Purpose and Need

Amendment 12 addressed two potential problems in the Southeast sablefish fishery: 1) conservation and restoration of the depressed sablefish fishery; and 2) fishing grounds preemption and wastage of the existing sablefish resource.

Analysis

A 21-page RIR (draft dated April 1983) analyzed three alternatives:

1) the status quo;

2) make sablefish an exclusive hook and line fishery between 140°W longitude and Cape Addington (preferred action); or

3) do not include trawl gear in the proposed management measure. Pot gear was identified as less suitable for the area, given the bottom topography. Lost pot gear entangles hook and line gear, making both irretrievable and leading to ghost fishing. Pot longline gear was used extensively in the mid-1970s but was used to harvest less than one percent of sablefish between 1980-82. Since there was no existing or anticipated trawl fishery for sablefish in this area, a restriction on the use of trawl gear for sablefish was not adopted. However, later, trawl gear was limited to sablefish bycatch in other directed groundfish trawl fisheries (Amendment 14).

Regulation Summary

Amendment 12 was withdrawn.

Results

Significant new information in a report on the quality of pot-caught sablefish cast doubt on the argument that pot-caught sablefish are of inferior quality. For this reason, additional information needed to be included into the documentation for Amendment 12, and the amendment was withdrawn and reconsidered as part of Amendment 14. Amendment 14 prohibited the use of all pot gear in this fishery. Hook and line became the only allowed gear in the directed sablefish fishery for the next 20 years. An individual fishing quota (IFQ) program for sablefish was approved in 1988 and implemented in 1995 in both the GOA (Amendment 20) and BSAI (Amendment 15). Pot longline was never prohibited for sablefish in the Bering Sea and Aleutian Islands, and (with the adoption of GOA Amendment 101, effective 2017), is now once again permitted in the Gulf of Alaska.