97 



I think that this coordination is boginninji; to pay off, at least 

 within the U.S. Government, through actions such as Judge Train's 

 proposal at the IMCO council and the work in the law of the sea 

 negotiations, toward trying to achieve agreement on the concept of 

 international standards for vessel pollution and control. 



Also, I think we have begun to make headway internationally in 

 convincing some of the major maritime states of the necessity of rec- 

 ognizing the desires of many other states for more effective controls 

 on vessels. Hopefully that recognition will also improve their work 

 in IMCO. 



Senator Ste\t:ns, Are you the gentleman to whom I should direct 

 the question about the problem of our nets that are being dumped up 

 in Alaska ? That has been raised with you ? I know I have been scream- 

 ing all over this town about that. Has Japan taken any action to 

 provide for implementation of the convention ? 



Mr, Leitzeix, Not that I know of to date. They did sign the con- 

 A-ention, but I don't know what they have done to ratify the conven- 

 tion and become a party to it. The dumping overboard of nets, espe- 

 cially those made fi-om synthetic materials, is one of the outright 

 prohibitions. That is provided for in the convention. 



Senator Stj:vp:xs. That is like, if you will pardon me for being 

 facetious, like a law against people spitting out of car windows. They 

 do it, and you don't know who did it. 



I have over at my office now a couple of boxes of pieces of nets and 

 gear that are all plastic, that have been picked up by Alaska fisher- 

 men from the end of the Aleutian chain down to Ketchikan, the 

 whole rim of the Gulf of Alaska. 



There is no identification on them, except that we know they are 

 the type of gear that Americans can't use, and we are getting highly 

 alai-med about the increasing use of these by foreign nations, or by 

 these vessels of the foreign nations, of equipment that we ban from 

 our waters. 



I have suggested that we try to got some way to have these nets and 

 gear — the fishing gear — marked, some international identification 

 system, so that we could have enforcement of these contentions and 

 the implementing legislation. 



Right now, there is no way to enforce it against these A'essels unless 

 we catch them in the act, as we did those Japanese vessels — I think 

 by accident, really — a few weeks ago. 



But even then, now that we have caught them, I understand there 

 is no violation of Japanese law about what they did. There was a 

 violation of our law in the sense that they were within our waters 

 fishing. "We will have them — and Japan will prosecute those vessels 

 for that. But to my knowledge, they violated no law by dumping 14 

 nets that were monofilament nets, some of them 14 miles long, and if 

 we hadn't apprehended them — we got two CG vessels up there to get 

 them back — and it took about 6 days to recover those nets. 



We Avere lucky; we recovered all of them. Those are just the ones 

 we found. Those are the people we saw. I think this is probably the 

 worst form of pollution in the North Pacific today, the plastic, or 

 monofilament type fishing gear that is being jettisoned from those 

 foT'oio-n vessels. 



