by Craig Medred – Aug 11, 2011

Glenn Merrill is unlikely to get a warm welcome in the usually friendly Alaska tourist town of Homer on Friday, unless sitting in the hot-seat qualifies.

Who, you ask, is Glenn Merrill? He is the assistant regional administrator for the National Marine Fisheries Service, which has proposed a “halibut catch sharing plan” that Homer charter operators say is likely to bankrupt them. The plan would guarantee a comparative handful of commercial fishermen about 85 percent of the halibut catch in Southcentral Alaska for perpetuity. The charter skippers — who form the backbone of the Homer tourism business — would be forced to make do with the other 15 percent.

Merrill is due in Homer for a Friday evening meeting to explain to locals the need for the plan.

The Alaska Charter Association set the stage for his arrival earlier this week by charging that the proposal, as now written, will force a reduction in next year’s halibut bag limit down to one fish. The charter association doesn’t expect many anglers to be willing to spend more than $150 on a charter for the chance to catch one fish, down from the limit of two. And doing business is only going to get harder if there is a size limit on that one fish.

That is a possibility.

Charter operators in Southeast Alaska are already laboring under a limit of one fish less than 37 inches.

If the size limit comes into play for Cook Inlet, the 25-year-old Homer Jackpot Halibut Derby — Alaska’s best-known fishing tournament — will be toast. That would be a blow for the Homer Chamber of Commerce, which each year nets more than 20 percent of its funding from the derby. Worse, though, would be the general impact on the community’s economy, which lives or dies on the tourism business fishing attracts to the Spit that juts out from Homer into Kachemak Bay near the south end of the Kenai Peninsula, about 250 road miles from Anchorage.

Fish thief Arne Fuglvog supported halibut charter restrictions

All of this is thanks to Arne Fuglvog and the North Pacific Fishery Management Council, according to charter boat skipper Rex Murphy of Anchorage. A former leader of the politically powerful Petersburg Vessel Owners Association, Fuglvog was on the council when it began plotting ways to freeze the catch of halibut by charter boats and anglers. Small-time sport fishermen were seen as competitors for a public resource that had been awarded largely to commercial longliners through what were called “individual fishing quotas.”

The longliners argued restrictions on the charter business were only fair. They noted the total halibut catch for the Pacific Ocean is capped by the International Pacific Halibut Commission for conservation purposes. If charter catches were allowed to grow, they said, the commercial catch would need to be reduced to keep the total catch within conservation limits. And that, the longliners said, would result in the charter industry taking away halibut that longliners were owed under the quota program.

Fuglvog, who was appointed to the council by former Gov. Frank Murkowski, was a longliner at the time the discussion started. He subsequently left the council in 2006 to go to work in Washington, D.C., as the fisheries aid to Sen. Lisa Murkowski. She was appointed to the seat by her father, who had resigned as Alaska’s senator after being elected governor. Fuglvog’s role as Lisa Murkowski’s fisheries adviser put him into an even better position to influence Alaska fishery policy than he had on the North Pacific Management Council.