Chuckn'Duck

I'm not an expert on foreign fisheries, but I was a NMFS Observer aboard foreign boats in the early to mid-eighties. At night, the pollock grounds in the Bering Sea/Gulf of Alaska used to look like a city; there were so many foreign factory trawlers fishing. How much of a problem foreign interception presently is, I'm not sure.

My point is, the distant water foreign fishing fleets have shrunk to 0 in U.S. Pacific waters when they dominated the scene in the 70s and early 80s. Drift netting used to be legal, now its not. And we never did have much control of what those ships do in their own 200 mile zones. If these guys were a major problem, you would think our runs would be gaining ground, not losing ground.

[This message has been edited by obsessed (edited 04-08-2000).]