Trawler cast nets inside new restricted area, agents sayWARRENTON – Federal fisheries managers seized a cargo of Dover sole and other groundfish from an Astoria-based trawler in the first alleged poaching incident under new rules that protect imperiled West Coast rockfish.

Skipper Gary Baird was spotted aboard the Sara Frances Thursday night about a half-mile inside a newly designated “no-fishing” zone 30 miles off the southwest Washington coast, with his nets out.

A federal agent on board a U.S. Coast Guard helicopter demanded verification of Baird’s position, which Baird radioed back. Friday morning, as Baird pulled his 67-foot trawler to dock in Warrenton, federal agents were waiting.

They seized about 18,000 pounds of fish with a dock value of roughly $9,000.

The fish are being processed at the plant, as they normally would be, but payment will be made to the U.S. government, not the fisherman.

Federal agents say they made clear the new restrictions are meant to allow slow-growing groundfish to recover from overfishing and depleted numbers and that U.S. helicopters will be on watch to catch violators.

Baird, 42, and a captain for 18 years, said he did not think his position, off the Long Beach peninsula, was errant. “We were trying to hold the 300-fathom edge,” he said Monday. “I was trying to make a tow on the outside of that line.”

The new rules, which went into effect Jan. 1, prohibit all trawling at depths between 100 fathoms to 250 fathoms deep, where the most imperiled rockfish congregate, from Canada to Mexico.

The spot enforcement against the Sara Frances follows much debate about how the new no-fishing zones, drawn and adopted by the federal Pacific Fisheries Management Council in 2002, would be implemented and enforced. Historically, harvest limits were only sporadically checked by a few on-board federal agents and understaffing of federal agents often was blamed.

According to a Coast Guard press release, this was one of the first nighttime surveillance flights conducted by the Coast Guard since the new rules went into effect. It was also the first illegal incursion into the “no-fishing” areas since they were established.

“(National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) Fisheries and the Coast Guard are very serious about protecting, conserving and recovering overfished species of West Coast groundfish,” said Vicki Nomura, special agent in charge of NOAA Fisheries Northwest Office for Law Enforcement. “Detecting unlawful fishing in these Rockfish Conservation areas is our highest priority.”

Cmdr. Fred Myer, chief of the 13th Coast Guard District’s Office of Law Enforcement said, “Although the Coast Guard has a clear mandate to fully accomplish our homeland security mission tasking, we will continue to strive to meet our objectives for living marine resource enforcement.”

The fisheries management council, in devising the rules, was responding to reports by scientists that several species of rockfish, often sold in stores and restaurants as Pacific snapper, live longer and reproduce more slowly than thought.

Several species, scientists found, will take 70 years or more to repopulate, requiring area closures.

Fishermen, many of whom doubt the documentation of the scientists and argue that most species of groundfish remain abundant, reacted with anger to the federal seizure.

“This is absolutely ridiculous,” said Kelly Smotherman, who said he heard part of the radio conversation between the helicopter pilot and the trawler captain while he was pulling crab pots in the area. “They were hovering over him and asking him for his position.”

“Now they’ve got these lines in the sand and are going to make an example of him because he was the first to have a problem,” said Tom Morrison, a Warrenton-based fisherman.

Federal officials were unyielding.

Hans Radtke, chairman of the fisheries council, said the seizure should be a lesson to the small minority of trawlers who are not obeying the new rules.

“It’s sort of like having a new speed limit in town,” Radtke said. “People who want to test the speed limit should know that we’ll have enforcement out there.”