ALASKA CAFE

• Transparency is Fish Management King

  This is what I was talking about on Facebook: "RFA(Recreational Fishing Alliance) is recommending that the US Department of Commerce and individual governors in each of the coastal state coordinate a more transparent appointment process in the future,(to the federal Fishery Management Councils) thereby allowing potential candidates to be fully" [...]
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  Posted: August 22, 2009, 4:33am EDT
  

• Freedom to choose share-cropping the ocean

  The Tyee, an online magazine from British Columbia, has an article on privatizing the rivers in B.C. Sound crazy? Think privatizing all the ocean's fish like NOAA wants to do. British Columbia started this fish privatization business, and countries we sometimes compare them with, like New Zealand, were right there' [...]
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  Posted: July 22, 2009, 7:00am EDT
  

• Oh Brother, Where Art Thou Quota Shares?

  Sometimes a real fired up piece shows up on the Internet, such as this from Montauk, that deserves to be framed. I will add one thing; one of the two skippers who went to D.C. to testify long ago against the crew, declared his sincere regret for that testimony as [...]
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  Posted: June 29, 2009, 7:23am EDT
  

• Oceans Week, or Exxon Week

  Some very strange things going on in Washington. Oceans Week is sponsored by Exxon and friends. The events are staged by them and moderated by them under the guise of a do-gooder foundation. Some enviros have been sucked in, but the respected ones haven't. Here's what Food and Water Watch [...]
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  Posted: June 12, 2009, 6:59am EDT
  

• Privatization only helps the banks

  Lets talk about NMFS chief Jim Balsinger's wish to expand the Individual Fishermen Quota system.
  Over the years there have been numerous fishing industry stooges who have pushed privatizing of the fishery resources. And it wasn't too difficult; fishermen who were the larger players saw they could "own" a piece [...]
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  Posted: May 22, 2009, 7:58am EDT
  

• "I want it all, I want it now."

  This title is from a new TV series on the Tudor family of Great Britain. It pretty much was the Tudor motto through the centuries until they got so big that "the sun doesn't set on the British empire." Shift to the North Pacific fisheries. A convenient little mechanism was' [...]
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  Posted: April 07, 2009, 5:42am EDT
  

• Waging Peace for the Salmon

  For Community Based Fisheries Management to work, fishermen of different gear groups need to meet face to face. That brings up a vision of Japanese and Seattle trawl company owners meeting with Eskimo salmon gillnetters to work out getting some of the Yukon kings through the trawl fishery alive. And [...]
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  Posted: March 08, 2009, 2:39pm EDT
  

• Science vs Barons of the Fish Business

  
  "The days of Washington dragging its heels are over. My administration will not deny facts; we will be guided by them." President Barak Obama. At this point, we need a refresher for the thousands of new appointees in the Obama administration who may not have [...]
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  Posted: January 28, 2009, 2:40pm EST
  

• Action Plan for Alaska Fisheries

  
  

  If you insert the Alaska comparable into this Action Plan, you have a pretty good blueprint for halting the demise of the Alaska fishing industry. There is no evidence that this industry isn't going the way of the other basic industries in this country, like the auto industry, or' [...]

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  Posted: January 10, 2009, 11:48am EST
  

• Who has the trump card in fisheries policy?

  
  There's a saying that "if the footmen weary you, what are you going to do when the horsemen come"? If you're a fisherman, the horsemen are here already. The ecology may be the National Marine Fisheries Service's responsibility, but from these examples, you might find' [...]
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  Posted: April 18, 2008, 9:22am EDT
  

• Is Corporate Responsibility in Fisheries a Oxymoron?

  
  What's wrong with this statement? "Most recently, Kodiak trawlers tested the waters for a co-op in the rockfish fishery. The slower pace extended the fishery from three weeks to seven months, keeping more seafood workers on the job longer. By fishing cooperatively, the trawlers cut'" [...]
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  Posted: March 03, 2008, 11:46am EST
  

• Fishing for Answers

  
  A University of British Columbia Professor won a $150,000 three-year fellowship to document financial factors contributing to unsustainable commercial fishing around the world.
  
  Each dam on the Rogue River is estimated to cost 20% of the run in lost fingerlings. If this derelict [...]
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  Posted: February 25, 2008, 5:13am EST
  

• Planned Obsolescense for Fishermen?

