As the groundfish season for 2009 has opened up massive factory trawlers and other vessels are on the hunt for millions of pounds of pollock in the Bering Sea, Aleutian Islands and Gulf of Alaska. For the past three decades the beginning of new year has always been the start of these massive Alaska fisheries, which catch an enormous amount of fish, predominantly pollock and Pacific cod, with relatively little manpower.
For the longline fishery the date was January 1 while the trawl fishery has January 20 to start the season. It is informed that a significant portion of the pollock and Pacific cod harvest going to domestic markets. The North Pacific Fishery Management Council, during its December meeting in Anchorage, cut the Alaska pollock total allowable catch in the Eastern Bering Sea to 815,000 metric tons, down from 1 metric tons in 2008, as a conservation measure to sustain the fishery.
It is told that last year the BSAI groundfish harvest in federal waters was nearly 1.7 million metric tons, and the Gulf of Alaska’s was more than 151,000 metric tons. The groundfish fishery that year generated 1,182 jobs, compared to 3,759 jobs in the salmon fisheries and 1,246 jobs in the halibut fleet, state labor officials noted.
That humanitarian effort aside, marine conservation organizations have cast a skeptical eye for years on the groundfish fleet, charging them with fishing practices destructive to the ocean ecosystem , including the needs of sea mammals, and with wasting tons of seafood caught incidentally and dumped back into the ocean.
