire halibut population of Alaska and Canada move out to like 3,000 feet of water to spawn in the winter. All their eggs and stuff mix there, and then the trending currents carry them up to the Bering Sea, and that is where the larva settles. So they have these, what they call designated halibut nursery zones in the Bering Sea. And then they say, as the fish get older, they have a clockwise migration, so they move south and east.

Speaker 1:
[45:54] Hold on, back up for a minute. They're spawning in 3,000 feet of water?

Speaker 2:
[45:59] Yeah. Yeah, and we've seen them, you know, I've seen like ready to spawn fish in a couple hundred feet of water too.

Speaker 1:
[46:04] Sure.

Speaker 2:
[46:05] But that's the...

Speaker 1:
[46:05] I guess they can spawn in 3,000 feet of water.

Speaker 2:
[46:07] Yeah, I think it's like ducks migrating, like some of them migrate every time, and then you have local ducks. Yeah, got it. But the... Anyways, yeah, so essentially, the biological assumption is that the vast majority of halibut begin their life as larvae settling in the Bering Sea, then they go clockwise, which brings them to the Gulf of Alaska, brings them to Southeast Alaska, brings them to Canada, Washington, Oregon, all the way down. And so when we talk about how there's 4 million pounds of juvenile halibut being wasted a straw bycatch in the Bering Sea each year, that means we're hitting Homer in the Gulf of Alaska, Southeast Prince of Wales, Canada. It gets really crabby about this. Washington and Oregon have a halibut season of just a couple of days now because the population is doing so poorly. And so each year when they set these harvest limits, all these other countries and these other areas are saying, oh my God, we can't waste this many halibut in the Bering Sea each year because it affects all of us. But we've seen the trawl industry become this powerhouse in our regulatory agencies and they say, well, we make a lot of money from it. You can't shut that down.

Speaker 1:
[47:14] What about the Kings Salmon, for instance? Are they moving?

Speaker 2:
[47:18] Yeah. So you can pull up various charts where they're definitely moving. Yeah. So we'll see them go from like the Gulf of Alaska into the Bering Sea and feed. You see the ones from Oregon, Washington and Canada will come up into the Gulf of Alaska and feed. They all have this like four-year loop. Then there's a lot of fish from the Bering Sea area that go and do a loop in the Bering Sea. But one of the things we've seen with Kings Salmon coast-wise or the entire Oregon all the way up to Nome is that they're doing very poorly and they, before we started to see them crash all the way or fisheries be shut down, we've seen this huge shrinking size that age. So the fish, we used to see 100-pound King Salmon out of the Columbia River, 100-pound King Salmon out of the Kenai River, 80-pound Kings out of the Yukon River. Before they quit coming back at all, we're seeing them get smaller, smaller, smaller, smaller. We've seen the same thing with halibut. So halibut size at age, how big they are, depending on how old they are, has decreased by over half over the last 30 years. So that really points people towards a food source issue. That again is where you get into pollock as this forage fish of the North Pacific, that maybe 3 billion pounds a year isn't sustainable. And so then we can come into this conversation of-

Speaker 1:
[48:39] Yeah, this moves us beyond the bycatch issue-

Speaker 2:
[48:41] I was chasing this the whole time.

Speaker 1:
[48:43] To the food issue, right? Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[48:45] Yeah. And also the habitat issue. So when I look at it, I see there's three points. One is that the bycatch, the raw pounds, which they can defend and say, well, it might've been jellyfish or as a percentage, this isn't that much of a particular river. Okay, we can give them that. But then you get into the food issue of we're seeing fish and seabirds. They said the crab starved to death during that warm water event. Halibut size that age, salmon size that age. There's an issue with gray whales not getting enough food in the Bering Sea to finish their migration to Mexico and back. They've had big starving events with those. And then we look at, how could this be? Well, we're taking 3 billion pounds of bait fish out of the year, or out of the water every year. And we're also, the third part of this is what the seafloor habitats, what kind of hits we're doing there. So you've got the raw pounds of bycatch, bait fish coming off the bottom of the food chain, and then the seafloor impact of dragging, say, 6 miles of seafloor every day.

Speaker 1:
[49:44] But you and me both know that a population can have what we call a sustainable yield, meaning you can, let's just put this in the simplest terms. Let's say you sneak on to the local golf course and fish bass, and you like to make fried large mouth sandwiches. If you're frying three large mouths out of this golf course pond every year, you might realize that over the years, you can catch three large mouths just as quick as any other year, and that you eat in those large mouth sandwiches seems to be having no impact on the population in that pond. Meaning, if you didn't catch those three large mouths, they're probably about the same amount of large mouths in that pond. The pond is going to produce blank pounds of large mouths. You have a sustainable yield. What evidence is there that it is having a population level impact on pollock? Like, are they needing to fish longer and harder to catch the pollock? Are they needing to change tactics? Are they needing to move to new areas that haven't been previously exploited? Like, is there some evidence that they're putting a hurt on the pollock and that it's not sustainable yield?

Speaker 2:
[51:01] Well, so the place, so you have to look at kind of the progression of ships over time. So, you know, 50 years ago, we had low horsepower engines. They couldn't tow as big of a net. We didn't have near the electronics that we have now. We didn't have Starlink. We didn't have like this real time communication between ships. And we were catching about the same amount of pollock then as we are now. But we weren't seeing other species that were dependent on pollock starve to death simultaneously. But now we fast forward 50 years and we're seeing the size that age of the pollock are quite a bit smaller, which has been a precursor to a lot of other fisheries crashes as the fish get smaller and smaller and smaller. And go, we've seen trawlers complain about that. But the technology that we're using to catch essentially the same amount of fish is through the roof. You imagine the last 20 years of where the boats have gone. And I don't have data on how many toes they do or how many days they have to fish, but that had come up. We talked about like that Bering Sea crab crash. They had a tough time catching crab that year and so they were fishing in, assumably, new places and longer and more days. So all those kind of factor in. But this year in particular, they had done this survey of the pollock and they said in the Bering Sea that the total pollock population had dropped by about 30 percent. But they didn't reduce the trawl harvest pollock by 30 percent. They said, you guys catch the same amount, but if that means everything else, all these predator fish rely on everything that's left, the humans didn't lose 30 percent of their pollock. All the predator fish lost 30 percent. That has to come out of somewhere.