  
  It's been a wonderment to me why so many fish stocks keep going downhill in this country. Even salmon, as much as that is refuted by the marketers who want the premium 'sustainable' label.
  
  We should have started flying these P. cod to London' [...]
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  Posted: January 29, 2008, 1:39pm EST
  

• Mid-December Fisheries Memo

  
  News of the New Bedford Petition has been appearing in a number of news outlets.
  
  Island Free Press
  Commercial Fishing News
  National Fisherman
  Kodiak Daily Mirror
  
  Port Alexander, Alaska. Notice the haze from the surf out at [...]
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  Posted: December 13, 2007, 6:40am EST
  

• December Fisheries Memo

  
  Aquaculture strategizing by European Union
  They feel that they hatch the technology and other countries benefit from it mostly. (They forget that it was Dr. Donaldson of the University of Washington who jump-started salmonid farming to begin with back in the 1960's.)
  
  This' [...]
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  Posted: November 30, 2007, 1:42pm EST
  

• Mid-November Fisheries Memo

  
  Inuit put the kibosh on uranium mines in headwaters of five salmon rivers:
  “No one in the world today can prove to us that there is a safe way to dispose of uranium tailings,” said Anderson. “The two uranium deposits are in a watershed [...]
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  Posted: November 15, 2007, 3:00pm EST
  

• November Fisheries Memo

  
  The mother of all end runs in Eastern Canada would have the processors and big boat owners give the boot to all the small fishing operations. In the U.S. they call it "rationalization," which of course is only rational to the big processors and [...]
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  Posted: October 31, 2007, 5:45pm EDT
  

• October Fisheries Memo

  
  "I think lobbyists should get a lifetime tag, not fishermen." "In privatization, the good crewmen have all left Kodiak." The Kodiak Fisheries Advisory Committee is taking all this to heart.(maybe)
  
  Greenpeace diving spheres out to look at critical fish habitat for the first [...]
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  Posted: September 06, 2007, 8:45am EDT
  

• Sept. Fisheries Memo

  
  Seems the oldest son of the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia started a marine conservation foundation. They sure have good equipment. (Dirk Pitt would have been jealous, for you Clive Cussler books fans.) But the video statement of the Executive Director struck me as [...]
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  Posted: August 29, 2007, 1:10pm EDT
  

• Monday Fisheries Headlines 8/13

  
  Sign reported(?) on door of Calhoun Street fisheries building in Juneau: BEAT IT, WE'RE CLOSED! Do we dare hope? One of the "proprietors" was recently charged by the State Troopers with having an unlicensed crewman on his boat.
  
  Launching a robot from the "Esperanza"' [...]
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  Posted: August 07, 2007, 1:39pm EDT
  

• Monday Fisheries Headlines 8/6

  
  The fight over fish oil.
  "The omega-3s helped rebuild the damaged gray and white matter of his brain," says Dr. Bailes, who now takes his own medicine, swallowing a fish-oil supplement each morning. On his orders, McCloy, still recuperating at home, continues to take [...]
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  Posted: July 27, 2007, 1:20pm EDT
  

• Monday Fisheries Headlines 7/30

  
  Sea Change or Pocket Change?
  The Marine Conservation Alliance just has to keep trying to put a good face on the buffalo hunting of it's members. This time they dragged into the fray a midwater trawl organization and the Institute for Social and Economic' [...]
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  Posted: July 24, 2007, 12:38pm EDT
  

• Monday Fisheries Headlines 7/23

  
  Imports Fuel Push for U.S. Ocean Fish Farms. What I know about fish farming you could scratch on the back of a dime, even though my dad's secretary prophesied that I'd go on to run a fish farm. She was doing the high school [...]
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  Posted: July 16, 2007, 11:22am EDT
  

• Monday Fisheries Headlines 7/16

  
  Alaska fisheries academia catches a case of value added fever about once every 25 years or so. The last time the state was flush with oil revenues from a new oil pipeline, so they built the Fishery Industrial Technology Center in Kodiak.
  
