Badu Island, Australia: Sun, fun, fruitful fishing

The temperature was in the low 90s and I was standing on the most perfect, palm-lined, white-powder tropical beach I could ever have imagined. And yet somehow this island, 10 degrees south of the equator, reminded me of Alaska.

As with many Bush villages back home, it took two flights in successively smaller planes to get here from Cairns, Australia’s gateway city to the Great Barrier Reef. Both places represent the most northern reaches of each country – although the farther north you go in the southern hemisphere, the warmer it is.

Like most remote Alaska communities, the indigenous population, here a mixture of Australian Aborigines and Pacific Islanders, maintains a subsistence lifestyle. Instead of harpooning whales, the locals hunt dugongs (manatees) and sea turtles.

And like Alaska, humans are not at the top of Badu’s food chain. Instead of bears, sharks and saltwater crocodiles are the baddest beasts around. Bruins have never kept me out of the wild back home and I often couldn’t resist the calculated risk of diving in Badu’s warm and sparkling clear water.

But the most obvious connection, and the reason I was here, was David and Julie Maddock-Jones. This Australian couple came to Kenai in the early 1990s when Dave exchanged teaching jobs for a year with Dorothy Besch, a third-grade teacher at Mountain View Elementary. They eagerly participated in any outdoor experience our Alaska staff offered up, and now 15 years later, I was ready for any adventure David and Julie had in mind.

It was October and their school had just released for a two-week break. We were to spend eight days camping at Gaubuth, a deserted beach located across the island from Badu’s only town. Julie drove out with the gear and provisions while David and I took advantage of the early morning calm to motor around in the boat.

“Glad you’re here, mate,” David told me as we left the harbor. “Julie and I get a lot of pressure from our friends and family to go visit them during holidays. No one wants to come to Badu because it’s so remote, so we don’t get enough opportunity to just relax and enjoy what we have right here.”

I couldn’t be happier to oblige. We anchored the boat off of the shallow and sandy bottom about 300 feet from the shoreline and swam to the beach. The wind was beginning to pick up as it would every midday for our time on Gaubuth; no sense being wave-tossed in the 20-foot skiff. We took advantage of being land-bound by setting up camp and gathering firewood.

Go off in any direction in this part of the world and there are a hundred animals, insects or plants that can kill or cause pain. Since we were all in shorts and sandals, once off the beach, we had to watch for snakes with every step. That didn’t help me much when I brushed against a nest of flaming needle wasps.

Yep, they have that name for a reason. While the burning sensation lasted for only a few minutes, the needlelike stingers felt like they were 4 inches long and the swelling on my arm didn’t go away for nearly a month.

To beat the high cost of bringing beverages to the island, David was perfecting a home-brewing operation and his beer now fulfilled a much-welcomed medicinal purpose. A few hours later when the wind died down, we began our twice-a-day fishing ritual to provide our food for the day and restock their freezer back in town.

The waters here are very productive. Unpredictable shallows, extremely strong currents and uncharted reefs don’t allow for commercial netting operations. There’s not a developed sportfishing industry and the island population is too sparse to have a big impact on sea life. Consequently, we had the most prolific ocean fishing I have ever experienced and we had it all to ourselves.

When we got too hot or needed a break from cranking reels, we anchored off a reef, donned masks and fins, armed ourselves with rubber band-powered spears and dove in to hunt for crayfish. We tossed each day’s catch in the eskie, short for Eskimo, Australian slang for ice chest, and eventually found our way back to our beach before sunset.

Are there many things finer than sitting with great friends on a lonely tropical beach, watching the sun go down while sipping a cool brew as fresh-caught fish sizzle over the fire?

David and Julie will stay on Badu for just one more year and I already began to plan for another visit the moment I climbed aboard the four-seat plane headed back toward the mainland.

James Bennett is a semi-retired teacher from Soldotna. He supports his international travel habit and outdoor adventures by working as a long-term substitute in Alaska villages.

Complex halibut allocation plan OK’d

By Naomi Klouda
Homer Tribune

The North Pacific Fisheries Management Council on Oct. 4 approved a plan to divvy up available halibut in two Alaska regions among commercial and charter fleets.