Speaker 1:
[52:46] Understood.

Speaker 2:
[52:49] They assume there's about eight billion pounds of pollock in the Bering Sea each year. There's this population and we're harvesting about three billion pounds of it. So it's not like you're leaving 99 percent in the water. You're at like 40 percent or so. So there's not much room for error. Trawl will make this case that we talked about this 375-foot boat, it might cost $100 million to be built. They say we can't fish less because we have these huge boat payments and every day we're tied up to the dock, means that we're losing money. Our businesses can't survive on that. But that's a pretty poor way to manage a wild resource. Imagine we said that we don't tell guides that with big horn sheep or whatever it may be. If the sheep are having a bad year, then you guys are tied up. And we're seeing that in Alaska, that sport fishermen on the Yukon, subsistence on the Yukon, sport fishermen for Halibut, everybody else is getting cut back big time to protect the resource. The trawl has been able to make this economic case of, well, we lose our boat or the banks would default on us or whatever it may be.

Speaker 1:
[53:56] Job loss, whatever. But then, but that you don't see as much of that conversation in other commercial fisheries that are suffering as well, right?

Speaker 2:
[54:10] Yeah, well, they try, but they just they don't seem to have the sympathetic ear from the fish regulators.

Speaker 1:
[54:16] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[54:17] And so that brings up another interesting point with how these fisheries are managed. There's a federal board which regulates these trawl fisheries, and the majority of that is made up of people who are vested in the trawl industry. So an example is one of them is a vice president of a group which lobbies or is an industry rep for trawl. Another one is a CFO of a group that has trawl quota. They're out there fishing for these pollock, and those are the guys in charge making this decision of, well, should we cut back the pollock catch because they just dropped 30 percent?

Speaker 1:
[54:49] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[54:50] And they say they're impartial. They say it wouldn't matter, but then there's this question of could they keep their job if they cut their employers' fish harvest back by 30 percent? You know, and that doesn't line up. And there again, fishing on a wild population under the sea where we can't see it, we're just taking huge risks on maybe we're right, maybe we're wrong, but we're just teetering on this edge of if we're wrong one time, it could have big ramifications.

Speaker 1:
[55:14] You know, you brought up the Yukon River. Let me hit you with some feedback I got. I had made the statement on the news show. I had made a statement when I was just digging into this subject. I've been aware of it, but I was digging into it. I made a statement about how the draggers are killing more kings as by, this is my words, okay? The draggers are killing more kings, meaning king salmon. The draggers are killing more kings as bycatch than make it to the upper Yukon. So what I was referring to is in numbers, right? There's more king salmon getting caught as bycatch by the trawl industry than the number of salmon that make it to the upper Yukon. Now, the reason the Yukon is an important consideration here is people in the Yukon, on the Yukon River, there's a 10,000 year old king salmon fishery there, okay? But in recent years, people have been prohibited from fishing kings at all in the Yukon, right? So there's been like a closure of some subsistence practices because there aren't enough kings to sustain the fishery. An industry person pointed out to me, he says, the statement is not accurate. Now, I want to clarify a point here. I said the numbers, okay? I didn't say that they were catching more Yukon fish than are making it to the Yukon, but they're catching more kings than make it to the Yukon. But the person pointed out, they do genetic testing on kings, okay? He says, the Bering Sea Pollock Fishery had a Chinook Bycatch of 11,855 king salmon. They're claiming only 27 of those fish came from the Yukon River, okay? The Gulf of Alaska Pollock Fishery, they caught 18,432 kings. Their claim, zero came out of the Yukon, okay? So, this is 2023 numbers. 30,287 Chinook, of which 27 came out of the Yukon. And that year, 2023, he's saying that at the Pilot Station, Sonar, they were counting in the Yukon, 58,529 fish. So, the total Alaska Pollock fishery killed 30,287 Chinooks in 2023, 2023 numbers. And in that year, they saw 58,529 fish. That's the escapement. Okay, escapement, not incoming, right? What do you make of this?

Speaker 2:
[58:26] Oh, no, escapement is what returns.

Speaker 1:
[58:29] Okay, so escapement is incoming fish.

Speaker 2:
[58:31] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[58:31] I got it. Okay, understood. Thanks for the clarification.

Speaker 2:
[58:34] I'll never repeat this, but I think the Trawl Guy is right on this one point. So, they...

Speaker 1:
[58:40] Where are those fish from? If they're not out of the Yukon.

Speaker 2:
[58:43] Well, it's a huge... I mean, so if you think of Alaska, people don't get this, but if you superimpose the state of Alaska over the lower 48 of the US., the east side is over in New York City, and the west side is over to California, and it goes from Canada to Mexico. So, just the state of Alaska has more shoreline than the entire rest of the United States combined.

Speaker 1:
[59:05] Let me interrupt you. Phil, can you pull up that deal where they show Alaska overlaid on the lower 48?

Speaker 2:
[59:10] Yeah, sure.

Speaker 1:
[59:11] With the Aleutians and whatnot? Go on.

Speaker 2:
[59:17] So, there's thousands of rivers, what I'm getting at, and they encounter fish from other countries. Russia has fish that come in. But an interesting part of this is that you'll see trawl kind of play with these big numbers where it suits them, but they might say that only 1% or less than 1% comes into the Yukon River, which is one out of 500 rivers in Western Alaska, all of which are essentially shut down to king salmon fishing preemptively to save the resource. But then they'll say that about 50% of the kings they catch are from Western Alaska rivers. They pull it out and say that, well, this one we didn't get very many, but close to half of them total came out of this general area, essentially.

Speaker 1:
[60:00] Yeah. But that doesn't... I appreciate the clarification and the point there.

Speaker 2:
[60:06] This hurts me to agree with this.

