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These data represent marine waters used for commercial benthic fishing with fixed gear, which includes use of traps, pots, bottom longlines, bottom or anchored gillnets, pound nets, weirs, and other bottom tending gear types used to catch benthic fishes and invertebrates. Excludes all other forms of fishing.
Commercial fishing with benthic fixed gear occurs throughout the study area with a focus on dungeness crab, black cod, halibut, spot prawn and hagfish. Longlines are used in the canyons at depths of 50 fathoms or more; crab pots are most commonly between 2-75 fathoms with most of the crabbing inside 100 fathoms. Crabbers hold over 200 permits in the state and account for over 100,000 crab pots. Protection of the crab fisher heritage and culture is very important to the local coastal communities. Recently the crab fishery has been shifting towards the southern coast near Klipsan Beach where 40-50% of the crab fleet is fishing in 9% of the 140 mile coast.
Tribal uses of the ocean were not mapped explicitly, though tribal chairs and/or their designated representatives were formally invited by BOEM to participate in the mapping workshops. The sharing of tribal use information was dependent upon each tribe’s determination of whether the mapping workshops were an appropriate forum for sharing such information. Any tribal use information shared during the workshops was incorporated into the defined use categories. Thus, the atlas data and map products do not explicitly depict tribal use. |