The nets are set into the water at night, weighted on the bottom to keep them taut. They might span more than a mile, and cover more than 1 million square feet, the equivalent of 21 football fields. A large fish swims in, gets caught up and fights to wiggle out – no luck. Many others soon share its fate.
Sometimes it’s not a fish. It might be a mammal – a seal, dolphin or whale. Unable to surface for air, its struggle does not last long. Other times, it’s an endangered sea turtle, Pacific loggerhead or leatherback.
With a bycatch hovering around 65 percent, these nets – known as drift gillnets – have been called both “curtains of death” and our “deadliest catch,” and their use to target swordfish in West Coast waters has been under intense scrutiny for years. While banned in state waters since the ’90s, their use in federal waters off California – 75 to 200 nautical miles from the coast – persists, and despite their high environmental toll, federal and commercial fishing interests are pushing to expand the fishery.
But recently proposed legislation introduced by Assemblyman Paul Fong, D-San Jose, (a co-author is Assemblyman Mark Stone, D-Scotts Valley) aims to permanently halt the use of drift gillnets off California’s coast, putting an end to a fishing practice that discards more fish than are kept. The bill, AB 2019, is sponsored by marine conservation groups Oceana and Turtle Island Restoration Network (TIRN), both of which filed requests under the federal Freedom of Information Act to provide the public an arresting record of drift gillnets’ grave ecological costs.
That record comes from photographs by federal observers onboard drift gillnet boats; due to their high bycatch, such observers have been required by California law since 1990 on about 20 percent of the boats. But until the FOIA requests by Oceana and TIRN, images captured by those observers had never been seen by the public.
Until now “they’ve never seen the light of day,” says Geoff Shester, Oceana’s California program director. “All of a sudden, this secret comes to light, and they’re even worse than I was expecting.”
The images obtained by Oceana are graphic: dead, bloodied dolphins and porpoises lying lifeless on a boat deck. Sea lions that look alive, but are not. A giant gray whale fatally entangled on the water’s surface. “We’re still getting thousands more. This is just the tip of the iceberg,” Shester says of the photos. “This is California’s dirty secret.”
Of greatest concern is the fate of the critically endangered Pacific leatherback sea turtle. While the Pacific Leatherback Conservation Area – which stretches south from Port Lincoln, Ore., to nearby Point Sur – prohibits drift gillnet fishing off California’s coast from Aug. 15 to Nov. 15, there have still been two observed entanglements since it was established in 2001. Scientists say every turtle lost puts the entire population at risk.
TIRN Program Director Teri Shore doesn’t blame fishermen, because the demand for swordfish isn’t of their making. Instead, she blames the gear. “Now is a time of great opportunity to shift this fishery into less high-bycatch gear,” she says.
“We’re not pointing the finger at the fishermen,” Shore says, “but what is happening is not sustainable.”