66 



We would like to see incentives for clean fishing rather than pen- 

 alties for dirty fishing. There are plenty of penalties right now. 

 What Mr. O'Leary was proposing was in many ways a penalty sys- 

 tem. But under the Olympic system there is no incentive at all. In 

 fact, there is a penalty for clean fishing, because you are competing 

 on a constant basis with all those other fishermen. 



Senator Stevens. Can you tell him what you mean by that? I 

 think, my friend, it means that you are catching non target — too 

 high a percentage of the nontarget species. 



Ms. Graham. A clean fisherman catches his target species and 

 the 



The Chairman. And the dirty one- 



Ms. Graham [continuing]. Catches anything that is out there. We 

 do not know for certain because, as Beth Stewart was saying, we 

 do not have the information posted on the electronic bulletin board 

 by vessel name, it is hidden behind a PIN number, but we think 

 that there are some boats that have actually tried to catch more 

 of the prohibited species in order to shut a specific fishery down. 

 We think they wanted to corner the market on a particular species 

 that they had already caught quite a bit of, so to keep others from 

 catching much of it, they increased their halibut bycatch and shut 

 that fishery down. They can get away with this because there is 

 no individual accountability. 



The Chairman. The system is nuts, is that what you 



Ms. Graham. Yes, sir, that is what I said. 



The Chairman. Well, we are getting some testimony up here 

 now. 



Ms. Graham. We are real straightforward up. here in Alaska, sir. 



Senator Stevens. But is it the Magnuson Act or the way it has 

 been implemented? 



The Chairman. Well, it is lacking in the Magnuson Act. She said, 

 "We ought to improve upon it because there is no mention of indi- 

 vidual responsibility." I see Mr. Curry wants to comment, and Mr. 

 Thomson is going to jump up on top of the table here in a minute. 

 Go ahead, Mr. Curry. And excuse me, Ted, I did not mean to inter- 

 rupt, but this is a better way. At our committee level, it is always 

 informal because we learn better. Go ahead, sir. 



Mr. Curry. Senator, if I might, in terms of this individual ac- 

 countability, one of the reasons that we raised the question about 

 doing accurate and clean measurement catch is not only is it fun- 

 damental to our quota management system, making that accurate, 

 but Kate touched on a very good point, which is the inability to le- 

 gally enforce your bycatch rules against fishermen who might not 

 want to play the game and until you do accomplish the task of 

 making certain that you have an accurate assessment of what is 

 being caught by the fishermen, the prosecutor and the judge, I 

 think, will have a grave difficulty in making a lot of cases which 

 would lead to greater compliance simply because the database that 

 is presented to them will have a significant error factor. And I be- 

 lieve that to accurately weigh the measurement of catch, we will 

 plug some of the holes that are now causing us to leak out bycatch. 



The Chairman. Mr. Thomson, did you have a comment on this 

 particular point. I am going to get your statement in a minute. 



