In Washington D.C. a U.S. District Judge Rosemary Collyer has issued a temporary restraining order in the case brought by Southeast charter boat captains, who complained that the new rule was driving away customers for this summer. The court has scheduled the hearing to extend the order as a preliminary injunction on June 20.
The authority ahs imposed the one-fish rule this season in the tourist-oriented Southeast fishery as an effort to curb the catch by the charter fleet, which has been exceeding a harvest limit set by the federal North Pacific Fishery Management Council. According to commercial fishermen, who buy and sell quota shares for the bulk of the halibut catch, the unlimited growth of the charter industry has been eating into their shares.
Reacting on this complain the North Pacific council plans to resume work on a long-range plan for allocating halibut between the charter and commercial fishing industries in October. Earl Comstock, a lawyer representing the Charter Halibut Task Force, the group that brought the lawsuit, told that the current ruling was based on a procedural issue regarding the steps necessary before imposing such a limit on charter boats.
It is said that the one-fish rule had been imposed only in Southeast Alaska, where a decline in halibut has meant a 43 percent cut in the commercial harvest over the past two years. The federal lawyers defend the new rule saying that they had followed a long public process and met all the legal requirements to set the one-fish rule. It is true that the recent ruling focused on narrower procedural issues, however, rather than the fundamental allocation question.
