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MakoMike,
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"Maybe we need observers on every dragger, just make sure they play by the rules?"
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That would be ideal but will never happen. I would settle for some of the video monitoring technology they are now expirimenting with (it automatically turns on when the codend is hauled back).
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Increasing the minimum size for commerial fluke would only exacerbate the regulatory discard problem. "
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That sounds pretty hopeless doesn't it? Why not 13''? Why not 12''. In other words, all we end up doing is accomodating the shortcomings of the gear instead of fixing it. We do this in the NE Groundfish fishery too. Remember when rec haddock was 21'' and commercial haddock was 19''. Why? Because the highest size mesh in the world was still too indiscriminate to weed them out. So we accomodated them (ditto haddock/herring above)
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"I would force them to keep every fish, so none of them went to waste, no matter what size they are."
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I'm hessitant, but I could go along with that if it was based on the number of fish and not pounds. Again though, enforcement would be an issue.
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As far as the haddock bycatch cap in the herring fishery. Did it really work? I doubt it. If I were the owner of one of those boats every single haddock I could identify would get thrown back. I would'nt jeapordize my thousands of tons of herring by keeping any haddock I could discard.
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Yes, it does work. The whole premise behind why the herring boats need to be allowed to land at least some haddock is because it is virtually impossible to separate them as they are vacumed out of the bag. We are talking about 4'' - 14'' haddock here (haddock mature around 19''), and when a herring vessel was busted with some 4,000 lbs illegally, they tried to brush it off as insignificant because it only represented about 4% of its total catch.
But your point remains: that it would be easy for pitchfork FLUKE over the side to avoid hitting the cap. Again, I think that a video monitoring system could help with that.
Best,
Mike F.
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