Speaker 1:
[60:08] Yeah. I guess it brings this up. I don't want to say that this is the crux of it, but it brings us up. You spent your life fishing, hunting, trapping, so you're familiar. Like you know that when, again, to go to the pie analogy, you have any different thing. What are we talking about? Mule deer, we're talking about king salmon, sea cucumbers, whatever the hell, anything. You're going to have the pie, which is the total population that can be harvested. And then you're going to have who's getting their pieces of the pie. And the thing I've picked up in my career of paying attention to this, and I'm, and I participate just right along with everybody else. There's a human tendency. When the pie shrinks, there's a human tendency to look at other people's usage, to look at their piece and go, your piece, like your piece is too big. It could be, if it's, if it's elk, what are we going to say? Oh, it's the non-residents. It's the guides. It's the whoever, right? There's this human tendency to usually look and blame other people. Like no one usually goes like, man, I've looked in the mirror long and hard and I'm the reason I'm not seeing big bulls. You know, you're going to go like, oh no, it's Minnesotans are the reason you're not seeing big bulls. The guides are the reason you're not seeing big bulls. The out-of-state landowners are the reason you're not seeing big bulls. It's not you. So on this question, I think you get where like it's empirically true. No serious person, like no serious person. This is me talking, but I've had a lot of conversation. No serious person is going to say that we're not seeing a major pie shrinkage on King Salmon.

Speaker 2:
[62:10] I got a couple of things to bail you out on this.

Speaker 1:
[62:12] Well, let me finish the point. It's empirically true, okay? It's like an objective reality that we are seeing a shrinking pie on halibut. Right? No serious person is going to come and say that King Salmon numbers are better than ever in the Pacific. No serious person would say that. So if we agree on that, like to what degree, and I'm just asking you this question. I'm getting to a question, believe me, like to what degree is it that to what level of confidence can we look and be like, it's like that is the issue. Trawl is the issue. And to what is it like, is it that it's death of a thousand cuts? Right? Maybe, maybe trawl is a little bit of a problem. Maybe charter is a little bit of a problem. Acidification of the oceans, a little bit of a problem. Warming oceans and climate change, a little bit of a problem. But we're pointing and trying to be like, no, it's actually your fault. It's not these other issues, it's your fault and you alone. How do you speak to that question?

Speaker 2:
[63:26] For sure. So that brings us back to kind of these three points with trawl. So they'll talk about Bycatch, they'll talk about genetics in the Yukon River. But if you're going to make an analogy about that, like big horn sheep in the Missouri breaks. So you could say that somebody wanted to strip mine, the breaks or whatever. They wanted to mow down all the sagebrush out there, for whatever reason, make a parking lot. They could start doing that. They stretch a chain between two bulldozers, they start to rip up the Missouri River breaks. And they might only have that bulldozer, that chain might only run into two big horn sheep in a year and kill them. But when they destroy all the habitat and destroy all the food, then the entire population suffers. And so that's where we keep coming back to this pollock as a bait fish. And we're not seeing just king salmon shrink or not come back. We're seeing it across a dozen different species. Marine mammals, whales, fur seals, king salmon, chum salmon. And there's also this conversation of, well, of course you guys aren't catching many fish out of the Yukon River. The entire fishery crashed.

Speaker 1:
[64:34] They're not there to be caught.

Speaker 2:
[64:36] Yeah. I'm not turning down many blonde girls because there's not many blonde girls that want to go out with me in the first place, like this. Cause and effect here. But a good year on the Yukon River used to be like 500,000 fish. It used to be 10 times bigger. So functionally, this fishery has already crashed. And yeah, your bycatch of it has gone down proportionally, not necessarily because you're fishing cleaner, not because you're effective at avoiding them, but just because the fish aren't there. And so what we actually saw with trawl a couple of times in the last five years is, oh, one year in the Bering Sea, I think they had 8,000 kings as bycatch. One year they had 10,000. This is in a year long, their whole thing. And so they're telling us, God, we are good at avoiding king salmon now as everything else has crashed. But this year in about two months, I think they've already got 11,000 kings. So maybe there's more kings around, but they're not necessarily fishing cleaner. They're just profiting or getting luck fortunate off of these low returns. And if you start to look at a 30 year history, I don't have the number in front of me, but those bycatch reports statewide show about 1.1 million kings lost as trawl bycatch, which there's a lot of other fisheries that fish for king salmon too. But when you combine that raw bycatch, plus they're losing their food source, plus they were towing these midwater nets on the bottom and wrecking the seafloor habitat, then you get this perfect trifecta. There's definitely a conversation about ocean acidification, other fleets, climate warming, climate change, whatever you want to call it. But a lot of that is uncontrollable by humans or uncontrollable in the short term. But trawl could be fixed tomorrow or reined in, but not without economic pain to the people doing it. So there's a select group that's making a ton of money off this, billions of dollars. And they say, well, even if we are kind of the most obvious outlier here, the most controllable variable, you can't cut us back because we're making a lot of money off of it. And where that really connects is that so...

Speaker 1:
[66:44] To be clear, they don't say we're making a lot of money off it. They say we're creating a lot of jobs.

Speaker 2:
[66:49] Ah, yes, they do say that. They... Yeah, so... And where it gets... It really interconnects. And this is something a lot of people don't realize is that the Fisheries Management Council in Alaska, which regulates trawl, exists under NOAA fisheries. So you hear about NOAA like Save the Whales, Save the Turtles, NOAA Weather. But they don't realize that NOAA is a division of the Department of Commerce in DC. And so we think of every time that trawl starts to make this economic claim and says, if we don't catch the pollock, the Russians will, or we're going to, this is going to create a trade deficit between the USA and other nations. You know, the US Fish and Wildlife Service or Department of Interior or EPA probably wouldn't bite on that. They'd say, we got to protect the fish first, and then how much money you guys make comes later. But when you present that to the Department of Commerce, they say, that's a pretty good point. We're not going to make the USA lose money on this, even if Alaska only gets fractions of that money total. And so then you set up kind of this like Alaska versus Washington DC. How do you want these natural resources used? It would be like, so one example is that trawl claims that it only drags about 1.4 percent of the entire Bering Sea. They say our impact is really small. But anybody that has fish knows that not all fishing ground is equal. There's sea mounts, there's ledges, there's these super productive areas.

