PORT SUSAN – Alejandro Sarroca pulled on his neoprene hood, adjusted his scuba gear and hopped flipper-first out the back hatch of the 28-foot research boat.
The 34-year-old native of Uruguay was looking for a lost crab pot. Kevin Nortz / The Herald
Crayton Fenn, the 47-year-old skipper from Mill Creek, cracked a grin while Sarroca’s bubbles came to the surface. The day before, a prehistoric-looking sturgeon several feet long had swam by while Sarroca was diving for a lost wire trap.
“A guy gets worried after that sea monster yesterday,” Fenn joked.
Their real mission here – retrieving lost crab pots and fishing nets – is no joking matter. Scuba divers can get tangled in nets and drown.
Marine life suffers as well. The lost gear keeps fishing long after the fishermen have abandoned hope of retrieving it.
| State law encourages fishermen to report lost nets or crab pots without blame for how the gear was lost. The hotline is 800-477-6224, or go to wdfw.wa.gov/fish/derelict. * For more information, call the Northwest Straits Commission, a seven-county marine resources coalition, at 360-428-1085. * Jeff June is a fisheries biologist for Natural Resources Consultants in Seattle, 206-285-3480 or jjune@nrccorp.com * Crayton Fenn runs Innerspace Exploration Team, a Mill Creek nonprofit specializing in side-scan sonar and deep diving for marine environmental projects, 206-250-4906 or info@innerspaceexploration.org |
Salmon snag their gills in the mesh, and seals and ducks get wrapped in the nets and drown.
Crabs continue to crawl into the stray pots’ one-way portals, and slowly starve to death, only to attract more crabs, which also eventually die.
The cycle can last years.
“It’s kind of a silent killer out here that people just don’t realize,” said Jeff June, 55, a Seattle-based fisheries biologist on the boat.
The problem is gaining recognition among biologists. That’s why the Stillaguamish Tribe netted a $56,000 grant to pay for the three men to remove derelict fishing gear in Port Susan. The chinook salmon the tribe is working to save from extinction pass through the waters on their way to the Stillaguamish River.
Aside from adult fish getting caught in nets, the project should help young salmon, too, tribe biologist Jen Sevigny said.
“Dungeness crab larvae are a staple food for juvenile chinook,” Sevigny said. “This means there is a direct link between removing abandoned crab pots and protecting threatened fish.”
Other tribes and marine resources groups have hired June and Fenn the past two years. The Tulalip Tribes hired June’s company in 2003 to remove a large net from Tulalip Bay.
June and Fenn’s experience mucking around the sea bottom from here to Canada and the Olympic Peninsula has showed them it’s not an isolated problem. In 12 sonar seafloor surveys sampling almost 5 percent of the most heavily fished waters in that range, they identified 3,570 items that are likely lost fishing gear.
“Everywhere we’ve looked, we’ve found an extensive amount of gear, much more than people realized at first,” June said.
They have pulled up 303 fishing nets covering 65 acres of seafloor, June said. They’ve also removed more than 800 crab pots.
To find them, Fenn developed a special side-scanning sonar technique. Instead of sending sounds from a single point on the bottom of the boat, Fenn lowers a torpedo-shaped sonar emitter beneath the boat.
The equipment sends multiple signals in a 50-meter swath. When the signals hit an object, they bounce back and paint a picture on his on-board computer screen.
Experience has taught Fenn and June what nets and crab pots look like on sonar. They’ve also found shipwrecks, planes and drowning victims, which has helped police.
Then, using Global Positioning System equipment, they mark each site with satellite coordinates on the computer’s map.
After the survey map is completed, Fenn can return to any of the plotted items by simply using the boat’s GPS navigation.
Fenn and June chose a retrieval route that maximizes the number of nets and traps Sarroca can pull during the time they have budgeted. In Port Susan, they’ve identified more than 350 crab pots.
Just three minutes after splashing into the water, Sarroca popped up at the back of the boat. He had hooked the trap to a rope that Fenn then winched up the side of the boat.
The trap looked well-worn. Sea anemones had grown on the lid, keeping it shut.
“That’s been there a while,” Sarroca said.
“It’s still fishing,” June added.
An almost 7-inch-wide lone male Dungeness crab was stuck inside. Based on how lethargic it was, June and Sarroca estimated the trap might have been there for months or even years.
Crab pots can be ruthlessly efficient, left on their own. June said their record haul was 693 crabs in three days of pulling up lost traps. Forty-four of those were dead, and the others would have been if the pots had remained below.
The day before on Port Susan, Sarroca dredged up 20 pots with 55 crabs in them.
As always, June dumped the crabs back into the water to give them a chance to live.
The men hope more groups will fund their efforts, not just for the business but because they want to clean up the seafloor.
June looked at the crab pot icon at that spot on his computer map. No need for that one now.
“Hit delete,” June said, pushing the button, “and it’s gone.”
Reporter Scott Morris: 425-339-3292 or smorris@heraldnet.com.
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