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Time becomes an overriding factor in an Olympic style fishery. For 

 fisheries such as Pacific whiting, Alaska halibut, and even 

 Dungeness crab, time takes on significant value since a loss of a 

 day or a few day's fishing can mean the difference between success 

 and failure. From an individual vessel's perspective, "down time" 

 not only means a loss of short-run production, but a loss of total 

 production since those fish may become available to other vessels. 

 The concept of time, therefore, takes on significant value relative 

 to other production factors. 



Time is particularly important for Pacific whiting due to product 

 quality issues. Processors operating under this system must trade- 

 off control and improvement in product quality with potential 

 losses in production due to the time constraints binding the 

 fishery. For each individual vessel and processor, decisions to 

 "slow down" and control such factors as tow size, tow time, 

 culling, sorting, and matching product qualities with product 

 forms, must be evaluated in the harsh reality of the opportunity 

 costs of lost production resulting from the Olympic style fishery. 

 What may be optimal practices for an Olympic style fishery may be 

 less than optimal for a management scheme in which time is not a 

 binding constraint. Relaxing the time constraint could result in 

 improvements in production strategies, quality control, and 

 recovery rates. 



There are also other impacts of an Olympic style Pacific whiting 

 fishery. Because of the spatial and temporal characteristics of 

 the resource, compressed Olympic style fisheries can result in 

 heavy fishing pressure on certain year classes and can lead to 

 lower stocks and harvests and an increase in variability over time 

 (Enriquez 1992; Enriquez and Sylvia 1992 — see Topic 4 for more 

 details) . Olympic style fisheries can also result in higher 

 inventory costs, and loss of shelf life relative to management 

 strategies which allow fishermen to "inventory the product in the 

 ocean" (Enriquez 1992) . And finally, there are "learning costs" 

 associated with each trip and processing run which can result in 

 lower quality product during initial runs (Small 1993) . In 

 compressed fisheries the total time in which learning occurs is 

 proportionally larger than fisheries in which effort is spread over 

 time. 



To summarize, there are a number of opportunity costs associated 

 with compressed, pulsed, or Olympic style fisheries. These costs 

 may be significant in the Pacific whiting fishery. Comprehensive 

 analysis should be conducted in order to evaluate these impacts. 



Topic 4: The potential economic costs and benefits of an early 

 season whiting fishery (opening April 15) relative to a fishery 

 which may begin later in the year. 



This is another area in which important data and analysis is 

 lacking. However, there appears to be a number of issues which may 



