At its April 2019 meeting, the Council received a report from NMFS highlighting the challenge in completing the regulatory work needed to implement annual regulations for the ocean salmon fishery, based on the measures developed by the Council each year at its March and April meetings. NMFS encouraged the Council to adopt a long-term solution […]
Groundfish essential fish habitat, Rockfish Conservation Area modifications, and Magnuson-Stevens Act discretionary closures Amendment 28 includes a new configuration of areas closed to bottom trawling to protect essential fish habitat (EFH); it removes the trawl rockfish conservation area off Oregon and California; and it includes a deep water closure of groundfish bottom contact fishing in […]
Amendment 17 to the coastal pelagic species (CPS) fishery management plan was approved by the Council in November 2018 and by the Secretary of Commerce in June 2019. Amendment 17 eliminates the predetermined incidental catch allowance in the live bait fishery when a CPS stock is overfished, and instead requires the Council to determine appropriate […]
The Council began scoping the authorization deep-set buoy gear (DSBG) to target swordfish in March 2016. It adopted a range of alternatives, including a preliminary preferred alternative in November 2018 and took final action to identify its preferred alternative in September 2019. During review of the Council final action NMFS identified several elements of the […]
In November 2015, the Council took final action to remove blackgill rockfish from the Slope Rockfish complex south of 40⁰ 10’ N. latitude and reallocate blackgill rockfish and the remaining species in the southern Slope Rockfish complex to trawl and non-trawl sectors as follows: No changes were recommended to the accumulation limit for these species. […]
In March 2017, the Council was presented with proposed changes to the HMS FMP as Amendment 4. These proposed changes originated from a 2016 recommendation from the HMS Management Team (HMSMT) for housekeeping changes that would revise dated and inaccurate text. At its June 2017 meeting the Council adopted for public review proposed these changes to […]
Based on issues identified in its first review of the trawl catch share program (review of Amendment 20 to the FMP), the Council undertook a number of follow-on actions (see Section 5.0 of the review document, completed in November 2017). One of these issues was related to gear switching in the shoreside individual fishing quoa […]
CPS Amendment 16 adds a description to the CPS FMP of a very small sector of the CPS fishery that is not part of the primary commercial directed fishery and harvests minor amounts of CPS finfish. The intent of Amendment 16 is to allow this sector to continue targeting CPS finfish after a directed fishery […]
In September 2016, the Council changed management of the at-sea whiting sector allocations of darkblotched rockfish and Pacific ocean perch to set-asides, while maintaining the allocation formulas in the Pacific Coast Groundfish Fishery Management Plan for these two stocks to determine the set-aside amounts. Amendment 21-3 was included as part of this action. The final rule was published […]
In March 2017 the Council took final action to adopt Amendment 5 to the Fishery Management Plan for West U.S. Coast Fisheries for Highly Migratory Species (HMS FMP). This amendment would create a Federal limited entry permit for the California large mesh drift gillnet (DGN) fishery. Upon publication of NMFS’s final rule to establish the […]