By air and sea, environmental groups and the Quinault Indian Nation are spotting and retrieving derelict crab pots over 150 square miles of ocean, pots with lines that can ensnare gray and humpback whales and endanger boats.
“Great flight Sunday,” Quinault Marine Resources Scientist Joe Schumacker said of a recent flight from Grays Harbor to the Queets River. “Over 500 pots spotted.” Conditions for the flight were optimal, clear skies and little swell during slack tide when the buoys are easier to see. If there is any current, “they end up getting submerged and are almost impossible to spot,” he said.
Many have been in the water for years. “We believe there are many more,” Schumacker said.
Many derelict pots have floating polyethylene lines and buoys attached. The floating lines can form “forests” that can impede hook and line fishing. Lines that ensnare whales and other marine mammals may have played a role in the sinking of the trawler Lady Cecilia, which lost a crew of four in 2012, according to the Nature Conservancy.
Schumacker agrees the lines are very dangerous to vessels. “With no propulsion a vessel is at the mercy of the ocean if help doesn’t arrive fast. Any entanglement can bend props or drive-shafts and will cost the owner money, both for removal by a diver or repair in dry-dock,” Schumacker said.
The Quinault Ocean Committee, the Nature Conservancy and the National Oceanic &Atmospheric Administration are funding partners in the effort to recover and remove the derelict crab pots.
The work is being done with contractors from Natural Resources consultants and Fenn Enterprises. All parties worked together over the last few years to recover “ghost nets” from rivers and Grays Harbor.
So far, the group has sent out three flights over the area, which stretched from Grays Harbor south to the Columbia River and north to Destruction Island. The single-engine, fixed-wing plane is sent about five miles out, said Eric Delvin, who is the community conservation coordinator for the conservancy.
The crab pots are attached to buoys on the surface. Many of the crab pots are buried more than six feet deep in silt, which turns them into an anchor attached to a line that can choke the mammals of the sea, Delvin said.
The creatures can drown while entangled in the lines. Humpbacks are particularly in danger due to the shape of their fins, Delvin said.
Coastal commercial fishing of Dungeness crab has averaged a harvest of more than 14 million pounds a year for the past 20 years, according to figures the conservancy cites from the state Department of Fish &Wildlife.
More than 10,000 pots are potentially lost each year. The parties are working to clear the sea of debris, and to develop a way to keep up the recovery of the crab pots.
Recovery
After the crab pots are spotted, a fishing boat and crew head to the location of the derelict gear and retrieve it, sometimes with the help of side-scan sonar.
So far they have dealt with 144 crab pots, of which about half were fully recovered.
The teams also use hydraulic pumps to liquefy sand around the buried pots to allow them to be brought to the surface, the conservancy said. A heavy grapple hook can also be dragged along the ocean floor, too, to remove the pots, Schumacker said.
An exciting development is the use of a new “line cutter” by Kyle Antonelis, a contractor who works with Nature Resources Consultants, Delvin said. The line cutter is sent down to cut the line to the pot remotely from the safety of a boat. It cuts the line close to the silt, then the buoy and lines are hauled up.
Without the line-cutter, a diver would have to be sent down to cut the line manually from the pot.
“If the pots are not buried they may be ‘ghost-fishing’ or trapping crab and fish inside even though all pots are to be equipped with escape hatches that open after a piece of cotton twine bio-degrades,” Schumacker said. Sometimes the lids get jammed or the cotton string may not work, he added.
If the pots remain buried, they degrade quickly because they are made of metal, Delvin said.
The work is paid for through a $135,000 grant from NOAA, which was matched one to one by the Quinault and conservancy.
Ongoing recovery may involve issuing permits to crabbers who want to retrieve and claim the pots after the season ends, as is the case through Fish &Wildlife, Delvin said.
The pots cost from $200-$225, including buoys, lines and bait boxes. Extra line can drive the cost higher, Schumacker said.
Also being contemplated is the idea of attaching RFID (radio-frequency identification) chips to the pots, similar to tags on consumer goods, said Delvin. This would help identify who the pots belong to.
“We are currently conducting a pilot study to determine the feasibility of outfitting our crab fleet with electronic monitoring systems that would allow much better tracking of how many pots are in the water and where they may be lost in the future,” Schumacker added.
The Quinaults are “already entering derelict gear into a database that can be used to record gear located in the water or gear lost by fishers,” Schumacker said.
The removal of derelict gear should re-open the area to salmon trollers that were unable to fish the area because their fishing gear got entangled in the crab lines, Schumacker said.
With five sea trips to recover pots already done, the group plans several more. The goal is to recover as many as possible before winter storms increase and the crab season starts again on Dec. 1. The season runs through Sept. 15, 2015.
The plane will be sent back up on a clear day toward the end of the effort so they can gauge how successful retrieval has been, weather and conditions permitting, Delvin said.
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