The council voted 10-1 for the plan in Southeast’s 2C and Southcentral Alaska’s 3A, hoping to set to rest halibut tussles between commercial fishermen and guided recreational anglers. The vote followed three days of often impassioned testimony from both sides, with Kachemak Bay charter boat operators asking the council to not limit their clients to one halibut.

The sole council member voting no, Ed Dersham, said he could not support the plan because it “does not meet the test of fair and equitable.” He is the operator of Dersham’s Fishing Charters in Anchor Point.

The ruling would impact the allocation of halibut caught on charter boats, which in turn causes loss for the thousands of guided recreational anglers who don’t own boats or know dangerous bay waters, a local group says. It would not impact private skiffs and fishermen.

Rex Murphy, of Winter King Charters and a member of the Charter Halibut Task Force, said the multitiered motion with its many amendments was confusing and disappointing. In the end, it was the opposite of a “simple” ruling the task force had requested.

“The bottom line is at certain levels of abundance, the motion proposes different charter-angler limits,” Murphy said Monday. “In Area 3-A, we would be looking at either a two-fish limit or a two-fish with one under the 32-pound limit, what we call the minnow rule. In times of medium abundance, it would either be the minnow rule or a one-fish bag limit. In times of low abundance we would have a one-fish bag limit. In times of super low abundance we would have a one-fish bag limit with modifications by the council.”

The minnow rule is one fish any size and one fish under 32 inches. A 32-inch fish is 11 pounds, head off and gutted, Murphy said.

The council wanted to reach a decision that wouldn’t involve revisiting the halibut allocation issue each year, Murphy said. The Charter Halibut Task Force had recommended that when abundance is low, that all sectors take reductions, Murphy said.

Commercial catch numbers for the 3A area in 2007, including Cook Inlet and Kodiak waters, was 25.9 million pounds of halibut.

Guided recreational anglers brought in 79,560 fish in waters from Anchor Point to Homer in 2006, according to information supplied by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game in Homer, for 2006.

The task force is still studying the council’s ruling for ramifications, Murphy said. It will not go into effect for at least two years, having now to go to the National Marine Fisheries Service for approval, then to the Secretary of Commerce.
Ocean Hunter Charters Capt. Keith Kalke feels the council leans toward commercial fishing interests.
“That’s the fox guarding the hen house,” he said.

Only one member of the 11 voters on the council is a charter boat operator while six are commercial fishermen.

In reality, charter boat operators are something of a glorified taxi driver, Kalke said, for the many who can’t afford to buy their own fishing vessels. Cutting to one halibut for charter boats – not private boats – would create some hazardous situations, he said. Inexperienced people would be heading out on rough waters to get their catch. It’s also discriminatory against individual anglers when everyone should have access to federal waters and halibut jointly owned by all, he said.

“The waters throughout the Gulf and Cook Inlet are dangerous waters. A lot of people don’t feel safe trying it. We’re the safest outlet for fishing. A lot of people can’t afford to buy their own boats,” Kalke said.

There’s also concern that charter boat operators from 2A, in times of lower halibut allocation numbers, would move over to 3C. That would stress harvests in Kachemak waters, Murphy said, and trigger allocation reductions.

Fishing buyout talk on tap — Salmon task force to hear permit buyback info

By Jenny Neyman
Redoubt Reporter

When the Joint Cook Inlet Salmon Task Force meets in Anchorage on Thursday, it’s slated to consider an idea that, according to a Kenai senator, won’t get much support from commercial fishermen — permit buybacks.

Sen. Tom Wagoner, R-Kenai, who’s on the task force, said the bipartisan group of lawmakers is scheduled to hear a presentation by the Alaska Commercial Fisheries Entry Commission on permit buybacks for Cook Inlet.

The task force was formed last spring by the Legislature to address dwindling salmon returns to rivers in the Matanuska and Susitna valleys. One theory for why those runs are faltering is because fish bound for northern district rivers are caught in commercial nets in Cook Inlet. To that way of thinking, limiting commercial fishing in the inlet would increase salmon runs farther north.

