After the Alaska Marine Conservation Council presented an overview of research supporting the North Pacific Fishery Management Council’s recent action to close 375,000 square nautical miles of Alaska waters to bottom trawling, two Kodiak fishermen objected to the group’s inference that all trawling is bad.

“I wish you’d soften your approach when it comes to a fishery that supports this community,” Albert Geisor, owner of the 89-foot Hazel Lorraine, said before a gathering of 29 people at the Baranov Museum Tuesday evening.

Once you consider the high quality of bait the pot fishermen and longliners use, “We provide more protein than any other fishery — calorie in and calorie out,” Geisor said.

Geisor also argued that trawl gear harvests more edible fish per unit of fuel expended than either pot or longline gear.

Both trawlers and conservation groups praised the recent move by the NPFMC to close essential fish habitat to bottom trawling, and to close other vulnerable areas to all gear that touches the bottom.

“Science shows bottom trawling has a larger impact (on the seafloor) than other gear,” Ben Enticknap with AMCC said.

Enticknap showed a deep-water video comparing two sections of seafloor: one rich in sea sponges and coral with fish swimming past the camera lens, and a similar area laid flat by trawl gear and devoid of fish.

Under council guidelines the effects of trawl gear may be minimal, Enticknap said, but the effects are not necessarily temporary. Deep-water seafloor ecosystems are not adaptable to disruption like those in shallower waters.

“There is a lot of uncertainty,” Enticknap said.

“Then the question becomes: What degree of caution is appropriate?”

“The important thing is to get ahead of the curve,” as technology for scientific research improves and gear modifications are developed, Enticknap said.

“The important thing is for the council to close areas before there is a population crash,” he added.

“We can all make sacrifices,” Alexus Kwachka, a longline and pot fisherman, said. “Improvements for the entire industry can improve fisheries for all of us.”

In an ideal management system, Kwachka and Geisor said they’d like to see all fishing observed up to 100 percent of the time and all catch retained.

Cameras currently on board boats off the West Coast may make more observation possible in the future, they said. But regulations often require non-targeted species be thrown back into the water.

Curt Waters from the trawler vessel Mar del Norte said Tanner crab areas around Kodiak that AMCC proposes be closed as part of Gulf of Alaska rationalization may not need protection.

“We used to trawl in Tonki Bay (on the north side of Afognak) and now there’s Tanner there,” Waters said.

“We use so little of the bottom,” he said, because trawlers go back to the same spots where they caught fish in the past.

What Waters would like to see is one spot like Tonki Bay set aside for trawling to assess whether or not crab stocks are impacted.

Fisherman and Alaska Department of Fish and Game advisory board member Oliver Holm said it is not true that trawling didn’t impact local crab fisheries.

As one example Holm pointed to parts of Kodiak waters that have been closed for years as a result of federal king crab regulations in the past.

With one exception, those areas now have the highest concentrations of Tanners, Holm said.

The trawl fishery has learned a lot over the years of developing regulation, Geisor said.

“We just get tired of rocks getting thrown at us. The trawl fishery has been forced to change. Every fishery has problems, but we still need to eat. The planet is getting hungry,” Geisor said.