Unalaska, AK – The pollock and cod seasons are both starting out with unusually high levels of bycatch, which could cause problems for the fleet further on in the season. Cod boats are mostly concerned about halibut bycatch; they can only get a certain amount per year before the National Marine Fisheries Service closes down the fishery. Two weeks in to the season cod boats have already caught 180 metric tons of total limit of 525 MT of halibut. That's one third of the total yearly limit and four times higher than the bycatch rate from last year.

"The only way to try to avoid high halibut rates is to try to avoid the halibut themselves but at the same time try to find cod, so it's kind of a balancing act," said NMFS in-season manager Josh Keaton. "There's just a lot of halibut out there, from what I understand. We have a large recruitment class of halibut in the area where they're fishing."

Keaton said the fleet can help the situation by voluntarily standing down and waiting to fish until later. Some of the fleet has done just that. Sylvia Ettefagh, the co-op manager from Alyeska, said some of her boats already stood down for a week and have now found areas with many cod but few halibut. However, the boats need to be careful. Most boats have hard cap bycatch limits associated with them. If they hit their limits, they have to stop fishing even if the rest of the boats continue going out. Other boats are just limited by the hard cap for the fishery as a whole. One of the issues this year is that the cod quota was increased, but the halibut bycatch limit was decreased.

Bycatch is already an issue for the pollock fleet as well. For the first two weeks of the season, halibut bycatch in the pollock fishery is six times higher than it was last year. The pollock fleet's halibut bycatch limit is tied to the p. cod fishery bycatch limit, so higher rates are of concern to both fisheries. Salmon bycatch rates are also high - they're mirroring those of 2007.

"Everything's a rate. So it's calculated by number of Chinook salmon by metric ton of pollock, basically, that they bring in," said Keaton. "They're having a hard time finding pollock, so we have a lower groundfish number, but they're catching salmon with it, so that gives them a higher rate."

This year's pollock harvest is starting out much slower than last year's. So far the fleet has only caught 30 metric tons. By February 1, 2008 they had harvested 100 metric tons. Part of the reason for the slow fishing is a voluntary stand down to reduce both salmon and halibut bycatch.