Sport fishermen get a one month timeout from the halibut fishery

The Daily News featured developments from DFO in the halibut fishery, which see sports fishermen in BC having to keep their lines out of the water for one more month.

The start of the sport fishery will be delayed until March 1, due to concerns over a decline in the number of older, catchable halibut along the entire Pacific Coast

The story was the front page entry in Monday’s paper.

HANKERING FOR HALIBUT WILL HAVE TO WAIT A WHILE: DFO
By Leanne Ritchie
The Daily News
Monday, February 04, 2008

Pages 1 and 3

Sport fishermen chasing halibut will have to wait an extra month to drop their hooks in 2008 after Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DF0) announced a delay in the opening of the recreational fishery.

The season, which normally starts Feb. 1, has been delayed until March 1 in response to concerns from the International Pacific Halibut Commission (IPHC) that there has been a decline in the number of older, catchable halibut along the entire Pacific Coast.

Meanwhile, stakeholders and Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) are meeting to try and figure out how the allocate this year's total allowable catch between the commercial and recreational sectors, which has been dropped by the IPHC from 11.5 million pounds to nine million.

“It is giving us a chance to get the management plan sorted,” said Bill Shaw, DFO recreational fisheries co-ordinator for the South coast area.

According to Mark Reagan, DFO management co-ordinator for recreational fisheries North and Central Coast area, the halibut stocks are still healthy, the problem is they have fished hard on those halibut that are of the catchable size and now need to lower the catch limit until the younger fish have enough time to catch up.

“We fished fairly hard on the biomass that is above the available size limit for catch, which is 32 inches. We have removed the biomass that is there and we have fished it down. Now we have a couple of strong year classes coming through the system but they haven’t grown enough to reach the size to be in the fishery itself,” he said.

“You have to back off the harvest a little bit and allow these fish to grow, and move into that harvestable range. We are reducing our harvest levels to allow these fish to get bigger, so the kids can become teenagers and move in to the adult phase so we can catch them.”

Earlier this year, the International Pacific Halibut Commission (IPHC), which conducts stock assessments for Canada and the United States, reported a decline in the amount of older catchable halibut along the Pacific Coast and recommended both countries drop their 2008 catch limits from 7.3 per cent of 2007 levels.

The commission recommends harvest levels for the area from Alaska’s Bering Sea south to Washington State.

The IPHC concluded that a reduction in the harvest rate was necessary “to provide the combination of optimal harvest and to ensure viable spawning mass for the future.”

In B. C., the total allowable catch of halibut is divided between the recreational sector, which includes sport fishing guides, and the commercial fishery.

The recreational fishery generally runs from Feb. 1 to Dec. 31 and the commercial fisher from March 15 to Nov. 14 each year.

This is the second year in a row with reduced catch levels for the B. C. Coast and the second year the IPHC has used a new type of stock assessment.

It has left recreational and commercial fisherman asking questions about Canada’s portion of the international allocation.

In 2005 and prior years, the IPHC used to base assessments in each regulatory area, based on the assumption that halibut do not migrate.

However, new data showing the fish do migrate eastward caused them to change they way they determine the health of the stock.

Now they fit the assessment model to a coastwide data set and then apportion the total among regulatory areas in accordance with survey estimates.

What this means, according to the report by researchers for the IPHC, is about half the decrease in this year’s number of catchable halibut is due to a change in the survey methods, while the other half is actually due to lower catch rates reported in 2007.

In 2007, the IPHC used a catch rate of the B. C. Coast of 25 percent of the total biomass to offset the effects of the new coastwide assessment being used. This year, they are using the biologically based 20 per cent of total available biomass as the catch rate in most areas, including B. C.
Reagan said the IPHC has agreed to a workshop on their new stock assessment method sometime in the summer or fall in order to discuss the fisherman’s concerns.