“Some members on the task force, I think some of them have this — and several of us warned them — they think there is this silver bullet they can go and find and fix the problem, and one of the silver bullets they can play with is a buyout,” said Roland Maw, executive director of the United Cook Inlet Drift Association. “We have a big concerns. Is it going to be voluntary or forced?”

Debra Higgins, a staffer in Rep. Craig Johnson’s office, R-Anchorage, the task force chairman, said it is part of the task force’s mandate to at least hear information about buybacks. Wagoner said he didn’t think a permit buyback program would go anywhere.
“We’ll have to wait and see. There aren’t any provisions made for how that would work in Cook Inlet,” he said

“There’s going to be a resistance, for the most part, by commercial fishermen. They aren’t going to want to sell back their permits. That’s how they make their living.”
Maw said UCIDA hasn’t formed an official position on buybacks.

“At no time during the public hearing process did any commercial fisherman give testimony about a buyout, nor will we ever act about a buyout,” he said. “So if something comes out of this task force, they cooked that one up on their own without involvement of the industry, and we have grave concerns about what they may or may not be doing.”

Typically, permit buyback programs entail just that — buying a permit, and nothing more. Not the boat, nets, gear or investments in fuel and other costs commercial fishing entails.

“Some people seem to think if you buy a permit back you’re out of business. For the most part they’re people making their living off fishing, or a portion of their living, I should say,” Wagoner said. “They aren’t going to sell that for the value of the permit because they see more value in it than that.”

Steve Tvenstrup, with UCIDA, said he hoped the buyback idea had fizzled out.
“I’ve never been an advocate of buybacks, every time they talk about it,” he said. “To me, it’s a livelihood, and at age 51 right now I just can’t see it to be feasible to sell my permit and go find another job. They just want to buy the permit, and not the whole operation.”

Wagoner said it’s premature to consider limiting commercial fishing because science hasn’t settled whether commercial nets are to blame for what’s going on in the Mat-Su region.

“In a few years we’ll be able to see what, if anything, we can do about fish returning to the northern district. Nobody knows what the problem is, but we don’t catch all the fish that they’re complaining we catch in the northern district down here in Cook Inlet,” Wagoner said.

Until more answers are available, Wagoner cautions against making policy changes.
“As a matter of fact, nobody’s even sure there needs to be a buyback right now. It’s a lot of smoke and mirrors still,” he said.

Maw said considering a buyback proposal would be “way premature.”

“They haven’t asked us and we haven’t offered. I think there’s lots of available harvest surplus on the salmon stocks, if they would manage the habitat, especially those pike,” he said.

Northern pike, a voracious invasive species that eats young salmon, have been found in northern district watersheds.

Maw said commercial fishermen play a vital role in preventing overescapament of salmon runs, which can cause future runs to diminish. The state mandates managing fisheries for maximum or sustainable yield. To Maw, that means managing to escapement goals.

“You still have to take those fish down to that escapement value. If there are 500 boats, that dictates one fishing pattern, if there’s 250, that would dictate a much higher level of fishing in order to meet escapement goals,” he said. “It’s going to be interesting what this group comes up with. If they’re taking about throwing escapement goals out, that’s a very fundamental shift away from what we’ve been doing for 50 years and why the state was created. And it’s irresponsible, by the way, too. We’ll just have to wait and see what these folks do.”

Wagoner, a former Cook Inlet commercial fishermen, wanted to be on the task force because he was concerned about legislators stepping into a role that’s already filled by the Board of Fish, he said.

“The best place for that to be fought out is not at a Cook Inlet Salmon Task Force, it’s at the Board of Fish. The task force is trying to interject itself into the management of a fishery. It’s a very dangerous thing to do, have a lot of elected officials inject themselves into a scientific process. Because, number one, they’re not scientists, and number two, they’re not always honest because they’re out to please their constituents,” Wagoner said.
The task force is supposed to bring recommendations to the Legislature at its next session. So far, none have been formed.

“There’s been absolutely nothing come out of that task force,” Wagoner said.

Editor’s note: Rep. Craig Johnson, R-Anchorage, chair of the task force, was not available to comment on this story, and task force members Rep. Bill Stoltze, R-Chugiak/Mat-Su, and Sen. Charlie Huggins, R-Wasilla, did not return calls seeking comment.