Catch sharesby requestWest Coast groundfish trawl fleet adapts to a program eight years in making

摘要

Unlike their New England counterparts, West Coast groundfish harvesters asked for catch sharemanagement."Program development came at the request of the industry," says Pete Leipzig, longtime executive director of the McKinleyville, Calif.-based Fishermen's Marketing Association.In the past, regulators used trip limits to manage the region's groundfish harvest. But fishermen attempting to maximize their catch in each two-month regulatory period would encounter species whose harvest limit had already been reached.High discard rates resulted, upward of 35 percent for some species."That was just no longer acceptable, not just to the industry, but others as well," Leipzig says. "We needed to do something to allow people to fish and land what they could."