Fishermen Protest Proposed Channel Islands Restrictions

LONG BEACH — Dozens of California fishermen, angered by a federal proposal to limit fishing off the Channel Islands, asked the state Fish and Game Commission on Thursday to reject the plan.

Saying their livelihoods would be jeopardized by the restrictions, nearly 50 fishermen from as far away as San Francisco told commissioners Thursday that the problem goes beyond overfishing and includes El Nino weather conditions, pollution, hungry sea otters, kelp depletion, global warming and pesticide runoff.

“The National Park Service is a hostile entity,” said Chris Miller, a lobster fisherman from Santa Barbara. “Their main tenet is, ‘The less fishing, the better.’ You can’t work with someone like that.”

Officials of the Channel Islands National Park Service office in Ventura attended the commission meeting in Long Beach to outline the plan, designed to restore the number of fish living near the chain of islands about 50 miles off the Ventura County coast.

Headed by scientist Gary Davis, the federal agency wants to limit fishing within the one-mile band surrounding each island for at least a decade. To best repopulate the ocean, the Park Service is recommending that 20%, or 25,000 acres, within that mile band be off-limits to fishing. Swimming and boating still would be allowed.

Today, there are 104 such off-limits areas in California, which are small and often located in sandy, rocky areas where there are insufficient amounts of fish to conduct proper studies, Davis said. Fish and Game Commissioner Frank Boren, whose family has lived in Ventura for four generations, said he saw the benefit of the federal proposal.

“It is not bad to have areas of land set aside for future generations. . . . I want to leave the environment in as good a shape as I can before I leave the planet,” Boren said.

With the near-elimination of the abalone population as an example, Davis said portions of the ocean need to be closed to fishing. Species by species, fish have disappeared from California waters because fishermen hunt and gather until there are none left, Davis said.

“They [fishermen] use up the resources and shift to another resource,” he said. “Since the mid-20th century, we’ve been using everything up and we’re running out of species.”

Fishermen weren’t convinced by Davis’ report and accused him of being a scientist with an agenda.

“There’s not a lot of science in it,” said Zeke Grader, executive director of the 3,000-member Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Assns. in San Francisco. “They’re promoting their own backyard as a research area.”

But after the meeting, Davis said the Channel Islands is an ideal spot to create the expanded off-limits zone, because it is already a national park and sanctuary.

Many of the fishermen--coming from Ventura, Santa Barbara, Los Angeles, San Diego and San Mateo counties--urged the state commissioners to hold off and conduct further studies before accepting the restrictions. The state has final approval of the federal proposal because it regulates the waters immediately around the Channel Islands.

“No-take zones as a management tool is largely untried, way premature and not accepted by the broader science community,” said Bob Fletcher, spokesman for the Los Angeles-based Sportfishing Assn. of California.

Fishermen resent the idea that overfishing is the only cause of declining fish populations. Along with unseasonably warm weather caused by El Nino, they blame kelp depletion and an increased number of hungry sea otters. Therefore, they said, the proposed zone is shortsighted in that it only restricts fishing and doesn’t address any of these larger problems.

Some fishermen proposed species-by-species management, building artificial reefs and restoring wetlands as possible alternatives to the no-take zones, which they said were severe and economically devastating.

Eric Hooper, vice president of the Ventura County Commercial Fishermen’s Assn., said any benefits of the existing restriction zones are mostly theoretical. He suggested the commission form a 10-member group made up of Fish and Game commissioners, sport and commercial fishermen, environmentalists and a public citizen to review reports about the number of fish caught and other biological reports to create a better long-term solution.

Hooper’s assertion appeared to be supported by a study introduced by Deborah McArdle of the University of California Sea Grant Cooperative Extension.

McArdle’s study indicates the state’s existing marine-protected areas are too small and too unregulated to determine whether they work. Before creating a new one around the Channel Islands, it would be wise to study what the state already has, she said.

Because Thursday’s three-hour discussion came during a Fish and Game workshop, the commission only listened and did not make a decision on the federal proposal.

The five-member panel, which meets monthly in different cities, is scheduled to meet in Visalia on May 4 and 5. The commissioners promised to revisit fishing restrictions in the future, although the issue is not yet on the agenda for the May meeting.