Speaker 1:
[68:13] And so I fish less than 1 percent of the area. I fish less than 1 percent of the area where I fish, but I fish where the fish are.

Speaker 2:
[68:19] For sure. That's it. And so that would be like, say that this logging or mining company came and made this claim to the Department of Commerce that, hey, we want to log 1.4 percent of North America. Like that's it. All this other forest will be here. But if you look at how much forest is contained within like Washington or sorry, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, that's about 1.5 percent. So you effectively wipe out the entire Rocky Mountain elk population. And so that's where these percentages-

Speaker 1:
[68:49] Yeah, you can really start messing with numbers, but I wasn't familiar with that one.

Speaker 2:
[68:53] Yeah. Anyways, so it's, yeah, you can play with percentages where it is advantageous to you. But there again, it's this wild population that does have all these external factors on it. And we know that they're causing problems and going to cause problems. So, common sense says that we should slow down the manageable take of that, the human harvest, because we acknowledge that there's these bumps in the road. It's just like if you're driving down the highway, if you don't slow down when it gets bumpy, you wreck your car, you know. But we're not seeing that in fisheries management of these trawl fleets. The road is doing this through everything else, all these external factors and trawl saying, we got to go full speed ahead, we'll never crash. But common sense doesn't agree with that.

Speaker 1:
[69:36] How worried are you about the industry coming after you? It's so hard, like you personally.

Speaker 2:
[69:40] Well, yeah, it's definitely a concern. So I get tangled up in, we talked about there's a Stop Alaska Trawler Facebook group, it's got about 55,000 people in it. State of Alaska only has 750,000 people, not everybody in that group is from Alaska, but it's a huge voting block contingent. And my real drive is that I want to see these common sense rules be enforced. And then if that means it puts trawl out of business somewhere down the road, say that they, right now, we talked about these halibut nurseries, nobody can fish for halibut there because we're going to protect the halibut on the nurseries, but trawl can trawl there. So they can have bycatch of halibut because they're not targeting them. But it's an area shut down for everybody else. And we talked about these midwater trawls can fish in areas closed to bottom trawl, because we're trying to protect the habitat there. But they say if they got kicked out of there with their midwater nets, that they'd go out of business. And they make this argument successfully to the Department of Commerce. But no other sportsmen or no other group gets to exist under these rules. So that's what really gets me is I want to see these enforced common sense. If trawl can still continue to fish under that and thrive, then that opens up a new conversation of do we want them in the state? Is this good for society, et cetera? But if it shuts them down through enforcing common sense regulations, then so be it. And I take a lot of heat for that because I think they know that they would effectively be shut down if those common sense regs went into effect.

Speaker 1:
[71:14] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[71:14] But they don't get a pass on this, not with a wild resource, you know, and not in Alaska where so many people depend on, I mean, fishers culture there essentially.

Speaker 1:
[71:23] And this fishery has been, this fishery has been booted out of various places over the years.

Speaker 2:
[71:29] Yeah. So they, most of the, if you really go back in the history books, there's a really neat book called An Unnatural History of the Sea. And it has a section on trawling. And it says that the first references to trawling in history were where they were banned. And so you see in like the, I think it's 1376 in Europe was the first mention of this trawl net, which would be drug along and indiscriminately catch everything. And it was banned then. So 700 years ago, close to it. Then the next reference is from the 1500s, where it had become a capital offense. So they killed two people who had added chains to the bottom of their drag nets. But as the fishing productivity of the oceans decreased, and as more money got into fisheries, the lobbying came with it. And with that was this detachment of where fisheries regulators live relative to where the fishing happens. So when we talk about a trawl fishery, we're talking to senators in Washington DC, or this DC political machine that has no idea of what trawl is, what Alaskan issues are besides the trawl lobbyists show up in their office every day and say, We've already gotten there here. We've made a lot of billions off of this. You can't shut it down. These guys are crazy. We've only caught 33 kings out of the Yukon this year. Don't ask us about the halibut. Don't ask us about whether or not these are bait fish. And that has been effective. But we also see that a lot of times it comes wrapped with this campaign check of like, don't worry about it.

Speaker 1:
[73:05] And then this fishery is mostly out of Seattle.

Speaker 2:
[73:09] It is. So there is about 10%. So when the USA and really the world has done what they call rationalizing commercial fisheries. So it used to be that it was open entry. If you owned a boat, you'd go pay $10 to register and anybody could go out and fish like crazy until the quota was got, then everybody quit. But that created this race for fish where even if the weather was terrible, if we had two days to catch what we catch, we'd go and maybe somebody'd sink or die. And it flooded the canneries with fish all at once. It didn't work in that way. So they rationalized it and said, hey, if you guys have always caught a million pounds of pollock for these last five qualifying years, then we're just going to say that for the rest of forever, we're going to give you a million shares of pollock. And sometimes that goes up, sometimes it goes down, but you own it now. You can buy it and you can sell it, which is a crazy thing with a natural breed. I mean, imagine if they did that with elk. But they, I forgot what I was talking about.

Speaker 1:
[74:07] Well, it's something about where the fishery is based out of.

Speaker 2:
[74:09] Oh yeah, all right. So when they rationalized the straw fisheries in Alaska, most of the participants at that point, like in the 80s, early 90s, had been these big factory trawlers out of Seattle, Washington. But they said, we're going to do this 10% set-aside for communities that actually live in Alaska. They live next to this Bering Sea. They've fished on it for thousands of years, and we don't want them to be aced out of this resource. And so now we see some of those, what's called CDQ, Community Development Quota Groups, have about 10% of this total fishery.

Speaker 1:
[74:42] We heard from some of these guys.

Speaker 2:
[74:43] Yeah, yeah. And some of them have gone beyond 10% of it. So some of them leased their quota out to these big Seattle boats, but some of them have doubled down to buy their own trawlers. And as other fisheries have crashed, essentially, this Pollock and this trawl quota has become a larger and larger part of their portfolio. So now it's like, even if they're like the residents of these communities are morally objecting to trawl, they're invested in this $100 million boat. They can't just go fish for crab because crab are gone. They can't fish for halibut, salmon. Those are gone. So they're in kind of this use it or lose it scenario now, which is just a crazy concept for a rural village on the edge of the Bering Sea. They kind of got drug into it in that way.

