“No-fault” Derelict Gear Recovery: An End to the Blame Game Leads to Successful Gear-removal in Puget Sound

Gary Wood, J.D., Northwest Straits Commission

Marine Killing Fields
Abandoned, lost, and discarded fishing equipment lays submerged wherever the world’s oceans have been fished, and the salmon-rich inland sea of Puget Sound is no exception. The designation derelict fishing gear consists of nets, traps, hooks, weights, lines, or crab and shrimp pots abandoned or lost during commercial and sport fishing. Since modern fishing equipment is composed of synthetic monofilament, lost nets survive for decades.1 All the while they present safety, liability, and nuisance issues, but the real harm is their persistent, deadly impact on species and habitats.

“Ghost nets” — so called by divers because monofilament is invisible underwater2 — entangles divers and swimmers, often with fatal results; while huge trawl nets damage propellers and rudders, putting even the largest oceangoing vessels and crews in peril.

At a minimum, such gear continues to do what it was designed to do: entangle and kill fish. At loose in the benthic environment each net becomes a veritable “killing field” trapping fish and fin — even shellfish, crabs, birds and marine mammals, including endangered or threatened species — depending on the site. Each entanglement becomes bait for the next, in turns, so the nets passively ‘fish up the food chain.’ The consequence of this historic accumulation is an “unobserved mortality” that continues unabated in most harbors and oceans today. The economic impact of these losses is inestimable.

If such a wasteful carnage were to occur terrestrially, imagine the outcry for a solution.

Obstacles to Recovery
The problem cries out for remediation, but the work has just started. Efforts by NOAA in 2002 and 2003 to clean up nets in the Northwest Hawaiian chain yielded a grisly harvest of commercial gear and dead or dying sealife by the tons, but these were very expensive operations involving research ships and dive crews at sea for several weeks. Funding ongoing cleanups there as elsewhere remains an unresolved issue, and the source of ‘imported’ gear must be addressed.

Puget Sound presents different challenges: the Northwest Straits are within a temperate, deep inland sea with 100 years of commercial and sportfishing gear (and centuries of tribal nets) hanging on its steep walls and draped on rocky reefs along salmon migratory corridors. In 1999, several wild species of salmon were listed under the Endangered Species Act, the first such action within a metropolitan population and commerce center.3

Yet there had never been a concerted effort to deal with the gear problem, other than one report to the legislature deploring the nets problem, but confounded to solve it because of ‘liability issues.’ In fact, Washington’s own state law was the major impediment to gear removal operations, unintentionally.

At the time, a regulatory, punitive approach that penalized commercial fishing operators who reported gear losses constituted the sole redress of the problem. Considering that the value of complex seine and trawl equipment is $15,000 – $40,000, its loss is an immediate and severe economic blow – often cut loose to save a hapless fishing boat from its grasp.

The added imposition of a fine or license suspension for such reported losses, employing classic legislative wisdom, was the lawful “deterrent.” Indeed, reporting lost gear did cease, wholly deterred. Nonetheless, gear losses – and those unobserved mortalities – persisted out-of-sight, and out-of-mind.
Another principal impediment to recovering this material was the safety issue. The stuff is dangerous. No protocol for removal operations existed; and safety was a paramount concern of the pilot project.

Commission Awarded NOAA Grant
The Northwest Straits Commission, http://www.nwstraits.org , is a regional citizens’ panel authorized by the Northwest Straits Marine Conservation Initiative,4 a bipartisan measure authorized by Congress in 1998. This innovative Initiative employs a county-based “bottom-up” approach to the protection of the region’s vital marine resources; addressing them community by community, by diverse stakeholders sitting on a Marine Resources Committee (MRC). Over 100 active volunteers, representing local planners, tribal co-managers, and the scientific, economic, commercial fisheries, recreational, aquaculture and conservation communities have accepted appointments to seven county MRCs in the Straits.

Where appropriate, the Commission undertakes regional projects that protect or restore the area’s marine resources. The derelict gear problem presented an opportunity to design and initiate a pilot remediation program. Dr. Andrea Copping of Washington Sea Grant co-authored (with this writer) a successful funding proposal,5 and Sea Grant was instrumental in building the project’s team. The ensuing ‘Northern Puget Sound Derelict Gear Recovery Project’ developed, tested and duly secured approval for new recovery protocols6 for removing fishing gear from those cold, deep waters – safely and with regard for the surrounding habitats.
But first, they had to fix the law.

