Box to track boats chafes like an ankle bracelet, fishermen say

NEWPORT, Ore. — A "black box" tracking system installed on fishing boats to prevent them from straying into waters protected for conservation of groundfish has drawn complaints from commercial fishermen, who compare it to government spying.

"I wasn't real crazy about it," said Mark Chase, who operates the Norma M out of Newport. "We had this shoved down our throats, just like a lot of things in our business."

The owners of about 300 West Coast fishing boats were required to install the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) "vessel monitoring system" in 2003. The small black boxes wired inside the cabins of the boats track vessel movement via satellite and report positions once an hour.

The purpose is to keep boats from straying into closed waters, so that a groundfish species that collapsed during the 1990s can continue to rebound.

But as NOAA Fisheries considers expanding the program, the number of boats required to carry the monitoring systems could dramatically increase to include hundreds of fishermen who don't target the various groundfish species the government is trying to protect.

Salmon trawlers, for example, only pull in the occasional yellow-eye or canary rockfish incidentally, and they're allowed to set hooks in waters closed to groundfishermen.

"It's an ankle bracelet," Kevin Bastien, a Newport salmon fisherman, said of the black boxes.

"How would you like it if for no reason you had to have an ankle bracelet on?" he said. "We didn't cause this problem. I didn't catch one yellow-eye last year — not one and only a handful of canaries. We're going to fight it tooth and nail."

The program came about because the government changed how it defined where fishing boats could hunt. Latitude and longitude coordinates had been used to mark the borders of closed areas. But in September 2002, the National Marine Fisheries Service implemented a depth-based system, closing off areas based on how many fathoms deep the water is.

These larger areas are tough to monitor, say NOAA officials, because they extend far offshore and the boundaries are set by coordinates that amount to guesses at the ocean's depth. The size also makes patrols expensive and limits their effectiveness.

The payoff of the monitoring systems for fishermen comes in more liberal harvest limits, fewer boat inspections and fewer bad apples breaking the law, says Yvonne de Reynier, chief of NOAA fisheries' groundfish-management branch.

The depth-based closures earn trawl boats that hold expensive limited-entry permits an estimated $26,000 more annually than they would under the old system, officials say.

"We have to maintain the integrity of these rockfish-conservation areas," de Reynier said. "Our goal is to provide a tool that both protects the fish and increases the amount of fish and consequent revenue."

But Oregon Trawl Commission President Rayburn Guerin says the amount of rockfish that salmon boats catch results in only a minuscule profit for the fishermen. "It's more of a nuisance," he said. Guerin argues that NOAA is just looking for a new way to justify its existence.

"They create a problem to manage a problem," he said.

Peter Huhtala, senior policy director for the nonprofit Pacific Marine Conservation Council, said a balance needs to be struck.

"I can understand the irritation from fishermen's point of view about having this big-brother box on your boat," Huhtala said. "I also understand the need to rebuild the groundfish species that have been so severely depleted."

In the long run, however, "there'll be more fishing opportunities, the fishing industry will be stronger and there'll be more dollars in coastal communities," he said.

In January and February, NOAA Fisheries held meetings along the West Coast to get public comment on nine options for expanding the monitoring program, which the Pacific Fishery Management Council will consider in April in Tacoma.

The council's recommendation will lead to a proposed rule by NOAA, which could be in place by next fall.