THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, December 20, 1995 TAG: 9512200613
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: NORTH CAROLINA
SOURCE: BY LANE DEGREGORY, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: ROANOKE ISLAND LENGTH: Medium: 97 lines
Outer Banks watermen want a piece of the world's most profitable fishery.
They realize that it will probably take national fisheries officials at least a year to adopt and implement regulations that would allow them to sell bluefin tuna. They're resigned to the fact that they will not be included in the 1996 adjusted Atlantic quotas.
But since federal fisheries regulators closed the East Coast's bluefin tuna fishery this month - when 2 metric tons of the pricey fish could still be legally caught and sold - a group of Dare County fishermen asked representatives of the National Marine Fisheries Service to let them catch and sell the remaining 4,400 pounds of bluefin.
``You shut down the quota last week when 2 tons were left. I propose you open it up next week and let us have what's left before the end of the year,'' Hatteras Island charter boat Capt. Rom Whitaker said Monday night.
All 40 fishermen who gathered at the North Carolina Aquarium on Roanoke Island for a National Marine Fisheries public hearing on bluefin tuna agreed.
``We want it!'' they shouted from the back of the meeting room.
Federal fisheries officials were noncommittal.
``We had hoped to have a proposed rule out to the public by this meeting,'' National Marine Fisheries Service spokesman John Kelly told the crowd. ``But with all these federal shutdowns, we haven't been able to. I can't guarantee anything now because the entire situation is so tenuous.''
A migratory, off-shore species that has been schooling around Hatteras Island in large numbers during the past few years, bluefin tuna can weigh upward of 1,000 pounds. They live to be 30 years old. And a single fish can fetch more than $30,000 at Japanese sushi markets.
Along the Atlantic seaboard, watermen were restricted to selling 1,235 metric tons of bluefin during 1995. The season, however, didn't open until June. Bluefin swim off the Outer Banks from late December through early March.
So North Carolina's watermen have never been able to cash in on the coveted species before the quota is almost caught up.
Monday night's meeting was called, Kelly said, to figure out how to allocate Outer Banks fishermen a piece of the pie.
``We're not here tonight to offer any proposals, make suggestions or explain recommendations. We want to hear from you all what you want,'' said Kelly. ``We're starting from the beginning here and we want to get everyone involved in this.''
Watermen proposed myriad management plans during the 2 1/2-hour public hearing. Most said federal fisheries regulators should move a line delineating the north and south bluefin landings from 34 degrees to 36 degrees latitude. And although recreational anglers tagged and released more than 750 of the giant fish off the Outer Banks last year - while commercial fishermen sold only 11 bluefins - watermen said they did not want the government to restrict the catch and release recreational fishery.
``All we want is for the citizens of North Carolina to be able to share in this resource,'' said Willie Etheridge, owner of Etheridge Seafood Co. in Wanchese. ``I propose you change the general category date so that the quota begins Jan. 1. Or, you could divide it into equal seasons year-round so each state will have the opportunity to use the resource for financial gain.
``We don't have these tunas in our waters in June,'' Etheridge explained. ``They're up off Massachusetts and New Jersey and New York then. How can the National Marine Fisheries Service justify that Massachusetts landed 90 percent of the quota for these fish last year when we didn't get a thing?''
Responded Kelly, ``I can't justify that. We admit we didn't do a very good job on this. We were looking only at the areas up north that had been most active in this fishery.''
Among the most popular suggestions was one to split the Atlantic quota either in half, with 50 percent of the pounds being caught from January through June and the other half during the remaining months; on into quarter or monthly quotas.
Other ideas included:
Issuing a certain number of bluefin tuna tags to each permitted vessel. Suggestions ranged from two to five tags per boat. A captain then could, for example, catch his five fish any time during a single year. But when his own individual quota was caught, he'd have to stop fishing.
Transferring some of the southern tuna quota allocation, which has not been caught, to the northern states so that the fishery could stay open longer in North Carolina.
Decreasing the amount of other fish required to be caught in order to bring in a bluefin as an ``incidental catch.'' Currently, watermen have to have 20,000 pounds of fish on board if they want to bring in a bluefin. ``That's absolutely impossible,'' Etheridge said. ``You don't even allow us to land that many fish on a single trip, so we have to cut all the bluefins that end up on our lines off.''
Allowing watermen to bring bluefins that have died on long-lines into shore instead of tossing them back into the ocean and wasting the resource.
Letting commercial watermen keep two fish each per month from January through April.
``That's only eight fish each a year,'' Whitaker said. MEMO: FOR DETAILS
For more information about federal fisheries regulations on bluefin
tuna - or to propose changes to the current rules - write the National
Marine Fisheries Service at 1315 East-West Highway, Silver Spring, Md.
20910 or call Richard Stone at (301) 713-2347. by CNB