Just about a month after halibut and black cod fishing came to a close, fishermen are taking stock of their seasons. Some longliners using a new piece of gear, known as longline pots, to prevent whales from stealing their catch are returning happier than others.
Bill Harrington is returning to pull in his line only to find a pod of killer whales swarming his boat.
“Yeah, there’s one, right underneath you a killer whale,” yells one of Harrington’s crewmembers.
Harrington is not happy. The sound of pulling in his longline is a dinner bell for both the pod and a large sperm whale that bursts out of the water about 20 feet from his boat.
Harrington yells “whoa!” and then calls the whales a few colorful names as the video rolls on. This cellphone video was shot ten years ago when Harrington longlined in the western Gulf of Alaska.
Harrington and his crew would travel a hundred miles or more and bait thousands of hooks attached to a commercial fishing line by hand before anchoring it to the ocean floor between two buoys.
A sperm whale or just a couple of killer whales can pick a line clean as it's pulled in.
“As far as I’m concerned, they’re only thieves in tuxedos,” Harrington said during a phone interview about the video earlier this month.
Harrington retired a few years back and he says the problem only got worse. Many longliners say whales are unavoidable at this point.
However, federal fishery managers say the number of black cod whales are eating off longlines has been decreasing over the past decade. Sperm whale depredation is said to have peaked in 2007 at 300 metric tons per season. Fishery managers say killer whales hit their peak way back in 2001 eating a similar amount.
Currently, the National Marine Fisheries Service estimates that both species eat about $3.1 million worth of black cod statewide per season, just a fraction of the overall catch.
The International Pacific Halibut Commission doesn’t currently estimate those numbers for halibut, but fishermen say they’re losing thousands of dollars per trip.
Roy Wilson lives in Cordova and he delivered his last halibut load of the season to Homer in early November. His crew is washing off the deck after a trip to the Aleutian Islands, a trip Wilson ended early because of killer whales.
“We just left a lot of fish on the ground. Yeah, probably $50,000 worth of fish on the grounds that we won’t ever see again,” Wilson said as he stood in the wheelhouse of his boat. “But at least the fish are alive.”
Wilson says the whales ate more halibut than he pulled in altogether on the trip. Despite smaller paychecks for both him and his crew, Wilson is happy killer whales didn’t steal more of his catch.
A potential solution to this problem is coming from new regulations. In the coming years, longline fishermen in western Alaska will be allowed to catch halibut in longline pots, something black cod fishermen in the region have done for years and those in the Gulf of Alaska began in 2017.
Instead of fish being exposed on hooks along the ocean floor, fish swim into enclosed containers seeking the bait inside. The pots protect the catch from sperm and killer whales looking for an easy meal.
Wilson also fishes for black cod and made the switch to pots.
“If everybody could go to pots, it would be a great thing for the fishery,” he said.
However, only 12 percent of black cod longliners pulled from the water this season were caught in pots, and there are reasons some fishermen are reluctant to make the switch.
Pots take up more space on the fishing grounds and they can get tangled with traditional longline gear. That’s why the North Pacific Fishery Management Council prohibited pots in the 1980s and 1990s. Now that regulators have re-approved the gear, there’s another barrier.
“The gear is just so expensive,” Homer longliner Erik Velsko said.
He’s thinking about spending $200,000 just to buy enough pots to get started and to make a few modifications to his boat in order to pull in the heavier gear.
Like Wilson, Velsko also views the switch as a conservation measure as he fears black cod managers are underestimating just how many fish whales are eating.
“I think if we just keep doing what we're doing, it's just going to get worse and worse and harder and harder every year,” he added.
Velsco may stop black cod fishing altogether and focus on other fisheries if he can’t financially justify the switch to pots.
Back on the deck of Wilson’s boat, his 28-year-old daughter Marissa Wilson is cleaning fish. She worked for her dad full-time up until last year when she took a desk job in conservation.
“This is the first year that I haven't gone out fishing, and I've had to do a lot of soul-searching,” Wilson explained.
She’s been thinking about buying her own boat, but deciding what fishery she might invest in first is a big financial decision.
“I don't think I'll ever stop feeling like a fisherman. I'm taking a little hiatus, but I've always got my eyes on the ocean,” she said.
Wilson says she’s leaning toward fishing for black cod in the Bering Sea, particularly pot fishing for the valuable groundfish. If she makes that investment, she won’t have to worry about those thieves in tuxedos.