  The [...]
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  Posted: July 14, 2007, 12:41pm EDT
  

• Monday Fisheries Headlines 7/9

  
  The fight for the Klamath River king salmon is symptomatic of the public's attempt to re-establish the concept of "common" ownership, as in "We the People....." The West has switched from hired guns to hired lawyers, so it boils down to who has the' [...]
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  Posted: July 09, 2007, 12:17pm EDT
  

• Monday Fisheries Headlines 7/2

  
  Even though the Bridges to Nowhere elicited public disgust at the Republicans, and Sen. Ted Stevens and Rep. Don Young in particular, it doesn't hold a candle to the greed built into Stevens' patented buffalo hunting machine he calls the Magnuson-Stevens Act.
  
  Trawl by-catch [...]
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  Posted: July 01, 2007, 3:30pm EDT
  

• Monday Headlines 6/25

  
  Dave Benton, executive director of the Marine Conservation Alliance in Juneau, called the action to ban bottom trawling in the Arctic "an important step for the health of Alaska's oceans and the seafood industry." As if this is some great revelation he alone got, or' [...]
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  Posted: June 24, 2007, 10:35am EDT
  

• Monday Headlines 6/18

  
  UVic makes ocean history off Vancouver"The first phase of the most challenging ocean observatory installation ever attempted was completed early last month in the Strait of Georgia near Vancouver." $10 million is an unusually large amount of money to put a bunch of sensors [...]
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  Posted: June 18, 2007, 7:09am EDT
  

• Monday Headlines - 6/11

  
  Adopt-a-Stream Program
  What do you know, there really is such a program, and it's alive and well here in Oregon. Well it figures. They have thousands of miles of dead salmon streams they feel a little guilty about. I'd thought for awhile that a [...]
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  Posted: June 04, 2007, 9:49am EDT
  

• Monday Headlines

  
  Registration for Global Food Alaska - 2007
  This chance to meet buyers, sellers and other food chain participants in Alaska seafood, agriculture and bio-products won't happen again for two years. The June 13 and 14 event in Soldotna, Alaska is a first, and right' [...]
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  Posted: June 01, 2007, 5:15am EDT
  

• When government drops the ball, I mean, fish

  When we get a report like this about a technological breakthrough for seafood handling, we're going to pass it on. This new temperature tracking device is a throw-away and trumps all the bulky and expensive devices for monitoring temperatures of fish in-transit, one of which was recently explored by' [...]
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  Posted: May 23, 2007, 11:05am EDT
  

• A Coalition of Fishermen, Researchers and Conservationists

  
  "A coalition of fishermen, researchers and conservationists is calling for a new approach to groundfish management that advocates predict will help rebuild depleted stocks while protecting another increasingly rare species: Maine’s small, independent fishermen." And, "This is just essential if we’re ever [...]
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  Posted: May 18, 2007, 10:13am EDT
  

• Alaska's fisheries management needs realigning

  It's been a wonderment to me how with such a big Alaska Department of Fish and Game, so many salmon streams in Alaska are struggling to even produce the "last of the Mahicans." This article about the fallacy of the maximum sustained yield principle Alaska uses might shed some [...]
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  Posted: May 12, 2007, 6:08am EDT
  

• Coastal communities discuss ocean information needs

  
  Oregonians have begun a process to develop a "Whole Oceans Catalogue," or "How To Have Your Ocean And Eat From It Too." This article is a prescription for the health of coastal economies, if policymakers dare to read it. The North Pacific Fisheries Management [...]
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  Posted: May 05, 2007, 8:39pm EDT
  

• News from around the spawning grounds

  
  "We hear all the time from our fathers and grandfathers how great the fishing used to be, and how schools of salmon and steelhead used to choke our waterways, before headwater forests were logged or roads were constructed along fragile coastal streams.
  
  Now you [...]
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  Posted: May 02, 2007, 3:45am EDT
  

• Global Food Alaska - 2007

  
  
  

  Only once in a blue moon does a workable solution in the seafood industry come along, and this is one of those times. A chance for the aspiring Alaska fish monger to go to a Boston Seafood type show, right [...]

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  Posted: April 21, 2007, 10:00am EDT
  

• Something is rotten in the Pacific fisheries

  
  
  Just in is a study that looks at the effects of bottom trawling off the West Coast. In areas that were bottom trawled there were 30% fewer species of fish and six times fewer invertebrates. I haven't been around bottom trawling that much, [...]
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  Posted: April 19, 2007, 6:44am EDT