I spent a few years up north dragging.I was a deck hand for most of those 8 years.Never saw a chinook salmon.Did count a few chums though.probably 20 a year on my watch.They generally are too fast for a net working at 3-4 knots. the openings are huge and the first meshes are upwards 50' on a pelagic net.

Did kill our share of halibut though.mostly chickens like you saw.They come up and feed in the rookeries we fished.The big ones generally get out of harms way.Did get literally knocked out by a 400+that got down into the live tanks.I always thought that calling them live tank was a lot like naming the housing development after the small creek they just killed.The crew on the Snow King always felt bad about the halibut by catch and never treated them like you just saw.We treated them with kid gloves.

The observers on our boat sampled damn near every bag and if they did not,it was because of there own accord not because we were trying to pull a fast one.Some were out to save the world some were just putting in there time to finish there degrees.All young kids fresh from school,getting paid pennies.Back in my time the observer had to tally the tonage we caught as it went against a huge quota for the fleet.The season ended when the observers reports added up the quota.Halibut by-catch could and did a few times shut down the fisheries before the quota was reached.



I am not defending dragging just trying to give you some real observations from your side of the table.I did this as a kid .The romance of the Bering Sea is a powerful thing to a young man.At least it was to me.The best times of my life were being a c hair from death 200 miles from anything.Puts the world as we know it and the people in it in a whole knew light.

That being said dragging is one of the most harmful things we are doing to our oceans.There is the by catch then there is the habitat destruction.Bottom trawls destroy the bottom.My last few years they outlawed our bottom nets and made us ditch our rock gear.They have been taking huge steps in trying to clean up the fishery.One of the problems is that the trawl fleet is reely owned by the norwegians and they could give a rats ass what we or our government thinks.They do what they can get away with.I lucked out and worked for two Icelandic Bossuns under an American skipper.Villy would of thrown me overboard if I behaved as you saw in that video.I quit when the weegies bought our company and fire Villy and Toby just because they were Icelandic.I have absolutely no love for the square heads in the trawl buisness.Used to call them fcn L7s.

More of the world eats fish than eat beef.The world does need to eat.People are not going to work out there for free.This is reality folks.

Flame on.