On the halibut front.

• Author: Swagel, Will

Sitka sport and subsistence fishermen found it harder to catch a halibut due to increased demands on resources by charter and commercial vessels.

What were they to do?

For decades, living in Sitka meant access to great local fishing holes where townspeople could easily harvest a halibut--a catch that couldn't be better designed for the dinner table.

A North Pacific halibut is basically one big muscle--each fish provides two filets that comprise so much of the body mass, you marvel at how little of the fish you discard. A 40-pound halibut yields more than 30 pounds in edible flesh. A tomcod seems like all belly, a ling cod all head, but a halibut seems to be all meat.

But, starting in the 1990s, Sitka sport and subsistence fishermen noticed that it became harder for them to catch a halibut in Sitka Sound--even at legendary local fishing spots like Vitskari Rocks that previously yielded a seemingly endless bounty. As the decade wore on, the situation worsened. State statistics showed that the same local residents, who had caught 3,019 halibut in Sitka Sound in 1993, caught only 447 there in 1996.

The cause: the fishing pressure on Sitka Sound halibut had spiraled upward during the decade. Spurred by an explosion in tourism, charter fishing out of Sitka became big business, with the number of charter boats increasing exponentially through the decade. Federal Individual Fishing Quota regulations permitted commercial halibut fishermen to fish closer to home. Boat sales were up in the Booming Nineties and local marine fuel-dock workers reported lots of new vessels coming in for a pre-fishing fill-up.

Sitka confronted a dilemma facing more and more communities that depend on the sea to provide for competing interest groups--how do you allocate a finite resource?

And complicating things more--any plan to manage and preserve these local fishing holes would have to move through several levels of state and federal fisheries agencies, accustomed to paying attention only to fish in the hundreds and thousands of tons, and coastline in the hundreds of miles.

The Sitka Halibut Task Force succeeded, not only in implementing controls for the local halibut holes, but also in creating a process of bringing together local groups, a process being emulated up and down the Alaska coast, called the Local Area Management Plan process, or LAMP.

LAMP IS LIT

As with many other local resource issues, Sitka Natives were among the first to notice and take decisive action...