Almost all Hawai`i longline vessels use monofilament line when they fish. This is a clear plastic line, all but invisible in the water. When I spied the thick stainless steel hook lashed onto about a foot of thin plastic-coated wire cable, I knew I was looking at gear from another fleet.
The hook, glinting in the sunlight, lay on the unpaved cart track along the southern shore of Midway’s Sand Island, immediately south of the runway. I pocketed it and the next day showed it to Jim Cook, then the chair of the Western Pacific Regional Fishery Management Council, which met last month on Midway.
If anyone in Hawai`i knew what fleet was using that gear, I figured, it would be Cook. His business, Pacific Ocean Producers, provisions ships from many different Pacific ports. In addition, Cook and his business partner, Sean Martin, have several longline vessels.
Cook instantly recognized the gear as the kind used by Taiwanese longliners. It was, he said, “extremely primitive.” Gear identical to what I had found had been spotted by a colleague of his a couple of months ago, while he was transiting the North Pacific from Alaska to Honolulu. The hooks on the longline had been set at relatively shallow depths – about half of the 120 foot depth where most Hawai`i fishermen would set their gear if they were targeting swordfish. (Tuna gear is set much deeper.) Floats were spaced along every second or third hook, and a short leader line – independent of the longline gear – was tied onto each float and drifting practically at the water’s surface. The hook I had found was attached to this short leader, about a foot and a half long.
“I had two questions when I saw this,” Cook said. “First, why would anyone fish with this crap? And then, why is the hook on the float so shallow?” The only answer he could think of, he said, was “some fisherman decided this was a way to get an extra hook in the water.”
The colleague who first spotted the gear pulled up some of the lines to examine it – a routine practice in the open ocean, apparently, where the gear stretches out miles beyond the line of sight of the fishing vessel that put it in the water. “You seldom see boats on the open ocean, you see gear a lot more often,” Cook says. When his colleague came upon the Taiwanese gear, almost every hook attached directly to the float had either an albatross or a shark attached to it, “probably an albatross first, and the shark later,” Cook speculated. The shark would almost certainly be finned, with the proceeds from the sale of the fins being used as a sort of bonus for the crew.
Cook invited me to his office to take a look at the Taiwanese gear. Sure enough, the hook he showed me that had been taken from a float set by a Taiwanese vessel matched up perfectly with the one I had found at Midway. The only difference between the two was that the cable on the one I had found had been cut at one end, while the one picked up with the rest of the gear still had a complete leader cable, with end loop, attached to it.
How did the hook I had found get to Midway?
Nancy Hoffman, a Fish and Wildlife Service biologist at Midway Atoll National Wildlife Refuge, thinks an albatross may have been drawn to the bait, which in the case of the Taiwanese is usually cut mackerel instead of squid. The bird probably swallowed the bait and hook and was still alive when the line was pulled in, she surmised. The crew cut the line and the bird flew back to Midway, where it eventually regurgitated the hook.
Fishing Dirty
According to Cook, his company has serviced about a dozen Taiwanese vessels in Honolulu this year, many of them targeting swordfish. In the past, Cook says, he would never see even one. Also, because of rising prices for swordfish, the Japanese have redirected about 50 of the tuna vessels in their fleet to swordfish.
The increase in fishing effort directed at swordfish is not good for birds. Generally, swordfish sets have fewer hooks between floats than do those targeting tuna. Among Hawai`i vessels targeting swordfish, the catch rate of albatross is about three birds in every four sets, while vessels targeting tuna catch about one bird in every 10 sets.
The catch rate for birds among foreign vessels targeting swordfish is probably even greater.
“From my perspective, these things are a living demonstration that we’ll not conquer issues until MHLC is in place,” Cook says. MHLC is the Multilateral High-Level Conference to develop a Convention on the Conservation and Management of Highly Migratory Fish Stocks in the Central and Western Pacific Region. For the last several years, the United States, through the State Department, has been engaged in talks with about two dozen other countries whose fleets fish in the international waters of the Pacific in an effort to arrive at measures to conserve fish stocks. (The MHLC was scheduled to hold its seventh and final meeting from August 28 to September 2 in Fiji. Because of political unrest there, the meeting will probably be held in Honolulu.)
After six meetings, the draft MHLC convention contains no provision relating to protection of birds, turtles, or other animals not targeted by the fishing vessels. As explained by Paul Dalzell, a staff biologist with the Western Pacific council who has followed closely the MHLC process, “the important thing isn’t so much the text of any agreement, but the fact that all the nations are present at the table.” Once the agreement is in place, then “we can get on with the issue of protecting species,” he said.
Other international agreements may eventually come into play. The Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals (otherwise known as the Bonn Convention) has been ratified by 55 nations. It obligates them to take measures to protect species listed in the appendix to the convention. Draft agreements are being developed now to protect some 16 different species of albatross.
— Patricia Tummons
Volume 11, Number 2 August 2000