Speaker 1:
[75:30] Can I hit you with a conspiracy theory?

Speaker 2:
[75:32] Do it. They did that.

Speaker 1:
[75:35] The conspiracy theory is that this isn't about salmon. The conspiracy theory is it's not about fisheries. It's like it somehow is using fisheries to get Alaskans worked up politically to seek broader political change, and that no one really cares about these fish. They just want to push in a different political agenda, and you're not here about fish.

Speaker 2:
[76:06] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[76:08] How right am I?

Speaker 2:
[76:10] Well, so you're definitely... So trawl, like we talked about from the very start, bottom trawl and now these midwater trawls that it's been found out that they're on bottom, there's a worldwide push to shut down bottom trawl, and it's been around for decades. You mentioned this poll that Alaska did, that 74% of Alaskans wanted its total ban.

Speaker 1:
[76:29] Yeah, I don't understand that poll, and someone dismissed it saying it was a push poll. Well, it was a manipulative poll, I don't know. I'd like to see the polling data. I haven't seen it.

Speaker 2:
[76:36] Yeah, I got a website. The... Anyways, but I think you'll see, like in the comment sections on your video, this not quite universal support, but if there's 2000 comments, you'll see 25 from trawl reps that get paid to interact and write comments, and the rest of them are, you know, Alaskans and people that have dealt with small fisheries and gotten the short end of the stick that are really vehemently against it.

Speaker 1:
[77:00] Well, and I'm not criticizing anyone that wrote in, but the people that we wrote in, in defense of big trawl or eventually the trawl industry, the people that wrote in are in the industry. But that might be because they're the ones that, they're the ones that have a understanding of it. But I'm not hearing from, I'm not hearing from anglers. I'm not hearing from rod and reel fishermen defending it.

Speaker 2:
[77:40] Yeah, that's, you'll never hear anybody that wakes up tomorrow and says, you know what, I'm in faith. I think bottom trawl is a good eco-friendly way of catching fish. And so what I was getting at with trawl has a big problem that everybody already disliked bottom trawl before they figured out it happened in Alaska. The midwater nets are on the bottom, so they're kind of bottom trawl. So to me, strategically, their last possible move that they could make would be to try to make this a political issue. Alaska is this historically red state, super resource extraction. People work in oil extracting resources or they're in fishing extracting resources. And so anytime you get into this, anytime somebody can say, well, these are the ecoterrorists or these are the greenies coming in trying to control us, then they have this opportunity. And I think trawl sees that as their one last ditch move. But what they're forgetting is that the Republican side is big into conservation. I mean, we've, Pebble Mine had come through like Trump Junior. You see these stories out of Africa where hunters had preserved the land. That was this big success story on and on. And so I fish too, there's this extent of like, we want to protect the fish so that we can kill the fish, which has some irony, obviously. But we want it to be sustainable and we want our kids to kill the fish too. And what we really want is the habitat and the bait fish left intact so that that can happen indefinitely. And no other fishery impacts those factors near like trawl does. It's kind of like you could say you're managing deer in a forest. You could hunt these white tails down until there was one buck and one doe left in this entire forest, stop hunting. And in 10 years, you'd probably have a decent deer population. But if you cut down the forest and paved over it in the process, you lose those deer forever. And so that's the concern with trawl and especially the bottom, like the seafloor impact. And that's not tough to understand for most people, you know.

Speaker 1:
[79:43] No, it's not, man. It's not. So what, if you had to make, like, let's say, let's say you were emperor of the world all of a sudden.

Speaker 2:
[79:53] It's a good idea.

Speaker 1:
[79:54] Okay. You're emperor of Alaska. Like, hit me with what, based on your research, what you hear from people, your personal opinion. What do you feel is a, what, what do you feel is a reasonable, in your mind, a reasonable step to take, both either to validate or invalidate the notion that this is, that this is partially responsible for the collapse, the fisheries collapse we're seeing around. I won't say collapse on Halibut, but the degradation of the Halibut fishery, the collapse of the King salmon fishery, right? How would you find out whether that's true if you're going to jump into management changes? What would you propose? Like, what do you think the next step would be?

Speaker 2:
[80:39] So I want to see the common sense stuff checked off first. And so this is 2026 is a election for our new governor in Alaska. And that's important to this issue because the governor of Alaska chooses a majority of the voting members on this federal NPFMC fisheries council that regulates trawl. And what we've seen with the past governor is this trawl vested group would donate 100,000 to his campaign. And then he would put, you know, the vice president of this corporation on this council to regulate trawl. And it's a majority goes vote system on there. So it's dominated by trawl. It doesn't make matter if it makes sense. Doesn't matter if it's ethical. If they vote in favor of it, then we're stuck with it, essentially. And so first step for me is that we need to have a governor that emits that they're not going to put active trawl reps on this regulatory council anymore. Or at least people who are neutral, you know, I don't want it full of a super green side. I don't want it full of an ecological side, because I fish too. But they at least need to not be making hundreds of thousands of dollars personally. And so once you get that in there, then you can start putting forward these motions of, hey, we need to if we've acknowledged that there's Bering Sea halibut nurseries, and trawl is still out in there, it needs to be banned right there. They can still fish everywhere else, but we're going to kick them out of there. There needs to be an acknowledgement that pollock are a forage fish. So forage fish get these special considerations.

Speaker 1:
[82:07] What are they regarded as right now?

Speaker 2:
[82:10] Long story, as a target species. And there's this weird deal in federal regulation where a fish can't simultaneously be regulated as a forage fish and as a target species. And so trawl successfully makes this case that, you know, there's studies out there that say 85% of the forage base in the Bering Sea is made of pollock. They say that the number two most commonly eaten thing for chinook salmon in the Bering Sea in 2024 was pollock. It's huge for halibut, huge for whales.

Speaker 1:
[82:37] What was the number one?

