Archive for April, 2019

Apr 9 2019

San Pedro Fishermen Help Add to Sardine Stock As­sess­ments

Video: https://spectrumnews1.com/ca/la-west/news/2019/04/08/

SAN PEDRO, CA –

Based out of San Pedro harbor, Nick Juril got his first fishing boat in 1982 and has been making a living ever since with a variety of catches including squid, mackerel, and sardines.

“I grew up with the fishery,” said Juril on the deck of his current boat, Eileen. “[It] goes back to my dad’s childhood. There’s still a handful of us left and we’re still, you know, hanging on. It would be a shame to see it go away.”

Sardine stock assessments are based primarily on acoustic trawl surveys conducted by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. According to the administration, the sardine biomass has fallen short of the 150,000 metric ton threshold needed for commercial fishing to commence. Therefore, the Fisheries Management Council has prohibited a directed sardine fishery since 2015 to allow for stocks to bounce back.

“In 2014/2015 we weren’t seeing a lot. But since the water kind of changed, the water warmed up a little bit, there’s a lot of sardines around right now,” explained Juril. “So, we’re hanging on, but not having the sardines has been really, really tough.”

Joe Ferrigno, one of Juril’s neighboring fishermen, says the loss of the sardine catch has taken as much as half of his business away.

“There was some years we fish sardines all year long,” said Ferrigno. “Now, we go farther, and we work a lot harder to try to catch a little bit of squid to make up for it.”

Besides human consumption, sardines also feed the pet food market and act as live bait in the multi-billion-dollar recreational fishing industry. They are also a food source for larger marine life, like sea lions which can be seen coming into harbor looking for fish.

Juril says the acoustic trawl surveys are flawed because they do not take near shore measurements, which is where he says fishermen are seeing stocks of sardines.

“These fisheries are managed on best available science,” said Juril, “and when the science is bad, it’s not doing anybody any good.”

Juril has been working in conjunction with the Department of Fish and Wildlife to do near shore aerial surveys. A spotter plane will take images once a school is spotted and radio back to the boat with location. The school is then scooped up with the boat’s purse nets and the yield will be measured and correlated to the images so that future estimates can be made more accurately.

“Most, or almost all almost all, of [the sardines] are always fished from 25 meters into surf line,” explained Juril.

Another neighbor, Jamie Ashley, is a bait hauler, also participating in the aerial surveys. The Pacific Fishery Management Council does allow for a few thousand tons of sardines to be harvested as live bait, but Ashley is worried that too could be shut down.

“If we can’t get sardines, we’re out of business,” Ashley said. “There’s nothing else to catch. There’s nothing else to use for bait so we’re done.”

“The corns ripe, ready to pick,” said Juril. “There’s corn all over the place and some scientists are saying, ‘No corn this year. Can’t pick it. Sorry.’ So we’re trying to do what we can do to add to the science so that they do have better information and we can get a better assessment of abundance.”

Juril will haul other catches like squid and continue the near shore surveys hoping to add to stock assessment data and end the moratorium on sardines, but scientists aren’t optimistic and worry sardine stocks will take years to recover.


Original post/video: https://spectrumnews1.com/

Apr 3 2019

Pacific sardines likely to face another shuttered season


For the past four years, fishermen who are on the ocean on a near daily basis have been reporting an increasing biomass of sardines – in a range of sizes — in nearshore waters of California. In October 2018, our collaborative CDFW/CWPA aerial survey documented more than 13,000 tons of sardine in nearshore waters along a 70-mile stretch of coast near Big Sur.

Yet the 2018 AT survey ran the length of the West Coast from Canada to Mexico and estimated only 27,547 mt in July 2019; 94 percent of the estimate was located in the Pacific Northwest, and very few sardines in California.


In light of multiple lines of evidence of recruitment and abundance excluded from this update stock assessment, we ask the Council to employ some “best available common sense,” suspend this assessment until the problems can be resolved in a new STAR panel review, and simply extend last year’s fishery management measures in the interim.




Pacific Sardines. NOAA photo.

 

Sardine fishermen on the West Coast are preparing for another year of severe restrictions after a new draft assessment from NMFS shows the the population is continuing its collapse.The new report, released on March 26, indicates a sardine population of 27,547 metric tons. Any tonnage below 50,000 metric tons is considered “overfished” by NMFS.

These numbers indicate a 98.5 percent collapse since 2006, when the population reached an estimated 1.77 million metric tons, according to NMFS data.

The assessment still must undergo review and adoption by the Pacific Fishery Management Council’s Scientific and Statistical Committee before any rules are passed to restrict this year’s season, which begins on July 1.

Last year the council voted to allow up to 7,000 metric tons of sardines to be caught by West Coast fishermen as incidental take, or bycatch.

The cause of the sardine population collapse is still being debated.

The California Wetfish Producers Association has repeatedly taken issue with NMFS’ assessment strategy. Executive Director Diane Pleschner-Steele has called Oceana-driven claims of overfishing to be “fake news.”

The organization claims that NMFS is not collecting data close enough to shore where fishermen are reporting seeing more sardines, not fewer. NMFS has acknowledged that its research vessels are unable to take stock data close to shore but have said the number of missed fish is unlikely to have a significant effect on their general findings.