WARRENTON With todays tricky fishery laws, keeping the wrong fish out of your nets has become as big a challenge as finding the right fish in the first place. Thats where Kevin Dunn comes in.

Hes a commercial fisherman by day and net-maker on the side. His trawl nets can be found on boats from Kodiak, Alaska, to Monterrey, Calif., but one of his newer items is an excluder that keeps protected fish out of the net.

A catch share system that went into effect in 2011 means boats have a set limit of each species they can catch. Catch too much of a particular species and your boat can be placed in a maritime time-out.

Dunn skippers the Iron Lady, a trawler out of Warrenton.

I have a menu of fish I can go out and catch and one of the constraining species was halibut, he said. We cant keep halibut; its a federal fish. Even if its dead. We have to throw it over.

When the quota system was put in place, people came and discussed what had worked to keep halibut out of the nets in Alaska where there are a lot of halibut, Dunn said. One of the ways was excluders.

I came home and said, Hey, Ive got some time, Im gonna mess with it, and I built one in the shed.

The device goes ahead of the trawl net. It has a ramp with openings to allow the smaller fish to pass through while directing the larger halibut to another chamber and out into open water.

Shakedown Cruise

The Enviromental Defense Fund chartered the Iron Lady to see how the excluders work. They put Dunns excluder in action off the Oregon Coast in 2011.

The charter put his excluder through its paces to find out how well it worked.

How many halibut do we get, whats our exclusion rate, etc, he said.

The EDF returned in 2012 for a repeat performance.

Unbeknownst to me you cant just go out and make one tow, he said. Because of the funding, there have to be 30 tows without anything being changed, anything being fouled. We learned a lot more last year. We tried different things.

Plywood Of The Sea

Skates, fish similar to stingrays, proved to be a problem, Dunn said.

Theyre like great big pieces of plywood, he said. When you put a hundred-pounder right there (on the ramp), it starts clogging. Pretty soon theres nine of them, and that comes down to water flow.

With a modification to the excluder, the skates were prevented from entering the excluder in the first place.

Allocation Cuts

Dunn predicts a cut to the halibut allocation in 2014, and the time for making an excluder work is now, he said.

All of the sudden theres going to be 155 fishermen saying, I want the best excluder you can build me, and well worry about the problems later.

Thats a problem now, he said, because every net, every trawl door requires something different for an excluder to work properly. If the fishermen arent working on the problem now, theyre going to have problems when the time comes.

Whats In A Name

Dunn named his net company, K&K Knots, after himself and his yellow lab, Kate.

My dog sat down there for nine billion days with me while I built nets and she chased tennis balls, he said. And when I went to talk the attorney to incorporate he said, What about the dog? Shes always with you. So we did K&K Knots. It was never supposed to come out KKK, because that is unfortunate.

Some years he does $80,000 in net business, others he does $20,000.

Its a hobby that got the best of me, he said. I do not want (the Iron Lady) owners to feel Im not putting 100 percent in here. So this is my day job. I try to never have (the boat) sitting because Im making nets.

Hes tried to have people help him with net-making, but hes never found anybody whos made it a commitment to learn.

(Its) I gotta do this, Ill help you tomorrow, so I just decided Ill do it myself until I cant do it any more, he said. Quality is never an issue. I wont sit there and spend six hours teaching somebody whos going to quit doing it in three weeks. I dont have the patience.

Paying For Skill

The excluders take 40-50 hours to build. Dunn sells them for $7,200.

Im not trying to be a Cadillac, he said. Im incorporated, I pay my taxes You pay for a skill, and I try to give them the best one I can.

He takes the same approach to net repairs.

If Im going to put a patch in this net, everything has to work, he said. I cant just throw a square in it and say, Thats good enough.