Last week’s decision by the Kodiak City Council to not support the extension of the Rockfish Pilot Program (RPP) is inconsistent with keeping more fish crossing the docks in Kodiak. My trawler is permanently based in Kodiak and employs four Kodiak fishermen, supports many vendors; fuel, electronics, hardware, hydraulics, welders, Wal-Mart, Safeway, fish plant workers and longshoremen as fish leaves the island in vans.

My crew will benefit by ending the race for fish between the shore-based trawlers that deliver to Kodiak and the factory trawlers that work directly offshore. This has kept the price for those great fish humiliatingly low for a decade. The RPP divides the fishery between the factory ships and the local trawlers about 50/50 and assigns an amount to each vessel.

With the RPP in place, the local trawlers will be able to fish these allocations at different times throughout the season to meet their individual fishing plans. Ending the race in this fishery will greatly improve the safety for the crews and vessels.

In its present form, this fishery for the shore-based boats is the equivalent of a marathon three-week, old-style halibut opener. It is grueling, trying to bring a share of the quota back to town! July of this year the price in Kodiak was 15 cents per pound, up from a decade of 5 to7 cents per pound.

It takes the local trawl fleet to harvest these fish in large enough loads to make the economy of scale work for the plants in Kodiak. The majority of these fish are 40 to 240 miles offshore and found in depths from 90-140 fathoms. It has taken many years of open process at the North Pacific Management Council (NPFMC) to get to the point where at least half of this resource will reach town without a race.

Put simply, my crew will earn more and spend more and so will the plant workers and longshoremen because the race will not close the fishery prematurely. The trawlers will then be able to work on other fisheries in July, including the underutilized arrowtooth flounder fishery.

The vice president of Alaska Jig Association characterized in testimony to the City Council that the RPP is a program “designed to give a very small group of fishermen, 48 catcher boats and 10 catcher-processors, all of the allocations for all the rockfish in federal waters in the central Gulf of Alaska.”

This shouldn’t be a surprise to Mr. Dochtermann, since the State of Alaska was a very early adopter of fisheries rationalization beginning with salmon and herring and made no objections to the sablefish and halibut IFQ programs. All of these fisheries are conducted in the Gulf of Alaska and the allocations went to the fishermen and vessels that created the history.

In recent years the State of Alaska has taken steps as strong as wresting 25 percent of the federal quota of codfish from federal waters and creating a “small boat” inshore fishery (inside three miles) to ensure a protected waters fishery. The jigging fleet has a small quota of rockfish set aside (2.5 percent) each year beginning Jan. 1 for the last few years, and to date they have not caught the full allocation each of those years.

While the City Council has to take testimony from citizens on items on the agenda, on an issue involving millions of pounds of fish crossing the docks in Kodiak each day during every trawl fish opening, a wider scope of testimony should be garnered. Any council meeting on any issue normally has polar opposite opinions given in testimony; my hope is that members of the City Council take the time to talk to some plant workers and longshoremen and some of the vendors about how they are idled for weeks at a time every time the trawlers are tied to the dock. This is abstract but they don’t have a dog directly in the fight. My hope is the City Council takes a second look at drafting a letter to the NPFMC, reconsiders and drafts a letter in support of the extension of RPP.

 The City Council and the Borough Assembly meet Oct. 17 in joint session with rationalization on the agenda to come up with a recommendation to the NPFMC at the December meeting. I hope they only ask one question. Is keeping the trawlers racing for fish and then sitting idle for weeks at a time good for Kodiak?

Al Geiser first came to Alaska in the Coast Guard in 1974-76. He owns and manages the fishing vessel Hazel Lorraine.