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Commercial Fisheries News Volume 32 Number 6 April 2005 Surprise! 2005 bluefin specs are out; public hearings set for April GLOUCESTER, MA - In a move that’s sure to surprise a lot of people in the bluefin tuna fishery, the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) has published proposed specifications for the 2005 fishery and scheduled two public hearings on the proposal for April. The agency has come under heavy criticism from industry for years for sitting on proposed annual rules often until well into the fishing year, which, for the general category, starts on June 1. In 2004, the initial specs weren’t released until the fall and the final specifications for the 2004 fishery were only announced on March 7 of this year. The practically unprecedented early publication of the 2005 specifications is sure to be a welcome change for dealers trying to plan for the upcoming season – and there’s even a chance they might like what they see. “The proposed specifications are a relief,” said Rich Ruais, executive director of the East Coast Tuna Association. “NMFS kept the 100 metric tons (mt) donated by the purse seiners (in December), but they abided by the spirit of the donation and returned a lot of fish to the general and harpoon categories.” NMFS is proposing the following initial quotas for 2005: • General category – 908.3 mt, an increase over the 689.8 mt baseline allocation for 2004; • Harpoon category – 90 mt, an increase over the baseline allocation of 57.1 mt for 2004; • Purse seine category – 530 mt, which includes 257.6 mt of uncaught quota from 2004; and • Angling category – 288.6 mt. The general category initial quota would be split up into time-period subquotas as follows: June-August, 539 mt; September, 269.5 mt; October-January, 89.8 mt; and New York Bight, 10 mt. NMFS is also proposing new restricted fishing days, which are all Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays from Nov. 18, 2005 through Jan. 31, 2006, to help extend the general category fishery into the late season off North Carolina. The agency also is asking for public comment on how to go about complying with a four-year average eight percent tolerance on the harvest of school bluefin as recommended by the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT). In a somewhat unusual move, NMFS has also published a “draft environmental assessment regulatory impact review and initial regulatory flexibility analysis” for the proposed rule. The 59-page document goes into NMFS’s reasoning behind its proposals in extensive detail, especially in terms of how the measures comply with ICCAT recommendations and applicable US laws such as the Atlantic Tunas Convention Act. That document can be downloaded from the NMFS Highly Migratory Species Management Division web site at <www.nmfs.noaa.gov/sfa/hms>. In addition to the two public hearings, the deadline for public comment is April 18. For more information, call the NMFS HMS Management Division in Gloucester at (978) 281-9260. Lorelei Stevens |
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