Speaker 2:
[82:40] Capelin or needlefish, something like that. The, anyway, so there's this, there's all this documentation saying that it's this crucial link, but they, the NPFMC essentially, this trawl regulated body says it's not gonna explore that because there's also this understanding that if they started to take that into consideration and say that, well, maybe the halibut are smaller, maybe the king salmon are smaller because they don't have enough pollock, that would create a cutback in limit for how much pollock they can catch, so they fight that tooth and nail. But there again, it's a super common sense thing. And if it failed, you know, after five years of study, then I get that, but it at least needs to be brought to the table. So I'd kick them out of the halibut nurseries. I'd say we got to ask this question of whether pollock should be a forage fish. Another big one that we've run into is that a lot of the bycatch limits were set 20 years ago when the fish were a lot more abundant. So with king salmon in the Bering Sea specifically, 15 years ago, they said that if there are a bunch of king salmon around, you guys can catch 60,000 of them as bycatch. Or if there's not as many king salmon around, you can catch 45,000 as bycatch. But in the 15 years since that, they've crashed down to essentially nothing. You know, most people can't fish for them in a river because they aren't there.

Speaker 1:
[84:00] And that hasn't been adjusted.

Speaker 2:
[84:01] But the 45,000, yeah, is still sitting up there. And we've seen that with...

Speaker 1:
[84:06] It's gonna be weird if that number want to be higher than the number of kings.

Speaker 2:
[84:10] Well, yeah, so that brings up a really big philosophical debate of if there's only one king salmon left, who has the ethical right to catch it? Should it be the subsistence user that lives in the middle of nowhere on the Yukon River? Or should it be a trawler to waste it when it's five pounds? And that's a really easy question for people to answer. And unfortunately, we're drifting off in that direction, you know?

Speaker 1:
[84:34] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[84:35] So those would be some really big ones. The other one is this issue of we, at the start of this, we talked about there's two types of bycatchers, observed bycatch and there's unobserved bycatch.

Speaker 1:
[84:43] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[84:44] And we said that trawl says they only impact about one and a half percent of the Bering Sea, but the Bering Sea is incredibly huge. So the 1.4% of the Eastern Bering Sea is, I think 390 billion square feet. And if you start to look at how much life is on a square foot of seafloor, it's like if you're on a trout stream and you walk, lift up a river, everything darts out of there. But you can apply different levels of what might live there. Say it's five grams per square foot, you come up with essentially billions of pounds of unobserved bycatch. So this is the stuff kicked up by the mud, drug over by the nets. But since it doesn't make it to the deck of the boat, we just pretend it doesn't exist. But other nations have taken that on and we could be taking it on too, if there was the will within this regulatory body to say, hey, maybe this is a problem. But there again, trawl knows that it's a real big problem if we start to quantify it or go down that rabbit hole. So they essentially roadblock it at a DC or regulatory level. So that's my push is that I think there's all these common sense concepts that just need to be explored. We have to have a regulatory system which allows us to bring these concerns to the table and take a look at them. And right now, we don't have that.

Speaker 1:
[85:59] Yeah. Last question, is there a possibility, is your current governor term limited out or what's going on?

Speaker 2:
[86:07] Yeah, he is.

Speaker 1:
[86:08] So someone new is coming in.

Speaker 2:
[86:09] Correct.

Speaker 1:
[86:10] And is there a chance that both parties would have a candidate that was committed to looking at this?

Speaker 2:
[86:20] Absolutely.

Speaker 1:
[86:21] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[86:21] So Alaska doesn't open primary. So right now, we have, I think, 19 people that have put their name in the hat.

Speaker 1:
[86:30] Are you in there? No.

Speaker 2:
[86:32] Thank God. So 19 people have put their name in the hat. And I think we've heard from half of them that have taken essentially an anti-trawl stance.

Speaker 1:
[86:41] From both sides, Republican and Democrat.

Speaker 2:
[86:43] Yeah. And independent.

Speaker 1:
[86:46] So there's a possibility that in the end, the final ballot could come out and each side of that ballot could be saying, I'm not committed to looking into this issue and taking some regulatory steps. That's possible.

Speaker 2:
[86:58] Correct. And so that is what has got trawl through the roof. Because those governor candidates, when they say they're against trawl, they don't have to say that they're going to shut it down tomorrow. All they have to do is say that they're just not going to put trawlers on this regulatory board anymore, or at least not a majority of them. And just that simple threat is enough to put, to have the hackles way up on trawlers.

Speaker 1:
[87:21] And that's why we're hearing about this so much.

Speaker 2:
[87:23] They don't think they can continue to win, and they don't think they can continue to catch the volume of fish anymore if somebody besides trawlers start to regulate the fishery in a more common sense way. And I think there's a good chance that that is where we're headed, is that we're going to have a Democrat and an independent and a Republican governor that have all said, hey, we're going to put different people on this regulatory council, and what shakes out shakes out.

Speaker 1:
[87:51] So, let me say this, man, I said, that was my last question. Here's my real last question. Let's say the trawl practices were that the harvest was adjusted, the halibut nursery was off limits, and you saw, we saw a recovery of fish. OK, so 10 years down the road, 20 years down the road, we see a recovery. And it's recovered, and people are like, hey, we're back in a strong position. Let's revisit, maybe it's time to have the, maybe it's time to invite the trawl industry back into these waters. What would be your attitude about that?

Speaker 2:
[88:29] Well, we'd have to, so we've actually seen that start to happen some. So, you talked earlier about how we've had these big crashes in the US. So, Grand Banks Cod in the mid 90s, early 90s had crashed all the way. We saw West Coast ground fish, early 2000s crash all the way. And so, now we're 25, 35 years later than that. And they're just starting to open those fisheries up again. The fish have started to come back a little bit, nothing compared to historic rates. But when we look at the regulations that they put on trawlers down there, it is insane compared to what we see in Alaska. So that's become this frustrating disconnect for us because it's still federal NOAA fisheries regulating all of them. But after they've crashed, they say, oh my God, we could never let you guys get away with that kind of bycatch, or we couldn't send you out with an observer, or we're not going to assume that half the halibut survive. You bring it all back to the dock, and we're going to check it ourselves. But in Alaska, they say, everything's great, just keep doing what you're doing.

