New Canadian patrol targets remote high seas to protect salmon
CBC
A federal fisheries vessel sailed north this September, some 12,000 nautical miles (22,200 kilometres) to the Aleutian Islands, the first Canadian patrol of its kind in the North Pacific.
This newly outfitted Canadian Coast Guard vessel, the Sir Wilfred Laurier, is part of Canada's effort to ramp up monitoring of the North Pacific to protect salmon that may migrate into international waters near Russia and Alaska.
The patrol vessel sailed from Victoria to Japan, then north in September on a two-month mission near the Aleutian Islands off the coast of Alaska, where a flotilla of industrial vessels gather, their lights appearing as bright as a small city in satellite images.
"The radiance of these lights is observed from space," said senior Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) officer Dustin De Gagne,
The government earmarked $46 million to combat illegal fishing and outfit a special patrol vessel to ply the North Pacific, both to protect fish and keep an eye on remote zones using high seas patrols, flyovers and satellite surveillance.
Last year, the first high seas mission was announced, using a chartered boat. Fisheries officers were able to board foreign vessels based on the North Pacific Fisheries Commission's High Seas Boarding and Inspection Act.
"Only in 2018 did international law change to allow the boarding and a similar inspection regime in the Pacific," De Gagne said of an inspection regime that had already been happening in the Atlantic under a similar but different international law.
Now, for the first time, Canadian coast guard and fisheries enforcement crews are making patrols in their own dedicated vessel.
The United Nations estimates that between $10 and $ 23 billion US worth of illegal fishing is occurring in international waters each year.
And there are concerns that it is putting some of Canada's fishing stocks at risk.
De Gagne says that just sailing near the fishing fleets has prompted some to move, and "just being present has a great deterrence effect."
"There's approximately 40 million square kilometres of high seas where these vessels can fish, and only a handful of patrol vessels will ever go out there in a year," he said.
The Sir Wilfred Laurier has about 50 crew: 20 armed fishery officers, dozens of Canadian Coast Guard crew and two U.S. Coast Guard officers. There are concerns about illegal fishing fleets using drift nets — that can capture 100 tonnes of fish at a time — and about the unintended bycatch of salmon, a species already stressed by a changing climate and higher water temperatures.
Scientists want to know more about how industrial fishing fleets affect salmon returning to Canadian rivers and streams. De Gagne, a senior officer with the Department of Fisheries international enforcement program, sailed to the Aleutian islands with a crew on a chartered ship in 2023.
