Featured Image Credit: Video framegrab by Robert Hanson
Off the coast of the Bering Sea, fisherman are trying to make a living by fishing for halibut and black cod, but they have some tough competition…and it isn’t from competing fishing boats. According to local fisherman, large pods of killer whales are following them and stealing their fish.
On a good day, fisherman say they can harvest up to 20,000-30,000 pounds of halibut in a single day. On a bad day, they come home with next to nothing when these pods of killer whales catch on to them. The whales have started to pick up on what the boats look like and will strip the hooks clean. If the fisherman are lucky, there might be halibut “lips” left on the hook.
“It’s kind of like a primordial struggle,” fisherman Buck Laukitis said about the orcas last week. “It comes at a real cost.”
Not only have these pods become more and more popular over the years, the whales have become more and more aggressive. In an effort to try and make this issue known, FV Oracle Captain Robert Hanson wrote a letter to the North Pacific Fisheries Management Council describing the challenges he and the other fisherman have faced in the last few years. On a trip to the continental shelf in April he said his crew was “harassed nonstop.” He wrote that they lost approximately 12,000 pounds of sellable halibut to the whales and wasted 4,000 gallons of fuel trying to outrun them.
Another time he drove his boat out near the Russian board where he’s allowed to fish, and fished for a day before a pod of at least 50 whales showed up.
“The pod tracked me 30 miles north of the edge and 35 miles west (while) I drifted for 18 hours up there with no machinery running and they just sat with me,” Hanson wrote.
Herbert, captain of the Aleutian Sable, has noticed that the whales seek out the longliners. Herbert, in efforts to try and distract the whales, has used sonars that emit frequency that is designed to keep the whales away.
“It’s gotten completely out of control,” he said. Herbert has estimated that he has caught millions of fish in the Bering Sea, and does not fish anymore because of the whales. “It’s simply not worth it,” he said, “to work so hard to only have your fishing lines striped ‘100 percent.’”