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Victor Simon: In the early 2000's,
the state of the fisheries on the west coast of the United States
were in really bad shape.
John Harms: The west coast groundfish fishery was
actually declared a federal disaster
due to the decline of several important species.
Jim Benante: And the fishermen on the west coast were
really impaired in their ability to make a living.
Mike Thompson: It was a huge deal to a lot of people.
So, the need was obvious that something had to be done.
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Mike Retherford: I've fished out of Newport, Oregon all my life.
And at that time, you just went fishing.
I didn't really understand a whole lot
about the management behind things.
I didn't understand how they set quotas.
Narrator: In the U.S, our local seafood
is some of the best managed in the world
because our fishermen must abide by limits
on how much of a targeted species they can catch.
Regional management councils set these quotas
using information from the previous seasons,
both from the fisheries themselves,
and dedicated scientific surveys,
along with environmental data that may affect reproduction and survival rates.
One of the big problems on the west coast back in the late 1990s
was that information was fragmented and incomplete.
John Harms: The issue there was
these surveys weren't always conducted annually.
They were often conducted only along a portion of the coast at a time
by larger Alaska class boats that
typically didn't spend much of their time fishing along the west coast.
And we weren't able to track the abundance of these species
as closely as we would have liked.
So, in the late 1990's,
NOAA Fisheries partnered with the local commercial fishing fleet
aboard the smaller trawlers.
By working with local boats and captains and crew
that know the fishing grounds well,
you're going to maximize the amount of habitat that we're able to sample.
Narrator: This cooperative research partnership
surveys from the Canadian border down to Mexico,
and has continually improved the quantity and quality of data collected.
Trawl nets are outfitted with multiple sensors
to measure the real-time catch information together with oceanographic conditions.
And onboard, a wireless network connects measuring boards,
scales, bar code readers,
printers, and touch screen computers to maximize efficiency,
and, in turn, the number of sites that can be sampled.
Victor Simon: Annually, we see approximately 635 different species.
We also collect about 120,000 fish lengths
and these are very valuable for the stock assessment.
Mike Retherford: So, six or eight hundred tows a year on the west coast
done by industry and the science community,
it's, it's awesome.
And it has just steadily gotten better.
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Narrator: While trawl fishing is well suited for flatter, soft-bottoms,
there's a lot of rocky, high relief habitat along the west coast,
which attracts different communities of species.
This is especially true along the coast of Southern California.
Joe Villareal: We were being regulated
on a couple overfished groundfish:
boccaccio and cowcod.
When this all began, one of the biggest problems was
the trawl nets couldn't sample the habitat that these fish lived in.
Jim Benante: And after speaking with
local sport and commercial fishermen,
the idea was to use hook and line gear to sample these habitats.
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Mike Thompson: Let 'em go.
Narrator: The hook and line survey,
which began in 2003,
involves three participating vessels that divvy up
200 pre-determined sample stations.
Combining these two survey methods,
stock assessors have a much more comprehensive data set
for the whole west coast.
Chantel Wetzel: The stock assessment has become more robust over time,
and that's due to an improved understanding
of the biology of the stock and more data.
Now that we have a survey that has persisted for 20 years on this coast,
we're able to look back
and what we've learned is that our perception of the past
is constantly changing as you get more information.
John Harms: The management of west coast groundfish
is in a much better place now that it was 20 years ago.
We have a much better handle on overfishing
and we're able to put in place the right management
for the right species at the right time.
Narrator: Since the early 2000s,
when 10 species were designated as overfished,
all but one has been rebuilt,
and that final species, yelloweye rockfish,
is trending positively.
Mike Thompson: It's absolutely worthwhile for us to do this
because the research that we're doing, the information that we're getting,
is critical to our continued existence.
Mike Retherford: It's important to have a fishery that is going to continue.
Fact is, one of the guys had asked me the other day on the boat,
do you think there's a future in the fishery?
And I said, I think the future's better now than it ever has been.
I really do. And I believe that.
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