SAC President Bob Fletcher’s comments:

Charterboat perspectives on the use of MPA’s

The Sportfishing Association of California (SAC) was created in 1972 to represent the interests of the commercial passenger fishing vessel (CPFV) fleet in southern California. As its’ president since 1989, I have been working to help the fleet maintain reasonable ticket prices for the approximately 750,000 passengers that ride the boats of the SAC fleet annually. Some of the boats fish almost entirely in Mexican waters, but a large portion of the fleet fishes the local waters of the coast of California, and many of the overnight boats target the waters around the offshore banks and islands.

Since early on, the Pacific Fishery Management Council (PFMC) and the California fish & game commission have regulated recreational anglers by use of the more traditional

Management tools, including seasons, bag limits, gear restrictions, closed areas and minimum size limits. It has only been since the late 1990’s that MPA’s have become

An issue of concern to us, and only after then-Governor Gray Davis signed state legislation in early 1999 called the Marine Life Protection Act (MLPA). In addition to the MLPA, the sport and commercial fishing interests in southern California had to deal with the implementation of marine reserves (no-take) in the waters of the Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary (CINMS). For sportfishing interests, the heart of our concern goes to our need to have access and opportunity to fish on the majority of our traditional fishing grounds. While we can live with scientifically supported actions to recover overfished stocks, we draw the line at total no-take areas, unless there is sound science supporting the total closure of an area to protect a unique ecosystem or a cultural resource.

I mentioned the late 1990’s as a turning point, and the birth of the MPA controversy coincided with the recognition of the declines of several rockfish stocks on the west coast. As a result of those declines, the PFMC reduced the sport and commercial quotas, using accepted management tools, in most cases over the loud opposition of the affected recreational and commercial fishing interests. The PFMC even utilized the MPA tool, closing a 4,400 square mile area off the Southern California coast to all rockfish take, to protect the overfished cow cod rockfish. While the fishermen were upset, they agreed to go along with the action because there was good scientific information justifying the closure. This MPA, called the cow cod conservation area, still allowed fishing on the surface for highly migratory species, while completely protecting all rock fish species.

When the environmental community in California first sponsored the MLPA, there was a general perception by those groups that traditional fisheries management had failed, and

The imposition of large closed areas throughout California coastal waters was necessary to prevent the collapse of fish stocks and to assist in the recovery of depleted species. Two things have happened since that time that has radically altered this perception, in the minds of all but the most committed preservationists.

The first was the PFMC recognition through better science that stocks of rockfish needed more protection, resulting in more restrictive regulations. The other significant event

That occurred that changed the dynamics of the marine protected areas debate was an almost total recovery of the productivity of the ocean off the California coast. Most

Scientists believe that the ocean turned warmer, more sterile and generally very unproductive in the late 1970’s. This condition, combined with more frequent El Niño events, had a very negative impact on the food chain and led to “fishing down” of a number of rockfish populations throughout the 80’s and 90’s. Fortunately for the ocean and the resources off our coast, those conditions ended in early 1998 following another major El Niño event. Since that time the waters have cooled down, upwellings have resumed, food chain production is up and repeated successful spawnings of overfished rockfish populations have taken place.

Recognizing the need to manage more conservatively, the PFMC has continued to restrict sport and commercial fishermen by using large “rockfish conservation areas”, MPA’s that limit fishermen to certain depths, as well as closing other areas year-round. These closures are based on the better science now available, as well as accurate catch information, and will last as long as necessary to recover and maintain the health of stocks of concern. While these are MPA’s, they are annual regulations that will change as needed. The fishermen have evolved with the PFMC on this approach to management,

And are supporting this process because they see that return of access to closed areas will be allowed when the health of the stocks support a change in regulations. The use of MPA’s as part and parcel of this more ‘traditional management’ approach is far superior to the conservation community’s concept of a network of MPA’s (mostly no-take) that are adopted and put into place permanently throughout some of the most productive traditional fishing grounds. Many of the boats of the SAC fleet are ‘day boats’ that have limited time to reach the fishing grounds, make a catch and return to port. Areas off limits to sportfishing near major ports where SAC boats berth could have a major negative impact on these small businesses.

SAC believes that the only intelligent approach to managing fisheries is through the use of sound science coupled with accurate, timely and credible catch information. If you

Provide the sound science and credible catch data to the managers, they will adopt intelligent fisheries regulations that will maintain healthy fish stocks while giving the

Fishermen regulations they can live with, using the traditional tools of managing those fisheries, including MPA’s where appropriate and as long as appropriate.

I keep coming back to the importance of access and opportunity, and I think a concrete example of this will help you understand the devastating impact on fisheries that results from the imposition of a permanent MPA that excludes fishing and fails to adapt to changing ocean conditions. In the case of fisheries management, change is good.

In 1995 a combination of cold ocean temperatures, onshore currents and remarkable concentrations of anchovies in the eastern Santa Barbara channel resulted in large schools of Chinook salmon packing in to a relatively small stretch of coastline. Had the area been designated an MPA prior to that time for reasons of habitat and species protection, it might have prevented the recreational and commercial fishermen from harvesting the abundant salmon resource available in that area that year. No such concentration of salmon had occurred earlier in that area, and there has been no similar catch since. This example simply points up the dynamic actions that occur constantly as an infinite number of variables affect the movement of marine species and the health of their environments.

While the charterboat industry that I represent is opposed in general to MPA’s that exclude fishing, we can support some MPA’s to protect areas of cultural importance, areas of unique ecosystem complexity or to protect overfished species and their habitats. A prime example of this exception is an area called ‘gull island’, off the coast of Santa Cruz Island in the Channel Islands group. During the Channel Islands Marine Reserve debate, scientists described an area that included a very complex marine ecosystem that uniquely combined flora and fauna species from throughout the southern California bight. We quickly recognized that protection of this special zone justified the gull island areas’ designation as a marine reserve, and supported it as a no-fishing area. The key in most

Cases, however, is to use an adaptive management approach, and have any applicable MPA tools fully integrated into the bigger fisheries management picture, and modified as needed to maintain healthy fish stocks.

As you can see from my resume, I have been involved in the MPA controversy since the late 1990’s, and while those early discussions made very clear that what the environmental community desired was large networks of marine reserves, or no-take areas, off the California coast to prevent resource collapse, the debate today has shifted considerably. SAC is pleased to see that shift to a more reasonable discussion. this ‘sky is falling’ attitude was overtaken by events, as I described earlier, and today the debate centers more appropriately on the broader issue of marine protected areas, and their use, and what kinds of decisions will help further the protection of cultural and natural resources and their habitats. One logical approach would be to establish a network of marine protected areas along the coast that allowed only those commercial and recreational fishing gears that could be designated as sustainable, and would exclude gears such as trawl, long line and gill net, and other gears that have been documented to be responsible for habitat destruction and high levels of bycatch.

While we in the sportfishing industry are always open to considering the use of marine protected areas for more long term protection for marine resources and their habitats, we think that the use of any of the various ‘MPA’ tools should be carefully considered, scientifically justified, selectively implemented, and comprehensively integrated into the bigger fisheries management picture. Thank you for giving SAC the opportunity to speak to you and I’ll be glad to try and answer any questions.