The February NP Council Newsletter is out. Dr. Ian Stuart of IPHC was appointed to the SSC for a one-year term.
The Council is currently looking at re-structuring the Gulf of Alaska groundfish trawl fisheries. They will consider:
-Alternative 1 leaving the fishery continue to exist as License Limitation Program and leave the prohibited species catch (PSC) unchanged.
-Alternative 2 allocating the groundfish and PSC quotas to harvester-processor cooperatives based on historical catch of LLP licenses.
-Alternative 3 allocating only PSC quotas to harvester processor cooperatives based on equal share and dependency on the fishery.
-Alternative 4 setting 5-15% PSC and/or groundfish for use by Community Fisheries Associations or an Adaptive Management Plan. This could be selected in addition to Alternative 2 or 3.
Electronic monitoring is scheduled to be in initial review in October 2016. The Council endorsed expanding the EM pool from 50 to 90 vessels in 2017 as well as expanding the size criteria to any length. Priority will be given to vessels without enough space for human observers. The Council also discussed the possibility of using cameras on trawlers in the future.
Halibut RQE is scheduled to be in initial review again at the April meeting. There will also be an update on the Halibut Management Framework and a discussion paper on Halibut DMR’s methodology at that meeting.
Here is the full newsletter, the three meeting outlook is at the end:
http://www.npfmc.org/wp-content/PDFdocuments/newsletters/news216.pdf