Speaker 1:
[89:29] That is interesting, man, because those fisheries, I mean, those fisheries you named are places that crashed hard.

Speaker 2:
[89:36] And we actually see a fair amount of boats now fishing in Alaska with the same owners, same boats, same crew, probably not the same crew after 30 years, but same ownership structure have come from like, there's a fleet in Alaska that's home ported in Rockport, Maine. And if you look at the company timeline on their history, they had fished up until the early 90s. And they said, well, then we decided to send our fleet to Alaska. But what they don't mention is that the cod fishery they were fishing on crashed, and they were forced to go somewhere else or lose their boats.

Speaker 1:
[90:07] They became like a refugee.

Speaker 2:
[90:08] Yeah. And that's been another big deal with this concept of a factory trawler, is it's essentially a floating, pretty self-sufficient city. And so even now, the factory trawler is fishing in Alaska. Most of the crew isn't from there. I think 97% of the crew is non-Alaskan. So they fly to this boat. They live on it for two weeks. They work, they fish, they come home. And they don't really care where that boat is. That boat could be in Nicaragua, or it could be in the Arctic, or the Antarctic, or wherever. It's not like you and I go out and fish in this pond in our backyard. They're flying to the boat, they work, and it's this mobile city that moves around. So because of that, trawl has never had to have this local investment. You know, if you and I lose our fish in the backyard, or we lose the elk in Montana, you know, that might be the end of our fishing or hunting. But when you're from this factory platform, and you just move to another continent, or you move to another area, and you keep doing what you're doing, it doesn't impact you in the same way. And you're not worried about what your kids are going to do, because your kids could fly somewhere else, too.

Speaker 1:
[91:12] Yeah, it's not a death sentence to wipe an area out.

Speaker 2:
[91:16] Sure, not in the same way. And there again, that's crazy that, you know, we have a wild resource that we regulate in this way and take this big of risks with, because we see all the protections, you know, sage-grouse or bighorn sheep or whatever it may be. We're counting a single species and those, we can go out with a helicopter and look at, but what happens in the ocean is a whole new ballgame.

Speaker 1:
[91:38] You know, one of the craziest things, just a final thought that I was reading about this morning. So, these fish, the trawl fish, they're catching, they were ex, they're moving them from the West Coast over to New Brunswick. So they're moving them over to Cannon. They're going through the Panama. These fish are going through the Cannon. Processed fish are going through the Panama Canal.

Speaker 2:
[92:03] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[92:04] But there was some, like, some regulatory advantage to using Canadian Rail.

Speaker 2:
[92:10] Yeah, the Canadian Railroad scam.

Speaker 1:
[92:12] Okay. There's some regulatory advantage to using Canadian Rail. Okay. So, these dudes, they got in trouble for this. These dudes hit on this scheme where they load these fish up. I think it was, was it Pollock? I think it was Pollock. Pollock or Herring, I can't remember. They load these fish up and take them by ship through the Panama Canal up. But when they get up there, when they get to Canada, they'd put them on a train that would go 100 feet back and forth. And then they would take them off the train. It went nowhere. They loaded them and unloaded them in the same spot, and the train traveled 100 feet. And they'd offload them in order to be able to be that there was a Canadian rail product. They got busted. It was funny reading about it as like, it seems like such a weird little scheme. But I was reading about there's like this years long investigations. Like how much do you investigate?

Speaker 2:
[93:13] Well, they, so that's the most, it's like the most cynical thing I've ever heard of.

Speaker 1:
[93:18] So funny, dude. Can you imagine like working there and being like, home, you know what now? I'm supposed to put these fish on this train and move them 100 feet back and take them back off again.

Speaker 2:
[93:27] Well, I think that was actually part of the breaking story was there was this videotape of this worker like laughing. It's not even a train. You drive the entire semi on this rolly cart. And it goes there and it goes back and then the semi drives off. But they, so that was American Seafoods was at the center of that.

Speaker 1:
[93:43] That was the funniest story, man.

Speaker 2:
[93:45] But they, there's this Jones Act regulation that says if you're shipping from the USA, one port in the USA to another port in the USA, you're required to use American ships with American crew. But that is, it's more expensive to ship American made or American in that way. So they dodge that by they'd use this. But there's an exception to that that says if the fish lands in another country and it is transported somewhere on a rail, then it can come back into the USA and it never had to travel on this American ship. So they found this big savings of they'd send this foreign ship around to Canada, right north, 40 miles from the US border, drive the truck on the rolling cart, roll it back and forth on a train track, and then drive it back into the USA and dodge all this taxes.

Speaker 1:
[94:33] That's what they, okay, dude, that was the, I had a laugh this morning drinking my coffee on the couch and I was reading about that scheme. Dude, that is just, it's just, you gotta laugh, man.

Speaker 2:
[94:45] But there's more to that story. So this American Seafoods, there's this regulation that foreign interests can't own these shares of an American fishery. But American Seafoods was started by this guy in Norway. It has a Norwegian CEO, and the majority owner in it right now is a private equity company out of New York City that has its parent company is over in Switzerland. So then you start to look at this essentially foreign country that's scamming the US out of using US workers. They had a bunch of EPA fines, etc. So there again, when we think of guys that go fishing, or when we hear from the trawl lobbyists that say, we're just common fishermen too, you know, sorry about, I'm not well spoken. I'm just this little low key fisherman. The biggest Pollock holder in the Bering Sea is American Seafoods that's half owned by private equity, you know, with backing in another nation.

Speaker 1:
[95:41] So I'll be curious, man. I'll be curious as someone, like after hearing your conversation, right? I'll be curious who reaches out, that wants to explain, like if they want to explain the other side of this or if it's just too, that if they find that it's better not to talk about it, I'll be curious to see what happens.

Speaker 2:
[96:08] Yeah, it's been really fascinating for me to watch this reaction in Alaska, because like we say, nobody wakes up tomorrow and decides suddenly that they just love trawling. If you make money from it or your parent company makes money from it, if a family member does, then you'll see people that'll defend it and say, well, it's an economic engine, maybe this isn't right. But nobody just converts.

Speaker 1:
[96:29] Would you ever do a debate?

