Fishermen cast wary eye on trawlers' `Big Brother box'.

Byline: Winston Ross The Register-Guard

CORRECTION (ran 3/17/05): The Oregon Trollers Association represents the state's commercial troll fleet. A story on Page B1 on Monday used an incorrect name for the group.

NEWPORT - Big Brother is watching Mark Chase.

The Newport groundfisherman has a small black box wired inside the cabin of his trawler, the Norma M. It stays on all the time - as far as he knows - and tracks the vessel's every move, via satellite. Once an hour, the box tells the government the exact location of the Norma M.

The purpose is to keep Chase from sailing into closed waters, so that a groundfish species that collapsed during the 1990s can continue to rebound.

And even though he's done nothing to make the government suspicious of him specifically, Chase had to pay for the monitoring system - $1,300 up front and $20 a month to keep it running.

At first, like the owners of 300 other West Coast boats required to install the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's "vessel monitoring system" in 2003, Chase grumbled about the unanticipated investment.

"I wasn't real crazy about it," he said. "We had this shoved down our throats, just like a lot of things in our business."

Now, he's feeling better about the "black box," largely because the satellite link may prove useful once he installs a computer on the boat for e-mail, navigation, even thermal images that could help him catch more fish.

But as NOAA Fisheries considers expanding the program, the number of boats required to carry the monitoring systems could quadruple, to include hundreds of fishermen who don't target groundfish - the various species the government is trying to protect. Salmon trollers, for example, only pull in the occasional yellow-eye or canary rockfish incidentally, and they're allowed to set hooks in waters closed to groundfishermen.

"It's an ankle bracelet," Kevin Bastien, a Newport salmon fisherman, said of the black boxes. "How would you like it if for no reason you had to have an ankle bracelet on? We didn't cause this problem. I didn't catch one yellow-eye last year - not one - and only a handful of canaries. We're going to fight it tooth-and-nail."

The program came about because the government changed how it defined where fishing boats could hunt. Latitude and longitude coordinates had been used to mark the borders of closed areas.

But in September 2002, the National Marine Fisheries Service implemented a depth-based system, closing off areas based on how many fathoms deep the water is.

These larger areas are tough to monitor, say NOAA officials, because they extend far offshore and the boundaries are set by coordinates that guess at the ocean's depth. The size also makes patrols expensive and limits their effectiveness.

The payoff of the monitoring systems for fishermen comes in more liberal harvest limits, fewer boat inspections and fewer bad apples breaking the law, says Yvonne de Reynier, chief of NOAA fisheries' groundfish management branch. The depth-based closures earn trawl boats that hold expensive limited-entry permits an estimated $26,000 more annually than they would under the old system, officials say.

"Our goal is to provide a tool that both protects the fish and increases the amount of fish and consequent revenue," de Reynier said.

The system includes a transceiver unit that automatically determines a boat's location using global position system satellites, and then relays that to NOAA Fisheries, which passes it along to law enforcement agencies such as the U.S. Coast Guard.

For now, fishermen must bear the cost of the units, de Reynier said, because "they have essentially free access to a public resource. They're making an investment in extracting that resource."

But if funding becomes available, the government will reimburse fishermen for their costs.

In January and February, NOAA Fisheries held meetings along the West Coast to get public comment on options for expanding the monitoring program, which the Pacific Fishery Management Council will consider in April at a meeting in Tacoma.

The council's recommendation will lead to a proposed rule by NOAA, which could be implemented as early as next fall.

Now, only limited-entry groundfishermen are required to have the monitoring system on board, but the expansion could include all fishermen with a federal permit who travel outside state waters.

At the meetings, the most outspoken opponents were salmon fishermen.

"How would you like a camera in your office at work?" asked Lee Taylor, a Newport fisherman.

Oregon Trollers Commission President Rayburn Guerin says the amount of rockfish that salmon boats catch results in only a minuscule profit for the fisherman. "It's more of a nuisance," he said. Guerin argues that NOAA is just looking for a new way to justify its existence.

It's hard to tell just how much the government will expand the program, de Reynier said. A staff analysis has determined that 80 percent of salmon fishermen don't target groundfish, "so the vast majority of salmon fishermen may not be a concern." But the option for including these boats remains alive.

Peter Huhtala is senior policy director for the Pacific Marine Conservation Council, a nonprofit group with offices in Oregon and Washington that advocates for sustainable fisheries.

He recognizes that the expansion idea is problematic, despite the benefits of increased allowable catch limits and the prospect that if fish stocks improve, closed areas could be reopened.

"I can understand the irritation from fishermen's point of view about having this Big Brother box on your boat. I also understand the need to rebuild the groundfish species that have been so severely depleted. In the long run, there'll be more fishing opportunities, the fishing industry will be stronger and there'll be more dollars in coastal communities," Huhtala said. He added, however, "I'd prefer to see the federal government pay the cost of the units. That's equitable."

Winston Ross can be reached at [phone] or rgcoast@ oregonfast.net.