New Statute Adopted
In 2002, the Commission sponsored and shepherded Washington Senate Bill SB6313 through the state legislature, establishing a new legal framework that enabled actual gear recovery operations – and divers — to get into the water. The proposed revision to state law had three stated purposes:

The legislature finds that fishing gear that is lost or abandoned may continue to catch marine organisms long after the gear is lost. The purpose of this act is to develop safe, effective methods to remove derelict fishing gear, eliminate regulatory barriers to gear removal, and discourage future losses of fishing gear.7

The project’s sponsors attacked the problem strategically, and removed the regulatory barriers, while ensuring that future recovery efforts would be safe, monitored and conducted in accord with the new protocols.
Reporting Gear Losses: The Commission was not interested in assessing blame. “The objective was removal of submerged gear and restoration of the affected marine habitats,” explains Tom Cowan, the Commission’s director, who used his savvy as an ex-legislative aide to guide the legislation. To that end, a remarkable new code section added “encouragement” to the loss-reporting issue, in lieu of penalties: a person who loses or abandons commercial fishing gear within the waters of the state is encouraged to report the location of the loss and the type of gear lost to the department within forty-eight hours of the loss.8

The ‘encouragement’ was not lip service: the Commission’s program introduced no-fault to net recovery, and followed through by providing for a toll-free “1-800-Gear Hotline”9 and an on-line reporting website for divers, fishermen, boaters, beach-goers and anyone involved with the marine environment to report sightings with ease - in the water or on shore.10 (Recreational scuba divers are strongly cautioned in all program materials to avoid the gear because of the inherent dangers.)

Gear Location Database: A GIS database of reported gear has been built to map recovery sites, and help set priorities for removal efforts, based on threats to public safety and marine resources, hazards to navigation and other criteria. The gear locations are not made public.

Removal Guidelines: Another feature of the new statute required the state’s Fish & Wildlife agency to draft removal protocols, in consultation with the Commission and other experts: “The Department of Fish and Wildlife, Northwest Straits Commission, the Department of Natural Resources, and other interested parties, must publish guidelines for the safe removal and disposal of derelict fishing gear . . . by August 31, 2002.”11

More importantly the statute provided that, “derelict fishing gear removal conducted in accordance with the guidelines prepared in subsection (2) of this section is not subject to permitting under RCW 77.55.100.”12
The way was clear: the self-imposed barriers to a real recovery effort were soon replaced with a practical, safe methodology for accomplishing the work. A technical team of experts representing a variety of state and federal agencies, divers, private individuals and tribal interests was convened and drafted guidelines for the safe removal and disposal of derelict fishing gear. They were tested in the water and modified, then made official and published. Throughout this technical process, the Commission kept legislators, state agency heads, and the fourth estate involved: ultimately a ‘VIP Vessel’ filled with such luminaries attended the first official net recovery, which was carried on National Public Radio and made national news.

Since that start, commercial divers and vessels trained in the new protocols – exempted from permitting delays – have been at work. They analyze hazards with sidescan sonar and videography to reduce risks, then divers physically remove the gear from the waters of the Northwest Straits, under surface gases.

During the first year of the pilot effort fourteen state and federal agencies and other organizations partnered onto the project. In September of 2003, the project participants were awarded the prestigious 2003 Coastal America Partnership Award.13 The Governor has even visited the team at work, and the budget for gear removal has tripled, thanks to those additional sponsors.

They will need it; that new project database now contains over 160 locations of known derelict nets in Puget Sound.

Endnotes
1. Monofilament lasts up to 500 years. Chas. Moore, Trashed, Natural History, v.112, n. 9 (Nov. 2003).
2. The term ‘ghost nets’ is objectionable to many fishermen, and this project avoids its use in program materials.
3. ESA listing: 50 CFR parts 223, 224; 64 Fed. Reg. 14327 (March 8, 1999).
4. Title IV, H.R. 3461 (105th Cong., 2nd Sess.).
5. Grant award: NOAA/NMFS CRP Grant.
6. The Guidelines can be downloaded at http://www.derelictgear.org/ .
7. Wash. Rev. Code § 77.55 (emphasis added).
8. Id. at § 77.12(2).
9. Reporting Hotline: 1-800-477-6224.
10. Report online: www.wdfw.wa.gov/fish/derelict/ .
11. Wash. Rev. Code § 77.12 (2) (emphasis added).
12. Id. at § 77.12(3) (emphasis added).
13. The award announcement can be viewed at www.coastalamerica.gov/text/awards .