Speaker 2:
[96:31] I don't know. The interesting thing to me is that I don't really see it as a debatable issue. There's this ethical component of this that's pretty hard to get around. So, we could say we're going to debate whether hunting is ethical or not. And I know what your stance is going to be. And if there's somebody from PETA, we know what their stance is going to be. And you guys could debate and they'd draw out a thousand facts and you'd draw out a thousand facts.

Speaker 1:
[96:59] No, I understand.

Speaker 2:
[97:00] And the people listening wouldn't get anything out of it.

Speaker 1:
[97:03] Yeah. So they would talk about if I was debating someone from PETA, they would talk about a set of concerns that I'm not, they would talk about concerns that I'm not concerned about.

Speaker 2:
[97:13] Yeah. Yeah. And so, and it's also that, you know, I do this, it's not fun anymore, but it was an important issue to me to take on personally. And so I do it on my own time, on my own dollar, you know, but if you get up against like these multi-billion dollar corporations, they have entire teams of lawyers. They hire a lot of the fisheries regulatory people, they hire a lot of the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, gets hired into their essentially lobbying wing. So if you go and talk to somebody about it, it's not like you and I talking about something we don't know. One side's got essentially a team of lawyers and all this data set on the back, and it's me saying, but it's still not ethical, you know, it's still not ethical. So it's interesting in that way. And I think we're going to see it come up in like these Alaska governor debates. I think there's a couple candidates there out of 2019 that have started to do like some kind of pro-trawl commercials. So I think we're going to see it come up in like these political debates there.

Speaker 1:
[98:13] Wow, wouldn't that be interesting?

Speaker 2:
[98:14] Yeah. Yeah, it will be. There was one, Dave Bronson's one of the guys running for governor up there, and he said he was digging around this NPFMC, this Federal Fisheries Council that regulates it. And one of the guys there told him anonymously that he said if they ever tried to regulate pollock as a forage fish or somebody from that regulatory agency brought that up, that they would lose their job or essentially be eliminated from that process because that's such a threat for them to have to consider that, hey, there's other stuff that eats pollock too. So there's a lot going on in the background.

Speaker 1:
[98:47] Well, I'll be watching, man. I'll be curious. It's been, yeah, it's an interesting debate. And I think that, like, I'm interested in it because it's a fishery that I'm exposed to. It's a fishery that I love. A lot of people that I'm very close to are involved in, you know, built their lives around those fish. So I care about that. I'm also interested in it from when I made that point about when it comes to wildlife resources and we have shrinking pie or in some cases expanding pies and what those wedges look like and who gets those wedges. And that understanding how those that plays out, whether it's, you know, understanding how that plays out, whether it's like bobcats in Nevada, you know, sandbar deer off an island in Florida, fish up in Alaska, whatever, like that question will always be relevant. And I think that, you know, I would like listeners to just pay attention to how it goes, how it goes in other places, what the debates look like, because eventually this kind of conversation is gonna, this kind of conversation is coming to you about something, you know.

Speaker 2:
[100:01] And I think that's, so that's been a big, like near and dear issue to me is that now there's this accusation that this is like a big green movement in Alaska, people from the outside want to come and force their conservation rules onto us. And I've, so we've had that Facebook group about six years, I'm the main person that posts on there, and I've had probably hundreds of messages or seen comments of people that say, hey, we have to get, I'm going to make more enemies, we have to get Greenpeace in here, we have to get PETA in here, Sea Shepherd or whatever it may be. And I say, oh my God, no, like we don't, that's not how we want conservation to go. We're fishermen ourselves, we run this big risk of if this becomes too much of a headline issue and trawl feeds off of this as it messages Alaskans. They run this fear factor deal of, hey, we're going to get these guys in here that think fishing is unethical. Completely, and they're going to shut it all down for you guys. But that is really not the vibe.

Speaker 1:
[100:57] You know, Mike, I'm glad that's your instinct because a lot of people will be like, a lot of people will take whatever kind of partner they can find in something. And it'll come around and bite. And yes, we've been covering this situation on Catalina Island with them wanting to eradicate mule deer on Catalina Island. And you see like, you know, maybe some hunter group being like, hey, we're kind of on the same opinion with Humane Society about this, you know, that's partner up. I'm like, dude, those guys will cut your throat. First chance they get.

Speaker 2:
[101:29] For sure.

Speaker 1:
[101:30] Watch out for those hosers. All right, well, man, I appreciate you coming on the show and talking about it. I'm sure we'll talk about it more. I'm not going to invite you down to do a debate because I think you're probably right. It probably won't be too productive, but we'll see, man.

Speaker 2:
[101:43] Like if, oh, you'll get some letters.

Speaker 1:
[101:45] Well, no, and I might talk to somebody about it. It would have to depend. I'd have to kind of see what they had at stake. I'd a little bit want to know what they felt was threatened, how personal it was.

Speaker 2:
[101:59] Yeah. I mean, so I think the question to ask the other side is like, with the midwater nets on bottom, they say, hey, if we're not allowed to fish for pollock on the bottom with these midwater nets, we'll go out of business. But does that really make sense to somebody to say that? Or they say, hey, if these pollock were regulated as a bait fish because everything eats them, then that could put us out of business. I think they need to be pushed on that. Is that because you're getting paid millions of billions of dollars to catch these fish, or is that because that's common sense and good conservation? For me, it's when they exclude that to even say that, hey, we're going to get fired from this fisheries regulation process if we even bring up the idea that pollock should be regulated as a forage fish. It's essentially corruption, you know, or it doesn't follow the intent of good governance that we all depend on and we live by, you know? So as that starts to fall apart, it has ramifications for wildlife everywhere.

Speaker 1:
[103:00] All right, man. David Bayes, he can be frequently found at The Stop Alaska Trawler Bycatch Facebook group. He can frequently be found fishing halibut out of home or Alaska.

Speaker 2:
[103:16] You should come up there.

Speaker 1:
[103:17] And we fish south there. I should, though, because that's where the big ones are.

Speaker 2:
[103:22] All right.

Speaker 1:
[103:23] Thanks for coming on, man.

Speaker 2:
[103:24] Yeah, thanks a lot.